Chat, message and do whatever else you do as a social networker, but don’t forget that the world is watching: Estée Lauder has decided we have to look good while we do it. Ad Age reports that the venerable cosmetics company is now offering free department store makeovers with professional photo shoots in the US for those precious mug shots we post on our accounts.

I can’t count the number of people from other countries (outside the US) who have told me they just don’t understand the US bankruptcy system. I occasionally make a stab at explaining it, saying that the idea behind Chapter 11 is that you don’t kill off the business, but help it get back on its feet. Trying to explain why this isn’t unfair to people owed money by the company that is in difficulty is something I do less well. I still get riled when I think about the $650 I was owed by Robert Maxell, once Rupert Murdoch’s rival, when Maxwell fell overboard at sea. The lawyers hired to sort out his unhealthy financial situation wrote to me at least twice a year for five or more years to tell me I was unlikely to get any money, but they were trying. No comment.

So here is a living, breathing example of how the system works. The Minneapolis Star & Tribune, one of the top 20 US newspapers for decades, filed for bankruptcy at the end of 2008. It was suffering, like everyone else in the media industry, from weaker business, fading advertising revenue and problems specific to its own financial history. The Star (actually known locally as the Strib) will soon rise, it seems. Read all about it!

Geneva-based Ago Cluytens, who occasionally contributes guest blog posts on GenevaLunch and who writes marketing blog brandingthroughpeople, picked up on something I sent him to write about the marketing woes the newly re-named Willis Building in Chicago in the US might face. I was intrigued by his point that the foes – Chicagoans have always loved a good fight (think boxing, Al Capone and anti-war protestors) – are using Facebook and Twitter to get the word out, but the Willis insurance group is not. Check back in five years and we’ll let you know if Big Willie is a household name in Chicago. Sounds like the same kind of Pickle a famous building in London found itself in, in 2004.

In fairness, here is a lengthy article from the Guardian in 2004, singing the praises of Norman Foster’s SwissRe landmark building in London.

Simply the best news I’ve heard all day: one charger for all cell phones. 2012 sounds like a long way off, but three cheers for the world’s cell phone makers for finally getting us all plugging in together. According to CNet News they’re planning to make the charger use 50% of the energy required by today’s chargers. Now to get them running on solar and wind power, hmm. Anyone care to comment on how well solar chargers work right now?

Twitter, or microblogging (you send a max. of 140 characters from your cell phone or computer) will undoubtedly get a boost from the latest publicity, a software engineer who scrambled out of last week’s plane crash in Denver, Colorado, USA, pulled out his iPhone and started telling the world what it was like to be a crash victim in a ravine. Times, UK

MinnPost in Minneapolis today carries an article that looks back at the recent history of particle physics and the shifting role of the US, as American physicists contemplate the LHC startup 10 September. Author Sharon Schmickle notes “The buzz of activity last week at CERN’s Swiss campus dramatically illustrated a changing of the guard on the frontier of physics, with Europe taking over from the United States, Alan Boyle of MSNBC reported” and she goes on to explain why physicists everywhere are so excited about what’s happening at Cern.

Ad Age today explains the astonishing success of Spam,
the meat and not the other annoying stuff. I read this article all the way to
the end and I still just don’t get it: spam or Spam, it’s disgusting
stuff and we’d all be better off without it.

Sorry, Hormel, I’m a fan
of Spam-free living (spam-free, too). Give me peanut butter for my sandwich, any day.

It’s obvious: people sit down for meetings. And then along come people who notice the obvious and think about it and suggest standup meetings. Martin Fowler and/or Jason Yip at Thoughtworks caught my eye with a post on the rights and wrongs of standup meetings, which it had never occurred to me is an option. The idea behind it is wonderful: if people stand up, the meeting will be shorter.

I came across this in an odd way, part of the joy of the Internet. I had googled "standing on hands too long" and came up with several links to Beatles’ lyrics ("I saw her standing there") and then the post from Thoughtworks. The only problem is that the post is too long so I started to glaze over just as I do in long meetings – and that is when I hit "Who attends? All hands" and then something about getting everyone moving in the right direction, so the image I’m left with is a little confusing but I can see why Google sent me here.

I still don’t know how long you can safely walk on your hands, at a meeting or elsewhere.

Bloomberg today carries an interview with Google’s deputy general counsel Nicole Wong about the company’s efforts to learn "to live with countries that ‘don’t share the same baseline’ about the web," from Thailand, where an offending video with the Thai king, and China, where filtered searches are used.

The news is zooming around the Internet that two spammers have been ordered to pay $230 million for illegally sending messages to MySpace users. Spammers who do this just for the fun of the chaos it creates are a thing of the past: today’s hackers and spammers do it for money. And they make money for one reason, which is that people make it easy for them to do so.

Photo: we’re all too easily linked on the Internet.

TSR’s leading story about the huge award is coupled with some very sensible bits of advice (Fre). Here are some sources of guidelines in English: don’t be so foolish as to think you don’t need them! Do you belong to any social networks? Have you signed up online lately for prize drawings or seen your name on a group e-mail where there are names you don’t know, sent by a friend or colleague?

• "Lack of security in social networking and wifi," Best Security Tips, UK
• series of tips for home users (parents, adult users) from Stay Safe Online, US
• most universities now have student guidelines; here are the ones from the University of Santa Cruz in California, a good reminder for all of us of the basics.

The problem is not just at the international level, nor is so blatant as someone asking for your bank account number. If you are asked to supply a personal email address by someone you don’t know (use Hotmail or similar instead), the name of your employer, your nationality or other information that could be part of a database, STOP. Don’t give it. In the past two months, while editing our Events pages and some news stories, I’ve noticed that events organizers, social networks and small groups sometimes ask for information they should not. They might not have plans to misuse it, but the public doesn’t know this – and the data you supply might not stop with them, with or without their knowledge.

If you’re a company, an organization, a school group or just a small club DO NOT ask people to send you their e-mail addresses with other personal information.  Do your bit to keep the Internet safe.

Related: "Geneva Security Forum, beyond James Bond and science fiction," 24 June 2007, GenevaLunch