At this point, I think most of the civilized world has established that the U.S. economy is heading into a recession . The signs are starting to crop up in the advertising world: Companies are starting to make hard decisions, like Gawker which announced yesterday that it was dumping three blogs , including Wonkette, in a cost-cutting effort. Cautionary commentaries are beginning to crop up in most advertising publications, like this one ,

Earlier today Google and Salesforce.com officially announced the expanded partnership of Google apps and Salesforce's online enterprise apps, the result of a 10-month-old collaboration between the two companies. Docs, Calendar, Gmail, and Gtalk have all been integrated directly into the Salesforce interface, enhancing the company's productivity suite as described by Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch : "Google documents, spreadsheets,

Photo sharing site Flickr this week added the ability for its paid users to upload short videos, or what it's calling "long photos." Like video site Vimeo, Flickr wants users to upload original content. But video length is capped at 90 seconds, which will help it distinguish itself from YouTube, et al. Flickr's Heather Champ explains : While this might seem like an arbitrary limit, we thought long and hard about how video would complement the flickrverse.

Nasser Manesh is an entrepreneur and the co-founder and CTO of Frucall , a mobile comparison-shopping site. Manesh also writes a blog at Unixica , where he comments on startup news. Searchviews asked him for his insights on mobile development and advertising. Here's what he had to say. Searchviews: On your blog Unixica , you recently referenced an article about the decline of mobile development. As CTO of Frucall, a mobile shopping search engine,

Google yesterday announced the launch of Google App Engine , a hosting platform for web application developers. From the brand-new Google App Engine blog : The goal is to make it easy to get started with a new web app, and then make it easy to scale when that app reaches the point where it's receiving significant traffic and has millions of users' Google App Engine gives you access to the same building blocks that Google uses for its own applications,

The European Commission may soon tell search engines to delete user data within six months, the BBC reports , after a report found that search engine data storage might not do enough to protect user privacy. From the Beeb: The report from the Article 29 Data Protection Working Party said search engine providers had "insufficiently explained" why they were storing and processing personal data to their users.

MySpace will turn MySpace Music into a joint venture with three of the four major record labels )EMI is sitting things out, at least for now(. The new service will provide free, ad-supported streams; shareable, customized playlists; and DRM-free ad-supported or paid downloads. From the New York Times : Visitors to the site will be able to listen to free streaming music, paid for with advertising, and share customized playlists with their friends.

Google's DoubleClick growing pains are making themselves clear today, as the company announced it is selling part of Performics , the search marketing arm of its DoubleClick acquisition, Search Engine Land reports . From the Google Blog : Recently we completed this process for the DoubleClick Performics businesses, and have decided to split them into two separately-run business units: Affiliate Marketing and Search Marketing.

Yahoo is beefing up its mobile capabilities, today announcing key improvements in mobile search . According to the company's press release , it will blow out its user-facing products, create standards for mobile widgets, and continue to develop monetization in the mobile space. More specifically, Search Engine Land notes Yahoo is opening up its oneSearch platform, and also cut a deal with voice-search technology company Vlingo.

Happy April Fools' Day! Google's gag this year is gDay MATE , which searches the future. They had us at "fuzzy measure analysis," and we are big fans also of "language recession analysis." From Google: The core technology that powers gDayâ„¢ is MATEâ„¢ ) Machine Automated Temporal Extrapolation (. Using MATE'sâ„¢ machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques developed in Google's Sydney offices, we can construct elements of the future.

Guy Kawasaki recently launched Alltop , an aggregator broken up into categories, with pages that link to topically relevant blogs and their five most recent posts. For instance, the page on moms links to blogger Dooce and " lifehacks " includes the minimalist blog Zen Habits . Kawasaki called Alltop as a "digital magazine rack," which is an apt description because it feels a lot like browsing a newsstand. One of Alltop's pages is for SEO ,

Barry Diller and IAC officially won their day in court on Friday: The parent of Ask.com will break up its conglomerate into five branches. According to TechCrunch , the new companies will be the Home Shopping Network, Ticketmaster, Lending Tree, Interval International, and the new IAC, which will be an umbrella for various web properties, including Ask.com. The move is expected to revitalize IAC's online businesses, but TechCrunch notes: The problem,

YouTube today finally added a few analytics that go beyond number of video views and backlinks. Called YouTube Insight, the new metrics show the geographic locations of video viewers and a video's popularity relative to other videos on the site. Search Engine Watch notes that the map looks just like that of Google Analytics and wonders if it will be integrated into that dashboard )our vote is yes(.

Digital and non-traditional media will be getting a lot more ad dollars, according to a study from research firm PQ Media, USA Today reports . The breakdowns suggest that online video will see the greatest percentage of growth in spending - with projections at above $12 billion, or 389% above current levels. That kind of growth makes sense in a space that is still growing, and in which monetization is difficult.

Tony Pierce oversees the nearly three dozen blogs at the Los Angeles Times . Before working at the LAT, Pierce edited LAist , a blog that covers local L.A. culture and events. He has also worked at Buzznet and the E! channel, and he runs a popular personal blog from which he's created two books, aka blooks . Searchviews asked Pierce to share his insights on blogging and media convergence: what it takes to successfully integrate blogs in a news organization,

ESPN is dropping its ad networks, MediaWeek reported today . MediaWeek suggests the sports publishing giant has decided to sever ties with ad networks because, like many publishers, the company sees ad networks as diluting the value of its content. From the article: "We're heading down a path where it no longer suits our business needs to work with ad networks," said Eric Johnson, executive vp, multimedia sales, ESPN Customer Marketing and Sales.

Reuters reports today that eBay will be cutting some staff in what a company spokesperson calls a "globalization and centralization effort." The number to be cut is less than 1% of eBay's workforce, the spokesperson said, which could be as many as 150 people, as eBay has around 15,500 employees, according to Portfolio.com . With recent news that eBay dumped its partner ValueClick in favor of handling its affiliate network in-house,

Google's search share grew 0.7% in February 2008, according to stats released by comScore today. The search giant continues to eat away at Yahoo's share, which declined 0.6% in the same period. Microsoft also lost 0.2% and Ask.com gained 0.1% )anyone wonder how much that has to do with their ads on Google ?(. From comScore: When it came to overall query volume in February, comScore reported across-the-board slowdowns, for Google and everyone else, of 5% to 8%.

Yahoo yesterday filed its three-year financial plan from December 2007, detailing expectations of doubled cash flow by 2010 and reiterating that it believes Microsoft's takeover bid offer of $31/share undervalues Yahoo. But it may be too little, too late, as the economy has taken a bit of a nosedive since December ) $2 shares of Bear Stearns , anyone?(, making those Yahoo's financial forecast optimistic. Mashable lays it out nicely: Unfortunately,

The Chinese government has blocked YouTube and Google News in the wake of pro-Tibet protests . China's the most recent in a long string of countries that have blocked YouTube, but TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld notes that Google is in a tough spot when it comes to doing business in China. If the company removes the videos that China doesn't want seen, it becomes complicit in the country's censorship. If it doesn't, Google loses its business in China.