Communications Major

In a week that should have belonged to President Barack Obama, taking the oath of office for his second term and making a courageous speech dedicated to equality for all, it was the ladies around him who captured the social media spotlight.

Let's proclaim 2013 the year of the "Ph" - since we all know no one ever looks back at these statements at the end of the year to see if anyone was right. But if we were the type of blogger to make big predictions (we are), here are three for 2013, and they all start with what should become the 27th letter in the English alphabet - the "Ph": Phablets, Photos (Vaporizing) and Photos (Printed for (Posterity).

Binders.

Those back-in-the-day ubiquitous office supply designed to collect and make sense of reams of hard copy data.

That's what we're talking about on a week in October 2012.

Women are more addicted to the Internet than men, and that's a good thing. The court of online opinion drove another controversial threat to women's health, bodies and rights into the ground. People continue to mess up on Facebook, but there's hope. Pinterest may be driving a new trend in social networking, one that says "look at this" instead of "look at me". Adele goes double-platinum on iTunes and Mad Men is coming back, check out some snazzy new video trailers.

Make-believe girlfriends, truthers, the man who watched cat videos while outsourcing his six-figure job to China, Jodie Foster is not Honey Boo Boo and when is it time to stop taking your own Instagrams and hire a social media butler? - it all seems so surreal. And it is, because this is what people are talking about online this week. Yowza!

As the keeper of one the leading curation sites about online news and trends, "What People Are Talking About Online", we were all set to write our "Best of 2012" story today. But then we saw this set of questions and it made us rethink our hook. At first glance of the questions, we knew we already had a lot of the answers. So, with advance apology to the New York Times and quiz creator Ben Schott, we present 2012: The Year in Answers.

I've just had a few weeks away from my desk and laptop and daily routine of tracking what people are talking about online only to return this week and wonder, did anybody even know I was gone?

In an era of breaking us down into percentages - 99%, 47%, 8% (that last figure is the percentage of adults who use Twitter on a daily basis) - and obsessively counting followers, connections, "friends", page views and hits it's easy to get caught up in "your" numbers and start wondering what - if anything - do they mean? And even, if they matter.

Googling "Santorum", the joy of spending time offline, Steve Jobs action figure, the human Barbie, divorce over Facebook and Fidel Castro is still not dead. These stories and more have been curated for your one-stop consumption on the Online Media Roundup.