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London riots feature social media policing and Blackberry Messaging. London's Metropolitan police told reporters they were delving into Twitter and other social media as part of their investigation into looting. For the better part of a week, many parts of London, centering on Tottenham, have erupted in fire and looting.

Attention has also been focused on Blackberry's private messaging service, known as BBM. London tech and media specialist Jonathan Akwue wrote a post on his blog outlining the case for Blackberry as the messaging vector of choice for the rioters.

Pope Benedict XVI tweeted for the first time today. His tweet was to announce the new Vatican news aggregator, News.va, which has gone live.

The Pope pushed the site live and tweeted about it using an iPad. The site itself is the first time the Vatican has provided a single place for all the news and opinion surrounding the Church, the Vatican state and the Pope.

Recently, a neuroscientist scanned the brains of an Apple devotee with an MRI machine. What he found was that each time the Apple logo was flashed onto the screen, this acolyte's brain lit up in exactly the same region that lights up when a religious person is shown an icon of their faith.

Alex Riley, in his documentary, "Secrets of the Superbrands," set out to figure out "how (the world's most powerful technology) brands - such as Apple, Microsoft and Google - have grown so explosively to become some of the world's biggest companies."

Self-reinforcing delusional and Family Radio babblespout Harold Camping has predicted the "rapture" for tomorrow. (He predicted it for June of '94, but...never mind.) A - God help us - "radio evangelist" (I'm going to run out of quotation marks and parentheses before this is done, I can tell), he has junked up the American cityscape with billboards to this effect. (And seriously, dude, hire a graphic designer.) In fact, my friend's cousin was hired to put them up in Eugene, Oregon, inspiring a dual epidemic of eye-rolling and hand-wringing.

The Web has responded to this with its typical enthusiasm, combining the snackbar wisdom of the hipster with the maudlin goop of the true believer.

The United Nations does a lot of good in this world, as far as I'm concerned. If nothing else, it gets representatives of enemy nations in the same building, sometimes in the same room. However, the organization is sometimes troubled by a desire to be so "fair" that it elects Libya and Thailand to the U.N. Human Rights Council.

Its latest move, however, goes far beyond the pale of common sense. It has passed a resolution outlawing "defamation" of religion. That means that wherever U.N. writ runs, neither a person nor an organization nor a representative of the press may say anything negative about a religion, part of a religion, an offshoot of a religion or a representative or member of a religion.

As the cloud is getting more players and interfaces, best and worst practices are emerging. As the market grows and more companies try to plug in, the cloud may benefit from guiding principles.

Similar to new technology movements in the past, a natural process is underway to define "what is good", which, for some in the industry, equates to "what is open". Like religion itself, open can be defined in ways that are uplifting, or on the other side of the coin, restricting. Also, we learn again, nothing is free.

What do you get when a Christian pastor, an atheist, a grad student and a lawyer set up a website to criticize churches?

I swear, this isn't a bad joke. It's a very real site, ChurchRater, and it allows anyone with an Internet connection to identify and review church services around the world. Is the site inspiring frank conversations about worship and religion, as its creators intended? Is it allowing sometimes closed or cliqueish communities to see how they appear to outsiders? Or does it, as some users wrote, "trivialize the deep dimensions of spiritual experiences" and "bolster the notion that church is a consumer-oriented proposition"?

Today, Pope Benedict XVI announced that priests and church leaders should be actively using digital tools, including the social web, to communicate with laypersons, particularly young people.

The occasion was the 44th annual World Communications Day, traditionally a time for the Vatican to project an annual message from the church to its people and the rest of the world. This year's message stood in sharp contrast to the missive he delivered in 2009, when the Holy See stated that mass media - including online information sources - acted as a "poison" that numbed morality and sensitivity. "'It recounts, repeats and amplifies evil," he said, "making us accustomed to horrendous acts, desensitizing us and, in some ways, poisoning us." So, why the about-face?

Pope Benedict XVI made a big jump into the world of social networking today, making public statements about Facebook and MySpace and launching an official Vatican channel on YouTube.

The Pope celebrated the World Day of Communications on Friday with a statement calling social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace "a gift" that could speak to the "fundamental desire" we all have to connect, so long as people don't isolate themselves online, forget those marginalized by the Digital Divide or violate the "goodness and intimacy of human sexuality." To that we can only say, leave Britney alone!!