Category: Archive

Facebook has revealed the United States "Gross National Happiness," the results of a study on the collective mood of Facebook users. Facebook "data scientists" started a project earlier in the year to measure the overall mood of people from the US on the social network, based on what they said in status updates.

New research from Robert Half Technology indicates that over half of chief information officers (CIOs) do not allow employees to visit social networking sites for any reason while they’re at work. This information comes from a survey of 1,400 CIOs from companies around the US with 100 or more employees.

Update 2: The FTC is now saying that the $11,000 fine is not accurate, at least for the first violation. Fast company got some responses from Richard Cleland, assistant director, division of advertising practices at the FTC, who says:

Google and Bing employees know tons of useful stuff about search engines, and many people find their tips useful.  But let’s admit: a lot of SEO experts have seen the same pieces of advice repeated at conference after conference for years, and so at SMX East, two speakers went a little bit off the beaten path into the subjects of speed and security.

Global mobile subscriptions are on track to reach 4.6 billion by the end of the year, and mobile broadband subscriptions are set to surpass 600 million in 2009, according to a new report by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU).
More than a quarter of the world’s population is online and using the Internet, as of 2009. Increasing numbers are opting for high-speed Internet access, with fixed broadband subscriber numbers more than tripling from 150 million in 2004 to a projected 500 million by the end of 2009.

There’s no question that search engines can be a tremendous source of traffic. Social networks are also proving to be big traffic generators for a lot of content producers, and Twitter is one of the big ones.

However, it is Facebook and Digg that are driving the most repeat readers according to a study conducted by online ad network Chitika. Traffic is great, but traffic that returns is even better.

Yahoo has released an API for Meme, the company’s microblogging service, which is still in beta. If you’re not familiar with Meme, it’s kind of like Yahoo’s version of Twitter, minus the enormous amount of hype.

 In what is becoming not so unusual, a celebrity announces news on Twitter in order to beat the mainstream media. Late today actress Elizabeth Taylor announced to her 156,673 Twitter followers, "I am going into the hospital to have a procedure on my heart".
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Four U.S. states are among the first to receive grants from the Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), to map broadband use in homes.
California received $2.8 million, Indiana $1.3 million, North Carolina $2.035 million and Vermont $1.2 milliamp.

Google has introduced a new type of ad for local businesses called Local Listing Ads. They are designed to display when users search for a business in its local area. Google says it’s the easiest way to advertise your business to local customers on Google, because they require no maintenance.