Online holiday spending has reached nearly $16 billion, marking a 3 percent increase compared to the same time period last, according to the latest data from comScore.

The most recent week ending December 6 reached 4.6 billion in holiday spending, heavier than any individual spending week in 2008 but still below two individual weeks in 2007. The week began with strong weekday spending, led by $887 million on Cyber Monday, but ended on a quieter note with negative year-over-year growth rates during the weekend.

MySpace has announced a new set of APIs. These include APIs for real-time streaming, status and mood commenting, open search, photo uploading, and an updated version of the post to/share API.

Let’s not kick Yahoo while it’s down; after a glance at some financial charts, it’d be sufficient to say that the company hasn’t done as well as Microsoft and Google in recent months (the three companies are up 6.6, 19.1, and 28.0 percent since September 9th).  But circumstances are likely to change, according to Carol Bartz, who made some interesting remarks at a conference today.

Google may have busted the "duplicate content myth" a while back, saying that you don’t technically get "penalized" for it, but that doesn’t mean it is a good thing. Shari Thurow of Omni Marketing Interactive says you should care about it so that your better pages are available to rank.

Google has started including Place Pages in Google Earth. Place Pages are the pages that Google sets up for places and businesses that have been accessible via Google Maps for a little while. They incorporate photos, videos, reviews and other content about that particular business or place, into one spot.

Early this year, Burger King made waves with a "Whopper Sacrifice" Facebook app.  Google, meanwhile, has achieved Twitter omnipresence with 87 official accounts.  But not every company has tons of free hamburgers and/or employees lying around, so a like-named session at SES Chicago addressed the matter of "Social Media for the Little Guy."

U.S. advertising spending in the first nine months of 2009 fell by 14.7 percent compared to the same period in 2008, according to a new report by TNS Media Intelligence.

Ad spending during the third quarter of 2009 was down 15.3 percent compared to last year, marking the sixth consecutive quarter of year-over-year declines.

A little less than a month ago, we reported that a beta version of Chrome for Mac might be released in December, and sure enough, it’s arrived.  Something "[f]or Mac OS X 10.5 or later, Intel only" became available today.

Considering that Chrome was introduced in September of 2008, this development was a long time coming.  Google likely hurt the adoption rate of Chrome by ignoring a market segment that’s known for preferring unusual tech and trying stuff out early in its lifecycle.

Officials in the UK have announced plans to require children beginning at age 5 to be taught about online safety starting in 2011.

The new initiative called "Click Clever Click Safe" was created by the UK Council for Child Internet Safety (UKCCIS).

Leading publishers are getting together for what is widely being considered something of a "Hulu for magazines." Publishers involved include Conde Nast, Hearst, Meredith, News Corporation and Time Inc.

There are two key concepts of search according to Javed Panjwani, Business Development Executive, Wolfram Alpha.

(Coverage of SES Chicago continues at WebProNews Videos.  Keep an eye on WebProNews for more notes and videos from the event this week.)

Dell seems to have achieved a very good understanding of Twitter and social media in general.  This morning, a representative shared some statistics regarding the hardware manufacturer’s achievements, and by most standards, they’re extremely impressive.

Gmail’s offline feature has graduated from Gmail Labs, and is now a full-blown feature of Google’s email service. The feature emerged as a lab experiment nearly a year ago, but it has now been deemed ready for primetime.

Google has introduced a very cool new feature for android devices, called Google Goggles. The feature is just a "labs" experiment at this point, but it can already do some very interesting things, and has the potential to do much more. The official description is as follows:

Google released Google Maps 3.3 for Android today, which lets users find nearby businesses, try new experimental "Labs" projects, and report problems with map data from their phone.

Users can check to see what businesses are nearby at anytime, by simply long-pressing on the map, tapping the bubble, and going to the option that says "What’s Nearby?". Users will get a menu that shows a business, and it can be clicked on to see more nearby places. The feature can also be accessed from the "My Location" menu or from address search results.

Search engines are constantly evolving and marketers need to know how to leverage the various aspects of search to have successful campaigns.

(Coverage of SES Chicago continues at WebProNews Videos.  Keep an eye on WebProNews for more notes and videos from the event this week.)

As Google’s search engine competitors often bring up, searchers want more than just "ten blue links" these days. Of course it has been quite a while now since search results from any of the big three were only ten blue links for most searches. We are well into the era of blended search.

Online music video service Vevo, has reached a content agreement with EMI Music on the eve before its Tuesday launch.

EMI joins Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment in what is being called the "Hulu for music videos." So far Vevo has not reached a licensing agreement with Warner Music Group.

Amazon is making some enhancements to its Kindle electronic reader, aimed at improving the reading experience for people who are blind, visually impaired, or dyslexic.

"Kindle is for anyone who loves to read—in fact, we’ve heard from thousands of vision-impaired customers and customers with learning disabilities over the past two years who have been helped tremendously by Kindle," said Amazon Kindle Vice President Ian Freed, Vice President.

Online holiday spending has reached $15.3 billion, a 4 percent increase over the previous year, according to the latest report from comScore.

The most recent week saw three individual days surpass $800 million in spending, led by Cyber Monday with $887 million in spending, matching the heaviest online spending day on record. The following Tuesday nearly matched the Cyber Monday total with $886 million in spending, while Thursday, December 3 reached $808 million in spending.

In a recent article, we discussed ways the local search landscape is changing. Add another one to the list, because now Google is sending brick and mortar businesses decals to put on their windows, with barcodes that people can scan with their phones to bring up business listings on Google.

At this point, Twitter may not gain much from the backing of any more "celebrity" members; we’ve already seen lots of politicians, media personalities, and Hollywood types join up.  Just the same, it seems noteworthy that Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, apparently established an account last night.

Facebook has formed a Safety Advisory Board with five safety organizations from North America and Europe in an effort to better protect its 350 million global users.

The five organizations on the board are Common Sense Media, ConnectSafely, WiredSafety, Childnet International and The Family Online Safety Institute.

Yahoo has launched a tool it’s calling "Ad Interest Manager" in beta. The tool is designed to provide transparency and let Yahoo users make decisions about how they want their information to be exposed to interest-based advertising from the Yahoo Ad Network.