The "Weekly WassUp" is a brief weekly overview of what has been showing up in "the feeds" in the last week.
In this issue:
- Dec. 8 : Pulitzer prize for online content
- Dec. 8 : Google launches ads for mobile
- Dec. 10 : Google Zeitgeist 2008
- Domain name locking for .be
- 'Koobface': the social network virus
- Adobe's infinite images
Dec. 8 : Pulitzer prize for online content
From the Pulitzer website on December 8 : "The Pulitzer Prizes in journalism, which honor the work of American
newspapers appearing in print, have been expanded to include many
text-based newspapers and news organizations that publish only on the
Internet." This is a big change for the prestigious prize in journalism and a clear sign of the shift towards online content in the media world. As an example, the well-respected Christian Science Monitor -which already won 7 Pulitzer prizes- will as from April 2009 discontinue its printed version and will publish online only. The inclusion of online content into the Pulitzer doesn't however mean that all online publishers make a chance of winning. Publications still have to be American, have to appear daily or weekly and have to focus on "original news reporting and coverage of ongoing stories".
Dec. 8 : Google launches ads for mobile
If you are an advertiser using Google AdWords to get yourself listed next to Google search results, you now have an extra option: platform targeting. As from now, advertisers can display their normal desktop ads also on mobile
devices (being full HTML compatible smartphones like the iPhone or G1). They can create campaigns for them and get separate performance
reporting. However, if you do have a special mobile ad design ready and have created a mobile landingpage, you can still use the existing Mobile Ad campaign tool.
Dec. 10 : Google Zeitgeist 2008
For the eighth time already, based on their massive amount of data, Google has put together a small overview of the hot topics of the year. Globally, the fastest rising search terms were:
- sarah palin [celebrity]
- beijing 2008 [sports]
- facebook login [social web]
- tuenti [social web]
- heath ledger [celebrity]
- obama [celebrity]
- nasza klasa [social web]
- wer kennt wen [social web]
- euro 2008 [sports]
- jonas brothers [celebrity]
As you can see, there were 3 main topics of interest: celebrities, sports and the social web.
The specific results for Belgium show the same rise of social networks (facebook, youtube, netlog, skyrock), together with a couple of (to me surprisingly) generic search terms.
From the Google Zeitgeist website:
Domain name locking for .be
If you own a domain name, you might already at some point have received an email requesting the transfer of your domain name to another agent (a 'trade') or owner (a 'transfer') from someone you've never heard of. Especially larger companies are often targetted by these 'cybersquatters' who try to get a hold on the company's domain name by sending out transfer requests hoping that you might incidentally approve. And although most of the times you can get your domain name back afterwards, it's quite a hasttle.
But as from now, owners of a .be domain name can ask their registrar to 'lock' that domain, protecting it from cybersquatters. Locked domains can never be traded or transferred unless they are unlocked first.
Locking has to be requested by the domain name owners for every domain.
Official press release (PDF - dutch)
'Koobface': the social network virus
"Koobface" is the name of a Trojan worm that has been making its way through a number of social networking sites lately. Since its first victim was Facebook, it is more commonly known as 'the Facebook virus'. But also MySpace, Bebo, Friendster and other social networking sites have already fallen victim. Once a computer has become infected with the Koobface worm, it spams the
owners friends by leaving comments on
their profiles. Those comments appear to come from the infected user,
saying things like "Are you sure this is your first acting
experience?", "is it u there?", "impressive. i'm sure it's you on this
video", "How can anyone get so busted by a spy camera?" and "You're the whole show! i'm admired with you." [sic]
The link takes you to a website offering a video download but stalls with the message that you'll need a new version of Adobe's Flash Player in order to
continue. Of course, if you click the button to proceed with the
install, you get infected.
Now social networks are booming, they get more interesting for virus creators. So my guess is that we will be seeing a lot more of these...
more info here
Adobe's infinite images
Adobe's Shai Avidan, the man who gave us the spectacular 'seam carving', has worked his magic once again.Together with Prof. Bill Freeman and
a team from MIT, Shai has been working on "Infinite Images," "a system
for exploring large collections of photos in a virtual 3D space." It's a bit like Microsoft's PhotoSynth, but even cooler 
.
"Our system does not assume the photographs are of a single real 3D
location, nor that they were taken at the same time. Instead, we
organize the photos in themes, such as city streets or skylines, and
let users navigate within each theme using intuitive 3D controls that
include pan, zoom and rotate...
We present results on a collection of several millions of images
downloaded from Flickr and broken into themes that consist of a few
hundred thousands images each. A byproduct of our system is the ability
to construct extremely long panoramas, as well as image taxi, a program
that generates a virtual tour between a user supplied start and finish
images.
"
