South African citizens have taken to Twitter to support City Press after the ruling party called for a boycott of the newspaper. The name of the national paper, which published photographs of the controversial 'Spear' painting featuring president Jacob Zuma with his genitals exposed, trended on Twitter today as users voiced their opinions on the saga. City Press's front page

Social media campaigns are big business. In fact, social research company Hubspot estimates that some US$3.08-billion was spent just on advertising on social networking sites in 2011. And although quite a bit has been made about General Motors (GM) pulling a chunk of their marketing budget from Facebook, the fact is the company is still committed to spending US$30-million a year just on Facebook campaigns. They work too. A recent study by research company Millward-Brown showed that there was a direct correlation ...

Famed for his prolific commentary on social media and tech, Ben Parr was a key member of the Mashable team, an award-winning social media and technology news site, for three years before his axing in 2011. The former editor-at-large, who refuses to go into details about why he was asked to leave the company, now pens a weekly column for CNET, another technology news site. He was recently named the coolest social media geek in Silicon Valley by SF Weekly, a San ...

One of the best features of blog platforms is that they’re so customisable. Through plugins and widgets, you can easily add handy sharing capabilities, lists of recent posts, a live Twitter feed, whatever you like -- adapting your design to your needs, setting it apart from the competition and making it distinct. Here’s a look at some of the coolest WordPress and Blogger widgets out there, to help you spice up your blog with the features that are right for you. For ...

Facebook is rolling out its new innovative advertising medium, called Facebook Promoted Posts for Facebook pages. If you own a Facebook page you can now promote your status updates to your fans, forcing them to see it in their newsfeeds. Facebook works with an algorithm called Edgerank, which determines who sees status updates from Facebook pages. Normally only a limit number of your fans are reached with a new status update. With promoting posts you now can guarantee a number of ...

Things could be about to get even more interesting at Facebook HQ. The social networking giant is rumored to be eyeing a takeover of Norwegian mobile and desktop browsing company Opera. Tech news site Pocket-lint cites a "man in the know" who says that the social networking giant is looking to expand into the browsing space in order to give it a fair go at the like of Google, Microsoft, and Apple who all have their own browsers. It says ...

If you are among those who think social networking is becoming too noisy and intrusive, then there is a solution. It's a private social network that allows you to communicate with your partner in a private, intimate way. No it's not Pair. In fact, it predates the cutesy social effort that's been grabbing headlines in the tech press. Between is an app developed by South Korean startup VCNC. It provides a quick chat option between couples, as well as photo ...

The Square Kilometer Array (SKA) of telescopes is to be split between South Africa and Australia and New Zealand. That's according to an announcement made by the nations belonging to the SKA organisation at an airport in Amsterdam today. The 1.5-billion Euro project has massive financial and tech implications for both countries. As we've previously pointed out, in order for the 3 000 radio dishes to operate effectively in real-time, they will need some pretty impressive networking and processing power. They ...

Facebook's IPO is considered a failure in that the share price was too high to attract retail investors. There's more bad news. More than 1.7-billion shares owned by insiders, such as employees, etc, will be "unlocked' over the next six months and will be eligible for trading. That's a huge overhang considering that Facebook floated 421-million shares in its IPO. It's equivalent to an additional four Facebook IPOs. The largest block of shares, about 1.3-billion, unlocks in six months time. Also, the late ...

History has just been made. Space X's Dragon Capsule has docked successfully with the International Space Station. It is the first privately built spacecraft in history to do so. After launching earlier this week, the spacecraft gradually made its way to the space station, eventually flying in formation with it. Before the Dragon docked, it turned its engines off, signalling that it was ready to be brought in on the space station's robotic arm. Here's the moment it happened: ...