On the night last week when Lou Dobbs announced he was leaving CNN, before his final show had even ended, WebNewser was one of the first to groundlessly speculate about a presidential bid for the controversial news host.

Look who's groundlessly speculating now: Lou Dobbs himself. Reuters' Tim Gaynor reports:

A week after abruptly quitting his longtime job as a CNN television news host and commentator, Lou Dobbs said on Thursday he is considering career options including possible runs for the White House or U.S. Senate.

"Right now I feel exhilaration at the wide range of choices before me as to what I do next," Dobbs told Reuters in a telephone interview.

Since his departure, some have speculated he might run as a candidate for the U.S. Senate in New Jersey, where he has a home, or even run as a third-party candidate in the 2012 U.S. presidential elections -- options he says remain on the table.

Flashback to November 11, when WebNewser wrote:

Dobbs's comments tonight almost sound as if he's considering running for public office: "Some leaders in media, politics, and business have been urging me to go beyond the role at CNN and to engage in constructive problem solving as well as to contribute positively to the great understanding of the issues of our day."

A presidential bid? The GOP field is wide open, his ego appears up to the task, plus his anti-immigration views mesh with the party's base. It'll be interesting to see how it all plays out.

It's eerie. Admittedly, we made two or three other predictions in that post about what Dobbs will do, but only because of our exhilaration at the wide range of choices before him.

Condé Nast and Adobe Systems formed a strategic alliance, and the first crop to be harvested from it will be a digital-magazine application built on Adobe AIR runtime.

The two companies said they expect the app to be compatible with devices including laptops, netbooks, smart phones and the upcoming electronic color-slate devices.

Wired will be the first Condé Nast publication to deploy the digital-magazine app, which the companies said will "deliver full-color, high-resolution magazines that combine the immersive experience of its award-winning titles with the convenience and functionality of a digitally distributed and internet-connected product."

Condé Nast president and CEO Charles H. Townsend said:

This is the next piece of the puzzle for developing our unique magazine content in a digitalized format that will drive the new devices that will hit the market in 2010. Our hope is that the product of our work with Adobe will be used widely throughout the magazine industry.

These initiatives are part of a strategy by the company to extend its iconic brands into the digital world. Condé Nast's goal is to create experiences that closely resemble the process of reading its print magazines. The creation of a digital magazine using Adobe's authoring tools will create reader engagement that matches or even exceeds what it achieves in print.

And Adobe senior vice president of creative solutions John Loiacono added:

Condé Nast is home to renowned publishing brands, with magazines and reporting that help drive and hold a mirror to our culture. Our unique collaboration is a natural extension to the commitment that Condé Nast has made to the Open Screen Project and their support for the Flash platform. Condé Nast is trusting Adobe technology to deliver, in digital format, the high design values and visual aesthetic that readers and advertisers expect from them. We're confident that the resulting work will set new standards in visual impact and reader engagement for Wired and other flagship Condé Nast magazines.

With nowhere near the fanfare of ESPN's local-site launches, Fox Sports Net soft-lauinched one-dozen local sports sites this past week, paidContent reported.

The sites are different for each corresponding regional sports network, and they include headlines from various sources, original video, dedicated pregame and postgame segments, team pages and integrated Twitter and Facebook feeds, according to paidContent.

Fox Sports spokesman Chris Bellitti told paidContent:

Our plans were underway long before ESPN rolled out their sites. Our goal is to be the best at serving local sports fans, and a strong online platform helps us achieve that.

The dirty dozen: Fox Sports Arizona, Fox Sports Carolinas, Fox Sports Detroit, Fox Sports Florida, Fox Sports Houston, Fox Sports Midwest, Fox Sports North, Fox Sports Ohio, Fox Sports South, Fox Sports Southwest, Fox Sports Tennessee and Fox Sports West.

Based on Facebook's share price of $21 apiece on SecondMarket, an independent marketplace and auction platform for illiquid assets, the social-networking site is valued at about $9.5 billion, SecondMarket managing director Adam Oliveri told Bloomberg.

Renaissance Capital analyst Paul Bard expects an initial public offering in the next 12-18 months, telling Bloomberg, "The fact that the stock on these private exchanges moved—I'm sure that has to do with the fact that people think a deal is coming sooner rather than later."

On the subject of a potential IPO, Oliveri added:

The perception is that that the company is going to IPO, and it's going to be the next kind of Google IPO situation where you're going to have massive interest. Investors are coming out of the woodwork, trying to figure out a way to get exposure.

In an effort to capitalize on the obvious synergy between Mickey Mouse and bleach, The Possibility Shop, a Web-video series produced with The Jim Henson Co. and exclusively sponsored by Clorox, will debut this week as the first-ever branded-entertainment program on Disney Online, according to AdAge.com.

The Possibility Shop was created to promote Clorox brands including Clorox disinfecting wipes, toilet-bowl cleaners and the new Clorox 2 laundry pre-treater, but the episodes will not feature the products themselves, instead being accompanied by Clorox-branded vignettes showing how each brand can help clean up the home, according to AdAge.com.

Clorox will also back The Possibility Shop with some magazine-advertising support, AdAge.com reported.

Clorox director of media Ellen Liu told AdAge.com:

The world is changing, and people are viewing all sorts of content in multiple places, whether it's still on-air or online or on their phones, etc., so I think there's a lot of growth to be had in terms of digital syndication.

And Disney Online vice president of advertising sales Brad Davis added:

Everything we've created before that has been Disney-driven. Now we've flipped that model where, in our case, we're creating the product with the advertiser's needs in mind and with the (online) guest's benefit.

Twitter's user-entry prompt question -- "What Are You Doing?" -- has long been inadequate to the task of defining the multiple ways people use the microblogging service. Worse, it has been the set-up for the greatest cliche of countless Twitter-bashing articles, "No one cares what I'm having for breakfast."

Today Twitter revealed that "What Are You Doing?" has been replaced by "What's Happening?" Company co-founder Biz Stone made the announcement in a blog post this morning:

Twitter was originally conceived as a mobile status update service--an easy way to keep in touch with people in your life by sending and receiving short, frequent answers to one question, "What are you doing?"...

The fundamentally open model of Twitter created a new kind of information network and it has long outgrown the concept of personal status updates. Twitter helps you share and discover what's happening now among all the things, people, and events you care about. "What are you doing?" isn't the right question anymore—starting today, we've shortened it by two characters. Twitter now asks, "What's happening?"

Two quick thoughts: 1) It sounds as though they're trying to be hip, but in an '80s kind of way. Which sort of comes out to "not hip."

2) It's amazing they didn't crowdsource this decision. Think of all the free publicity! The Huffington Post would have turned it into a three-month contest.

Our sister blog FishbowlNY has word that BusinessWeek media columnist Jon Fine will not be returning to the job from which he has been taking leave.

Amanda Ernst writes:

Today, we have been following the tweets of departing BusinessWeek writers and editors as they get word from the bosses at Bloomberg LP about layoffs.

Although we knew no one was safe, we were shocked to learn that media columnist Jon Fine, who has been enjoying a six-month sabbatical since September, would not be returning to the magazine after it gets taken over by its new parent.

Fine tweeted earlier today: "some sabbaticals last longer than others: I will not be returning to BusinessWeek and my column once Bloomberg owns the mag."

Fine is married to Laurel Touby, founder of mediabistro. They are taking time off to travel the globe. Ernst has more details here.

Facebook is testing a new photo-uploading tool built entirely in JavaScript, CSS and HTML as an alternative to its current solution, which is based on ActiveX controls, Java applets and Flash, Inside Facebook reports.

Users can activate the new tool via Facebook's Prototypes page.

Facebook engineer Chris Putnam told Inside Facebook:

The photos in thumbnail view are served by a lightweight local Web-server thread, while the file-system information is provided through a JavaScript API. After selecting photos and starting an upload, you'll discover another great feature—asynchronous uploading. The plug-in spins off a background thread to perform the upload regardless of what the browser is doing in the foreground. Then the local Web server provides JSONP endpoints to retrieve progress information or cancel the ongoing upload, without needing to re-embed the plug-in itself. With this approach, you can even navigate away from Facebook entirely without worrying about your uploads.

Putnam added, "Depending on the results of these tests, we hope to roll it out to all users soon."

Speaking on a panel in London for the National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said a premium Twitter service offering verified streams and an analytics package will be available by year-end, paidContent reported.

Stone said:

This takes advantage of some of the commercial use of Twitter we've seen from businesses like airlines and big box stores…We want to present to them a layer of features that allows them to become better at Twitter, show them some of the analytics.

On the subject of mobile use of Twitter, Stone said, as reported by paidContent:

When we look at where we can grow, we look to the more than 4 billion active mobile phone accounts in the world, as opposed to the 1.65 million active Web accounts.

And on newspapers:

As we begin to add things such as the ability to geo-tag an individual tweet and recognize which users have higher reputations than others, that will feed into the culture of news organizations.

Web surfers searching on Yahoo! are in for a real tweet.

Yahoo! users are now able to browse through tweets and images related to their search queries without having to navigate to the Yahoo! News page, CNET reported, as the search engine is using Twitter's public application-program interface, and then running tweets through a Yahoo! algorithm to determine relevancy.

Social media not only can be a force for good -- sometimes it's a force for justice.

London's Telegraph.co.uk reports on a British woman, Jennifer Wilson, who used Facebook to identify another woman who smashed a pint glass in her face in a nightclub, nearly blinding her, and then left the scene.

Police investigating the attack told her CCTV from the club was not clear and evidence had been cleared away from the dance floor by staff.

But Miss Wilson, from Oxhey, Herts., recognised one of (assailant Ashley) Holliman's friends who she knew vaguely from Facebook.

She trawled the social networking site and searched through 200 of the man's 'friends' until she found a photograph of her attacker.

She even tracked down her address through a mutual friend on the site and gave it to Hertfordshire Police.

Holliman wasn't home when police arrived to arrest her, so the cops asked Wilson if she could find out where the assault suspect worked. Another quick visit to Facebook and the information was retrieved. Police picked up Holliman the next day at the hairdresser's where she worked and took her to the station, where Wilson picked her out of a lineup (or, as the Telegraph puts it, "an identity parade").

Wilson told the Telegraph that while she was happy to have had her assailant caught and punished, she's not going to be "friending" the local cops any time soon.

"In the end I had to do the police's job for them and track this girl down on Facebook," she said.

Google unveiled new technology to automatically add text captions to YouTube videos, The New York Times reported.

The technology can only add English-language captions thus far, but Google told the Times its automatic translation system will enable users to read the captions in 51 languages.

The captioning technology will roll out later this week, initially to only a few channels that specialize in educational content, but expanding gradually, Google told the Times.

Ken Harrenstien, a deaf engineer who helped to develop the automatic captioning system, told the Times:

This is something that I have dreamt of for many years. To see it happen is amazing.

Because the tools are not perfect, we want to make sure that we get feedback from the video owners and the viewers before we roll it out for the whole world. Sometimes the auto-captions are good. Sometimes they are not great, but they are better than nothing if you are hearing-impaired or don't know the language.