Facebook users compromised - Zuckerberg gets richer?

The lead story on VNU at the moment tells us that Facebook has won a record spam payout after users of the site were tricked into parting with their confidential information and spammers were able to send out millions of spam messages.

The question is - what will happen to this money? Will the users who were affected see the compensation? Will they be offered training from Facebook in how to prevent such attacks in the future? Will Facebook invest in itself? Or will it further line Zuckerberg's pocket?

Safe to say the first two options are pretty unlikely.

Nonetheless, it raises an interesting question though about who has the right to this kind of compensation.

I'm bored with it - not of it!

There was a story in Metro this morning that appealed to my inner pedant and gave me and fellow PR and friend Laura a good chuckle on the train. I stand firmly alongside John Humphreys when he complains about tautology saying it is the 'the linguistic equivalent of having chips with rice'. Brilliant.

As a PR bad grammar and the misuse of words is something that just shouldn't happen and fellow PR Steve Earl and journalist Sally Whittle are just two people who agree and blog about this topic regularly.

And so inspired here are a couple of my all time bugbear phrases that this article overlooked:

1. Blatantly obvious

2. To be fair

3. Bored of (trust me, it is with. A big thanks to my friend Barney for drilling that one into me and all my friends!)

4. At the end of the day (yes it's in the article but is just THAT annoying)

5. No word of a lie (thanks Claire!)

6. Oh yes, and any unnecessary acronym, like ITCEC

So, if you use any or all of the above - stop it.

That is all.

The dangers of sexy surveys

Rory Cellen-Jones didn't think much of the news today (we think from uSwitch) that Granny's like Gaming.

The debate has also worked its way on to twitter with a few journo's slating flaky surveys - they've even slating the PR for trying to light-heartedly defend the survey - ooh er!

Not that I blame them. Yes, surveys have been the source of many a successful campaign for us (like this lovely one for a client) and, let's be honest, there is always a certain level of assumption with the stats as you are looking at a portion of the population, not the whole of the population. However, there is a fine line and in order to maintain credibility it is important that we don't cross it.

Note to self - no sexed up surveys!