• Laundry time. Make sure you are getting what you're paying for. That's good advice in a lot of areas of human endeavor and it's certainly true of online advertising. We wrote last month about efforts by the online advertising industry to impose standards on how viewable an ad must be.  Now advertisers have a new worry: "domain laundering," a scheme in which online advertising exchanges represent to advertisers that ads will appear on legitimate sites, but actually place the ads on sites known for pirated content. Clearly, that's not the environment in which an advertiser wants its message to be located. "This has become increasingly common as sophisticated perpetrators realize they can circumvent the manual, internal checks that many ad platforms have in place," the senior vice president of corporate development at comScore, a digital analytics company, told the Wall Street Journal.
  • Valuable tweets. Twitter earned $361 million in the last fiscal quarter and has certainly carved out a place on the social media scene. Kurt Wagner of Re/code says this is a perfect time for the company's leaders to define what Twitter aspires to become in the next few years. Does it plan to try to hit a billion users? (Its current count of active users is about 284 million.) Or is it thinking somewhat less broadly? Twitter starts with a smaller user base than Google or Facebook, but it provides an immediacy that distinguishes Twitter from many other major networks. According to Wagner, this is also a good time for Twitter to explain to advertisers what its true value is. One key may be for Twitter to find a way to count the people who don't have accounts but still visit its site or see tweets on television.
  • Cops and robbers. There's been a lot of discussion about law enforcement and social media: Are the cops keeping up with techniques that are being used by criminals? And are they making sure to stay within the framework of Supreme Court decisions that protect the rights of suspects? A new study from LexisNexis isn't especially encouraging. It shows that 80 percent of law enforcement agencies in the United States use social media to catch criminals but that 52 percent of them don't have a formal policy regarding the use of social media. Only 33 percent of the agencies have an assigned social media monitor, while the others leave such monitoring to individual officers. The study solicited answers from nearly 500 local, state and federal enforcement agencies.

Because of the generality of this update, the information provided herein may not be applicable in all situations and should not be acted upon without specific legal advice based on particular situations.

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