WebProWorld

The media frenzy over swine flu may have died down a little since earlier this year; it’s no longer a top headline on every other news site, at least.  But people remain extremely concerned about it (anyone care to guess how many tons of hand sanitizer have been sold?), and Google’s trying to help out by pointing them towards flu shots.

YouTube wants you to know that it’s not just a place for individuals to watch videos.  This afternoon, the site released some stats (and used the word "social" about six times) to show that users are interacting with each other and with different sites in all sorts of ways.

Google has used its Insights for Search tool to provide some data about consumers’ searching behavior when it comes to things like discounts, free shipping for the holidays, coupons, and promotional codes.

Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment has launched an iPhone and computer application called FoxPop, aimed at offering users a more interactive experience while they watch DVDs or Blu-ray Disc.

Students and statistics hounds now have even more reason to love Google.  Today, the search giant announced that it’s made information related to 17 World Development Indicators available through standard search results pages.

Today, as is often the case, one tech company’s loss became another’s gain.  Utkarsh Srivastava has left Yahoo after spending more than three years as a senior research scientist there, and Srivastava confirmed (in well under 140 characters) that he’ll land at Twitter.

Srivastava’s background is quite impressive.  On the educational front, he earned degrees from the Indian Institute of Technology and Stanford, and happened to receive the Stanford Graduate Fellowship, too.

Digital technologies continue to drive a new approach to shopping, with social media and mobile phones becoming key influencers this holiday season, according to a new survey of holiday retail spending and trends by Deloitte.

Social media is gaining traction with 17 percent of consumers planning to use social media during their holiday shopping, and 60 percent plan to use it to find discounts, coupons and sales information, More than half (53%) plans to use social media to research gift ideas, while 52 percent plan to check the gift wish lists of friends and family.

In a recent interview we wrote about this morning, Rupert Murdoch indicated that News Corp. may block search engines from indexing its sites.  Now, it doesn’t exactly look like Google’s going to offer money to him (or throw a fit) in response, as the search giant’s more or less replied by saying "fine."

Don’t be shocked if ads for 420,000 square feet of office space start popping up all over MySpace.  It seems that the social networking company no longer intends to use a particular facility, but until it can unload the space, has gotten stuck paying over $1 million per month.

Google has launched a new way to lock SafeSearch. What this accomplishes is, users will have to enter their password to change the setting, and Google Search results will be visibly different than when SafeSearch is not locked.

Google demonstrates how to to lock SafeSearch with the following short clip: