Now, Ashley Cole hasn’t done this himself (though that could have been merely due to the social networking ban the England team faced while they were in South Africa, so stay tuned) but it is incredibly common according to US divorce lawyers; so common in fact that divorce lawyers in the US regularly use Facebook as a means of gathering evidence – and it’s like shooting fish in a barrel.

According to figures from the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, a monumental (and frightening) 81% of people involved in divorce cases in the US have either used evidence gathered from social networking websites, or faced it! The sites in question include Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and even business website LinkedIn and video sharing site YouTube – the mind boggles as to what people must be uploading to YouTube.

Facebook is the biggest source of evidence online for divorce lawyers, with 66% of all Internet evidence coming from the website. 15% of evidence from online sources comes from MySpace, and just 5% from Twitter.

Linda Lea Viken is the president of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, and she commented on how easy it is for lawyers to gather this sort of evidence:

“This sort of evidence has gone from nothing to a large percentage of my cases coming in, and it’s pretty darn easy. It’s like, `Are you kidding me?’”

Some examples of people being caught out online include:

- A man sought custody of his children, while at the same time he created a new account on Match.com listing himself as being childless.

- A husband said that he didn’t have any issues with anger, yet posted in his Facebook status:

“If you have the balls to get in my face, I’ll kick your ass into submission.”

- Another father successfully used the Internet to prove that his wife didn’t spend any time with their children, when records from her World of Warcraft and Facebook Farmville accounts showed her as being online when she should have been with them.

The advice from divorce lawyers in the US is, if you’re going through a divorce; don’t publish anything online that could be used in court. Keep all comments to yourself and whatever you do, do not post photos of you and your new flame online as an attempt to get back at your estranged partner… it will only backfire on you.

Naturally, there is no codec either, just some very harmful malware laden with adverts and pop-ups.

Websense features a blog on the malware attack, showing exactly what to look out for. They have even created the following video showing you what happens and how to avoid it.

Note, this video is not the sexiest video ever, merely a video showing what happens if you happen to fall for the trap of trying to watch the sexiest video ever on Facebook.

The methods of SMO, just like search engine optimisation, vary from site to site. You might want to simply feature a couple of affiliation buttons on your homepage. You might want to get your site into social bookmarking circles. You might install some of the numerous widgets that social media networks are now offering to participants. All of these moves are going to reap very little reward, however, if you haven’t managed to track down what your target users actually need.

Different social media sites appeal to different groups of Internet users. Digg, for instance, has a predominantly technical leaning. Twitter tends to attract users who are into mobile communication. Facebook, of course, has a broad range of users, but is so big that a little definition is needed to reach the right people.

It’s best to research your options before putting a social media plan into place. It’s not much use featuring a Digg bookmarking button on your pages if your site or your users have absolutely no technical knowledge.

If you’ve already got a few social media buttons on your pages, they probably came from the pursuit of your own interests. In most cases, these will match up quite neatly with the needs of your site users, but it is worth doing a little research. It’s just as important to have the right focus for your social media optimisation as it is for search engine optimisation.

The high bandwidth costs of YouTube are one of its main costs.

Google has now come up with another way that it hopes YouTube will begin to make money, and it’s bad news for companies such as Blockbuster. Yesterday Google launched a new service whereby Internet users in the USA could pay to rent movies from YouTube, watching them online. The service only includes five films from the Sundance Film Festival, but if the trial is successful we could see YouTube offering the latest blockbusters online, which is bad news for Blockbuster.

The owners of the films, the studios, will be able to decide what price they want their movies to rented for – and YouTube’s users will then have 48 hours to watch the movies. It works similar to Sky Movies on demand service.

YouTube would then take a cut of the rental price, which could spell huge profits for Google.

Ben Fritz, a writer with the Los Angeles Times, wrote how Google has struggled in the past in persuading the big studios to release their latest movies (such as Transformers 2 and Star Trek) to YouTube:

YouTube has had little luck over the last several years wooing major studios and networks to stream premium content on the site, which would make it easier to draw advertising.

Most studios have instead opted to put their content on Hulu, a joint venture of NBC Universal, News Corp and Walt Disney that has had more success luring marketers.

Should YouTube be successful with its rental business, it would provide competition for Amazon’s download service and Apple’s iTunes store. Microsoft’s Xbox Live would also suffer, and we all know how much pleasure that will give the boys at Google.

We don’t mean those awful US shows either; this news is about British TV shows written and shot in good old Blighty. Shows such as Derren Brown, Peep Show, Gordon Ramsay’s F Word and yes, sadly, Hollyoaks are now available to watch on the Google owned video sharing website.

Google has entered into a three year agreement with Channel 4 to show full length TV programmes, which went live yesterday. There are currently 4,000 full length shows in the ‘Shows’ section on YouTube, but more shows will be added in 2010, and C4 will get its own branded YouTube section.

If you’re into classic TV and you don’t have Dave, you can also watch some of the old episodes of Whose Line Is It Anyway and enjoy Clive Anderson saying goodnight all over again.

This deal marks the first of its kind where a UK broadcaster has made its programmes available on YouTube. However, just like the C4 website (and BBC iPlayer) C4’s catch-up content is only going to be available to watch on YouTube for 30 days.

This deal marks yet another attempt by Google to turn a profit with YouTube, which it paid $1.65 billion for back in 2006.

You have? Well you could be in luck, because Google has just launched YouTube Direct, which is aimed at allowing YouTube users to submit videos (not necessarily their own) to local news networks’ websites.

News and media organisations are able to use the YouTube Direct service to request users, members of the general public, to submit YouTube videos that may be of newsworthiness. These videos are then assessed for their relevance by the media organisations and, if found to be of note, are used as news.

Steve Grove, from the news and politics section of YouTube (yes, there is one) added:

People around the world are taking up cameras and covering news in ways big and small – from documenting global events, to filming local town halls in neighborhoods. YouTube Direct empowers news and media organisations to easily connect with these citizen reporters, and use the power of our platform to cover the news better than ever before.

The Huffington Post in the USA tested the service and it is now being rolled out to different news organisations in America. The idea is that users will be able to upload those all important eye witness videos taken with camera phones and camcorders much faster, and their sources can be verified much easier.

Steve Grove continued:

As we are trying to meet a need that news organisations have, we created an ecosystem between the news audience and YouTube. Think of it like this: YouTube Direct is like a loop between a news website and YouTube. It wraps up YouTube’s upload site in a box and places it on the site of news organisations.

Once this is rolled out to news organisations across the world, everyone can become amateur news reporters and see their footage screened on the news.

Make sure you have your camera phone with you at all times!

SEO is just one small part of making your website hugely successful though. It also has to be engaging, useful, well designed, sticky (meaning that people stay on it longer and come back again) and lots of other things besides. The most successful websites in the UK all have these things in common, as you can see below in the Hitwise report for the most popular websites in the UK for the week ending on Halloween, October 31st.

Google.co.uk is out in front, naturally, because it is the search engine that produces the best results when users are looking for information, products or generally anything on the Internet. Notice that Yahoo.co.uk is down in 10th place, with roughly 10% of the traffic that Google.co.uk receives?

Even Google.com is above Yahoo.co.uk, showing that anyone who is going to find your website is going to do it through Google.

Microsoft’s search, Bing, is down in 18th place with just 0.44% of visits.

Great interactive websites such as the BBC, BBC iPlayer and YouTube have all performed well. In fact, the BBC has done so well that 4 of the top 20 places belong to Aunty.

Facebook is the big winner in the battle of the social networking websites, with 6.12% of the traffic.

Obviously your website isn’t going to compete with the likes of the top 20, but it shows you how the UK is spending its Internet time. If you’re not taking advantage of Facebook, YouTube and Google’s dominance then you’re missing out.

What does this mean for you, the website owner, who wants to increase your traffic and rankings?

It means that YouTube is one of the most powerful websites on the Internet, and by using YouTube effectively you can not only increase your website’s exposure but you can also increase your website’s rankings.

Since Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion it has struggled to make the website profitable. Google isn’t about to give up though, and it does what it can to increase YouTube’s userbase. Through ‘Universal Search’ Google features videos from YouTube (and other video providers it has to be said) within its search results pages for keyword searches – as you can see below.

This means that by using YouTube you can create videos, and subsequently pages featuring your website address and branding, that rank for keywords that would otherwise be too difficult, or take too long, to rank for.

The trick is knowing how to create the videos. You need to film them, edit them and compress the files for upload. You then need to know how to SEO the files that you upload, ensuring that they rank for the chosen keywords.

These two skills, video production and SEO, are skills that we at StuckOn possess. Find out more about YouTube filming for SEO here.