• The single largest expense of the Obama campaign in Janaury was Internet ads, as the New York Times reported. "Mr. Obama spent $4.3 million on Web ads in January, about as much as some of the Republican candidates raised."

• A Buzzfeed writer has now written a short book based off the story of Mitt Romney and his dog Seamus, titled "Hey Mitt! Dogs don't go there!" In the book, "Mitt's dog Seamus walks you through the many things you shouldn't do as a dog owner," such as giving the dog aspirin or heating him up with a microwave.

• Actor Jason Alexander responded to Mitt Romney’s use of a Seinfeld reference during Wednesday’s debate that he attributed to the character George Costanza. Alexander tweeted, “Thrilled Gov. Romney enjoys my old character. I enjoyed the character he used 2 b 2. If he’d embrace that again, he’d b a great candidate.” The reference, which Romney wrongly attributes to the Costanza character, was also made in December.

• Rick Santorum was the most searched-for candidate on Google during the recent Republican candidate debate, but terms deemed harmful to the candidate were also top trends.

• The Michigan Democratic Party is encouraging its supporters in an email to vote in the state's Republican primary. The email links to a YouTube video in which Republican state senators said in a legislative session that they would welcome Democratic voters. The Washington Post notes that the Democrats' effort is in part a move by liberal blogs like Daily Kos, under the motto "Operation Hilarity."

• Rep. Allen West took to Facebook to address his anger over high gas prices and questioned how much it cost President Barack Obama to “fill his gas tank?”

• The United States government formally charged Army private Bradley Manning in the Wikileaks case yesterday. No date has been set for the start of the trial.

• In a New York Times op-ed, Bill Gates comes out against allowing the publication of individual teacher ratings in New York following a court decision last week that allowed the release of that data:

  Many districts and states are trying to move toward better personnel systems for evaluation and improvement. Unfortunately, some education advocates in New York, Los Angeles and other cities are claiming that a good personnel system can be based on ranking teachers according to their "value-added rating" - a measurement of their impact on students' test scores - and publicizing the names and rankings online and in the media. But shaming poorly performing teachers doesn't fix the problem because it doesn't give them specific feedback...At Microsoft, we created a rigorous personnel system, but we would never have thought about using employee evaluations to embarrass people, much less publish them in a newspaper.

  The New York City Department of Education is expected to release the ratings today.

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• Head of the MPAA Chris Dodd told the Atlanta Press Club that "Hollywood is pro-technology and pro-Internet." But he also emphasized that online piracy is a serious problem. He said that ""nearly one-quarter of all global Internet traffic is copyright theft. And at the heart of the problem is the proliferation of parasitic foreign rogue sites whose sole purpose is to facilitate, and profit from, the theft of international property." He continued to state that "wee are not talking about overzealous film buffs or political activists making a statement about freedom of information. We are talking about criminals."

• The White House yesterday announced a set of online privacy guidelines that it said would help provide consumers control over how companies use their private data. While the White House unveiled its proposed Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights, Internet companies and online advertising networks in the Digital Advertising Alliance came to the White House to commit to using Do Not Track technology.

• In a letter to Google CEO Larry Page, 36 State attorneys general express strong concerns about Google's new privacy policy and request a meeting with Page and an answer to their letter by February 29. The EFF has been instructing users how to remove their Google search history before the start of the new policy in March, a message that many Internet users have been spreading on Twitter and Facebook.

• A 14 year old Libyan boy has founded an online news site called the Brega News Agency:

  In May, Malik founded the Brega News Agency as a platform for the articles he wrote during the 2011 revolution that ousted Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi from power. He now leads a team of 10 volunteer reporters covering Libyan news, publishing articles and photographs on the BNA Facebook page. Malik is moving into television as well, posting video interviews on his Brega97 YouTube channel, and on a new television station called the Benghazi Broadcasting Network ... "My goal is to be an agency like Reuters or A.P., but at the moment we just have the Facebook page," he said. "We don't have any money. Hopefully we'll soon have a Web site."

• Google announced that it plans to offer glasses that project information, entertainment and eventually advertisements on to its lenses. The product is like Google Goggles, the augmented reality software for your Android phone, only with actual goggles.

• FCC chairman Julius Genachowski called on Internet service providers to adopt new security measures that would notify customers when their computers are compromised.

• The New York Times reports that a manual disclosed as part of a Freedom of Information request indicates that Homeland Security officials were instructed to produce reports on policy debates related to the agency that drew content monitored from social media. Some of the keywords that officials were encouraged to search for were "China, cops, hacking, illegal immigrants, Iran, Iraq, marijuana, organized crime, police, pork and radicals. "

• Verizon's rival cell phone companies are asking the FCC to block the company's deals to buy wireless airwaves from cable operators, saying the move hurts competition.

• The provosts of 11 research universities express their commitment to open access in a letter and their opposition to the Research Works Act.

• The creators of a website that allowed students to search for cheaper textbooks have open-sourced their code to allow any student to "scrape" data on textbooks and prices from their college bookstores and compare them to other sources such as Amazon or eBay.

• The City of New York recently launched a new Facebook page and a Tumblr page.

• An Ohio judge has ordered an ex-husband to post an apology on Facebook to his ex-wife every day for thirty days for breaking a protective order.

• The Georgia Senate has passed a bill requiring students to take online courses as a precursor to graduating high school. Meanwhile, new legislation in Mississippi will expressly prohibit the use of state funds to pay for “virtual public charter schools.”

• A New York Times reporter notes that as the situation in Syria becomes ever more dangerous for journalists,raw, amateur video emerging from the country online is becoming more crucial to convey the situation on the ground:

  “Bashar al-Assad shut off the Internet and cut us off from the world,” said Abu Jaffar, a Homs activist, who helped dig out bodies from the apartment building, and then videotaped the effort and posted the results. “So he has made every Syrian into a journalist.” Mr. Jaffar and several of his fellow activists were interviewed by means of Skype, over a computer they powered with a car battery, using a portable Inmarsat satellite transmitter set up to provide a WiFi hotspot in the corner of the city where they were hiding. Activists said they were raising money overseas to pay for the transmitters and the satellite time. The apartment building where [London Times Reporter] Ms. Colvin died was targeted, Mr. Jaffar and other activists asserted, because it housed the activists’ media center. The satellite transmitters on the roof had probably been spotted by Syrian reconnaissance aircraft, they said.The dead were found in and around that center, and the activists were uploading videos of every body and disseminating details about the victims.

• In Iran, a new national Internet that will have greater monitoring capabilities will reportedly launch later this spring.

• Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin set the Internet abuzz when it came to light that Putin has written two blog posts for the British version of the Huffington Post. His posts, entitled “Russia: The Ethnicity Issue” and “Being Strong: National Security Guarantees for the Russian People,” were published in January and on Tuesday, respectively.

• Germany is considering a two-strikes online piracy law.

With Raphael Majma