Yes, Shamu has a Twitter account, and boasts more than 10,000 followers.

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Sony (SNE) joined forces with the label by streaming his runway show on video site Vevo, projecting it on enormous Bravia screens and providing Vaio notebooks and “Bloggie” video cameras to reporters.

The commingling was perhaps better in theory than in practice. Plenty of flashbulbs popped, and others took photos with their iPhones and BlackBerrys, but few journalists and bloggers used the Sony-furnished devices. The event’s Twitter hashtag, “#WRastSony,” produced only a handful of tweets, with about half coming from the Sony Electronics account.

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Did anything even matter before the iPad? Or did the lives of tech geeks as they knew them officially begin today?

Answers: No (unless you count Larry Ellison’s dream of buying the Golden State Warriors), no, and finally, yes. Especially if you have at least $499 burning a hole in your pocket and a desire to browse the Internet for 10 hours straight.

Nothing, not even some presidential address, seemed to overshadow the unveiling of Apple’s (AAPL) tablet in San Francisco. Aside from the gadget’s name, which some bloggers noted has the unfortunate tinge of a feminine hygiene product, a flurry of tech journos took to the Web to gush–or grouse–about their encounters with the iPad.

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How do we know they are fake? Well, we don’t, actually. A commenter on my own tablet story posted a link to this YouTube video, which features a 360-degree view of a tablet-like device and some paintball splotches that are similar to the graphics on the invite for the Apple event. And, typical of Apple commercials, the spot features a catchy tune from an indie-ish band (in this case, it’s “Someday I Won’t Exist” by Cola-Cola).

But Gizmodo cried foul about a similar YouTube video from a super legit-sounding site called nowhereelse.fr, saying the tablet depicted in it “has USB ports in the back that would necessitate a device twice as thick as the one shown” (we’ll take their word for it) and “looks faker than Heidi Montag.” Well, all right, then. Driving another nail into the coffin is TechCrunch, which noted that the translation from French on the nowhereelse site reads: “in the meantime, here’s what an advertisement might look like….” Whoops.

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In response to a growing trend of using verses from the Quran or the prayer call for ringtones among Muslim cell phone owners, Mr. Gomaa said the practice “violates the sanctity of the divine words,” according to the Arabic and Muslim news site Al Arabiya, which quoted a copy of the fatwa, or religious edict.

“Picking up the phone is sure to interrupt the verse and this is disrespectful to the holy book,” the fatwa said. Instead, cell phone users might replace the ringtones with other religious songs. And prayer calls should not be used as ringtones, the fatwa said, because it might confuse people and make them believe it was actually time for prayer.

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Not necessarily, according to a new study from the British Academy. In fact, in an examination of schoolchildren’s texting habits, the kids who used more “textisms”–abbreviations such as “plz” (please) and “l8ter” (later)–showed higher scores on some spelling, phonetics, reading comprehension and other English language competency tests.

“We have found no support in our research for the negative media and public speculation surrounding mobile phone use, text language and its effects on literacy development,” wrote study authors Beverly Plester and Clare Wood, both psychology professors at Coventry University in the United Kingdom.

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“If the consumer wouldn’t understand that the endorser, whether it’s a celebrity or a mommy blogger, is being paid…to talk about the product, that’s something that we’re concerned about, because we think consumers are being misled,” said Mr. Gordon in a panel discussion on Thursday.

He said the blogosphere “went a little crazy with visions of storm troopers taking down suburban houses and seizing the computers of mommy bloggers,” but that the FTC has no plans to enforce the rules so aggressively.

Instead, he said, the agency wants to focus on people who are being paid to make plugs for products in “non-traditional contexts” such as tweeting. In particular, they’ll go after companies that make claims that aren’t true or can’t be substantiated, essentially the same mission of the FTC in holding companies accountable offline.

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But at CES, Ed Hardy entered the world of mobile accessories with handset designs called Icing, intended for “the distinguishing mobile user who wants to show off the Ed Hardy brand with subtlety,” according to the company.

They’re made by Crystal Icing, which makes handsets adorned with Swarovski crystals. Users can choose between 10 new designs with names like “Beautiful Ghost,” “Love Kills Slowly” and “Koi Fish” for mobile faceplates ($30), iPod faceplates ($20 to $30) or special rhinestone faceplates ($50).

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I arrived 45 minutes early for Polaroid’s CES event Thursday, only to find 200 people already crowded into a press pen. The pop star’s music, with lyrics such as “I love your psycho, your vertigo stareschtick,” blared from the speakers (sadly, I know all the words).

While the brand that created the iconic instantaneous film remains well known around the world, Polaroid filed for bankruptcy in 2008 and was purchased and relaunched in 2009 by PLR IP Holdings. The troubled company made a splash on Tuesday prior to CES with the announcement that Lady Gaga, the 23-year-old singer known as much for her eccentric costumes as for her hit songs “Poker Face” and “Paparazzi,” would serve as a creative director for a “specialty line of Polaroid imaging products.” Whether or not she will actually have strong creative input remains to be seen.

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Protector, which debuts Thursday at CES, is made by Taser International, a company that’s best known for its series of electronic stun guns (watch the video below, from CES 2009, to see The Journal’s Andy Jordan test one out for himself).

Protector uses GPS so that a child’s calls, texts, emails and photos are first routed to the parent’s phone, where they can be screened and blocked if desired. It also monitors a child’s location and can even track driving habits, Taser said. (In case you’re wondering, it emphasized that Protector is not a stun gun.)

Parents can dial up restrictions by, say, blocking all calls from outside a local area code, or ease up by allowing all text messages to be received. “It grows with the child,” a Taser spokesman said, in that the special needs of each age group can be addressed.

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The number of apps downloaded for the iPod Touch surpassed those downloaded for the iPhone for the first time on Christmas, by a whopping 172 percent, according to the mobile applications analytics firm Flurry.

While app downloads for the iPod Touch usually lag behind those for the iPhone, according to Flurry’s metrics, iPod Touch 3G downloads increased by more than 900 percent on Christmas day in comparison with the average numbers of downloads on all the other Fridays in December. The following day, iPod Touch downloads still exceeded those for the iPhone by 104 percent.

“It appears that an influx of new iPod Touch devices has flooded the market over Christmas, and that users of the handset, primarily pre-teen and teen audiences, are voracious downloaders,” wrote Peter Farago, Flurry’s vice president of marketing.

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Numerous blogs discussed the possibility that electronic devices like laptops and MP3 players could be barred altogether on international flights arriving in the United States. The speculation came after various news outlets posted details of new security measures, including requiring passenger to remain seated during the final hour of flights.

Gizmodo, for example, on Monday posted what appeared to be a leaked memo from the Department of Homeland Security, in which the Transportation Security Administration’s acting administrator Gale Rossides wrote that airplanes should “disable aircraft-integrated passenger communications systems and services (phone, internet access services, live television programming, global positioning systems) prior to boarding and during all phases of flight.” The TSA on Monday appeared to relax some of the rules detailed in the memo.

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You’re not alone–seven of the 20 Facebook apps that have gained the most users in the past week are holiday themed, according to AppData, a site that tracks Facebook application metrics.

In the lead this week is the Christmas Cards! app on Facebook, developed by Janet Currie, which has nearly 200,000 fans and 13.8 million monthly active users. It gained more than 5 million users during the past week. Users select one of several cartoon-like Christmas greetings, including an animated picture of three cats wearing Santa hats.

The Christmas Greetings app, which allows users to choose from dozens of Christmas-themed “gifts” (read: various photos of Christmas trees and ornaments), has more than 3 million active monthly users and over 52,000 fans. It garnered nearly 2.5 million new users to snag the No. 6 spot on AppData’s list of top gainers this week.

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While Facebook users in the U.S. were primarily white and Asian in the beginning of 2006, blacks and Latinos are increasingly joining the site, and now comprise 11 percent and 9 percent of Facebook users, respectively. And 6 percent of U.S. Facebook users are Asians, down from about 8 percent four years ago.

Facebook data team researchers Lars Backstrom, Jonathan Chang, Cameron Marlow and Itamar Rosenn wrote that they were interested in finding out more about the composition of race and ethnicity among Facebook users.

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Randy Meech has created a site called TaxiHack that lets unhappy passengers post their cab comments, via email or tweet, in real time. A director of engineering at Patch, an AOL (AOL)-owned local news site, Mr. Meech said that he was interested in creating a dialogue about taxi rides in the vein of Twitter.

“I was hoping it would be a fun conversational thing and not just for complaints, but the complaint aspect is definitely there,” he said.

There’s no legal or criminal consequence for any of the drivers or cab companies cited on TaxiHack, but Mr. Meech said he imagined it would be in their best interests to pay attention to the comments.

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“If there is such a thing,” he said at a conference. “I buy everything Apple comes out with.”

He then added, “There is no such thing,” after which Fusion-io President David Flynn interjected, “You’re talking to a guy who has seven [navigation] systems in his car. So he will definitely be buying it.”

The men were there to announce that Fusion-io’s technology will be used for a new solid-state-disk storage technology offered by IBM’s (IBM) servers, called the High IOPS Adapter.

The company said that these technologies are a “new tier of memory,” faster and more cost-effective than disk drives, which will change the way data centers and computer architecture are designed.

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So where can you find the Black Friday deals? Google (GOOG) the term and a host of compilation sites pop up, many of which began posting information a month ago to alert customers to the best deals.

Black Friday Ads, for example, publishes daily updates featuring the best deals on electronics across the Web. SlickDeals.net categorizes offers by retailer, including major ones like Amazon.com (AMZN), Best Buy (BBY), Macy’s and Target, and the number of deals available at each one. BlackFriday.info allows shoppers to create a Black Friday shopping list and specifies which deals are online-only.

Some sites offer a highly organized look at what could otherwise be a jumble of information. DealsVista has created a deals spreadsheet that can be viewed online or downloaded, and Shoppers Shop created an online table of deals that includes start and end dates.

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Starting Friday, Twitter users began to post updates about service outages. Alex Mendez tweeted “33:40 minutes on the cellphone dealing with TW / earthlink. UGH,” and Diane Fischler wrote, “Not getting email messages again. Woke up to about 60 left over from yesterday’s Earthlink outage, now seems to be down again. Who else?”

On Saturday and Sunday, EarthLink users continued to complain about their lack of service. Jim Rattray wrote: “#Earthlink email has been down for 24+ hours. ‘We’re aware and working on it.’ Not good enough,” while romeneskoblogs said, “I haven’t received Earthlink email since Friday night. Customer service rep (in India) said could be 72 hours b4 restored.”

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Congress on Tuesday introduced the Secure Federal File Sharing Act, which would restrict the use of peer-to-peer file sharing software like Limewire among federal employees.

The new legislation follows multiple embarrassing leaks of sensitive government information by means of open file sharing networks, including the location of a safe house for the First Family, financial files belonging to Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, the electronic schematics to President Obama’s helicopter, and a list of 30 lawmakers currently under investigation by the House Ethics Committee.

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Networks of fraudsters use spam and malware to direct Web traffic to phony pharmaceutical sites, wrote Graham Cluley, a technology consultant for Sophos.

“Although unwitting buyers do often receive some kind of drug as result of the transactional exchange, at best the drug doesn’t work and at worse it can pose serious health risks,” he added. Cybercriminals are “putting their customers’ health, personal information and credit card details at risk” with these counterfeit versions of Tamiflu.

Many of these fraudulent pharmaceutical sites originate in Russia, Sophos’s Dmitry Samosseiko noted in a paper on the topic. One network called GlavMed, for example, has more than 120,000 online pharmacy sites selling generic drugs under the name of Canadian Pharmacy.

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Rent the Runway, which started Monday, marks another entry into the growing market of online luxury rental services. Shoppers can browse its selection of dresses and rent them at roughly 10 percent of their retail price, then return it in a prepaid envelope.

Before that, Madeline Passarelli, a former fashion editor at Lucky, introduced Wear Today, Gone Tomorrow in March. The daughter of a fashion designer and manufacturer, she spent years as a stylist and editor and had noticed that women in her field attended many events but didn’t want to wear the same outfit twice.

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Cookies, small programs that can be used to track Web movements, have come under fire as consumer groups, including the Federal Trade Commission, have sought to regulate companies that engage in targeted behavioral advertising.

While the current EU telecom law states that cookies are allowed if Internet users are notified of them and have an opt-out option, in practice, the law has been interpreted more loosely. In the United Kingdom, for example, the information commissioner’s office issued a directive emphasizing that sites should clearly direct users to a page where they can opt out.

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Just as the service was instrumental in providing updates during the summer’s election protests in Iran, Twitter feeds from Texas-based news sources such as the Austin-American Statesman and the Killeen Daily Herald provided a stream of local updates.

The Statesman’s feed amassed more than 3,000 followers by the end of the day Thursday, and soon larger news outlets such as Huffington Post, CNN and the New York Times (NYT) had tapped into it and other sources by using Twitter Lists, which lets users create groups of other Twitter accounts that others can view and follow.

“Lists proved a new way to follow breaking news on Twitter, with filtered groupings of local news outlets, military accounts, and local citizens,” Craig Kanalley wrote on Poynter’s E-Media blog.

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As part of an exhibition at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York City, Mr. Dorsey subjected himself to a Jungian analyst. “I thought it was an awesome experiment,” Mr. Dorsey said after his session. “It’s not something I had done before.”

The Rubin Museum is currently showcasing renowned Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung’s previously unpublished Red Book, a tome which has been referred to as “the holy grail of the unconscious” and has been hidden away from the public by Mr. Jung’s family for decades.

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The tech-advocacy group highlights a handful of cases it calls “the most egregious examples of takedown abuse,” usually involving businesses or organizations that cry foul–or issue takedown notices–even when their copyrighted materials are used in accordance with fair-use laws.

Among the honorees are National Public Radio, which tried to get an All Things Considered segment removed from YouTube because it appeared in an anti-same-sex-marriage ad. Others include NBC, for yanking an Obama campaign video that used archival footage of Tom Brokaw, and the National Organization for Marriage, which pulled YouTube footage of Rachel Maddow criticizing the audition tapes of one of its ads opposing gay marriage.

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