Retailers and businesses from other sectors must adhere to new online marketing rules set by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) this week.

Marketing communications on companies’ own websites and in other third party space under their control, such as social media portals Facebook and Twitter, will have to meet standards set out in the Committee of Advertising Practice code.

ASA ran an ad campaign across TV, radio, online and outside over the last month to raise awareness of the organisation’s extended remit, calling on firms to ensure marketing messages on their websites are “legal, decent, honest and truthful”.

But how might the changes affect retailers?

With social commerce quickly growing in importance as a sphere in which business is conducted and user-generated comment being more closely monitored, companies could inadvertently breach the new regulations.

The new rules only apply if user-generated content is used for marketing purposes, but businesses that are active in the social commerce arena are uncertain how this will be assessed and there could be mistakes made as firms adapt to this new environment.

I’d love to hear how you think this may affect your business?

Thanks,
Mike

Swindon Borough Council is the first authority in the UK to provide free Internet access for all its residents.

Other UK cities have had trials of the schemes, but this is the first time an entire county area will be covered by council-backed public Wi-Fi.

The scheme, in partnership with the private sector will roll out free connection to the Internet and free line rental and connection charge for the 186,000 Swindonites within the next four months.

Swindon has a 35% ownership in Digital City UK, the company created to begin the service, and expects to cash in on similar roll-outs of the technology to other towns and cities across the UK.

Some 1,400 secure access points will be fitted around Swindon and subscribers to the service – to be called Signal – will have limited access but could pay for 20Mb upgrades.

The company was set up in partnership with the concept’s originator Rikki Hunt and digital technology firm aQovia.

“Digital City’s business model is built around subsidising free access with revenues from business and community services that are delivered over our wireless network. This innovative partnership demonstrates a viable way forward for other towns and cities.” said Mustafa Arif, director of aQovia.

For more information on the scheme and to read the official press release, visit www.getsignal.co.uk.

Lightspeed Venture Partners and Pitango Venture Capital are pouring more capital into WeFi, operator of a global, community-based network of WiFi hotspots, in an undisclosed Series B round of funding and following an earlier round by both investors secured back in May 2007. The follow-up financing was provided to support WeFi’s business and financial needs, and according to the release is being allocated toward expanding development, marketing efforts, and strengthening unspecified partnerships.

The WeFi community so far has mapped over 30 million WiFi access points, and counting. Next to this directory and the community formed around it, the startup boasts a free software program that allows users to automatically connect to WiFi locations wherever they are. The tool, which was previously only available for Windows and Mac users, is increasingly finding its way to mobile devices, which makes a lot of sense. More specifically, the company has recently introduced applications for the Windows Mobile, Android and Symbian platform.

Additionally, WeFi recently announced the launch of WeROK, a mobile entertainment / communications portal as well as the opening of WeFiApps, a WiFi powered app store for mobile tools.

WeFi was established in February 2006 by Yossi Vardi, Tamir Scherzer, Arnon Kohavi and Shimon Scherzer, and is incorporated in Delaware, U.S. with R&D facilities in Israel.

Delicious was once one of the hottest social sites on the Internet. That’s why Yahoo bought it in 2005. But it’s weird now to even think about it as a social site, I get more of the utilitarian vibe from it these days. People still use it, but it’s more of a repository. Or, to put it another way, it’s where links go to die.

Contrast that with services like Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed where people are sharing and re-sharing links all over the place, and having conversations about the content, making it feel alive. And that’s what Yahoo wants to tap into now, with another revamping of Delicious. And not surprisingly, this revamp is very Twitter-centric.

The biggest difference is that the main Delicious homepage is now an area called “Fresh Bookmarks.” Previously, the main page contained the most popular bookmarked pages on the site, but that is now relagated to the second tab. This redesign is all about freshness, which is to say real-time-ness. Delicious looks at and refreshes this list of links every minute or so based on what people are bookmarking and what they’re tweeting. This model, while flawed (I’ll get to that), does make the main page of Delicious more interesting.

“Design” is the most popular tag on Delicious, according to Yahoo, and that meant a “Popular Bookmarks” area that was dominated by things like “200+ Paper Brushes For Photoshop.” For some people, that is useful, but for at least just as many, those types of links are not useful in the least bit. The redesign is an effort to move away from that.

One problem I see with this Fresh Bookmarks area is that the tweets it uses in its equation, often don’t have anything to do with the content being linked to. Yahoo did this on purpose, noting that some 81% of tweets don’t contain URLs, and they still wanted to use data from the most amount of tweets to populate this area. So instead they use keywords in tweets, but this often results in tweets populated below the shared content that have absolutely nothing to do with it.

And on top of this new Fresh Bookmarks area, when you bookmark things, Delicious now allows you to also tweet your links out at the same time. This should be useful to people who want to save stuff for later, but also want to let others know about it. You can also easily email links to people, and send them to your Delicious contacts. This is all done through the bookmarklet.

And the search aspect of Delcious has been completely revamped as well, making it easier for power users to dig through things they’ve bookmarked in the past. The new search area also features rich content, so if someone shares a YouTube video, you can play it inline. The same is true with Flickr images.

All of that is great, the problem is that it’s hard to teach an old dog new tricks. Delicious has long just been about saving links and not about sharing them like many of the new, more versatile social sharing services out there. If Yahoo wanted to tie the product into Twitter, it should have done that months ago, to get ahead of the curve, rather than at the back of it.

The problem now is that there are plenty of other services people are already using to share stuff on Twitter. Most people still just paste links right into the update box, and Twitter uses Bit.ly to shorten them. This is allowing Bit.ly to collect a huge amount of data about what people are sharing — something which it could use soon to take on Digg and Delicious.

And on the bookmarking side of things, the trend seems to be towards simple. Mike likes a service called Pinboard, I’ve long been a fan of Instapaper. Both require less effort to use than Delicious, and are quicker.

But you don’t have to take our word for the downsides of this new Twitterification of Delicious, just listen to its founder, Joshua Schachter (who left Yahoo last year, to go work for Google). He’s not even waiting for the embargo to lift on these new changes, he’s just ripping them left and right. First, he notes:

I can’t BELIEVE delicious delicious did integration with other social networks before finishing with its own. sigh

But later he completely rips the new feature:

i hate the delicious twitter integration (sharing != saving) but i like the new search a great deal.

Well, at least he likes the new search, I guess.

Issuu, the Danish startup battling the likes of Docstoc and Scribd in the professional document publication and sharing space, is today introducing a REST-based API that enables its users to automatically upload and manage publications, bookmarks, and folders under their accounts.

That means developers and designers can henceforth tap into the Issuu platform and services to equip their own applications and websites with the oft-needed functionality of offering document consultation without the need for end users to download the docs or to visit the Issuu website. Issuu already offered two APIs: one for Search (which allows developers to sift through all Issuu publications, comments, and users) and one for its Viewer product. It is now adding a third one for the ‘Upload’ feature, obviously an essential one.

When Docstoc recently left the beta phase, it also launched with a number of open APIs. I’d check up on Scribd too, but their website is currently down.

Either way, we like Issuu here at TechCrunch. When the company first launched, it was one of the first services of its kind whose interface and functionality didn’t suck. The startup has been busy adding new features to its products and venture capital to its bank account – it raised a total of $6.25 million in funding to date – and is seeing decent traction as well.

According to co-founder Martin Ferro-Thomsen, Issuu currently services over 325 million monthly unique page views across its entire network of publishers (including embeds in articles etc.) and welcomes 4.4 million unique visitors to its main website Issuu.com every month.