Here’s something we haven’t seen since the last bubble: TheStreet.com with a stock price over $12. A sign of steady growth and progress, rising subscription and ad revenues, and a dogged desire to mine one’s Hedgehog Concept?

The Palo Alto review board has approved Google’s plans to create a child care center next to the Baylands Nature Preserve, an 18,500-square-foot kid’s complex.

Alan Scott, Dow Jones & Co. SVP and chief marketing officer, said it’s a cool time to be a marketing guy, as consumer expectations of businesses have changed with the rise in blogs and social media.

Google’s OpenSocial has been both laughed at and fawned over as people have debated if it has any value.  The discussion will, by and large, continue, but the people at Plaxo have already decided that OpenSocial is extremely good.

Despite a slow start in November, online US non-travel retail topped $7 billion for the first 18 days of the holiday season, an increase of $1 billion from the same period in 2006.

In the spirit of the season – we’ve compiled a few things we are thankful for around here at Ignite.

What will Google do with 1,000 acres?  Well, the company’s not saying.  But it has purchased that much land in Iowa, and it’s not likely to let the lot sit idle.

Users of Digg can keep an eye on how candidates (or presumably their campaigns) interact with stories appearing on the social media site.

Those much-revered top five placements on search engines for a given set of keywords only draws the viewer’s attention for seven seconds. Gord Hotchkiss sees this short attention span as a call to brands to keep doing their market research.

BusinessWeek magazine has a piece about user-generated content and how it’s old and busted now — people really want professional content, apparently.

Buying in bulk is great until you actually have to transport and store 50 gallons of peanut butter or whatever else is at stake.  Uploading in bulk also has its share of problems, but Google Base has introduced a new bulk upload dashboard to make things simpler.

Muhammad Saleem has written a great introductory guide on how to approach social media.

I was recently invited to participate in a panel discussion titled, “What Advertisers Want” at the PostieCon conference in Las Vegas, hosted by Payperpost – which has recently changed their name to IZEA. 

In a recent court case against Google, it was decided that a Blogspot blogger from the US may keep her anonymity, considering free speech protection rights.

Give another point to the “print is dying” crowd; new numbers reveal that, in the third quarter of 2007, online newspaper advertising grew and the traditional type dropped.

Below is a summary of key data points from Hitwise regarding Black Friday Traffic (week ending Nov 17th)

MySpace will be testing the ad supported music waters this March with punk band Pennywise. Fans will be able to go to the MySpace profile of Textango, a mobile indie music distributor, and after adding them as a friend be able to download the entire album for free.

The publishers behind the venerable Physicians’ Desk Reference opened a new site for consumers based on the same information platform as the book.

The web crawling Googlebot may find a forgotten line in robots.txt that causes it to de-index a site from the search engine.

Yahoo Search followed its release of NBA and NHL Shortcuts with ones oriented toward holiday recipes.

Jonathan Miller has reappeared on the Internet scene, this time as a member of the board of directors for online search ad management startup, Clickable.

The DNS admins had plenty to do at Google this week, with a lot of domain names being moved to Google’s servers.