Microsoft finally persuaded Yahoo to surrender control of the Internet's second most popular search engine and join it in a daunting battle — taking on the overwhelming dominance of Google in the online advertising market. A 10-year deal announced Wednesday gives Microsoft its best shot yet to show its new search technology, Bing, is as good as or better than Google's. Microsoft also hopes to use Yahoo to divert sales from Google, which generates more than $20 billion a year from ads. Gaining access to Yahoo's audience would instantly more than triple Bing's U.S. market share to 28 percent. That's still a far cry from the remarkable 65 percent of U.S. searches handled by Google, according to the research firm comScore Inc. By joining forces, Microsoft and Yahoo are betting they will be able to focus on their respective strengths. By turning over [+]

Accordig to Richard Jalichandra from technorati

We’re asked all the time how platforms like Twitter and Facebook are impacting the Blogosphere. This is what we’re seeing: Twitter is not replacing blogs, but it has evolved as a major awareness vehicle for bloggers and people who read blogs (same goes for Facebook status updates).

So the idea behind Twittorati was to allow people to view the topical geist that the most influential bloggers are tweeting and blogging about. We say this is where the Blogosphere meets the Twittersphere, but what does that mean? Twittorati shows what top bloggers are tweeting about, and how these trends [+]

Four leading marketing and advertising industry associations today announced that they are working together to develop enhanced self-regulatory principles for online behavioral advertising in order to address privacy concerns and to increase consumers' trust and confidence in how online information is gathered and used. This cross-industry self-regulatory initiative represents the first time the entire marketing-media ecosystem has come together to develop practices in interactive advertising. The associations are the American Association of Advertising Agencies (AAAA), the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), the Direct Marketing Association (DMA), and the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB). The Council of Better Business Bureaus (BBB), a leading organization dedicated to advancing marketplace trust, is also part of the effort. The joint industry task force plans to engage with policymakers, a broad cross section of business, [+]

Welcome to Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere 2008 report, which will be released in five consecutive daily segments. Since 2004, our annual study has unearthed and analyzed the trends and themes of blogging, but for the 2008 study, we resolved to go beyond the numbers of the Technorati Index to deliver even deeper insights into the blogging mind. For the first time, we surveyed bloggers directly about the role of blogging in their lives, the tools, time, and resources used to produce their blogs, and how blogging has impacted them personally, professionally, and financially. Our bloggers were generous with their thoughts and insights. Thanks to all of the bloggers who took the time to respond to our survey. comScore MediaMetrix (August 2008) Blogs: 77.7 million unique visitors in the US Facebook: 41.0 million | MySpace 75.1 million Total internet audience 188.9 million eMarketer [+]