Google has been granted a quite interesting patent for "Claiming Real Estate in Panoramic or 3D Mapping Environments for Advertising". The company filed the patent back in the summer of 2008. The abstract reads:

Late yesterday, Yahoo Southeast Asia got what may be a big leg up in the social networking arena.  Yahoo Southeast Asia established a partnership with Friendster that will see the two entities doing a great deal of cross-promotion in the near future.

Google announced that Google Friend Connect features are now available for the Drupal and Joomla content management systems. This means that content publishers using these platforms can integrate Google’s product, which basically turns your site into a mini social network.

Someone with a very interesting political background will soon be in charge of Google’s corporate communications.  The company’s hired Jill Hazelbaker, who’s worked with both John McCain and Michael Bloomberg in the past, to replace Matt Furman.

PubMatic said today it would extend its ad network optimization technology to include mobile advertising.

The company said it would use its real-time optimization technology to help publishers maximize revenue from their mobile ad inventory. PubMatic’s technology helps online publishers get the most revenue from their advertising space by determining in real-time which ad network or exchange can best monetize each impression.

If you ever set out to collect personal email addresses at a tech gathering, here’s a tip: generally speaking, you can save time by typing or writing out the "@gmail" part before approaching people.  But Compete provided a bit of a reality check today by showing that Hotmail remains in the top spot overall.

More than half (51%) of holiday shoppers across 11 countries used their mobile phones for in-store activities such as comparison shopping, getting peer feedback, product information and coupons, according to a new study by Motorola.

Back in 2008, Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear announced that he wanted to shut down 141 Internet gambling sites in the state in an effort to stop unregulated online gaming. He filed a civil suit against the domain names and asked the court to force the sites to block access to Kentucky users or give up control of their domain names.

Starting in mid-March, Yahoo Shopping will no longer be a solo act.  Yahoo announced today that it’s arranged to have PriceGrabber take care of some of the technical details, and it’ll be able to make one more cutback thanks to the adjustment.

In an attempt to give our readers some real world application of all this social media theory swirling about we will be occasionally speaking with some real people who do the real work. How about that? Today we look at social media and the sports world.

We in the online world take every opportunity to turn our nose up at traditional media like newspapers because they are so 1900’s. Just take a look over the past year of posts that I have done and I at times can lead that charge. For the record, I do not relish in the fact that newspapers are going by the way side in many ways. I see that they are and it’s hard not to notice.

For many in the online space these days the words “Facebook privacy” would be called an oxymoron. Then of course there would be the usual calling others at Facebook morons and then it would get worse from there but I digress. Michael Arrington recently interviewed the poster child for the “Privacy? What privacy?” movement, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

As marketing professionals, we usually have to justify ourselves to our bosses, our clients and everyone in between—especially in the less-tested, sometimes-hit-or-miss arena of social media.

Back in November we talked about AOL’s need to trim their headcount by some 2,500 people. At the time the hope was that enough would walk away from their positions to avert the need for playing the bad guy and actually firing anyone.

More than one in five taxpayers say they will go online to prepare their taxes according to a new survey by Opinion Research, conducted for CompleteTax.

The survey found sixty percent of taxpayers plan to use an accountant or professional tax preparer. The number of taxpayers turning to online tax programs now slightly surpasses those planning to use packaged software with 11 percent saying they will go online compared to 10 percent saying they will buy a packaged program.

As you may recall, News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch began talking about blocking search engines and news aggregators a couple months ago. This escalated discussions that have essentially been going on for over a decade about the online news industry and fair use.

It looks like a certain search giant’s scored another victory in terms of its influence on society.  Or it’s at least half a win, as the American Dialect Society has declared "google" the word of the decade.

Google is used to coming under fire from different groups when it comes to its Google Books project. Most recently, the fire has come from the China Writers Association, which has over 8,000 members.

The group complained that Google was scanning and uploading its books without permission from authors. According to a Bloomberg report:

At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Encore unveiled a new version of The Print Shop. Yep, that’s right – The Print Shop, a time time-honored desktop publishing software that’s been around for decades. The company has completely redone it this time around.

Arguably the biggest news in the tech industry so far this year, has been Google’s launch of the Nexus One smartphone. The company rocked the mobile space when it announced that it would be selling the device on its own without the need of a carrier contract (although such contracts are available).

Symantec has put together its "State of the Data Center" report, which is the product of a survey of 573 businesses in 26 countries.

David Carruthers, the former director and CEO of online sports wagering firm BetOnSports, was sentenced to 33 months in prison on Friday, the Justice Department announced.

Carruthers, a citizen of the United Kingdom, was hired by BetOnSports founder, Gary Kaplan, in 2000 as CEO of the online wagering company, which was based in Costa Rica.

Germany’s justice minister is less than happy about the direction Google’s headed.  Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger thinks the search giant may become a monopoly, and she’s not of a mind to sit by while that happens behind closed doors.

Before 2009 came to a close, Google provided a look (as always) at the most searched for terms of the year. It showed the top ten fastest rising and fastest falling terms on both a global scale, and in the U.S. Globally, "Michael Jackson" was the fastest rising, while "Beijing 2008" was the fastest falling. In the U.S., "Twitter" was the fastest rising (just above "Michael Jackson", and "John McCain" was the fastest falling (just over the Olympics).