A supposedly real shot of Hurricane Sandy water. (Wikimedia Commons)

Many viral shots of the first 24 hours of Hurricane Sandy turned out to be fake.  Somehow we missed detecting that one right away.  Citizen journalism yields a lot of incredible stuff, but kinks still exist (only human, right?).  According to the Nieman Lab, the human rights organization Witness is creating an app that hopes to make it easier to nab the fake videos, photos, and audio people share from mobile devices.  The InformaCam app “would bring metadata to the forefront, allowing journalists, human rights organizations, and others to better identify the origins of a photo or video.”

(Wikimedia Commons: Google Inc)

Google recently released its twelfth end-of-the-year list of trending searches, according to CJR.  They collected data from 55 countries to see what topics, people and events were the most searched terms for 2012.  Whitney Houston and Kate Middleton were the most-searched people (with Middleton’s topless photos earning the number two spot on most-searched events, behind Hurricane Sandy).  One Direction, the boy band, was the top trending term on image searches.  “It’s quite a snapshot of what makes us human: a blend of guilty pleasures and higher pursuits,” said Amit Singhal, SVP of Google said on their blog.  If you’ve paid attention to news in the last year, all these terms remain all too familiar, with news sites paying close attention to Google Analytics to drive their content focus.