Some news that broke late yesterday. MySpace announced that it had officially joined the DataPortability Project , an initiative that pushes for user control over personal data access and use by other applications, open source solutions, and bottom-up distribution solutions for said data. From the official DataPortability blog : "MySpace joins other existing corporate members such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft, LinkedIn, SixApart, and Digg.

Despite all the questions swirling around Yahoo thanks to its rejection of Microsoft's buyout offer the company has managed to implement an interesting new way of presenting search results called Glue. Barry Schwartz at SearchEngineLand expands : "The Glue Pages combine classic search results on the left hand column with more visual information related to your query in the middle and right section of the page. The results contain images, videos, articles and more.

An interesting quote from Peter Sealey, former Coca-Cola CMO, on paid search as reported by Miguel Helft at the New York Times : "Search is great, but you can't advertise Coca-Cola in search." Danny Sullivan brought this to our attention over Twitter. Now, while the context of the article is how Google is the winner in this Microsoft-Yahoo standoff )there's no escaping that story, is there( it's just difficult to overlook a statement like that. I mean,

Unless you've been in a cave the last three weeks, you'll have heard of Microsoft's unsolicited bid for Yahoo! and followed the complex tango performed by the company's respective top executives, Steve Ballmer and Jerry Yang . The soap opera-like unfolding of this financial ordeal played out daily in newspaper headlines, with assurances and deadlines from both sides ultimately being worth less than the ink it took to print them as Microsoft pulled its offer ,

Interesting article by Jack Neff at AdAge . For those of you without subscriptions, the premise here is that the search model of paying for clicks in an open auction and rewarding the advertisers who get users to click on their ads and visit their pages is in conflict with the way consumer package goods )CPG( companies are built )to take advantage of economies of scale by buying a bunch of bulk ad space at lower costs and distributing across divisions(.

Some coverage on a cool webmail service that is innovative enough to compete with the likes of Gmail and Yahoo Mail. At first glance, Zenbe looks like an ordinary mail service. Look a little deeper, and you'll find a calendar, task list, address book )all available through a sidebar(, a tab that lets you browse all attachments, viewable by type, and finally a Facebook tab that lets you see your friends' updates. If that's not enough for you,

Knowing your customer and knowing your brand are two keys to effective marketing. For online advertising, this means not just knowing what you call your product, but how customers refer to them - frequently, they turn out to be very different, and that difference makes a significant difference in traffic volume. It's a situation we at Reprise Media have seen play out over and over again.

Henry Blodget at Silicon Alley Insider unveiled the SAI 25 Live , an auto-updating list of the world's "Most Valuable Digital Startups" as assessed by Blodget and his associates. More from SAI itself : "Like public companies, the value of private change in real-time, but there's no convenient way to track these changes' until now. We've created a real-time tool, the SAI 25 Live, that indexes the value of the SAI 25 companies to the NASDAQ.

Some interesting happenings on Google. Earlier today, SearchEngineRoundtable reported on a forum thread started when one advertiser noticed Google displaying three scores under a Google Netherlands ad. The scores listed are Pscore, mCPC, and thresh. The article goes on to suggest that mCPC is minimum cost-per-click,

A new innovation in image search may soon prevent this picture from showing up for a query of "mcdonalds". This is a story that's gotten quite a bit of coverage today, starting with the New York Times . From the Times: "On Thursday at the International World Wide Web Conference in Beijing, two Google scientists presented a paper describing what the researchers call VisualRank,

Everywhere we turn, it seems that Google has established a foothold in another product or service. From iGoogle to Google Docs, YouTube to Maps, Google has stepped beyond the mere label of search engine to offer a suite of services that makes it resemble a true web portal. Why is it doing this? As the engine with the lion's share of the market, is this what's next for search?

Big news for about 120 million people today as MySpace has moved its Application Gallery out of beta. The gallery had been in beta since last March, with over 1,000 applications approved and added to the gallery and more than 2.1 million application installs across the site since then. More from Josh Catone at ReadWriteWeb : "Every application on the MySpace platform will receive its own profile, similar to musical artists,

Legal firm Kabateck Brown Kellner filed a class action lawsuit against Google on Tuesday. The suit, filed on behalf of one David Almeida, accuses Google of deceiving its customers into paying for ads they didn't expressly request. Elinor Mills at CNET gives the details: "When participating in Google's online auction-based advertising system,

Some news on a cool app that isn't getting much coverage yet. FireBall is a mobile geo-location service that integrates Twitter and Upcoming with Fire Eagle , a Yahoo!-run platform for controlling people's location information. TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld with a quick bit on how it works: "When you want to find out where your friends are who have also signed up for FireBall, you send a message to a FireBall account on Twitter.

A big announcement today by VoIP services provider Skype . The eBay-owned company unveiled unlimited calling to 34 countries including Australia , China , Germany , Japan , and the UK , essentially covering a third of the world's population. Skype's version of "unlimited" is 5 hours a day every month, which for most people is effectively unlimited. Skype is one of eBay's biggest divisions and caused the online auction company to take a $1.

Forrester Research today released a six-year Web 2.0 Market Forecast. From the report itself: " Enterprise spending on Web 2.0 technologies will grow strongly over the next five years, reaching $4.6 billion globally by 2013, with social networking, mashups, and RSS capturing the greatest share. In all, the market for enterprise Web 2.0 tools will be defined by commodization, eroding prices,

Earlier this week, Google announced its practice of crawling forms on high-quality sites in order to expand its web coverage. From Google's webmaster blog itself: "Specifically, when we encounter a <FORM> element on a high-quality site, we might choose to do a small number of queries using the form. For text boxes, our computers automatically choose words from the site that has the form; for select menus, check boxes, and radio buttons on the form,

An article by Glenn Derene at Popular Mechanics made waves today with its first sentence: Search is dead. The thesis, formulated during a discussion with an anonymous venture capitalist, is that search engines of the future will not be used for pure information gathering and consumption, but rather will index users' online footprint data to tailor customized results. These results will go beyond just utilizing browsing history to deliver results,

Web site metrics are an indispensable asset to any online marketing campaign, but there is hardly a standardized method for their use. This is due partly to disagreement over the relative importance of certain metrics, and also to inaccurate measurement techniques . Furthermore, the constant evolution of online advertising forces the creation of new metrics to accurately capture their effectiveness.

The big news today is the launch of Microsoft's Live Search News , an all-purpose news aggregator. The service will compete directly with Google News , and is Microsoft's second foray in the field. Anthony Ha at VentureBeat describes one of the features: "Live Search News does have some unique features of its own. For one thing, there's a local news sidebar, which takes your IP address and finds news stories based in your area. The sidebar is pretty nice,