Government supports "light touch" approach to cookie regulation

Following EU regulations passed last year, concern and confusion has surrounded how the regulation around online cookies (used to identify visitors across different web pages and sites) would be passed into law by EU states as todays deadline approached.

In an open letter from the DCMS today, Ed Vaizey sets out the governments approach; the government will take a "light touch business friendly" approach, clarifying that the government does not think that they should specify technical measures needed to obtain consent.

Confusion had surround an ambiguity in the EU directive, which originally set out a need for "prior, informed consent", but in a recital to the directive also stated that web browsers' settings (which may be left at a default setting, negating the "prior, informed consent") would be a sufficient indication.

Twitter's first employee moves to London

As Twitter prepare to open their London office (and rumoured EU headquarters), reports are that their first employee to be relocated has moved to head the yet-to-be-recruited London team.

The move will certainly help Twitter to grow its business here; currently, the sales focus of the company is very focussed on the US, but with targeted ads for the UK and other countries being made available later this year and the expected "self-service" advertising model, a local sales house will help to make Twitter's offering clearer to advertisers.

Obviously, unless you have been hiding from the media world this week, Twitter has been getting attention here for other reasons. With a significant surge in traffic reported last weekend as speculation over superinjunctions reached a peak, the site was at one point reported to be responsible for 1 in every 184 internet visits. This represented a 22% spike – compared to a 10% spike on 9th May, when the media reported the creation of an account which purported to name those who had taken out superinjunctions.

Some other interesting stats about the UK's Twitter usage were also reported; 12% of visits to the website are coming from new users (compared to 0.5% of Facebook visits), indicating that growth looks set to continue for a while, at least. Although Twitter only represents 0.55% of website visits in the UK (compared with 7.64% for Facebook, and 1% for BBC News) the growth means it has now passed the BBC's iPlayer in terms of popularity.

But perhaps a more interesting comparison of social and traditional media and the apparent tension between the two came from Tess Alps' Thinkbox blog

Anyone can search online and discover who the alleged sinners are but the mainstream media are gagged from telling us what those searches will uncover. […] It strikes me that until Twitter speculation is rubber-stamped by trusted reports in legitimate media, it is just a whiff of a story coming from the kitchen; it isn’t the meal itself. It needs ratifying to be satisfying.

Amazon selling more Kindle books than print

6 months after announcing that Kindle eBook sales had overtaken hardback books, Amazon have announced that they have now overtaken all book sales to become the most popular book format on Amazon.com.

Obviously, as exclusive sellers of books on the popular Kindle platform, Amazon's numbers aren't reflective of the industry as a whole, but publisher reports indicate around 15% or so of sales are coming from eBooks.

US bookshop Barnes & Noble offer a competing eReader platform ("Nook"), which is powered by Google's Android technology (although can't run Android smartphone/tablet applications), which this week saw the release of a new model with a black and white touch screen to complement the existing Nook Colour reader, which features a colour screen and the ability to run applications.

Future Publishing reach a digital tipping point

Future publishing say that they have reached a tipping point in their publishing model, as for the first time their digital revenue growth has outstripped the decline in print advertising, leading to total revenue growth for the 'magazine' publisher of 2% - its first growth in 4 years.

"The difference in the last 12 months [of trading] is that there has been more change in the last 10 months since iPads and tablets started to motor than the 10 years of digital before," said chief executive Stevie Spring.