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Happy returns for friends, and foes, reunited

Launched five years ago today by web designer Steve Pankhurst and his wife Julie to track down her old school friends and equip her with IT skills for a return to work after her maternity leave, the phenomenally successful website Friends Reunited now has 12 million members, writes Simon Crerar.

Run initially from a three-bed semi in Barnet, north London, the site hit critical mass in May 2001 – the point when anyone registering would recognise at least one name. By August 2001 there were one million members. One man was reunited with his mother after 53 years. Another was reunited with his cat after 10 years – his university flatmate had kept it. Numerous childhood sweethearts rekindled old passions. The oldest member was a 99-year-old woman searching for old school friends. Within a year the first Friends Reunited baby arrived, followed by an 80s compilation CD that sold over 100,000 copies.

Citizen journalism still in its infancy

US South African academic Vincent Maher is disappointed that more citizen journalism didn't spring from yesterday's explosions in London.

Maher, who teaches multimedia journalism at the New Media Lab at Rhodes University's School of Journalism and Media Studies, wrote:

What this says to me, despite my enthusiasm for citizen journalism and the we media is that we have a long way to go. It could start with getting paid, of course but I think the real problem is that it is simply too easy to sit and wait for someone else to write it up and then provide commentary. Journalists are expected to get up and physically go there, take a photo, do something and get back to post the story ... bloggers seem to get away with armchair journalism and its getting worse and worse.

What we need is people posting pics and stories from their phones, as and when the events happen. Those people are the real deal as citizen journalists go. Email me examples if you find any - I haven't as yet.

Maher's right that not a lot of citizen journalism went on yesterday. But there are good reasons why bloggers were "getting away with armchair journalism".

First: one cannot expect many London bloggers sitting at home or at work in, say, Hammersmith, on hearing about yesterday's explosions two weeks to the day after bombs that killed 52 innocent people, to jump in a cab and head for the scene of the blasts, not least because the Metropolitan police were pleading with people to stay where they were. So, not surprisingly, bloggers were restricted to regurgitating the breaking news coverage unless they happened to be on the scene of one of the explosions. What images there were reflected what was going on in the immediate vicinity of the snapper: see these ones on Flickr, or this one sent by Adam Randall from his phone to his moblog of roads being closed close to the Old Bailey and video of a pub being evacuated.

The battle of Brunel

Steven Schwartz, head of Brunel University.
Photograph: Guardian
Google war has broken out between Brunel University and the lecturers' union, the Association of University Teachers.

The head of Brunel, Steven Schwartz, announced 60 redundancies at the university last September, which the AUT are - naturally - opposing, and it's been an imaginative battle since.

iTunes in Japan

Given that all the new technological gizmos (almost) always arrive in Japan months before anywhere else, it seems amazing that it is only now getting an iTunes store, writes James Sturcke. Can it really be that shoppers in over a dozen countries have had up to two years' head start and the chance to download 500m tracks before the Japanese get a look in the door?

Apparently so. But not any longer now that Apple has opened an iTunes store in Japan. The Californian company is charging 135 yen (68p) for 90% of its music and 200 yen for the rest, undercutting the 210 yen per track charged by Sony's Mora equivalent.

Analysts have said that the lack of an iTunes store aimed at Japanese users was a major reason behind Sony securing the top market share there for flash memory based players in recent months, ahead of the iPod shuffle.

The new store has sparked an ecstatic response from international customers after the latest Japanese beat combos. But they may be disappointed. As in Apple's other iTunes stores, you will need a credit card registered in that country to buy music.

A no-no to google Google

Google hasn't just thrown its teddy out of the pram: it has stamped all over it as well.

The search giant has sent technology news site CNet to Coventry for a year over a story written by reporter Elinor Mills. She had the temerity to employ Google's own search technology to dig out details of Google CEO Eric Schmidt's business and personal life, including how much he made from selling Google shares and the town where he lives.

Seemingly as a result of the "privacy issues" raised by the piece, Google has banned its staff from talking to any CNet reporters for a year.

Flickr flak

The almost inevitable backlash against the ever-emphatic net giant Yahoo!'s purchase of Flickr is beginning, as this piece in Wired attests.

Disgruntled German artist and Flickr user Thomas Müller has set up Flick Off, in a bid to spread his anger about a coming change to users' Flickr logins. As I type more than 850 people have joined the group, who are threatening to kill off their Flickr accounts (overdramatically referring to this as "the Flickr Accounts Mass Suicide Countdown group") if Yahoo!/Flickr proceeds with plans to force users to log in with a Yahoo! ID in a change that will take place by early next year. The idea of melding Flickr logons with the Yahoo! mother ship is deeply disasteful to some users: as James Sharpe comments on Flick Off, " I don't want to join with Yahoo, if I'd have known this was going to happen I would have never joined Flickr in the first place."

Others, though, are less bothered. Will Merydith says: "Honestly, I don't understand the point here. I must be missing some key piece of information because from where I'm standing this whole 'protest' seems childish. You should call this group 'Flickle'."