The best source of traffic is Facebook.

The social networking site’s users are the most loyal referred visitors, according to an analysis of 33 million September internet users by the ad network Chitika.

More than twenty percent of Facebook users loyal are loyal visitors. For the purpose of the study, users were considered loyal if they visited a referred site four or more times per week.

Digg and Yahoo! were second to Facebook, with 16 percent of each site’s users considered loyal.

Continue Reading »

Searches related to the economy have increased dramatically in the past year, according to a comScore analysis.

“Online behavior has come to reflect the interests or concerns of Americans, and we are certainly seeing this manifest itself with respect to the economic downturn,” said comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni. “Search volume using terms relating to the economy has ballooned over the past year as Americans have become increasingly concerned over their economic well being.”

OK, so the news isn’t surprising, but the numbers are still interesting.

The fastest growing search term in comScore’s list is “Unemployment Benefits,” which grew 247 percent between December 2007 and December 2008. “Unemployment” grew 206 percent and bankruptcy 156 percent.

Continue Reading »

Yahoo released a new global data retention policy Wednesday that they hope will set an industry-leading approach to privacy. The company’s various services and products will anonymize user log data within 90 days with limited exceptions for fraud, security and legal obligations. The policy will extend beyond search data to apply to page views, page clicks, ad views and ad clicks.

This development shaves Yahoo’s data retention length from thirteen months to only three. As for their hope that this will establish an industry trend, they already have been strategizing to set themselves apart from Google , who truncated their own policy of eighteen months to nine in September.

Continue Reading »

Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang (picture right) announced that he will leave the position of Chief Executive Officer as soon as a replacement is found. Only CEO for 18 months, Yang has been subject to intense shareholder pressure and criticism. While his heaviest load of criticism was received after turning down Microsoft’s unsolicited buy offer at $33 per share, he again frustrated investors when a potential ad partnership with Google failed.  Yang’s efforts to boost Yahoo’s performance were only made more difficult by the recent economic climate.

Yahoo’s stock rose $1.17 at news of the change, reflecting the sentiment many share that the Microsoft merger may be back in play. Steven Ballmer was quoted in Forbes that this statement reflects the frustration of Yahoo board members, and Microsoft still does not wish to buy Yahoo. Goldman Sachs investor James Mitchell wrote in a note to investors that while Microsoft may favor search partnership, he believes that full acquisition “could be more appealing for both parties.”

Continue Reading »

For a long time, people thought Silicon Valley was recession proof. The last two weeks have made it apparent that that is not the case. At least dozens of tech companies - including Adbrite, eBay, Zillow, Pandora - have announced layoffs in October, most of them in the last two weeks.

“The next big thing in IT is not a technology — it is cost reduction, risk management and compliance,” said Gartner’s Peter Sondergaard. Gartner projects budget cuts of up to 20% at some companies.

Yahoo! is expected to cut more jobs than initially announced in January; that announcement could come as early as today. The cuts are expected to cost more than 1000 jobs.

Continue Reading »

On Thursday, September 25, Yahoo.com began implementing what it has called the Content Optimization Knowledge Engine. The engine draws on personalization technology to provide the user with a combination of articles and Web sites that have been specifically screened and interpreted from the user’s previous activity. The move is considered an overhaul of the Yahoo Site, which currently is the highest visited Web site on the Internet at 82 million visits per day.

In essence, the new Yahoo portal is a combination of editorially picked and self-selected articles or Web pages. Such a strategy provides the user with links of sites she most-commonly visited, in addition to related links that she may not yet know about, but will likely be interested in. This information is in a sidebar located on the left side of the Yahoo home page. The user can also create customizable pages by creating a new tab and dragging and dropping applications. The tab can be named, which is good for organizing themed pages.

Continue Reading »

The son of Tennessee Democratic state representative Mike Kernell, David Kernell (picture: right), has admitted that he is the hacker behind the attack on Sarah Palin’s email (picture:left).

Kernell was first identified Thursday as the hacker by Wired Magazine’s security blog, Threat Level. This was following an internet post on the 4chan forum, /b/, in which a hacker identifying himself as rubico10@yahoo.com described how he got into Palin’s account. The forum is well known for pop perversity, known for trend starting, notorious for internet attacks and pranks.

Continue Reading »

Intel and Yahoo have announced the Widget Channel, which will bring internet widgets to the TV set.

The Widget Channel, unveiled Wednesday at the Intel Developers Forum in San Francisco, is an interactive “snippet bar” at the bottom of the TV screen that shows weather, news, sports scores, stock prices, and Flickr photos, among (potentially) myriad other things.

Like Apple’s App Store, widgets will be available for download to TVs. Yahoo and Intel plan on releasing the development kit, which could be exactly what makes the Widget Channel a success. The participation of a heterogeneous and experimental development crowd could ensure that something potentially this awkward actually works.

Continue Reading »

The future of cloud computing currently abounds in hypotheticals, but we’re coming closer to a concretized reality, as HP, Intel, and Yahoo, along with members of government and academia, are joining forces to create a multi-continent cloud-computing research center. The Cloud Computing Test Bed will operate six data centers on three continents.

“The goal of the initiative is to promote open collaboration among industry, academia and governments by removing the financial and logistical barriers to research in data-intensive, Internet-scale computing,” says HP’s press release.

Continue Reading »

Internet expression has a double restriction: obviously, governmental censorship, but also, and a grayer area, corporate censorship. Internet providers and social networking sites can apply their own standards of taste when judging whether or not something on their site is offensive.

It is also difficult for websites to discern which are indeed the sites at fault. In New York, thousands of newsgroups were disbanded in an attempt to shut down child pornography sites. Many of these sites had nothing to do with pornography, but it was easier to disband them, for administrative reasons. Photographer Maarten Dors had a photo of a Romanian street kid removed from the photo-sharing site, Flickr, because the child was smoking a cigarette. Yahoo Inc., owner of Flickr, had the picture removed, as depicting adolescent smoking went against company policy. Yahoo later apologized and reposted the photo.

One of the difficulties in the debates over internet censorship is

Continue Reading »