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Independent News & Media have confirmed the sale of the Independent, the Independent on Sunday and its associated websites to Russian Alexander Lebedev. The Independent will be the second British newspaper purchase for Lebedev who bought the London Evening Standard in January 2009.

So Twitter has finally announced they were going to try and monetize their site. Their idea? To offer featured tweets for money – but is it going to work…?

Satisfaction with family life is high and despite views to the contrary (a quarter of all children live in single parent families compared to 8% in 1972 source Mintel) there seems to be a growing trend for togetherness. According to TGI 85% of adults enjoy spending time with their family. This togetherness is also supported by an article in the Daily Mail yesterday, saying of retired homeowners 65+ withdrew an average of £43,090 from their homes between January and March 2010–a third took out the money to help their family (compared with less than a fifth at the same time in 2009)

Facebook, the social networking juggernaut has now grown into a significant traffic source. The meteoric rise of the website is no secret – Facebook is already the most popular social networking website in the world, leaving competitors MySpace and Orkut far, far behind. The website is the number one traffic driver to news sources. However, Facebook is now also strategically poised to become a major Internet hub of the likes of Google and Yahoo.

An interesting report from Tamar hit the sport/business headlines this week, suggesting that World Cup sponsors are not adequately using search to leverage their sponsorship campaigns.

Twitter, like many things online, falls victim to spammers. These are people who will aggressively follow and unfollow people to try and build up their own follower number so when they send out their spammy twitter update it reaches as many people as possible.

Sadly, these updates can range from irritating messages to those with links which point to harmful phishing or malware websites.

With the countdown to the General Election now officially underway, every polling company in the land are releasing daily updates of their predictions, with current opinion ranging from a conservative majority to a Labour minority government, with plenty of talk of a hung parliament thrown in to the mix. Inspired by Hitwise’s Bill Tancer’s excellent book Click, we wanted to see what online behaviour could tell us about likely voting results – perhaps we could pick a winner with some good old search data and buzz monitoring.

Earlier this week MEC Manchester became the first media agency as a whole to ever take part in SDI training. What is SDI training you ask?

Twitter has confirmed it will finally be launching its own advertising platform in the next month. At present, websites such as Twittad have already offer the opportunity to advertise by two different methods: finding and targeting specific users directly based on their demographic/location/interests or campaigning for Twitter users with over 500 followers to advertise on their behalf. But an officially sanctioned ad system is a very different ball-game.

The following article is taken from the March edition of the interaction newsletter. In one of the articles, Gareth Owen wrote a piece about the regulation of social media marketing in the UK. Below is his opinion on this subject.

News International today announced the long awaited details of their pay-wall initiative for the Times and Sunday Times websites.  Matt Delaney, Account Manager in the MEC Manchester Press team, gives his view on the plans:

As you’re all probably aware by now, MEC Manchester loves to help people in need. Our latest adventure is for MedEquip4Kids.

4 Brave MEC staff will be doing a terrifying 50 mile hike across the Pennines. Yes you heard right, 50 Miles!! That’s just shy of two marathons to complete from sunrise to sundown, same day!

Until recently, Google have been developing an open source project called Google Gears. It was a new method of allowing browsers and web applications to interact with your desktop and store data in fully searchable databases. A good example of how Google Gears useful functionality was to offer offline support in Gmail. 

MEC Manchester likes raising money for good causes.

MEC Manchester doesn't do things by halves.

So we have set ourselves a Sports Relief challenge.

MEC were sponsoring Think Visibility in Leeds at the weekend. Six people from MEC's eleven strong SEO team attended the conference on Saturday: Carolyn Jones, David Towers, Dan Alderson, Waqar Shah, Mike Montgomery and Tahera Dudhwala.