First POST: Changes

Google visualized Rick Santorum's surge in Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri. At Search Engine Land, Danny Sullivan noted that Santorum not only has a well-known Google problem, but also a Bing problem. Rather than manually intervening as it did with Bush's "miserable failure" Google issue, Sullivan suggested that Google should add a disclaimer explaining why the results seem politically slanted. He added:

The Spreading Santorum site isn’t ranking because of some type of Google Bomb campaign. It ranks because it is entirely relevant for “santorum.” It was created years ago as a protest against Rick Santorum’s anti-homosexual views. Those views are entirely relevant, in fact arguably more relevant the further Santorum advances as a candidate to be president of the United States. To drop the site, Bing and Google would actually be making the type of political move that Santorum seems to think that Google is already doing (he clearly doesn’t seem to think about or care about Bing).

The Obama campaign has started a new Obama2012 Twitter account. As the account explained in successive tweets," We'll tweet the articles we're reading, answers to your questions, and behind-the-scenes info from the campaign. If you're not a campaign junkie, this may not be for you. If you are: Pull up a chair and send us your questions and thoughts." Later, the Twitter account answered the question "Do the majority of his donations come from small donations by individuals? Or from Super PACs, like Romney?" from a user: "Almost half the money raised by #Obama2012 has been from donors contributing $200 or less: http://OFA.BO/wSFxwU"

The AFL-CIO plans to "Occupy CPAC", which starts today in Washington D.C. However, the College Republican National Committee itself had been using the tagline #OccupyCPAC as part of a promotion for the event.

Jeff Sonderman from Poynter spotted an Obama Facebook ad promoting the president's job record.

American Catholics are being urged to contact Congress regarding the Obama administration's birth control health coverage policy with an "urgent action alert" posted on the website of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.

According to a Rasmussen Poll, 43 percent of voters say random choices from the phone book would be better than the current Congress

CNN announced yesterday that it had suspended reporter Roland Martin for allegedly tweeting homophobic comments during the Super Bowl.

A pro-Palestinian affiliate of the Presbyterian church has shut down its Facebook page after Jewish groups complained about "anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, and at times anti-Semitic content," according to JTA.

The New York Times looks at the build-up of opposition to genetically modified crops that is in part fueled by online petitions.

In the Huffington Post, Michael Calderone writes that Facebook and Twitter encourage political reporting on inconsequential details.

Atlantic Correspondent James Fallows answered questions on Reddit yesterday.

The Washington Post published a wide-ranging examination of lawmakers' earmarks that includes interactive mapping elements.

The Senate passed a bill earlier this week that would allow the greater use of drones domestically, legislation that has drawn criticism from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has sued the Department of Transportation for information on which entities have the authority to use drone aircraft and why.

Anonymous released personal information of officials in Oakland in what it said was retaliation for the city's treatment of Occupy protesters.

A hacker released source code for the antivirus software Symantec's pcAnywhere tool, after reportedly trying to demand $50,000 not to release it.

A judge refused to shut down a website that resells MP3 music files.

Politifact says Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) made a false statement about the cost of piracy.

Techdirt looks at which legislators are still supporting SOPA and PIPA.

The chief executive of the Recording Industry Association of America wrote in a New York Times op-ed that Wikipedia, Google and others were spreading "misinformation" about SOPA and PIPA, in their claims of its potential for censorship.

The hyperbolic mistruths, presented on the home pages of some of the world's most popular Web sites, amounted to an abuse of trust and a misuse of power. When Wikipedia and Google purport to be neutral sources of information, but then exploit their stature to present information that is not only not neutral but affirmatively incomplete and misleading, they are duping their users into accepting as truth what are merely self-serving political declarations.

As Techdirt and the Chronicle of Higher Education report, Paramount has been reaching out to law schools to talk with students and professors about piracy issues. The executive director of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School says the debate about piracy legislation ignores already existing copyright protections. A study has found that the Megaupload shutdown has not slowed pirated downloads, but redirected them to other sources.

A New York Times article emphasized the need for both sides in the debate to come to an agreement on how serious the problem is. It also noted that media companies were being proactive and making their content more accessible online, such as Comedy Central's The Daily Show. Adage recently reported that a new Kiefer Sutherland TV series would also air globally with a single sponsor, since "People feel so connected now, and they can, via the internet, know exactly what's happening in the U.S.," a Fox executive said.

A call for a veteran's parade in New York honoring Iraqi war veterans has found some support on Twitter, with the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America posing the question during what was billed as "first ever DoD Twitter town hall." New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn endorsed the idea on MSNBC.

The New York Times is still searching for hidden Super PAC donors.

The California State Teachers' Retirement System, the second-largest largest pension fund in the United States, wants Facebook to expand its board of directors and add women to its panel.

Zeynep Tufekci, assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Maryland at Baltimore County, counters Evgeny Morozov's claim that nobody leisurely surfs the web anymore:

However, in my personal experience, platforms like Facebook and Twitter have greatly increased the amount of unplanned and interesting information I encounter exactly because they are person-to-person spaces rather than information-spaces. Online, I interact with people with whom I share at least one strong interest-but thanks to the social Internet, I am not exposed to just that limited topic but the much wider universe of what my friends share. And this is always much broader than the narrower affinity that first connected me with that particular person.

Jon Stewart takes part in a video from the FeelGood Foundation calling for the funding from the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act to cover cancer.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints — as the Mormon Church is known — owns one of the most active and unregulated web portals for gun sales named in a report by Mayor Michael Bloomberg last fall. The site belongs to Deseret Media Companies, a for-profit arm of the Church.

Facebook has bought web addresses related to clean energy.

The Raleigh City Council has passed an Open Source Government Resolution, promoting the use of open source software and open data, placing open source software on the same level as proprietary software in the procurement process, and establishing an open data catalog to house data available from the city.

A new HBO series created by Aaron Sorkin about a fictional cable news channel will have a real presence on the web for the totally fake Atlantis Cable News. The series is expected to address newsy topics such as the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and the death of Osama Bin Laden.

A Search Engine Land column adresses whether websites should make changes to comply with new cookie laws in the United Kingdom.

A group led by an Austrian law student that met with Facebook representatives Monday over the site's privacy policy said that Facebook had promised to release more information about the data it collects from its users.

In a Washington Post op-ed, Vladimir Putin writes the following about his vision for Russia:

Modern democracy as government by the people cannot be limited to simply casting votes. Democracy, in my view, is the fundamental right of the people to elect their government as well as to continuously influence it and the decision-making process. In this regard, I propose introducing a rule for a mandatory parliamentary review of any legislative initiative that has more than 100,000 supporting signatures on the Internet. A similar practice exists in the United Kingdom. Internet-based democracy should be integrated into the overall development of institutions, especially at the municipal and regional levels, creating a referendum-based democracy.

According to e-mails hacked by Anonymous, a group of pro-Putin Internet activists have gone very far in trying to shape his image online, from paying users to leave hundreds of comments on negative press articles, manipulating Youtube view counts and "disliking" anti-Regime videos, the Guardian reported.

The emails show the particular attention Nashi pays to [Alexei] Navalny, whose anti-corruption blog and Twitter account have been instrumental in organising anti-Putin sentiment. Activists are seen proposing various ideas to Yakemenko - from projects that came to fruition, such as a cartoon video comparing Navalny to Hitler - to others that were rejected, including a suggestion that someone dress up like the blogger to beg for alms in front of the US embassy. Putin and his supporters continue to insist that opposition protests have been funded and provoked by the west.

The Atlantic's Jeff Goldberg suggests new e-mail passwords for Bashar al-Assad's presidential office.

The BBC told its journalists not to first break stories on Twitter.

The Metropolitan Police in London failed to warn victims of phone hacking that their privacy had been breached. An editor for the Times of London apologized to a high court judge for not disclosing instances of e-mail hacking.

Even as the British government warned against possible Internet outages during this summer's London Olympics, many government workers were also testing out working from home this week as part of a planned effort to avoid traffic gridlock during the games.

A Flemish national politician in Belgium has launched a new anti-immigration, anti-Islam campaign that includes a website with an address that appears to translate to "Women against Islamization."

The Pirate Party has arrived in Greece.

Voting has begun in India's most populous state Uttar Pradesh, and 900 video cameras and 1,800 digital cameras will be used to monitor the polls and provide live webcasts.

Three Indian government ministers in the state of Karnataka have resigned after they were seen seemingly watching a pornographic video on a cell phone. One of them said he was watching a video clip of a rave party to prepare for a discussion in the assembly.

A French health minister attempted to use Twitter to do damage control after she wrote a blog post that appeared to suggest that homeless people, to avoid the extreme cold weather in Europe at the moment "should avoid going outdoors." In response to criticism, she tweeted a link to an updated blog post without the reference to homeless people and wrote, "There are some subjects that lend themselves badly to irony."

German researchers say they were able to unencrypt calls coming from two types of satellite phones commonly used in Africa.

Anonymous claimed to have hacked German legislative files and posted documents detailing German military operations in Afghanistan that were marked "secret." However, a parliamentary spokesperson said all the data was already publicly available. While still in some cases marked "secret," it had been declassified and published as an appendix to a report on a controversial 2009 airstrike.

The Washington Post writes about a new "I Paid a Bribe" website in Kenya, inspired by a similar site in India, that aims to fight corruption.