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Last night’s lunar eclipse was a special day for the astronomical calendar – and social media, with the event streamed live through video uploading site YouTube.  Lasting a total of 100 minutes, this eclipse was the longest duration in the past 11 years; but whilst it was visible for fans in Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia and South America – those in North America missed out.

Fortunately for them, Google were nice enough to broadcast the footage through YouTube; whilst space camera site Slooh allowed those to watch the event on their mission interface – complete with narration.

Other ways of accessing the eclipse included the Google Earth sky layer feature, where users could view the event after downloading the recently launched kml; and for Android mobile phone users, the free download for the Slooh Space Camera app allowed customers to watch the footage all from their mobile device.

Or failing that, you could always just look outside your window.

The blogging arena has for a long time been dominated by 4 year old platform Tumblr and 8 year old WordPress – but experience is clearly no match for youth, as it has emerged that the majority of bloggers favour…Tumblr.

Over 7 million blogs were reported to be hosted on Tumblr back in January this year – and it was recorded earlier today that Tumblr’s total number of blogs was 20,873,182; beating WordPress by a narrow margin of just around 85,000 blogs.

Whilst WordPress doesn’t count the sites hosted by the users themselves through the WordPress.org software, Tumblr’s numbers are extremely impressive, especially as WordPress already had a 4 year start.

Tumblr has proven to be popular with the young crowd of students, graduates and new starters, and several businesses within the entertainment sector have jumped on the blogging bandwagon and released their own Tumblr blogs.

Many of the top brands have been represented by WordPress, including CNN, TED and the National Football League; whilst Tumblr blogs help to improve an online presence – particularly social media, by bridging the virtual gaps of sites and Facebook profiles.

Search engine heavyweight Google unveiled their latest “pièce de résistance” yesterday, in the form of three new features designed to ‘knock down barriers to knowledhe’.

Voice recognition software within mobile searches has existed for some time now, enabling users to search with minimal effort without needing to fiddle around with different buttons; so it makes sense for the global giant to bring this service to our desktop with Google’s Voice Search – especially since many computers have microphones built in/on some way or another.

Currently, the service is only available to Google’s Chrome browser – however, it shouldn’t be too long until it’s rolled out as plug-ins for other browsers, and translated into a number of different languages.

The ‘Search by Image’ application works as a montage of best bits from Google Googles, where searches are carried out by importing images taken on your phone to the desktop.

It’s reported that Voice Search contains around 230 billion words borrowed from genuine queries, but the divide in accents across Atlantic waters remains a worry.  Just ask Cheryl Cole.

World IPv6 Day was hailed a success by its organisers, with over 400 content providers and web hosts partaking in the event.

The occasion was sponsored and run by the Internet Society, where public IPv6 features set within ‘real-time’ was tested over a 24 hour period.  From midnight GMT on Wednesday to midnight GMT on Thursday, associates taking part in the experiment ran their sites simultaneously across IPv4 and IPv6 networks.

The end of the year is set to see the expiry of IPv4 addresses, but following World IPv6 Day’s aim in advocating the use of IPv6, businesses can expect to incur less costs as well as restricted website ability.

Companies such as Google, Hurricane Electric, iWeb and NTT America noted a positive outcome from the trial.

Chief executive for the American Registry for Internet Numbers, described the operation as a “remarkable success”, with no reported issues by any of the 500+ businesses who partook in the initiative.

IPv6 ‘Samurai’ and Google network engineer Lorenzo Colitti stated: “The test flight was a success.  World IPv6 Day is over, and IPv6 access to Google services remains enabled only for users in the Google over IPv6 program.  We carried about 65 per cent  more IPv6 traffic than usual, saw no significant issues and did not have to disable IPv6 access for any networks or services.”

They say the camera never lies – but a photo uploaded onto TwitPic has been causing quite a stir across social networking sites, especially for those using Twitter.  Circulating under the hashtag of #seriouslymcdonalds is an image of a blatantly fake sign that was apparently taken at a McDonald’s restaurant, claiming that “African-American customers are now required to pay an additional fee of $1.50 per transaction.”

Whilst many have been quick to condemn the fast-food outlet, it has emerged that the telephone number located at the bottom of the sign is actually the contact details for the KFC Customer Satisfaction Hotline.

McDonald’s have posted their innocence on Twitter, with their official account proclaiming:

A statement released by McDonald’s director of social media, Rick Wion, have called the whole matter a hoax:

“The sign is obviously a hoax.  As a company and a brand we have a long and proud history of diversity inclusion across our system on both sides of the counter.

“From our management crew, franchisees – across the board, we’re very proud of our record of diversity.  This is unfortunately an example of how rumors can outspeed the truth.  Over the last 48 hours we’ve been tweeting and striving to clarify that this is a hoax.”

Someone’s clearly not McLovin’ it.

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Whilst not a typical web hosting related story, several websites have gone crazy for the latest news regarding Leicester City Council.  You’re probably thinking, ‘Leicester City Council?  Hardly a newsworthy piece’, but throw zombies into the mix and what do you get?  Breaking news.

Government authorities receive hundreds of requests today, but Leicester City Council received the strangest one of all when a letter was sent to their offices enquiring into a comprehensive emergency plan – in case the Midlands were ever threatened by a potential zombie attack.

The Freedom of Information enquiry read as follows:

Dear Leicester City Council.

Can you please let us know what provisions you have in place in the event of a zombie invasion?  Having watched several films it is clear that preparation for such an event is poor and one that councils throughout the kingdom must prepare for.

Please provide any information you may have.

Yours faithfully,

Concerned Citizen

Unfortunately, the council had to admit that they currently had no determined rescue initiative should they ever become attacked by the undead.

The council’s head of information governance, Lynn Wyeth, stated that due to publicity concerning MPs expenses, there was a lot more awareness centralling on the rights of FOI.

She also said that the council had implemented a number of emergency plans, and features of these could also be applied to any possible zombie invasion.

UK watchdog the Information Commissioners Office have been in discussions with Facebook concerning the ‘privacy implications’ of its facial recognition software.

Yet in spite of Bloomberg alleging that European regulators are investigation the social media company in relation to the matter, no such action by the European Union’s authority has been taken.

“It is misleading to say that the European Commission is investigating the issue,” said a Brussels spokeswoman.

“EU data protection rules establish criteria for processing personal details and transparency requirements about the use of such data.  But it is for the national authorities in member states to monitor and enforce them.

“On the other hand, new technologies bring new challenges all the time and that is why the European Commission is currently reviewing the data protection rules.”

Regarding ICO’s plans to look into Facebook’s latest privacy palaver, a spokesman for the agency said: “As with any new technology, we would expect Facebook to be upfront about how people’s personal information is being used.

“The privacy issues that this new software might raise are obvious and users should be given as much information as possible to give them the opportunity to make an informed choice about whether they wish to use it.

“We are speaking to Facebook about the privacy implications of this technology.”

However, the regular has yet to confirm whether an investigation will be undertaken, instead choosing to state that talks are currently in place.

Renowned microblogging service Twitter recently issued an announcement that all links shared on the Twitter.com site are to be shortened automatically through their own t.co URL shortening system.

The links will be reduced to a much more concise length of 19 characters – with an ellipsis to show once the Tweet has been sent.

Whilst each individual link will be given their own unique t.co ID, the links shown on Twitter will appear as abbreviated versions of the originating sources so as to give the users an idea of where their click will lead them to.  This in itself is an extremely clever approach, especially in cases where several URL-shortened scam links have redirected the users to the wrong location.

An example of the URL shortening:

However, several other URL shortening services will still be noted around Twitter, particularly that of Hootsuite which gives their users an insight regarding the analytics surrounding each link. Twitter users will not have to worry about using the social networking site’s shortening system as their sole source of abbreviations, as third-party applications will still be available on Twitter.com

Remember that time Rupert Murdoch bought social media site MySpace?  Well forget about it – as the Fate of the networking arena will soon be decided within the next two weeks, according to technology sources.

The Australian MySpace office has since closed down, with many of the staff sent their separate ways late 2010.  However, News Digital Media are currently locked in meetings regarding the ownership of the online advertising sales duties for the site.  Rebekah Horne, NDM’s head of international, has reportedly said that a statement will be released within the next few weeks concerning the future of MySpace.

Although a current employee, Horne herself will be heading to pastures new in the form of DMG Radio, taking on the role of chief digital officer – where she will be rejoining Lachlan Murdoch, a shareholder with a 50 per cent stake in the broadcasting company.

Head of digital media for News Corp, Jonathon Miller, told US press last week that the business was “two weeks” away from being informed of the drawn-out conclusion of the relegated site.