According to comScore, social networking sites reach a higher percentage of women than men globally, with 75.8 percent of all women online visiting a social networking site in May 2010 versus 69.7 percent of men. This is just one of the highlights of a global report released today by comScore on women's online usage entitled, Women on the Web: How Women are Shaping the Internet . Click to read the rest of this post.

According to new research from Econsultancy, companies worldwide are increasing their investment in site search because they want to improve the experience for website users and increase site usage and sales. Click to read the rest of this post.

An overview of some of today's ad/tech news. Click to read the rest of this post.

Yahoo Japan - an independent entity from Yahoo - has decided to forgo the Bing transition and will be using Google search results, Reuters announced today . Click to read the rest of this post.

Most reporters are focused on the United States Copyright Office declaration that it is it legal to unlock or 'jailbreak' a mobile device from the manufacturer and network provider from which it was purchased from, which permits users to install unapproved software under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's )DMCA( fair use provisions.

The rumor is growing fast. Now the New York Post has it that Google could launch its search-related music store as early as this holiday season, i.e. November-December. Click to read the rest of this post.

The advertising industry is launching its own PR campaign by way of setting up an Institute for Advertising Ethics. The sector has always had a negative image and the likes of the "Mad Men" series are certainly surfing that tide to... sell. With the market staging a robust recovery the industry is planning ahead and wants to tweak its reputation. Here's how. Click to read the rest of this post.

NBC Universal )NBCU(, the media and entertainment company , has launched its own advertising platform UAP to serve its own network of owned and operated sites, Mediaweek reported, quoting company executives. Click to read the rest of this post.

When AOL is in the news, it means business... CEO Tim Armstrong said advertising would be AOL's primary source of revenues in his turnaround plan for the company. As such, AOL already demonstrated its willingness to leave non-viable operations behind by selling its failing and ailing social site Bebo for a reported $10 million. Now it's building a new future,

AOL is currently gauging the offers of several companies to power its search as its $700 million-a-year deal with Google is set to expire in December. Whether it renews its agreement with Google or switches to another search company, AOL is likely to sign in its partner for the few years to come by September, according to various reports. Click to read the rest of this post.

Microsoft's Greg Nelson and Yahoo's Mark Morrissey recently gave interviews to Kara Swisher of AllThingsD . Nelson and Morrissey are in charge of a two-year effort to coordinate the massive search and online advertising partnership that their companies struck last year. According to Swisher, their job "essentially is the search equivalent of herding cats." Click to read the rest of this post.

This past week, Matt Bailey, the president and founder of SiteLogic , Cindy Krum, the Chief Executive Officer of Rank-Mobile , and I taught half a dozen of the modules in the Rutgers Mini-MBA: Digital Marketing certificate program . Rutgers incorporated "cutting-edge digital technology" into our teaching approach for this program - supplying all participants with their own free Apple iPad tablet, containing the pre-loaded program materials. Click to read the rest of this post.

According to Glenn Blain of The New York Daily News , Governor David Paterson of New York has signed into law a measure giving New York City greater power to crack down on so-called "illegal hotels." However, Dennis Schaal of Tnooz reports that Paterson issued a statement saying that he, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and the bill's sponsor support an amendment to the bill which would mean the law would not go into effect until May 1, 2011,

If you scour the rates and registration details for SES San Francisco, you'll find something that I haven't seen before. Believe it or not, there is group pricing for 4-6 passes, 7-9 passes, 10-19 passes, 20-29 passes, and 30+ passes. Click to read the rest of this post.

On Wednesday, I asked, " Will Social Media Get Governor David Paterson of New York to Veto a Bad Bill? " We're still waiting to answer that question, but we do know that social media has rallied Stephen Kaufer, CEO and Founder of TripAdvisor, Arthur Frommer, author of the world famous Frommer's travel guides, and more than 500 people to urge Governor Paterson to veto Bill S6873, which would ban apartment rentals of less than one month. Click to read the rest of this post.

Foursquare, the location-based social media site , is aware of the value of its data for searches and has started talking to "a lot of different potential partners," including industry majors such as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft in order to clinch data deals. Click to read the rest of this post.

A week after reporting its second-quarter earnings , Google is facing a probe by 38 U.S. States . This comes on top of other potential lawsuits across the globe for its collection of Wi-Fi data. Separately, it is also being investigated for its AdWords policy by French competition authorities and by the EU for wider antitrust issues . And yet,

Google is now facing probes by a total of 38 States in the U.S., including the District of Columbia, over its StreetView Wi-Fi data collection. Connecticut's attorney general is now quizzing the search giant on the 'snooping' process. Click to read the rest of this post.

Search advertising spend is on the rise for small- and medium-sized businesses. In fact, that would be the understatement of the year: SMB ad spending in the second-quarter soared 159% from last year, according to a WebVisible report. What's more is that Yahoo is pulling the dollars away from Google and Ask. Click to read the rest of this post.

Yahoo and Microsoft announced more details of the coming integration of their two search engines and it appears from various reports out there that many people do not fully understand how the changes are going to play out. The two had previously given details about some of the paid search changes, but this release goes in to more details about both organic and paid search. So what are they? I will list the major changes, as I see them, below.