Thanks to Universal Music Group and a new service called gBox, DRM-free music will become available through Google’s search engine.  Sounds interesting, right?  You should also know that these songs will be 30 cents cheaper than the ones sold by iTunes.

One of the most popular categories of content we publish at Online Marketing Blog is the interviews. Recently, we ran a poll asking OMB readers for suggestions on people we should interview in anticipation of SES San Jose. There were some great suggestions and I’ve just started contacting a few folks as well as their mega company PR depts for pre-approval.

On Friday, I wondered what happened to a favorite LinkedIn feature for viewing recent users. I received two subsequent emails from customer service, only to find out I was wrong about the feature because of LinkedIn’s questionable grammar. The semantic web’s a long way off if we can’t master our native languages’ semantics first.

Here’s the first of the two responses:

Yahoo Shopping’s comparison-shopping listings will now display ScanAlert’s Hacker Safe seal. Online shoppers will be able to make decisions about merchants based on more than pricing and ratings.

It’s a safe bet that Google’s employees aren’t too happy; Yahoo has, for the first time ever, beaten them in the University of Michigan’s American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) survey.

That burning sensation may not be the result of an ill-advised hookup over the weekend, but an overheating cellphone battery Nokia has recalled.

Several updates to Microsoft’s Hotmail service should start rolling into user accounts; expanded storage, speed tweaks, and smarter contact handling rank among the improvements.

Webmasters whose sites have been flagged in Google’s search results as being potential links to malware have a new process for updating their listings after cleaning the site.

Depositions from Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, hosts on two of Viacom’s hottest shows, could be part of the legal proceedings between Google and Viacom.

Views of Australia’s well-known metropolis on Google Maps have diminished in their clarity, resulting in conspiracy theories and denials from the search company.

One word, unless you’ve followed him beyond some magazine articles about him, synonymous with Robert Scoble is "blogger." One of the originals, Scoble literally wrote the book on the topic. And now, well, he seems to be disillusioned with the whole damn thing.

I’ve seen it: an amazing 3D model of London that was meant to wind up in Google Earth.  Only now, due to what I’ll politely call “bureaucratic nonsense,” it won’t.

Seven in 10 UK mobile phone users believe marketing offers sent by their carriers are not relevant to them. Close to two-thirds of these users are unhappy with the spam, according to a Pontis- commissioned survey done by Gfk NOP.

When I think of the word “trajectory,” I think of an object arching through the air.  More specifically, I think of some sort of grenade or missile that explodes on impact.  So I had to raise an eyebrow when Microsoft’s Kevin Johnson said the company’s search business is “on a positive trajectory.”

It’s not exactly a stretch to say the White House has public relations issues. For the most part, though, footage that could be held against them has been dug up by the Daily Show more than the mainstream media. And then came YouTube.

What you might call a fringe group – global conspiracy prophets are fringe, right? – have uploaded an obscure video from 1994, where then former Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney defended the decision not to invade Iraq following the Gulf War (a decision which, if you remember in fairness, broke poor Al Gore’s heart).

Social networking site MySpace has formed an exclusive partnership with Rogers Wireless, Canada’s largest wireless services provider to offer MySpace to Roger Wireless customers on select mobile phones.

It is now, in a literal sense, a done deal: Microsoft has closed its $6 billion acquisition of aQuantive.  And that money isn’t intended to make people sit on their hands; some big changes are going to take place within the Redmond-based giant.

Social networking services will control a developing market for mobile user-generated content, according to a new report from Juniper Research, "Mobile User-Generated Content: Social Networking, Dating and Personal Content Delivery."

I’ve stayed in a pretty wide range of hotels; none of them seemed dangerous, but some were definitely less pleasant than others.  Now Yahoo Shortcuts is stepping up its effort to help users find the best possible lodgings.

Every travel site should offer some sort of map; they’re useful, and the idea isn’t particularly hard to arrive at.  VibeAgent is going above and beyond, however, with My Maps, a sort of customized, social network-y concoction.

In-text ad company Kontera received another infusion of venture capital from its backers to build upon an earlier investment in the company’s ContentLink product.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the quasi-independent organization that oversees domain and registry practices, have launched an investigation into the practice of "domain tasting."