Back in the Seventies, Monty Python lampooned the Special Branch in a well-know sketch in which Inspector Harry "Snapper" Organs announces that he keeps track of the whereabouts of notorious criminal "Spiny Norman" by reading the colour supplements (in the Sunday newspapers). That is the inevitable image conjured up in my mind by a tiny item of news buried away in today's Daily Telegraph. Investigators are using Facebook to track the whereabouts of suspected war criminals in Darfur after they had been indicted by the International Criminal Court in the Hague. Leaving aside the comic overtones of the leader of the Janjaweed having Facebook Friends, and his profile featuring "Which Dictator are You?" along with all his favourite songs, holiday photos, humorous videos posted to his wall, etc., there is a serious side. That is, how much can anybody find out about you? The answer should worry you and explains why investigators are looking on Facebook in the first place.

Email has revolutionised communications in speed and utility, but we haven't yet come to terms with the speed with which we can fall into the many pitfalls. We seem to be a society that skim-reads everything, that wants news delivered in sound-bites, and that has developed a short attention span. So, if you're still reading this, please let me explain the consequences so far as email is concerned. Skim-reading an email can mean that you completely miss the point, or that you perhaps take offence where none was intended. Replying in haste will mean you have not given enough thought to your reply or not expressed yourself carefully enough or clearly enough. Combine the two, skim-reading with hasty replies, and you have the potential to end a fruitful business relationship, or even your employment.

Viral marketing is the old-fashioned "word of mouth" concept, wired-up and electrified for the Internet Age. Compare a Mexican Wave with the old game of Chinese Whispers and you'll see the difference. It's not a message being passed down the line one person at a time, it's a tidal wave that spreads and rushes across a crowd. Think of all those emails you see from friends and colleagues passing around the latest joke or outrageous video. Have you ever forwarded one? They spread like a virus, and when they are deliberately created to promote a product, that's when they become viral marketing. How can you do that for your business?

There's an interesting dispute going on in America right now over "who owns the news". The governing bodies for Major League Baseball and the National Football League, among others, have drawn up new rules for sports coverage which the traditional news media are up in arms about. It's a heady mix over the use of audio and video clips on newspaper web sites, and access for bloggers.

We all tend to use words and phrases we are familiar with, it makes communication so much easier and in a technical context, it makes it more reliable too. Instead of talking round a subject in vague terms and perhaps misunderstanding, it helps to use some jargon you both understand. I try very hard to avoid jargon outside of the technical setting, but it is sometimes hard to remember what terms normal people know! Sometimes it is impossible not to use the very word that has a precise meaning, so to help you I have compiled a short dictionary of some of the more common terms you might come across.

Advertising spending on-line is growing at a frightening rate in the UK, being forecast to grow by 30.8% to £3.4 billion this year. That compares with television advertising which will grow by just 1% to around £3.56 billion by the end of 2008. It is almost certain to exceed television spending by the end of 2009, according to Group M, a media buying and planning group who are well qualified to know these things. It's a prospect that fills me with dread, quite frankly.

A new approach to standard email phishing scams has been reported targeting senior executives in California, coining a new term in the process - whaling. Whaling, then, is for phishing scams that target big fish. This particular email appears to come from a court in California and includes the target's name, company, and phone number to give it an air of authenticity. There are some useful lessons we can all pick up from this.

Internet retail spending is predicted to grow by 32%, according to Verdict Research Consulting, compared with off-line spending growth of just 1.2% over the coming year. Why should that affect your business if you are not in retailing? Quite simply because more people are spending more time and money on-line.

The IBM strike of September 2007 was historic because it didn't really happen. That is to say it actually took place in virtual-reality. Real-life IBM workers in Italy were engaged in protracted negotiations that had hit an impasse, so they called for a mass picket at IBM's virtual-world campus in Second Life. An estimated 1,500 avatars from around the world assembled there for 12 hours of peaceful picketing; non-existent people picketing the non-existent premises of a non-existent business in a non-existent world. How very 21st century.

A question I am often asked is, "How much content should I put on my site?" The answer is surprisingly easy, "How much have you got?" A lot of people confuse the issue of organising information with quantity of information. They want the site to look clean and simple, of course, and think perhaps the adage "less is more" might apply here, hence the question.

For an object lesson in how to exploit the Internet to maximum effect, you can't do better than this small hotel on the island of Corfu. On the face of it, it has every obstacle to overcome. It is only a two star hotel, it has no restaurant, no swimming pool, no car parking, it is in a small town twenty minutes to the south of Corfu town itself, it is on the "wrong" side of the island so far as the beaches are concerned, while the bigger hotels on Corfu are slashing their rates and sucking all the business away from the smaller hotels.

It's really helpful that a row has broken out between the BBC and Internet Service Providers over the new iPlayer service which lets people download and watch television programmes on their PCs. The network is already under severe strain due to the growing popularity of video-sharing sites such as YouTube and this brings the problem into sharp focus. While the BBC isn't causing that problem, they are exacerbating an already difficult situation.

Have a look at the emails in your in-box. What do you notice? If they're anything like mine, you'll see a hopeless mixture of senders' names and subject headings. It's very hard sometimes to sort the wheat from the chaff, even after the spam filter has done its bit. Now think how your emails will look in someone else's in-box. Is it clear to them who they are from? It is clear to them what they are about? How many emails do you see that just have someone's first name as the sender? Not very useful, is it? Or the sender's name isn't a name at all, just some cryptic words that mean lot to the sender but nothing at all to the recipient.

Blogging for business is a growing phenomenon that will reward those who make the effort. I have always advised my clients that what visitors to their sites will value is free information - knowledge and expertise shared with the visitor without obligation. It does not just establish your credentials; it also establishes a relationship of trust at the outset.

Full motion Flash adverts are the new plague on the Internet. Back in the early days, when animated gifs were first invented, web developers who wanted to be cutting-edge plastered them all over their sites. The phenomenon became known as "dancing baloney" and was widely loathed by the purists. And with good reason. They were unbelievably distracting, and, in the days of access with those early modems, they slowed down the loading of each web page. It was lose-lose.