A web media company I work with did some analysis recently on why articles had been rejected by Google News. Whereas just about anything can go on to the web search, Google vets sites before it will include them in the 'news' category. It then checks each article against a set of pre-determined criteria to decide if it's a genuine news article - we can't have bloggers masquerading as journalists now can we?

The problem I was facing wasn't down to bad teaching at Uni - I still have the utmost respect for a couple of my tutors who I often realised were going well beyond what their job description required to ensure we picked up as many design skills as possible. However, now I'm on the other side of the fence, having setup a small design studio which is now growing and recruiting students itself I can more clearly see how big the jump can seem from 'eager student' to 'commercially viable employee'.

If it goes wrong, quite a bit of PR effort can be required to persuade dissatisfied customers to return.

Earlier this year we were advising a venue (not in the Midlands) of the merits of a 'soft' opening. There would be no fanfare, just a few invited guests and critical friends, a chance for the staff to iron out any unforeseen problems. This came back to me at the weekend when I was a customer at a new venue closer to home.

Having read Terry Grimley's preview of 'The Public' in the Birmingham Post, I took the kids along for the opening day. We arrived when West Bromwich's new gallery/venue was just an hour old.

Like practically every 20-something bloke I know, I've been swept up in Indiana Jones fever, eagerly anticipating last month's release of Indy 4 by reliving all of those backyard fantasies of fighting Nazis, dodging fiendish booby traps and snatching priceless relics from highly improbable places.

Whether watching an ageing Dr. Jones creak his way through two hours of sci-fi mumbo-jumbo was actually worth the 19 year wait is a matter for debate, but the recent tidal wave of Indy mania got me pondering our own place in the annals of recorded history.

And I came to the conclusion that we're a future anthropologist's dream come true.

Not that I'm jealous of course. Well actually of course it's because I'm jealous. I even get invited to some of the same events that my friends and colleagues go to I just never seem to get round to going to them - either through a lack of willing babysitters or, more likely, a general acceptance that I'm a long way from being renaissance man. A beer and night in front of the telly are usually all the cultural activity I can muster after a day at work.

However, something about it set a few alarm bells ringing for me and, on further inspection, this throwaway story turned out to be a nugget of pure viral marketing gold.

It also prised open a family-sized can of worms in my hardened TV researcher's brain and set them wriggling in the part of my cranium that exists to remind me that the web can also be a truth-hunters worst nightmare.

The story concerned Ralph Hardy, a 13 year old kid in Texas who had been arrested after he swiped his dad's credit card and embarked on an epic $30,000 spending spree. This misadventure wound up with him and his mates holed up in a hotel room with a pile of junk food, a brand new Xbox and two nubile $1000-a-night prostitutes procured from the local whorehouse. It also landed Ralph in the arms of the law when the hotel room was raided by the local Texan constabulary after being tipped off by a delivery guy who'd supplied the boys with snacks.

Apparently our young hero claimed he was funding this escapade through the winnings of a World of Warcraft video games contest and, when the high-class call girls questioned his age, he convinced them that he and his friends were in fact "people of restricted growth" who worked for a travelling circus. Even better he went as far to inform them that, if they refused his custom, they would be in direct violation of the state's disability discrimination laws. Only when the boys seemed more interested in playing Halo than getting to grips with their "hired help" did the penny finally drop.

In a strange twist of narrative the poor, misinformed sex workers were released without charge whilst young Ralph was slapped with a three year community order for fraud, presumably ruing the day he figured out his dad's pin number.

Unsurprisingly the story turned out to be complete hogwash. It was later revealed to be the result of a viral marketing experiment by Cornish social media marketer Lyndon Antcliff (aka Lyndoman) who unleashed the story on popular finance site Money.co.uk.

Lyndoman deliberately laced his Munchaussen-esque tale with every conceivable narrative trigger point needed to ensure its viral success.

Your address is a part of your company image. That's presumably why big corporates like tall buildings (and why helicopter shots of Canary Wharf feature in the title sequence of 'The Apprentice' even though Sir Alan Sugar's office is miles away in Brentwood.

Or it's why traditional craft industries like to use pictures of country cottages and rural workshops in their literature.

In between constructing paragraphs about why the Delphi method rocks in research terms I was struck by the unfolding drama in my RSS reader. In fact I now realise how differently I use the internet from 12 months ago when I would probably have completely missed the row over whether or not Surface Unsigned are screwing unsigned bands and acting like dunderheads over the use of Cease and Desist notices.

It was fascinating to watch the Birmingham blogging community come together to support what it still the city's key resource for knowing what's happening and who's who in the creative and cultural industries. I'd presumed that they were fighting some corporate numbskulls who go out of their way to track down the mildest of criticism.  So, delighted to be distracted from proposal writing, I used the power of Companies House to track down the mighty Surface Unsigned Ltd. 

Now before you chuck rotten fruit at me, I just want to point out that A) I wasn't personally involved in this one and B) I think it's pretty newsworthy, not only from a company achievement point of view, but because it really ticks all of the boxes that I usually bang on about in this blog in terms of exploring the crossover space between TV and the web.

It also represents something quite extraordinary: a controversial, sensationalist and eyebrow-raising piece of multiplatform entertainment that genuinely has the potential to save lives.

If you haven't twigged already, I'm talking about Maverick's Embarrassing Illnesses spin-off, Embarrassing Bodies which hit the airwaves of Channel 4 last week amid the usual furore surrounding it's graphic, no-holds barred depiction of unfortunate body issues.

This time round, hidden behind the usual headline- grabbing cavalcade of warty appendages, crusty crevices, weeping orifices and unsightly growths was another newsworthy addition to the format which, in its own quiet way, was a spearheading a minor online revolution behind all of the attention grabbing TV.

However, it does make some sense and there is precedent here as the Jewellery Quarter station has only been there since 1995 and was built not on the site of a previous disused station but was created specifically to serve that creative quarter. The same could happen at Custard Factory. Imagine a direct connection from CF to JQ - a truly well connected, joined up Brum. It might even open up the Custard Factory to more visitors and before long we'd have more than two cafés and the newspaper shop would open before 9am and have some ice-creams in its freezer. In essence we might get what we don't want (and it's a leap but bear with me) - a long slow slide towards gentrification.

With more than 600,000 players using the Scrabulous application daily, game company Mattel has launched an official Scrabble application to rival the unauthorised version. Unfortunately for Mattel, early signs are that people are sticking with what they know with the official version only attracting 2000 daily views.

Have Mattel missed the boat or can they tempt users over to the official version? More importantly, should they be trying to best their rival or instead take advantage somehow of the renewed interest it seems to have generated in their product?