A Quebec woman on long-term sick leave is fighting to have her benefits reinstated after her employer’s insurance company cut them, she says, because of photos posted on Facebook…

…She said her insurance agent described several pictures Blanchard posted on the popular social networking site, including ones showing her having a good time at a Chippendales bar show, at her birthday party and on a sun holiday — evidence that she is no longer depressed, Manulife said…

…Blanchard said that on her doctor’s advice, she tried to have fun, including nights out at her local bar with friends and short getaways to sun destinations, as a way to forget her problems…

…Her lawyer Tom Lavin said Manulife’s investigation was inappropriate. “I don’t think for judging a mental state that Facebook is a very good tool,” he said.

Read the Full Article Here >>.

Story From Telegraph.co.uk.

An actor dressed as pop culture icon “Colonel” Harland Sanders managed to sneak his way past security and into the United Nations posing for photos, shaking hands, and even attending a meeting.

Usually these sort of pranks are pulled off by political activists or artists, but this time the whole thing was cooked in a KFC marketing department;

“As part of its campaign to promote a new menu range, KFC is “lobbying” the UN for the fictional Grilled Nation to be accepted as a member state.” Read the rest here >>.

Fast-food makers in particular seem desperate to launch ad campaigns exploiting so-called guerilla and/or viral “marketing” techniques to boost sales. Unfortunately so far most of these efforts are considered to be abject failures by industry watchers.

Too bad no one warned Richard Heene about this.

In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA and the wider intelligence community, is putting cash into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media. It’s part of a larger movement within the spy services to get better at using ”open source intelligence” — information that’s publicly available, but often hidden in the flood of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports generated every day.

Visible crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. (It doesn’t touch closed social networks, like Facebook, at the moment.) Customers get customized, real-time feeds of what’s being said on these sites, based on a series of keywords.

Read the Full Article Here >>.

Give it up for the analyst who pitched the idea of “open source intelligence” to the CIA – probably got got himself some nice funding and a sweet gig watching youtube all day.

But of course given the throngs of  willing participants  lining up to make information about themselves readily available for “public” consumption, and given  that they most often do so entirely for free and on their own time,  it would stupid of the gub’mint not to do this.  After all, some things really are  just too easy to resist -  like shootin’ “wild” birds in a pen.