Barack Obama’s support online is the stuff of legend, and most of it is positive. His netroots fundraising efforts have resulted in his campaign being the richest in history, and the mature realization of the Howard Dean phenomenon. His Internet advertising far outpaces his rivals, and he is the favorite amongst much of the Internet upper-crust. His site’s social network does a fantastic job of keeping his supporters connected and his campaigns overall grasp of the technology available far outpaces his rival, John McCain.

However, rumors are swirling that some of his supporters may be abusing their technological advantage. Several anti-Obama blogs, many of them by Hillary Clinton supporters, have been shut down on Google’s Blogger network after being identified as spam.

But there is no concrete evidence of foul play, and Google’s explanation for the shutdown scotches speculation by the conspiracy theorists.
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While Google is getting accustomed to being beaten in the search engine battles raging in China and Korea, Russia is proving to be a difficult market as well.

Russia’s biggest search engine is Yandex, and while Google is increasing its share at a rapid rate of speed, Yandex currently holds 44% of the market share in Russia, which is more than ten points ahead of Google. Yandex also has some share in other European countries like the Ukraine, making it the second biggest search engine on the continent.
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While Twitter has been functional for a pretty long while, for almost a week, users have been unable to reply directly to tweets. Understandably, non-functionality of this feature has caused yet more Twitter users to abandon it and move on to Friendfeed.

As Michael Arrington from TechCrunch reports, Twitter’s latest attempt at keeping its service up is to disable certain features. This way, they are able to maintain the ability of users to send and receive tweets, but at the expense of tools that compose integral parts of the service.

Arrington is dead-on when he points out that disabling replies is just about the worst move Twitter could make. Cutting out the ability to coalesce long, spontaneous conversations on Twitter is driving a lot of users, Arrington included, to the conversation feature on Friendfeed.
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Facebook has a problem.

Grammar geeks will have noticed that Facebook has a lot of made up words in its system, such as “themself” and moments where it has to say “Larry has changed their profile.”

A lot of this comes from people not specifying their gender in their profiles, and this is creating quite a significant headache for Facebook’s translators.

With Facebook now the world’s number one social network, and with expansion to Russia and China among other nations part of the reach, language difficulties are popping up as one of the obstacles to a more united Facebook. In languages like French, where gender is important in determining what words to use, some rather garbled looking results are popping out.
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The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has approved a plan that will open up top-level domain names to just about anything possible–so long as you’re willing to pay the price.

Early estimates put the price tag for the TLD’s at anywhere between $100,000 and $500,000, which means the .francis domain will be available for a good time yet to come.
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Multiply is one of those social networks you don’t hear much about, drowned out by the loud buzz of MySpace and Facebook. But Multiply has slowly built a loyal and active user base, and is attempting to monetize by offering high-volume media storage that never expires and ad-free usage for $20 a year.

Attempting to be the “adult” alternative to the mega-sites out there, Multiply is drawing in a good number of users in their upper-20’s to mid-30’s. Assuming users of this age group are more likely to shell out for a premium service, Multiply’s answer to the monetization question is built on the back of this perceived loyalty and maturity.
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Google has released another tool to make live easier for Internet marketers. After entering demographics and other sites marketers are targeting, Google Ad Planner will find other sites that reflect a desired audience.

Most appealing is Google’s refusal to only provide information on sites in their own ad network. All sites are available for perusal, and it’s good to see Google provide the technology without any strings attached.

Google claims that this program is targeted directly at media planners and provides the means to concoct a .csv file that can be exported and presented to clients and managers. Ad Planner is currently available by invitation, and those interested can apply here.
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More bad news for the newspaper industry: 2007 saw the biggest decline yet in advertising revenues for the nation’s top newspapers. The year saw an 8% drop in revenues, and 2008 is forecast to be even worse.

The Internet, however, saw a gain in ad revenue of 33%, which roughly correlates to the lost revenue in other sectors. Print’s loss is the web’s gain.

To make matters worse for newspapers, a very poor housing market in states like Florida and California are leading to big hits in classified ad revenues. Additionally, with free classified services like Craigslist increasing in popularity, one of the biggest money-spinners for newspapers is quickly going south. Hearst estimates The San Francisco Chronicle is losing $1 million a day at this point.
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I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by this, but I was: 1/3 of the senior IT workers surveyed by software firm Cyber-Ark admit to taking a look at confidential information on the networks they maintain.

It is kind of disappointing that people do this kind of thing. I’ve done a little bit of IT work in my time and I never wanted to know what people were doing on their computers. First of all, I wouldn’t want anybody doing it to me, and second, it’s just kind of pathetic.

The report also noted that companies are very negligent in their changing of privileged passwords. 9% were never changed, meaning ex-employees would still have access to confidential information.
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Time Magazine has a rather intriguing article about the future of mobile porn vis a vis the iPhone.

Several iPhone-friendly adult sites have popped up with video clips optimized for the iPhone. iPhone’s browser gives adult content companies an upper hand they’ve not previously had with other mobile carriers: restrictions by network providers.

Mobile porn is a $1.7 billion industry, but half of that income comes from Western Europe, where liberal mobile service providers allow adult content to be broadcast over their phones. With iPhone, there are no such restrictions.
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