It appears more than 50% of the fund has just been awarded to the International Press Institute, based in Vienna, which will be used to sponsor the IPI News Innovation Contest.

According to a Google blog post on the matter, Google wants to be part of the contest, which seeks to “find and fund breakthrough ideas that will have a lasting impact on the future of digital news in communities across Europe, the Middle East and Africa”.

The Commission considers that it can be acceptable in some circumstances for the press to publish information taken from such websites, even if the material was originally intended for a small group of acquaintances rather than a mass audience. This is normally, however, when the individual concerned has come to public attention as a result of their own actions, or are otherwise relevant to an incident currently in the news when they may expect to be the subject of some media scrutiny. Additionally, if the images used are freely available (rather than hidden behind strict privacy settings), innocuous and used simply to illustrate what someone looks like it is less likely that publication will amount to a privacy intrusion. Circumventing privacy settings to obtain information will require a public interest justification.

The Commission has recently made clear that it can be acceptable in some circumstances for the press to publish information taken from social networking websites, even when the material is originally intended for a small group of acquaintances and not publicly accessible. However, this will generally be only in cases where the public interest overrides the individual's right to privacy.

In response to Saatchi & Saatchi’s setting of the brief “get as many followers on twitter as you can” for their 2011 Scholarship, I pretended I worked for them, set up @Saatchi_grads and with a little design and carefully chosen words people began to assume I’m the official twitter feed.

I think it’s important to reiterate why I’m doing this experiment. There are a number of reasons, primarily:

1) I thought it would be funny to see how long Saatchi & Saatchi would let me go on pretending I’m them, and how far I could take it – a TV interview would be the pinnacle of success of the project.