There’s little doubt her article bemoaning her own beauty was misguided, whether because you disagree with her high regard for her looks, or detest her abysmal view of the female of the species. Or perhaps just her self-centred living-in-a-dream-world attitude to life.

Is Samantha a fool for writing such codswash, or a genuis for raising her national (and international) profile quicker than a coked up Charlie Sheen on a rocket launcher? (What’s next? I’m A Celebrity call up? A book deal? Piers Morgan Life Stories?)

The Daily Mail are the real winners – 1.5 million web hits and counting, leaving most retailers luminous green with envy at the robustness of the newspapers server capacity (you would expect they are used to this type of thing after their huge growth, and thanks to Jan Moir). Not to mention their ability to serve banner ad trash to another seven figure audience.

Ultimately though, the Samantha Brick story tells us more about our society today than most blogs or wikis or encyclopaedias could ever hope to.

“I don’t get angry”, Michael Grade mumbled yesterday on Radio 4′s Front Row, talking about talent shows on TV, “I don’t like exploitation, and I do feel occasionally the shows verge on exploitation”. Though he added “I think most people that appear on those shows by now, it’s informed consent”, he was being diplomatic.

The Daily Mail, by allowing pixel inches to be used for Samatha Brick’s drivel, have used the author in the same way reality TV shows use their contestants. No doubt the editor jumped with joy upon receiving the copy, fists aloft declaring another Max Gogarty or Mike Read moment, perhaps on their largest scale yet. Hurrah!

I hate the Daily Mail. I hate them partly because they are a mirror into the soul of society today, and I don’t always like what I see. It’s a society where poor, beautiful and foolish/genius [delete as appropriate] Samantha Brick can be as equally enlightening on how we operate as she is manipulated and exploited by the Daily Mail.

And by us, though our implicit consent to this behaviour. Perhaps she should know better as should the drove turning up at TV talent auditions.

Samantha Brick does not deserve vitriol, just as 19 year old  Max didn’t (Jan Moir however, made her bed). But perhaps the authors and their editors need to understand that in the long term, their appropriation of X-Factor values and lazy journalism might not be worth the banner ad revenue it generates them.

A budding jewellery maker wants potential buyers to see his forthcoming designs, but doesn’t want big companies to steal those ideas.

A photographer wants her talent to be recognised – perhaps her images even purchased – but doesn’t want to see them distributed across the web for free without her due credit.

Pinterest have announced the release of their copyright code which can block the repining of protected material. But for people with a vested interested in distributing their work in a controlled manner, should they be scared to share on Pinterest or should they block social pinning.

To me, Pinterest allows distribution with due credit and the ability to actually find where an image comes from, quite unlike an image appearing without credit on a blog. Sure people can still steal an image, upload it to Pinterest and reap the glory, but this new code isn’t going to put an end to that blatant disregard for online property..

The reason for such excitement in Pinterest is its ability to share images of inspiration, and images of inspirational things, with a wide and diverse audience. That’s something that copyright owners could use to their advantage, increasing awareness and interest in their content, with the added bonus of built in traceability and measurement.

The trade off to reaching this audience is allowing Pinterest to gain a large, engaged and long-dwelling audience which is waiting to be monetised.

Perhaps copyright owners would prefer a share of the revenues from re-pinning rather than blocking their content?

This independent ashop on Etsy has reached a new audience through Pinterest, and the links are traceable directly back to the product page on their store. A good reason to share copyright?

Connecting? Linking? Meeting? Sharing? Finding? Networking? Expressing? Belonging?

Absolute donuts.

This screengrab of a timeline was emailed to me, the source may or may not be this https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10150652961626972&set=a.10150261117236972.370374.299674901971&type=1&theater

As well as liking, @replying and tumbling, we can now ‘pin’.

And of all the social media platforms, Pinterest is one of the most useful.

Simple concept: see an image, pin it to a virtual board. It’s an indexable, shareable way of recording memories and inspiration, of virtually pinning interesting images to a cloud-based memory board in the sky.

Think an Evernote for pictures and a public timeline. Brilliant.

It was always a pretty wacky world really (real life is always weirder than fiction of course). But lately everything just seems more surreal than normal.

For instance, NASA have been given jurisdiction over the Scottish Premier League television rights.

NASA?!

Not to mention the news has broken that Status Quo no longer exist but instead are zombies made from the breath of puffins.

What?!

And apparently Beverley Knight and Darren Day are due to star in a new TV show as a detective duo solving crimes through music

(The sad thing is people might actually watch that…)

Of course, it’s not real life, but the random pseudo-life coach / Mighty Boosh-esque warblings of Bet Fair Poker and their comedy road show twitter feed.

Adopting a completely non-corporate feel to their brand communications, Bet Fair Poker’s tweetings are a stream of Crazy Man Michael musings to give Noel Fielding a run for his money (“Interesting Fact: LL Cool J once tried to eat an entire ostrich from top to bottom, but only managed to get as far as the beak..”

The stream of consciousness often lingers over several hours or days in recurring themes (such as a love affair with Victoria Principal from Dallas) that blur enough reality with nonsense to cause most people to stop dead what they’re doing and scroll down through the reams and reams of craziness that make up a day in the Bet Fair offices.

Genius game-changing social media strategy or a business heading for disaster? (and litigation?!)

For the sake of the world and common sense, I hope Status Quo et al see the funny side of it…

Click to see the full version (and thanks Happy Place!)

Where's the circle for "People, possibly famous, who I'd never admit to caring about but actually I'm quite keen on stalking anonymously." Not that I do that...

Schools desks might still be littered with compass etched expletives about Carly Butterfield or Daniel Drinkwater, but nowadays they’re more likely to be transcribed onto a new wall, a digital one. Nowadays it’s more likely that school yard slander will manifest itself as status updates on Facebook than engravings eked out whilst teacher is scribbling unintelligible physics equations on the blackboard.

The Wall, these days found on Facebook rather than an alleyway

Not forgetting the stupidity of nipping to the loo leaving your phone logged into Twitter in the presence of mischievous mates, or the high profile cases of serious victimisation through online channels, I’ve been wondering if social media has given new life to the darker side of our connected society. Is it too easy to shout and scream abuse at other individuals via a social network, a blog comment or a forum thread?

It would seem it’s not just school kids who don’t know any better.

Take PHD Worldwide, who probably deserved a little stick for their predictions of the future of digital, but you might agree that some commentators went a little bit OTT with their response.

Take Darron Gibson, Manchester United and Irish international footballer, who this week quit Twitter just hours after he signed up. Whatever your opinion of his abilities (and I rest assured that he would tear me apart on a five a side pitch) does a Premier League footballer really deserve to be served up such a smorgasbord of rants, criticisms and swear words from people who really should know much better?

One of the less vitriolic examples of Twitter abuse that Gibson received

Perhaps I’m idealistic, or plain soft, but is it really fair that anyone should be victim to this sort of behaviour? It was hardly constructive criticism or wink-and-smile humour. Would you scream these things at Gibson if you saw him in the street?

Perhaps in this example those in the limelight should know better, perhaps they should avoid putting themselves in that situation, but that’s somewhat missing the point.

We all know that shouts of frustration leave the mouths on the football terraces. We all know that Kerry Katona isn’t everyone’s cup of tea and that most blokes pretend to hate Ant & Dec for no reason other than they’re a smidgeon jealous. Let’s face it, swearing and moaning about others is part of everyday life . If it wasn’t Frankie Boyle would be out of a career…

And this opens up a whole other can of worms. What is acceptable to say in public? What should you leave for the save confines of the pub or living room?

It seems that social media has become such a personal thing that people are as comfortable talking to the world as they are talking in their own home and that with this comfort people have no trouble in making public their spontaneous outbursts of vitriol. Do some people have no shame? Is it ok to do this? Are certain people fair game? Am I kidding myself that some of these people don’t deserve it?

Social media has enhanced my life, I’ve shared and learned and met friends for life, and I’ve seen it used for many a good deed. But as with everything, it can be used for other means. There’s a dirty, nasty side to the ability to post whatever you’re thinking and have it re-tweeted around the world.

I doubt we can ever expect to have our pie and only lick the cream from the top, but is there a real danger that the power of social media is increasingly acting as a bike shed wall for our school yard hate mail?

If you blinked and missed Darron Gibson’s brief stint on Twitter then some of the tweets are recorded here. Whether you think it’s all blown out of proportion or genuinely unacceptable behaviour, let me know what you think.

The future.

How do you pre-empt the next big thing? How do you calculate how people will behave beyond iPads? How do you know where humanity will go in ten years, in twenty years, in a hundred years?

An agency called PHD Worldwide this week tried to predict the future of digital marketing. Suffice to say they’re not likely to influence reality TV shows in half a century like George did. Not with their effort, a promotional video entitled “We are the future“.

The video has received almost unanimous criticism from the marketing industry on a number of levels. It’s fair to say the criticism has bordered on the vitriolic and that in some ways I feel sorry for PHD and quite ashamed of elements of the reaction (surely neither the video and the comments have had a positive effect on the digital marketing industry?).

I think PHD dropped a bollock, but I’m not prepared to run them into the ground because of it. (Make your own mind up by watching for yourself).

Countless broadcasters and publishers have had a pop at pre-empting the technological breakthroughs of the future with limited success, whilst literary works have sometimes been capable of warning whole societies of the dangers awaiting them, with a varied amount of success.

Perhaps PHD’s problem was that they focused on what people are doing now and not what they will be doing. The video is nothing more than a buzzword filled brain dump of things that on the verge of becoming mainstream. And quite frankly the comments on brand blocking stinks of a lack of real thought behind what drives human beings in their online behaviour.

It seems to me that the best predictions of the future focus less on what technology we might be able to make use of, but how people might continue to treat each other (and themselves) in the advent of technological advances. Orwell not only identified the cyclical nature of politics in Animal Farm but also recognised the role that technology might play in freedom in the future (see 1984).

And there are the works that didn’t intend to predict the future but, whether inadvertently or not, detailed the inner workings of the hunman psyche.

Books like The Picture of Dorian Gray should make us reflect on the consequences of today’s image led society; songs like Lives in the Balance by Jackson Browne might be firmly rooted in the Reagan policies towards Central America in the 80s but the words (“When a government lies to a people/And a country is drifting to war”) resonate deeply with conflicts in the Gulf, Iraq and Afghanistan; whilst the stories of Gabriel Chevalier might reflect on rural French life in the 1950s, but they may as well mimic the celebrity and sex fuelled culture that we see all around us on a daily basis.

And that’s not to mention the two-steps-back evolution of humanity in H.G. Wells The Time Machine or Kubrick’s surreal vision for 2001: A Space Odyssey where the relationship between man and machine is blurred.

I wonder if PHD had focused a little more on how humans might interact with each other, rather than overlaying buzz words on a bunch of under-age actors, maybe the digital world would be discussing what the future holds rather than why some agency fucked up a viral campaign in the past.

But despite the weird and patronising execution - come on, using kids to say words they don’t understand is not insightful nor clever – fair play to PHD for having a go. It’s a real shame that agency folk from around the world have been so quick and eager to condemn their competitor and kick them, repeatedly, whilst they’re down. Is it any wonder they delete comments that spouted politically charged abuse from a blog that they are liable for the content on, free speech or not?

The future is an enigma and it always will be. Very few people can predict if with any accuracy.

But evidence suggests that the best way to predict the future is not to jump on the next bandwagon but to get under the skin of what makes human beings tick, what makes our humanity that bit different to the rest of live on earth.

The internet might give us the tools to do amazing things, but it’s our underlying nature that drives what we do with any technology.

I’d be delighted to know what you think on the situation. On first view I wondered what the fuss was about; on second view I told myself this was a bit shit; on third view I realised I’d witnessed an epic #fail by a company who claims to understand their sector and had managed to offend their peers rather than call them to arms. But I take with me some words from Larner Caleb, a wiser man than many. People make mistakes, ok? Less vitriol, more debate methinks. To paraphrase another wise man who I work with, “No-one died, get over it”.

Well, sort of. They’ve robbed me of my interests. The labels of things I want to be associated with, the tags that say who I am without delving into my inner psyche.

It all started with a stupid little pop up…

“Mark, please link your profile to a load of crap based on some dubious contextual analysis.”

Um, no thanks Facebook, if it’s all the same to you I’m a bit busy and just want to crack on.

“Well, that’s  not a problem Mr Fletcher, but in that case we’ll have to delete all your interests”.

Um, if it’s all the same to you I’d rather you didn’t do that please Facebook, they are my interests after all.

“Well link to these lovely suggested ‘activities’, ‘interests’ and ‘likes’ then please. Look ‘five a side’, you like that don’t you?”.

Er, well yeah I do, but then it looks like I’m linking to some global community of five a side lovers and weirdos that I’ve not even joined, and I’m quite alright for meeting any more weirdos thanks. I’ll just hit the back button…

[FACEBOOK ERROR SCREEN]: Contact form submission error…blah blah blah…

Bollocks. [TYPES: www.facebo....CLICKS: http://www.facebook.com/...]

Cue blank Facebook profile of a poor monkey with no hobbies or interests

So now I feel like a fool for shouting “I’m not bloody linking to all this crap”. This bloomin’ pop up seemed intent on making me sign up to these global communities or sacrifice my identity! Through sheer ignorance I’ve avoided selling my soul, but for my sins I’ve now ended up a culturally impotent sloth (according to my empty Facebook page anyway) with nothing to do with my long, pointless days then whittle them away thinking up not-very-witty status updates on my social spaces.

Their are no prisoners in Zuckerberg’s quest to take over the world with Facebook, only losers like me who are left identity-less.

• Creative types are more liberal and idealistic (and I think this applies to social media and digital geeks too)
• Business leaders have lost confidence in New Labour and will turn to David Cameron
• The lower down the food chain the worker is the higher the propensity to vote for Labour

There’s a few things that the poll suggests which seem to make sense in the current economic climate:

• Small and very large businesses are more likely to vote Tory

And there’s one major factor that I think may have already decided the outcome of the 2010 General Election this year, and that’s is:

• Age!

Younger people have the power to keep David Cameron out of power – but have they all registered to vote?

LinkedIn Election Poll - UK General Election May 2010