Countdown to the first Olympics of the social media age

The countdown for the Olympics today stepped up a notch and, with a year to go, London 2012 is gearing up to be the first truly social media-enabled Olympiad.

The International Olympic Committee has already proclaimed its intention to ‘actively encourage’ athletes to use social media to post, blog and tweet their experiences in its social media guidelines, as long as such activities stick to appropriate boundaries.

These include using social media in a “first-person, diary-type” format and not reporting what other competitors are doing. In terms of media, non-commercial photos are ok but video and audio recordings are not.

Digital Pharma (July 2011)

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The July print edition of Pharmafocus is out now and it, along with this month’s Digital Pharma column, can be viewed online through the iPad/iPhone-friendly ‘e-edition’ here.

The issue also features my report on the first social media breach of UK pharma’s Code of Practice. (The breach was first reported in an earlier, exclusive, blog of mine which you can read here.)

Meanwhile, all of the past month’s posts can be found in the Digital Pharma blog section on InPharm.com.

• Subscribe to the Digital Pharma blog RSS feed and keep up with all the latest posts.

Is improving your personal SEO a reason to try Google Plus?

I’ve been playing around with Google+ for the first time this evening and my first impressions are favourable.

I was going to get used to Google’s new social network before blogging about it, and then I Googled myself shortly after joining and noticed a change in the results.

My Google profile has just shot up the rankings (surprise, surprise) to take the top spot that my LinkedIn profile previously occupied.

Apple: over 15 billion apps downloaded

Downloads from Apple’s App Store have passed 15 billion, according to the latest figures for the company’s mobile devices and apps.

Strip out the hyperbole – and ‘exciting’, ‘amazing’, ‘successful’, ‘coolest’ and ‘incredible’ all feature in the short press release – and the rest of the figures show:

• More than 200 million iPhones, iPad and iPod touch devices have been sold worldwide

Twitter produces a guide for journalists

Deciding there’s no harm in preaching to the choir Twitter last week made a push to get more journalists to use its service.

The micro-blogging service is already heavily used by news services and journalists, but naturally wants to extend its reach and hopes Twitter for Newsrooms, or #TfN, will do the trick.

At this stage of Twitter’s growth it’s unlikely to win over those unconvinced of its merits, but it still stands as a useful primer to those starting out and as a revision guide for more seasoned hands.