Speaking to BusinessWeek, the news network’s head honcho rather disarmingly admitted, “I’m more worried about the 500 million or so people on Facebook versus the 2 million on Fox.” Meanwhile Google’s Chief Economist gave what amounted to a ‘it was already broke, Ma!’ Seems the celebrated – and at between £10m and £15m apiece, bleedin’ pricey - foray by Google and others into real-time search has been a dampish sort of a squib . Welcome to eModeration's round-up of all that is intriguing, alarming or odd in the world of social media, compiled by Kate Williams. For more social

Following my post on the Google/Italy legal case last night , the plot this morning, thickens slightly - to an almost minestroni-like consistency in fact. However, a crucial aspect to the case is whether Google were in fact guilty of not taking down the content quickly enough, and thus open to the charge of breach of privacy. At the time of writing there are some aspects of the case which remain unclear (and please forgive the nitty-gritty dissection of comment vs. Hmm. This is likely to be my first update of a few ....

I'm still reeling from the shock of hearing the news today that an Italian court has found three Google executives guilty (it acquitted the fourth), convicting them to suspended six-month sentences. Both common sense and legal opinion shared the view that it was not reasonable to expect a publishing platform - in this case Google Videos - to be responsible for every piece of content, provided they responded to complaints immediately by removing any offensive content. We have been awaiting the outcome of this trial for a long time, but I honestly didn't expect it to go this way, especially considering that similar cases in other countries had not resulted in convictions .