Google Earth Product Manager, Chikai Ohazama writes on the Google Lat Long Blog about how much progress Google Earth has made since 2004.

He mentions the partnerships the imagery team at Google has made with townships, national governments and commercial imagery providers to develop a comprehensive picture of the globe.

As with pretty much every tweak made to the social network, we’re not sure this will get much attention in the U.S.  People in other countries may be interested, however, as starting this month, social applications will become available to Orkut users.

A concerned webmaster who installed the Google Toolbar found himself seeing a Google 404 page instead of his own in the browser.

U.S. Internet ad spending in the fourth quarter of 2007 grew nearly 28 percent over the same quarter in 2006 to $7.3 billion, said analyst firm IDC.

For the entire year 2007, online ad revenue grew 27 percent year over year to $25.5 billion.

IDC said that Google’s net U.S. market share dropped for the first time in two years because of a slow down in growth in domestic fourth quarter sales. Google’s net U.S. advertising market share decreased 0.5 percentage points to 23.7 percent last quarter compared to 3Q07.

Companies are always trying to pass off deceiving statements or misleading data, and we pride ourselves on being suspicious types.  January AOL numbers have been presented by Frank Gruber, however, and they look pretty good in terms of both believability and AOL’s performance.

CNN has plans to expand its citizen journalist driven iReport into its own Web site.

If you ask someone about it, HotOrNot may get called sexist, silly, or a complete waste of time.  But "someone" – meaning almost everyone – is likely to know what HotOrNot is, and it’s probably this ubiquity that led Avid Life Media to acquire the site.

Now that the US Presidential candidates have been campaigning for a solid year, we’re running out of angles from which to look at them. Since the Googleplex has hosted each of the remaining candidates, we thought we’d use the Google search engine to find those new angles.

This can show us a few things: what the Internet "climate," so to speak, is for the candidates; how they stand on issues affecting the Internet; and which ones are making the best use of the Internet for their campaigns.

And I’ll try to keep my opinions out of it. (Cub)Scout’s honor.

After turning down a 62 percent premium for shareholders in the form of Microsoft’s takeover bid, Yahoo opened itself to litigation from unhappy stakeholders.

The price for inserting media like books, movies, music, and video games on eBay drops in response to angry seller feedback.

Slow growth in fourth quarter domestic ad sales gave Google its first downward push on net US market share.

The developers spoke, and Yahoo answered. Support for ActionScript 3 arrived for the Yahoo Maps API today.

The response to Yahoo’s “no thanks” to a $44.6 billion acquisition held the not-so-subtle threat of a more aggressive takeover action by Microsoft.

European mobile phone companies are charging customers too much when they send text messages or check email while traveling, a top European Union official said Monday.

Viviane Reding, the European commissioner responsible for media and telecommunications, told industry executives that she would introduce new rules unless they decreased data roaming charges voluntarily by July 1st.

Can you picture a world without Yahoo?  Well, for your imagination’s sake, let’s hope so.  This scenario shouldn’t become a reality, however, since in the event of an acquisition by Microsoft, the Yahoo name will continue to exist.

When getting ready to learn about a legal decision, it’s best to brace yourself for a lot of reading; court documents can be ridiculously long.  But when siding with Google, the Third Circuit used less than two pages, and this pretty fairly represents how ridiculous the lawsuit was.

Whether it’s a matter of strange planetary alignments, something in the air, or our wobbly economy, it’s hard to say, but in any event, these past few days haven’t been great for acquisitions.  The latest one to look ill is the proposed takeover of WebMD by HLTH Corporation.

An Auction Web site called PropertyRoom.com sells seized or stolen property that has been recovered by police nationwide.

California-based PropertyRoom.com was founded in 1999 by retired police officer Thomas Lane. Before that most police agencies held their own public auction to sell items obtained in criminal investigations. The company deals with more than 1,200 law enforcement agencies.

No deal, says Yahoo’s CEO, in response to a hostile $44.6 billion bid from Microsoft.

The majority of U.S. divorce attorneys (88%) say they have seen an increase in the number of cases using electronic data as evidence during the past five years, according to a survey of American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers (AAML).

Email was the most commonly used form of electronic evidence, with 82 percent citing it as the main source. The survey found a gender difference in that women are more likely to use electronic evidence than men. In all 27 percent of lawyers said wives used electronic data more often during a divorce case while only 5 percent said husbands did.

The term "minority interest" is pretty weak; it implies that something received just the tiniest bit of one’s attention or bank account balance.  So, although we’re in no way involved in the deal, it’s kind of reassuring to see that Comcast Spotlight has concluded an all-out acquisition of Vehix.

The GSMA Mobile World Congress in Barcelona spurred a few mobile-related items of interest, including Microsoft acquisition news that does not involve Yahoo.