"Dumb bitches don't drive jaguars."

The above statement came up in my Facebook News Feed on Wednesday night, accompanied by a link to a news article about Stephanie Rice's public apology, after she acted very unwisely on the internet on Sunday. The Australian Olympic swimmer tweeted "Suck on that faggots!" after the Wallabies won over the Springboks, causing a media frenzy, with ex-Footballer Ian Roberts calling her an "idiot".

Personally, I don't really care about her as a swimmer or a celebrity at all, but in looking at the events, I think she definately acted idiotically. Firstly, as an Australian sporting icon, she would have to have been aware that her tweet was capable of reaching people other than her friends, including the eyes of the media. For her to post anything at all on Twitter without seriously considering who can read it, and whether it could offend any of those readers, is an incredibly dumb thing to do.

While Rice has deleted the contentious tweet, the rest of her Twitter comments are still available for any one who wants to read them to see and she hasn't been holding back in terms of quantity. I don't really understand why some one with a public identity, such as an Olympic swimmer, would want to use Twitter to say things like "Happy birthday my best friend @laurauhlmann" or "HAPPY FATHERS DAY WAZZA". Maybe it's just me, but it seems that these kinds of  comments would be much better suited to a Facebook status update. What's the point of making them available to any one who wants to look for them, instead of them being on a private Facebook account? Especially if you run the risk of losing the support of fans and your flashy car if you present yourself as anything other than a morally upstanding citizen.

If I was her (or any other celebrity for that matter), I think I’d be too scared to tweet anything and I’d be making sure my privacy settings on Facebook were as private as possible.

Can I just get some detergent, please?

If you saw The Gruen Transfer on ABC on Wednesday night, you'll know about a crazy promotion that laundry detergent company Omo decided to try out in Brazil in August. The idea was to put GPS devices inside 50 unmarked Omo packs which would allow a team of Omo representatives to follow the unassuming purchaser home to award them their prize - which included a pocket-sized video camera and a day of "trying new things". The pretence that Omo is using to justify this promotion is that they're pushing new boundaries in advertising by taking risks, however, I think they may have pushed those boundaries just a little too far with this one.



The thing that worries me about this promotion is the fact that you have no say in whether or not you get followed home. You never ticked a box that says 'I agree to the terms and conditions'. You never signed up for anything. All you did was buy laundry detergent! Gruen Transfer panellist Russel Howcroft commented that he thinks advertising agencies are increasingly making the assumption that "there's no such thing as private". This has a lot to do with the popularity and increasing use of social networking sites like Facebook and the fact that many people are willingly putting a lot more information about themselves out there than ever before. However the difference is that even with Facebook (who recently changed their automatic privacy settings to make more of user’s information freely available), is that user’s still have the option to set their profiles to private. With this promotion there’s no button you can click to say ‘Don’t follow me home’, because you don’t even know that there’s the possibility of being followed home! That is, unless you’ve been endlessly trawling the millions of videos on Youtube and happened to stumble across this one.