If there's one thing scamsters love, it's a new way to hawk their tawdry wares. While it’s not nearly as ancient and powerful as black magic and voodoo, the internet has a powerful juju. And Google AdWords. Welcome to online witchdocters. If you live in a developing country (and who knows, maybe even in some neighbourhoods in the developed world) you occasionally find flyers stuffed under your windscreen wipers offering the services of "traditional healers", witchdoctors and suchlike. They’re normally cheesy ...

Status updates are at the very heart of the Facebook experience. They’re how its 800-million strong community shares thoughts, emotions and ideas. Now the world’s largest social network has taken those updates and collated them into a list of top trending topics for 2011. According to an official blog post, Facebook calls the method it's used to collate the topics "Memology". It claims to take "the pulse of this global community by comparing this year's status updates to last ...

Google's vice president of engineering for the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region, Nelson Mattos, commands god-like respect among googlers. He is, after all, the man responsible for engineering and product development. Mattos, the brain behind analytics products such as Google Trends and Google Instant, believes that Africa is in a unique position to change the way we experience the web via mobile devices. This is why Google is paying particular attention to the continent. Mattos spoke to Memeburn about the ...

The internet is practically heaving with top-quality “webisodes”. As such, selecting the best from a seemingly infinite bunch could be something of a Herculean task. Luckily, we have done the hard work for you and mined the funniest, weirdest and most uplifting web episodes from across the digital highway. Ask a Ninja Ask a Ninja launched in 2005 with its first episode Ninja Mart-Store. Since its debut, the series has released 117 episodes. The star of the show -- the Ninja -- ...

A record low for RIM stock, drunken rowdiness aboard an Air Canada Flight, a disappointing update to RIM’s fiscal Q3 guidance, and yet, there's hope. It's just another typical week for RIM. Drama RIM announced during an update to its fiscal Q3 guidance, that it no longer expects to meet its full year adjusted diluted earnings per share target of $5.25-6.00. RIM shares have lost more than 70% of their value this fiscal year and ended on a record low of US$16 ...

A simple but heart-wrenching YouTube video, originally posted in August, of gay teen Jonah Mowry telling his story, has recently gone viral across the internet. Set to the haunting Breathe Me by Australian pop-singer Sia, a then-13 year old Mowry -- silent throughout -- displays a series of flashcards in the 4min long video titled "What’s goin on..". Mowry tells of how since he started school, he has faced taunts, jibes, and homophobic slurs from bullying schoolmates."Gay. Fag. Dick. Douche. Homo. Asshole," ...

Facebook is finally rolling out its long-awaited Timeline feature. The first country to receive the update to the world's largest social network, announced in September, was New Zealand. According to an update on Facebook's official blog, "over a million people have signed up for the developer beta to access Timeline". The beta was initially designed to service developers looking to build apps on the platform. A number of ordinary Facebook users, however, took to the beta after their interest was ...

The gentle learning curve of mobile gaming is ever-present with Infinity Blade II, the sequel to the addictive, but repetitive, swords and sorcery adventure for iOS. Gone is the repetition (kind of), replaced by a branching structure which turns the once-linear cycle of death and rebirth into a whimsical, steel-plated action. Let me explain. A winning formula Infinity Blade II is all about death. Dying evolves your character, and each time you fight your way to the God King (or a similarly ...

Thousands of Russians gathered at a so-called “Facebook rally”, protesting the results of recent legislative elections in the country. The elections were won by Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party amidst widespread claims of fraud. Several thousand people reportedly gathered in Moscow, in what news service Russia Today calls, "unsanctioned rallies". Mirroring techniques used successfully in the Arab Spring uprisings, prominent Russian bloggers took to Facebook to organise the rallies. The march received no coverage on mainstream television. In fact one ...

Following a concerted decade-long campaign, proponents of an online "red light district" -- a specific domain for adult entertainment sites -- can finally celebrate with the sale of ".xxx" websites going live this week. With reports that the web was running out of web addresses sparking off fears that an “iPocalypse” was imminent, earlier this year, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) -- a global body responsible for managing the internet’s domain name system -- voted to allow ...