On 7 March 2010, we published an article by Zoe Margolis. In part of the first edition of the newspaper and online, this article carried the headline, “I was a hooker who became an agony aunt”. This was written by the newspaper not Ms Margolis. We accept that Ms Margolis is not and never has been “a hooker” or otherwise involved in the sex industry. The wording of the headline was a mistake and seriously defamatory of Ms Margolis. We offer our sincere apologies to Ms Margolis for the damage to her reputation and the distress and embarrassment which she has suffered.

* Zoe Margolis: I'm a good-time girl who became an agony aunt

Proposal to close digital new-music station brings strong response, with further 624 complaints over Asian Network

The BBC has received nearly 8,000 complaints about the decision to close its digital radio station BBC 6 Music.

6 Music, along with the BBC Asian Network, will stop broadcasting at the end of 2011 under proposals put forward by BBC director general Mark Thompson as part of his corporation-wide strategy review.

The announcement prompted a furious backlash from listeners, trade unions and the music industry.

6 Music presenters including Richard Bacon, Adam Buxton and Jarvis Cocker have spoken out against the decision, and the station's DJs have been encouraging listeners to make their feelings known to the BBC Trust, which is holding a 12-week consultation on the proposals.

A BBC spokesman confirmed that "just under" 8,000 complaints had so far been received. Another 624 complaints have been received about the decision to close the Asian Network.

"It is absolutely right that licence-fee payers have an opportunity to have their say on big decisions like service closures before final conclusions are reached and that is why the BBC Trust is running a public consultation in which we hope as many people as possible will participate in," the spokesman said.

• To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email editor@mediaguardian.co.uk or phone 020 3353 3857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 3353 2000.

• If you are writing a comment for publication, please mark clearly "for publication".

Being sued for libel is not only ruinously expensive, writes Simon Singh, it takes over your whole life. Which is why this will be his last column

Almost a year after writing my first column for this site, I would like to welcome you to my final article.

At first I was able to deliver my monthly column on time, but my submissions have become increasingly delayed, and this is my first since November. The problem is that I have spent the past two years being sued for libel, which has taken up huge amounts of time. And now all my remaining spare time is being devoted to campaigning for libel reform.

The crippling and prohibitive financial cost of defending a libel case is often highlighted, but the equally terrible cost in terms of time and stress is rarely mentioned.

I recently discussed this with Dr Peter Wilmshurst, the eminent cardiologist who is being sued for libel for commenting on the efficacy of a new heart device. Peter was put under immense stress when he received legal papers on Friday 21 December 2007 at 5.09pm, which was nine minutes after most solicitors closed for their Christmas holiday. It was not until the new year that Peter was able to get any legal advice, so it was an anxious Christmas.

Perhaps it was just as well that Peter was not aware of the full implications of what lay ahead of him, namely at least two years of anxiety, misery and the threat of bankruptcy. Almost all his spare time has been spent on the libel case. When finalising his defence, he took two weeks of annual leave to work on the documents. Moreover, dealing with ongoing legal issues has prevented him from carrying out his usual medical research, and a number of publications have been put on hold.

After chatting to Peter, I decided to count up how much time I had spent defending the article published in the Guardian in April 2008 that led to the British Chiropractic Association suing me for libel. I reckon I have spent 44 solid weeks on the libel action spread across two years.

I am in the very fortunate position of having no employees, being a freelancer, having financial resources and having a very supportive wife. In any other circumstance, I cannot imagine fighting a libel action because of the enormous sacrifices involved.

I should have started writing a new book a year ago, but as yet I cannot even develop proposals and talk to publishers because I have no idea how the next year or so will develop.

The case could easily continue for another two years. If I win then I will not recover all of my legal costs, but (worse still) I will never recover the time I have dedicated to poring over legal documents.

Before saying goodbye, I will urge you once more to sign up to the campaign for libel reform. If you remain unconvinced about the need for libel reform, try visiting the National Enquirer website. If you live in the UK then you will find a blank page except for the words "Page unavailable/under construction".

The reason is that the National Enquirer is so scared of English libel law that it no longer sells magazines in the UK or makes it web content available here.

You might feel that the unavailability of the National Enquirer is not enough to justify changing English law. However, more serious than the National Enquirer's position is the fear that other American publications will follow suit and that some key American magazines, newspapers and websites will be available everywhere in the world except in Britain.

You might feel that I am being alarmist, but major US newspapers, such as the Boston Globe and The New York Times, sent a memo last year to the House of Commons select committee on media, libel and privacy. They warned that they are considering stopping the sale of their publications in Britain due to the threat of libel. The benefits of selling newspapers here in terms of profit are outweighed by the potential losses in libel cases.

If publishers stopped selling hard copies in Britain, they would almost certainly also block their online content, because otherwise the threat of libel would remain.

Thereafter, it would be sensible for everything from academic journals to blogs to follow suit. Very quickly Britain could become an isolated society. In terms of free speech and access to information, our nation would become the European equivalent of China.

That's just one of the reasons you need to sign the petition for libel reform.

Update: the Apple Store is back up, and yes, you can now pre-order the iPad. We haven’t seen any other significant changes in the Store.

It’s finally here; the moment where the iPad actually comes into some sort of contact with the market. As we announced before, iPad pre-orders begin at 5:30 AM PT (in about 1:30 hours), and the Apple Store is currently down, indicating that pre-order forms will be available when it comes back up (and possibly something more – you never know.)

Of course, users won’t actually be able to fondle the device until April 3rd, but (besides giving fans and enthusiasts a chance to be one of the first people to own an iPad), this moment is exciting because from now on, Apple (and, hopefully, the media) will have some idea how well this thing actually sells.

Although the iPad has created an enormous hype, one mustn’t forget that the jury is still out on whether it’ll be a huge success or a complete flop. It’s not only a new device, it’s a new type of device, and we’re eager to see what kind of ripples it’ll do to the IT market.

Tags: apple, ipad

She is well acquainted with all things blue but the first woman in Britain to direct adult films will be displaying colours of a different hue when she stands at the next general Election.

Anna Arrowsmith is the new face of the Liberal Democrats in the UK. Personally, I can’t wait to scrutinise her expenses claims.

The 38-year-old, whose movie epics have included such delights as ‘Where’s The Rent Boys?’ - said she believes women are under-represented in Parliament and wants to clean the place up after the MPs expenses scandal.

Good on her. And at least her background is, shall we say, transparent.

Mrs Arrowsmith, who is contesting Tory Adam Holloway’s seat in Gravesham, Kent, said: “I have worked all my life to set up a successful business and I want to fight for the rights of people in Gravesham.”

She has made some 300 ‘female friendly’ porn flicks and, in her guise as porn bigwig, works under the pseudonym Anna Span.

She began shooting porn films after graduating from Central St Martins School of Art with a degree in Fine Art (Film & Video) in 1998.

And she’s just given us a chance to speculate which other MPs should star in her first ever Westminster porn movie – working title ‘(Going) Down In G Street’ or, maybe, the simple but elegant ‘Hung Parliament’?

Obvious candidates include:
• Ed Balls
• Dick Bacon (MP for South Norfolk)
• Black Rod
• John Cummings (MP for Easington)
• Peter Bone (MP for Wellingborough)

Go on Anna. We know you want to.

By Adam Moss, Brazen News Editor

At 12:30pm tomorrow, in Austin, Texas, I’m meant to be giving a talk entitled ‘Lost In Translation: The Nuances Of European Social Media’ at SXSW:

Europe is ahead of the US in terms of the consumer usage of social media, and yet little attention is often given to the nuances of what is on one hand is the world’s largest economy and on the other a collection of 48 countries with very different cultures.

Find out why the blogging scene in Paris is 2 years ahead of the US, the Brits are all a Twitter, the Dutch prefer Hyves to Facebook and the Germans will take any chance to give brands a hostile reception in social media.

I’m very honoured to get a speaking slot. The SXSW organisers whittled down over 2300 applications to just 300 based on public votes (if you were one of those that voted – thank you!) and their own judging criteria.

The trouble is, I’m not going to be there. Despite some of our friends taking the whole company to SXSW, with the speed things are moving here in Europe for We Are Social, right now I simply can’t afford five days away from the office.

Thankfully, our friend Peter Bihr (@thewavingcat), one of Germany’s leading social media thinkers, has agreed to step into the breach and lead the talk, but he’s not had much time to prepare. So, we need you your help – I’m going to talk below about what I was planning to cover, but please chip-in in the comments if you have any insights to add of your own. Peter’s relying on you!

Lost In Translation: The Nuances Of European Social Media
With over 10 pan-European social media campaigns under our belt, we feel like we’ve got a handle on the nuances of European social media, but it’s very hard to sum-up in a few words. Let’s take things step by step.

For those needing to get up to speed, Forrester’s social technographics profile tool is a good place to start. To save you the trouble of playing around with all the drop-down’s, here’s a presentation I put together based on the data from it:

As you’ll see, there’s a lot of variation between age groups in each country, with different generations in different places using social media in different ways. Germany really does seem to be lagging behind, with the Netherlands and Sweden leading the way.

However, the data doesn’t support the deliberately provocative proposition in my preamble that “Europe is ahead of the US in terms of the consumer usage of social media”. Well, Forrester is only one source of data, and others paint a different picture.

Nielsen’s ‘Global Faces and Networked Places’ report from March last year showed Spain, Italy and the UK ahead of the US in terms of social media usage:

And others often show similar findings. Universal McCann’s Social Media Tracker Wave 3 showed the vast majority of Europe ahead of the US in terms of blog readership (page 18), people starting their own blog (page 22) and membership of social networks (page 36). Sysomos has shown that London is the captial of Twitter (in fact, it could be argued it’s the social media captial of the world), and more recent data from Neilsen shows that people in the UK and Italy spend more time on social networks each month than those in the US:

Aside from the detailed look at European social media usage that the Forrester data provides, there are other reports worth looking at. Our friend Tom Smith of Trendstream put this really useful deck together based on his first round of Global Web Index data:

And IAB Europe’s Marketers & Consumers, Digital & Connected data is really useful when trying to understand what’s happening in some of Europe’s regions and smaller countries. Here’s a summary of their findings:

So far, I’ve concentrated on European social media usage and behavior, but it’s worth remembering that Europe has a rich landscape of social media services, despite Facebook’s merciless and continuing rise to world domination.

The FT recently carried an article by Maija Palmer that’s essential reading if you want to understand this landscape – ‘A future alongside Facebook’, looking at the fate of services like Skyrock in France, StudiVZ in Germany, Tuenti in Spain and Hyves in the Netherlands (although bizarrely, she neglects to cover the fate of Vkontakte in Russia).

So where does that leave us? Europe is a complex and varied continent, and it’s no surprise to find that its social media landscape matches this. From our pan-European campaign experience, we know it’s important to treat each country differently, and we always make sure we either have a native of each country working on the team in London or Paris, or we work closely with local partners. Despite the varied uptake and usage of social media in different countries, we’ve found if we respect the local social media culture, it’s possible to run successful social media campaigns in any market in Europe.

The Lib Dems steal from Labour and the Tories and end up with a muddle.

Almost no one seems to like the Lib Dems' new election logo and it's not hard to see why.

There's that strange, banana-like stripe for a start and the slogan, the bastard offspring of the Tories' "vote for change" and Labour's "a future fair for all", is even worse.

Paul Waugh cleverly notes that the colour scheme is almost identical that of the Somerfield logo.

I'm all in favour of a Lab-Lib coalition in the event of a hung parliament but could the Lib Dems please leave their design team at the door?

Follow the New Statesman team on Twitter.

www.newstatesman.com - The Lib Dems' dreadful election logo

Judge agrees with human rights watchdog that British National party's rewritten criteria for joining are still racist

The British National party (BNP) has been barred from taking new members after a judge ruled today that its constitution could discriminate against non-white people.

Judge Paul Collins issued an injunction ordering the far-right group to comply with race equality laws, adding that "the membership list will have to be closed until then".

Under the injunction, future prospective BNP members will not have to be vetted at home before being accepted.

Last month the BNP scrapped its whites-only policy in an attempt to avoid legal sanctions brought by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC).

But today at central London county court, Judge Collins ruled: "I hold that the BNP are likely to commit unlawful acts of discrimination within section 1b Race Relations Act 1976 in the terms on which they are prepared to admit persons to membership under the 12th edition of their constitution."

The commission welcomed the ruling, saying it proved that, while it is not unlawful to hold discriminatory views, it is unlawful for such principles to be used for controlled entry to a political party.

Susie Uppal, director of legal enforcement at the commission, said: "The commission is glad that today's judgment confirms our view that both the BNP's 11th constitution and the amended 12th constitution are unlawful.

"Political parties, like any other organisation, are obliged to respect the law and not discriminate against people who wish to become members.

The decision follows weeks of wrangling over the legality of the party's membership criteria as defined in its constitution.

BNP rules had stipulated that only "indigenous Caucasians" and people from ethnic groups "emanating from that race" could join.

After several months of delay, BNP members voted at an extraordinary general meeting a month ago to scrap the clause and replace the party's constitution.

But the EHRC decided to challenge the new document on the grounds that it still amounted to indirect racism.

The new constitution, which has yet to be published, requires would-be members to agree that they are "implacably opposed to the promotion, by any means, of integration or assimilation" that affected the UK's indigenous white population. Another clause expresses opposition to mixed-race marriages.

"It would be jolly difficult for a mixed-race person to join the BNP without effectively denying themselves," Robin Allen QC, representing the EHRC, told a hearing on Tuesday.

The BNP rejected this. "This party has a particular policy," said Gwynn Price Rowlands, representing the party. "It's a matter for the applicant to decide whether they want to join."

The BNP had a waiting list of non-white people wanting to join, he said.

The hearing was told that applicants under the new party rules would be subject to a two-hour home visit by two BNP officials.

Allen said that could operate as a form of indirect discrimination. "One way the provisions could operate would be to intimidate someone who wanted to join the party.

"Of course, it could simply be a greeting."

BNP critics argue the party has no genuine interest in recruiting non-white members and is merely doing the minimum to avoid legal action and potentially crippling court costs.

An internal BNP memo seen by the Guardian this week told members that the party had not "gone soft".

"We don't expect any more than a handful of people of ethnic minority origin to apply to join the party nationally, and we will not let this deflect us from our political objectives of saving Britain and restoring the primacy of the indigenous British people," the memo said.

You can now try a public beta version of the BBC's new homepage – with playable iPlayer highlights, but without clock

The BBC gave its web users a chance to try its new homepage today. It will stay as a public beta for a while to get feedback, and test some more features – and can be accessed by a link in the top of the old homepage or here.

Apart from removing its top-of-page clock to make room for central navigation above the top stories, the new design puts more emphasis on a visual multi-media approach and allows for further personalisation.

To showcase more top stories, the new homepage displays them in a automatically changing carousel. A new horizontal navigation bar above them offers news, sport, weather, iPlayer, TV, radio and a "More"-button for all other requests.

Otherwise the structure of the homepage stays basically the same, but with more emphasis on pictures and videos. BBC iPlayer highlights can now be browsed from within the homepage, and it will introduce a new Media Zone to showcase its range of content, which will be unveiled when a user navigates the mouse over the thumbnails.

You can also follow your interests through a new Topic Tracker section. But you'll need to put in your settings afresh if you personalised the old site, because the back end has changed.

The new design was developed in a collaboration with the graphic designer Neville Brody, whose Research Studios has worked closely with the BBC in the past couple of months; we had a first glimpse of the results a few weeks ago.

BBC sources have told MediaGuardian that the new-look site is supposed to fully launch by the end of March, but there might be some delays: this is a big project. The BBC has currently about 400 top-level domains, although it's meant to drop half of these by 2012, with its £135m budget due to come down a quarter by 2013.

Chris Allison is a social media strategist at NeboWeb, where he helps clients make the most of the social web. You can follow him on Twitter as the voice behind @Neboweb.

As social media marketing becomes more widely practiced, the questions of the day are less frequently focused on the benefits of social media and more often focused on its implementation. Justifying social media to superiors is no longer the marketer’s biggest challenge.

Instead, marketers are being challenged not on the potential benefits, of which there is ample evidence, but rather on how to get those benefits. Where to start?

With this challenge in mind, it’s vital to understand that social media is neither the end nor the beginning of any marketing effort. Rather, social media is a catalyst that works most effectively when it is finely woven into the fabric of a brand’s other activity.

When putting together a puzzle, it helps to take a look at the big picture on the front of the box. Likewise, when putting together a social media strategy it’s necessary to zoom out a little and examine how social media will fit into the context of your other business activities. Below are four pieces of the puzzle that brands can mesh with social media to maximize results.

The socialization of the web has made it evident that brands that want to succeed online must feel and act like humans, not like desperate, distant corporations. Accordingly, some social media marketers have taken on the role of teaching brands how to be human: don’t say stupid things, don’t feed the trolls, and don’t dominate the conversation – pretty fundamental stuff that somehow got lost during the incorporation process.

However, guidelines for not screwing up aren’t enough for brands to really benefit from social media. Until you bring something interesting to the table — something that inspires passion, laughter, or curiosity — nobody will care if you have a Twitter account.

One of the most effective, simple ways to get people to care about what you’re doing is to do something worth caring about: get behind a cause. Brands have been benefiting from cause marketing for a long time, but the catalytic nature of social media has brought three additional benefits to the cause marketing table:

1. Access to increased publicity
2. The ability to be a vocal activist instead of a silent philanthropist by joining conversations
3. The ability to bring customers into the support process

Pepsi is one of the best examples of a brand that has recently seized the opportunity to leverage a mix of social media and cause marketing. Their Refresh Everything project incorporates votes from users to decide where Pepsi will donate their funds as well as a variety of other simple social media features: single sign-on, a Facebook Fan Page, and a blog.

By involving users with a voting process, Pepsi has effectively done three things. First, instead of just doing good themselves, they’ve helped their customers do good, which helps establish a very positive brand association. They have also created a situation that will compel users to share with their friends (in order to accrue votes for the cause of their choice). Finally, they have built a feedback mechanism that will ensure the causes they support are also the most popular among their customers (which is great PR).

Brands can benefit greatly from integrating social media with cause marketing, and they can learn a lot about how to get started from the tactics that Pepsi has used.

Disclosure: Pepsi sponsored Mashable’s NextUp NYC: The Future Journalist event.

Isolating the impact of social media to the web is an easy mistake to make. It seems natural enough to meet online goals with online activity, but the tangible world of physical objects, locations, and events can often provide a compelling medium to drive fans to engage with you online, or vice versa, you can use your social media efforts to drive activity to guerrilla marketing events like Red Bull’s stash, or simply to brick and mortar stores.

Integrating your social media efforts with real products, store locations, or activities is an important way to acknowledge that you care about the complete customer experience, and that you’re not just in the social media space because it’s popular.

Some of the most successful campaigns, such as Burger King’s Whopper Sacrifice, have been focused on driving the purchase of offline products. Similarly, customer support profiles like Comcast Cares would be much less successful if they didn’t have the power to influence real offline change by working with customer support representatives that can help customers on location.

On the surface, social media may look like a simple set of social networks that people use to communicate, but when marketers look deeper they find that it presents a whole new venue for empowering all of their existing services, online as well as off.

Though citizen journalism and user generated content have proven to be extremely powerful (Iran’s election crisis, Barack Obama’s massive online get out the vote efforts, etc.), it is important to remember that brands can still benefit enormously from traditional media coverage.

When it comes to social media, or any marketing for that matter, brands must find ways to leverage all of their assets in the same direction. Just like the offline world can easily be used for online gain, so too can traditional media be leveraged in the new media space.

Amit Gupta, founder of several wonderful startups like Photojojo and Jelly, sheds some light on how his businesses have benefited from traditional coverage:

Mainstream press is harder to get, but still drives significant awareness, especially among ‘everyday’ people who aren’t spending all day on the internet. And the names of old media carry
significant cache, enough to drive double-digit increases in conversion rates simple because of the credibility their names lend.

I exchanged e-mails with Amit and he was kind of enough to lend some extended insight on what to expect from traditional media. TV, web, and radio are all able to generate fast, measurable results. With these mediums, people are either interested, or they aren’t. There are comparatively few lagging responses. Newspapers and magazines on the other hand, while carrying significant credibility, produce results that are harder to measure because their content is often read over days, weeks, or even months.

The ultimate success of a social media strategy depends on your ability to recognize problems and seize opportunities to solve them. When considering the needs of your campaign, whether it’s brand equity or an immediate spike in interest, consider traditional media as another tool in your toolbox that could meet those needs. However, remember that part of your strategy should involve doing, saying, or making something interesting and worth talking about. If you don’t do that, no amount of good press can save you.

Lastly, your social media strategy is inherently paired with technology. Without technology, social media cannot exist. However, technology’s role in creating a social media strategy often goes understated.

At SoCon10, a social media conference in Atlanta, Carol Kruse (head of interactive marketing at Coke) described the pain her team went through creating a Facebook application, only to find two months later that changes in Facebook’s design would require Coke to restructure the application – a maintenance cost that hadn’t been anticipated. Having a plan in place for making technological changes on the fly is an important ingredient in the fast-paced social media world.

But technology is more than just a potential cost that bloats social media campaigns; it’s also the life that fuels them. Applications like the recently launched MySpace Fan Video are powered by collaboration between experienced creatives and programmers, not just one or the other. Thus, perhaps the most important synergy to be formed by any company delving into social media is one between their technology team, internal or external, and their marketing team driving the strategy.

Synergy is the name of the social media game. Whether you’re coming from a small company or a well-known brand, starting as far back as possible, zooming out and staring at the big picture, is crucial to creating a strategy that makes sense.

These are four of the most important pieces to the social media puzzle. If you can think of more or have something to add to these listed, please leave a note in the comments.

- 5 Ways to Avoid Sabotaging Your Personal Brand Online
- 4 Elements of a Successful Business Web Presence
- HOW TO: Implement a Social Media Business Strategy
- HOW TO: Choose a News Reader for Keeping Tabs on Your Industry
- HOW TO: Measure Social Media ROI
- HOW TO: Use Social Media to Connect with Other Entrepreneurs

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, TommL

Tags: cause marketing, List, Lists, mainstream media, MARKETING, PUBLIC RELATIONS, social media, technology

Winweb chief executive Stefan Töpfer asks whether work-life balance is as important as we make it out to be.

The term "work-life balance" has come to be a bit of a buzz phrase of late but what do we actually mean by it? And why is it so important?

Talking about a work-life balance has come to symbolize a problem many of us face; increasing work pressures mean we neglect our families, friends and hobbies as they pale in to insignificance with the pressures put upon us to climb the corporate ladder.

I have been there. I worked in an office, not seeing enough of my children and spending a considerable amount of my precious time commuting. When I left the world of the office to focus on my company, WinWeb, in 1999 I switched to working from home, enabling me to see more of my son and even pick him up from school.

Despite building a growing company my work-life balance was better than ever. But did only my family reap this benefit?

It is my belief that increasing work pressures have led to detrimental trends being established within society over the last 150 years.  Many problems within our social fabric can be attributed to too much focus being placed on slogging on the working treadmill and our eyes being diverted away from our health, relationships and families.

Working from home when building a business allows people to work from anywhere, and can help build a sense of local community that many of our small towns and villages now lack. Most members of my team work from home and during their lunch hour regularly visit the local coffee shop, bakery or corner shop, building a sense of community around them that would be lacking if they traveled to an office in a city each day.

The implications of working flexibly, either for yourself or within an organisation, cannot be over looked when considering both mental and physical health. Being given a certain level of autonomy over the completion of tasks and being able to fit around the needs of your family reduces stress, anxiety and makes employees happier. And in my mind a happy employee is a productive employee!

With this in mind it is no wonder that now there is an ever-increasing and encouraging trend of people breaking out of the 9-5 stereotype and instead starting their own small businesses.  

Starting a business is hard work, I know that as well as anyone, but the flexibility it brings can suit a family's needs better than many roles within a corporate environment.

Technological developments have meant that virtually anyone, anywhere, with an idea, drive and passion can start a small business. Determination to succeed means that this can be achieved whether you work 9-5 or 5-9! In my experience more demands are actively pursued within a home working or small office environment to maximize financial results while maintaining the optimum work-life balance.

So is work-life balance an unobtainable dream? Is it a buzz phrase that will just disappear? I don't think so, and I certainly hope not. In my mind the definition of a work-life balance is different for us all. But I know that by finding your own satisfactory work-life balance you could not only increase your happiness, but also your productivity.

• Find out more about Winweb by visiting their website - or follow Stefan Töpfer on Twitter.

After years of negotiation, ITV strikes deals with BSkyB and Virgin Media, meaning almost all World Cup games in HD

Football fans will be able to watch almost every football World Cup match in high definition this summer after ITV announced plans to launch ITV1 HD on 2 April.

ITV has struck deals with BSkyB, bringing an end to almost two years of negotiations, and Virgin Media to carry the new channel, and it is also launching on Freeview for the first time.

On Freesat, the ITV1 HD service will launch as a full channel, replacing a red button service.

The deal means that almost all of the 64 World Cup games, which are being split for broadcast by the BBC and ITV, will now be available to watch in high definition. The BBC already has a HD channel.

Nearly all of the matches will be shown on BBC1, BBC 2 or ITV1 except for eight in the earlier stages of the tournament which clash with other matches. These will be shown on either BBC3, the interactive streams of BBC1, or ITV2, ITV3 or ITV4.

ITV's new HD channel will simulcast the ITV1 schedule including Britain's Got Talent, Law and Order: UK, Foyles War and the prime ministerial debates.

"All of our output will benefit from the stunning picture quality that high definition offers, whether it's ITV's original drama, landmark factual shows, entertainment events or our live football," said Peter Fincham, ITV's director of television, channels and online.

BSkyB said today that as well as ITV1 HD there would also be high-definition channel launches for Hallmark and Sky Sports 4 on its digital satellite service. Sky has now passed 40 channels in HD on its service and has targeted 50 by Christmas.

Hallmark Channel HD, which will launch on 28 June, will air shows including Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Law & Order: Criminal Intent and Without A Trace. Sky Sports HD 4 will launch on 29 April.

• To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email editor@mediaguardian.co.uk or phone 020 3353 3857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 3353 2000.

• If you are writing a comment for publication, please mark clearly "for publication".

Google’s new social network, Google Buzz, is getting some additional refinement, based on user feedback. Today’s news: The search giant is testing new features that will give you control over the flood of Buzz e-mail notifications.

Google Buzz has the benefit of being integrated directly into Gmail. Not only does it have a prominent tab in millions of inboxes, but it also sends e-mail notifications of recent buzz activity to your inbox. If you’re like us, the e-mail flood can get pretty overwhelming pretty quickly. Plus, anytime someone comments on a buzz thread, the e-mail pops right back up.

Google’s heard you loud and clear. In a buzz post, the Buzz team revealed that it is testing two changes to e-mail notifications to help you better manage your inbox. While these changes are not live yet, they should be up in the next few days.

The first change is something we’ve been seeking for some time: The ability to choose which items get sent to your inbox. If you just want an e-mail when someone comments on your post, it will soon be possible. If you want just posts where you are @replied, that’s possible as well. The second feature is a “Mute” link on individual buzz posts, which will stop a buzz post from reappearing in your inbox every time someone comments.

Both changes are necessary if Buzz is to be usable as a product. Still, Google hasn’t addressed our number-one request: collapsible comment threads.

[via CNET]

Tags: email, gmail, Google, google buzz, social media