In the first case of its kind, a UK citizen has just been fined £1000 after one of his tweets landed him in hot water.

Back in January, upon hearing the news that Robin Hood Airport was closing due to snow, angry Twitter user, Paul Chambers vented his anger by posting: "C**p! Robin Hood airport is closed. You've got a week and a bit to get your s**t together, otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high!!"

Whilst the airport themselves didn’t take the joke seriously, the police did and this week he was fined £1,000 due to the post being "grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character”.

On top of the fine, Mr Chambers was given a criminal record and also had his computer confiscated. This hasn’t stopped him using the micro-blogging site as since he has commented on the judgment with "I'd like to thank the CPS (Crown Prosecution Service) for their level-best efforts in f**king up the life of an ordinary citizen. I love Britain."

Mr Chambers is now considering launching an appeal, something which other Twitterers, including well known user Steven Fry, have said they would help fund.

A few days ago, Google announced that they would be launching their new social media service: Google Buzz. It’s currently being rolled out across the world, with some users still waiting to receive full access to the service, while others have already been able to try it out.

How does it differ to other social media platforms?

Google has worked hard to differentiate Buzz from other social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, which it does in a few different ways:

1. Integration with email

Google has integrated its successful email feature Gmail into Buzz, giving it an advantage over even the most popular social media platforms, whose email functions – if they have them – tend to be poor. Google is confident that Buzz users will see the advantage of not having to log into both a social media platform and separate email account.

2. Fast, full screen photo presentation

Buzz offers a photo viewing feature, which allows its users to view large, high quality photos that fill the screen and can be scrolled through at a high speed.

3. Buzz places high emphasis on location

Google believes that location is an important indicator of how relevant information is to you. Buzz can work out your location and is even able to ascertain the name of the building you are in.

4. Only shows posts which will interest you

Google has used it extensive knowledge of algorithms to create Buzz and shows this off by claiming that it will filter out posts that are not of interest to you – even if they are by your contacts – and vice versa: interesting posts by people you don’t already know. Then, depending on which tidbits you choose to approve or hide, its algorithm will attempt to gear more relevant and interesting results your way, personalised to your tastes.

Can it rival Facebook and Twitter?

What’s interesting is Buzz’s integration of other social media platforms, including Flickr and Twitter, but not with Facebook. Perhaps a deal is in the pipeline between the two, but until then it almost suggests that Google is content to live in harmony with Twitter (after all, Google recently paid $25m to index Twitter’s content), but with Buzz containing similar features to Facebook, it seems like Buzz’s main intention is to topple the current social media king.

It’s no secret that Facebook is currently dominating the social media market, with an official blog post on the site recently reporting that it had reached over 400 million users. While a completely fresh and unknown social media platform may struggle to compete with such a giant already in place, Google’s advantage is in its brand, which is already popular and established in almost every other aspect of the Internet - if anyone is going to compete with Facebook and Twitter, it’s going to be Google.

What should businesses do?

It’s too soon to tell whether Google’s new venture will take the world by storm or end up as a failed attempt, but at the very least, it’s certainly worth taking a look at and registering a profile, even if simply to get to grips with the interface and reserve your company name. For those who already have a Gmail account, getting started is easy, with current contacts automatically becoming friends/followers and therefore eliminating the registration process - not every social media site can claim to start off with millions of users raring to go.

Significant results have emerged from a nationwide survey which concluded that the majority of journalists now use social media as an essential source for finding information. The survey, conducted by Cision and Don Bates of The George Washington University, stressed that although PR firms are still used to verify and expand on information, social media sites are the first point of call for journalists who are researching articles or uncovering stories.

These findings will have major implications for many companies’ current PR strategies. Of the journalists questioned, 65% use social media sites including Facebook and Linkedin as part of their research process with a further 89% using blogs to obtain information. Micro blogging sites were also found to be popular among journalists with 51% consulting twitter when conducting research.

The use of social media is widespread throughout the profession, the survey found that those journalists who had greater experience (20 or more years) relied on blogs almost as much as those with fewer years experience (under 9 years) with only a 2% difference between the two groups. Of the journalists questioned 71% claimed to use the web ‘far more’ than they did five years ago when writing an article.

If your business wants to be successful when engaging in public relations then you must ensure that your firm or your PR agency is effectively using social media marketing techniques and consider it an imperative part of all PR work.

Google has just launched a new product called Web Elements. See here for details. The product aims to make it simple for webmasters and bloggers to place Google applications on their pages.

Whilst many of these applications have been available to developers for a while, they have never been in a single, easy-to-use package like this. On a single page you can now pick to show Google favourites such as Calendar, Maps, Custom Search, Spreadsheets, Presentations, and receive fresh news content from Google News and YouTube News.

Google has certainly put some thought and effort into the applications. For example, the YouTube news widget lets you choose content from over a dozen news agencies. So far there are a total of eight separate apps, but more are thought to be in the pipeline.

One of the widgets already gathering a bit of buzz (even though it isn’t yet 24 hours old) is the Conversation feature. It allows you to turn your site into a social community where users can comment on any topic you choose to start. Expect to start seeing this on quite a few sites.

Implementation for the most part is simply embedding a bit of JavaScript code, much in the same way as Google Analytics, allowing even novice developers to take full advantage of these widgets.