Earlier this year, Yahoo launched a content discovery and voting site that it dubbed Yahoo Buzz . The content was only collected from select publishers. Now, that all has changed. Last night, Yahoo opened up Buzz to all publishers. Kind of like Technorati, you can now submit your site content as well as place Buzz buttons on your site. Yahoo says sites saw their traffic soar as a result of being Buzzed. The site has already seed 5 million members,

Friendster has today announced the deployment of the OpenSocial API. Friendster is encouraging developers to make use of the API to reach its 75 million members. Google launched OpenSocial, a set of APIs, last fall . Earlier this month, Friendster named Richard Kimber, former regional managing director of South Asia for Google, as its new CEO . "With widespread support throughout the industry, OpenSocial has become a de facto standard for developers of social applications.

WebTrends estimates that $4.5 million will be wasted in search advertising this year. That's why they're launching a new service: Ad Director. Debuting at SES San Jose , Ad Director uses self-learning technology to optimize millions of combinations of keywords, landing pages and ads across the major search networks. WebTrends says that companies using the solution have seen their return on ad spend increase an average of 44 percent.

The Web Analytics Association has announced the addition of Yahoo's Dennis Mortensen to their board of directors . Mortensen is Director of Data for the Sunnyvale search engine, arriving there from IndexTools, which was acquired by Yahoo earlier this year . He will serve through 2010. WAA Chairman Jim Sterne said, "Dennis Mortensen is a pioneer and expert in the Web Analytics industry, having worked in the field of internet analysis and statistics since 1996.

With students everywhere preparing to go back to school, now is a good time to )re(visit SEO's foundational principles. In today's Au Natural column, " Search Engine Optimization: Back to Basics ," Mark Jackson is teaching SEO 101, and class is now in session.

If you're a small business owner, it can be difficult to juggle your responsibilities. In today's small business SEM column, " SEM Success In 10 Minutes A Day ," Carrie Hill gives you 10 search marketing tips that take just 10 minutes a day or less.

There have already been more than 65 news articles and blog posts from SES San Jose 2008 â€" and it's just Day 1 of the conference. Looking through the event coverage, here are the top stories for those of you who are trying to keep up with the latest news and developments. SES San Jose: Kevin Ryan WebProNews spoke with Kevin Ryan at SES San Jose 2008! Watch the first video of the conference.

There will be more coverage of SES San Jose posted very soon but in the meantime please enjoy this smorgasborg of pre-SES San Jose blog coverage! Click to read the rest of this post.

After a summer of high gas prices, Carmax.com is helping consumers find used cars that are easier on the wallet. They've launched a new search feature that allows car shoppers to search their inventory by MPG or miles per gallon. They've also added an MPG "quick link" feature, enabling site visitors to click on available cars that reach over 30 mpg. "Since gas prices remain high, people are looking for vehicles that offer better fuel efficiency," said Ann Yauger,

HelloMetro has also won trademark approval for the term Hyperlocal. HelloMetro now uses the term to describe their search results on HelloLocal.com and hopes to maximize the term in the internet advertising space. If the industry isn't careful, even more of these widely used terms could also become trademarked. Earlier this year, we learned that Jason Gambert applied to trademark 'SEO.' Many marketers took the opportunity to address the U.S.

Facebook competitor ConnectU's co-founder twins, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, placed 6th in men's pair rowing in the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Their time was 7:05.58 on a 2,000-meter course. Australia won the gold with a time of 6:37.44. How they find time to train and run a startup is beyond me. The Winklevoss twins along with co-founder Divya Narendra are suing Facebook for stealing their idea. The three recruited Facebook founder Mark Zuckerburg during their time at Harvard.

If you want to go global or develop your content in other languages , you're likely in need of a good translator. But just copying and pasting text into an online translation page isn't going to do the job. You need human intelligence that knows the culture of the audience you're aiming to reach. Rosetta Translation is looking to serve that need by launching website localization services. Rosetta defines this service as "process that makes a website accessible,

VeriSign has announced that their SSL certificates will now support International Domain Names )IDN(. These domain names display website addresses in local language characters such as Kanji symbols in Japan. This will come as welcome news to those who are looking to globalization marketing efforts or developing a multi-lingual site . "Internationalized domain names are gaining traction with the introduction of IDN-enabled browsers like Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox,

"Yayyy!! I will be covering the big Search Engine Strategy Conference 2008 in San Jose! Check back for the best of the best events and while you are in San Jose follow me on Twitter for the latest SES events info ! Webmoxy email:webmoxy@gmail.com are now "Our Events"! Quick Overview : Monday, August 18 : 1:30 â€" 2:30 pm Orion Keynote Panel and SES Awards 4:30 â€" 5:30 pm Orion Keynote Panel and SES Awards 8:00 - Midnight IMCharity Event!

If you are coming to SES San Jose next week, there are several special events in the evenings - after the conference wraps up each day - that you won't want to miss. The first is The Internet Marketer's Charity Party , which is raising money for the Children's Hospital of Aurora, CO, and the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. The party starts at 8:00 p.m. Monday evening and is being held at the Agenda Lounge, which is located at 399 1st Street. Donations are $40.

Jamie Welsh, the founder and CEO of 10% Solution , will be speaking at the session on "Non-Profits & Socially-Responsible Companies With Global Interests in a 2.0 World" during next week's SES San Jose . 10% Solution is a social responsibility certification and consulting company. In a previous life Jamie was a highly accomplished executive with a diverse background in, ISO certifications, process consulting, marketing, organizational management and software development.

Google is now offering AdSense for Feeds, after announcing that Feedburner would not be accepting any more applications to the Feedburner Ad Network . No official announcement has been made, but many publishers are able to access the feature in their AdSense accounts. I was able to do so with mine.

Google was the recipient of 70.77% of U.S. searches in July 2008, up from 69.17% in June , according to Hitwise. Yahoo and Microsoft continued to drop, at 18.65% and 5.36% respectively. Ask.com dropped month-over-month but gained year-over-year, coming in at 3.53%.

While not yet complete, AOL has confirmed that they will acquire SocialThing . The FriendFeed competitor is still in private beta. No word on the price for the acquisition, but expect it to be small. Still, AOL seems to be going after the social media world, having recently acquired social network Bebo for $850 million . Bebo has 40 million users, doubling AOL's media reach via the acquisition.

Two days ago, we brought you news that Ex-Googler Ben Ling was leaving Facebook . Now, we know where he's headed - back to Google. Ling will be taking on the difficult task of monetizing YouTube , Google's popular online video sharing site ) acquired in 2006 for $1.65 billion (.