Communications Major

A flood of stats about Sunday night’s Oscars ceremony has been unleashed upon the web. Among these stats are some looks at trends from Google, Twitter and Facebook. Best-actress winner Jennifer Lawrence was the most Google'd nominee during the broadcast, and her dress was the most Google'd item on the red carpet. "Argo" as best picture with 85,300 tweets per minute (tpm) nosed out Adele's performance of Bond-theme song "Skyfall" at 82,300 (tpm). Meanwhile, Facebook reported the Oscar buzz was the social network's biggest buzz of the year (bigger than the Super Bowl or the Grammys) with 66.5 million Oscar mentions during the live telecast.

This week's SOPA protests shined a light on what other popular sites and services could lose in revenue just by shutting down for 1-day: eBay, $28 million; Facebook, $11.7 million; Google, $100 million....

LOS ANGELES — The world's attention wavered between the tragic and the silly in 2012, and along the way, Web surfers searched in huge numbers to find out about a royal princess, the latest iPad, and...