ActiveState’s CTO and VP of engineering, David Ascher, will helm Mozilla’s new effort to build upon their Thunderbird email client.

Andy Berndt will make the jump from Ogilvy & Mather to head up a new unit at Google focused on the marketing and advertising potential in the entertainment industry.

Google has yet to create an algorithm that approximates how the human mind processes things. They’re working on it, of course, but it is still a textual (as well as contextual and behavioral, and mathematical, among others) process rather than a pure cognitive process. And that creates a gap that is hard to navigate when writing for the Web: write for the reader or write for the spider?

As online shoppers become more discriminating, retailers must provide a consistently positive experience, according to a Shop.org study "The State of Retailing Online 2007", conducted by Forrester research.

Google’s known for leaving “beta” tags hanging about for long periods of time, but today, the company pulled one of its products out of testing.  Behold: Google Reader is no longer in Labs, and it’s also gained support for a number of new languages.

Once upon a time, AltaVista was the best search engine on the Internet. Then they got sloppy, and Google blew past them. We’ve been hearing forever, it seems, that Powerset will do to Google what Google did to AltaVista. How …

Less than a month ago, we learned that Facebook would let advertisers target members based on the information in their profiles.  MySpace is doing something similar, and it may greatly increase the social network’s revenues.

With social networks like MySpace and YouTube taking an active role in politics, social media offers a good opportunity for presidential candidates to connect with potential volunteers and donors, according to a new report from JupiterResearch, "Politics on the Net: Reaching Audiences that Matter."

AOL has launched a beta version of BlueString, a free Web site that allows users to upload, store, manage, create and share digital media.

There’s no such thing as a portable La-Z-Boy, but there are comfortable camping chairs.  And although a 42-inch LCD might be ideal, pocket-sized video devices are also popular.  Now, with the formal launch of AdSense for Mobile, Google seems to be getting into the transportability trend.

IBM has decided to play in the free productivity suite market with a reincarnation of its Symphony brand, for a collection of Lotus Notes 8 editors under that name.

Two years after dropping its columnists behind a subscription wall, the New York Times tore down the barrier to a valuable source of traffic: search engines.

The rumored arrival of a Google option for creating and viewing slide-based presentations became fact with the debut of its newest feature on Google Docs.

Reuters Labs will use Viewdle’s facial recognition search features to help index video content delivered over certain Reuters satellite streams.

Sint Smeding IM’d me tonight, pointing me to this post on his blog, which basically is the Dutch version of what

SpiralFrog.com, an ad supported Web site that allows users to download music and videos for free has launched in North America.

If there’s one button within Facebook that can be discarded, it’s the “poke” option; this, anyway, is what new data from Compete says to me.  The poke button isn’t really a matter of great importance, however, and the Compete statistics also pointed to several other things.

Web analytics play a crucial role in building a high performance web business. Whether it’s basic site statistics like unique visitors, page views or sessions, analytical data like click paths or funnel abandonment or campaign performance metrics like cost per lead/sale, conversion or value per visitor, knowing your numbers help define your next steps for growth and improvement.

However, besides the greatest hurdle of web businesses actually taking the time to become aware of their numbers, there is also the concern with the numbers being accurate.

There is little doubt that patents are driving innovation. However, those same patents can hinder the progress if applied incorrectly.

Occationally I talk to progressive companies that have taken the leap into social media and have implemented full social communities with lots of features that enable users to interact on the site, but when I look at their site I discover a propriatry custom scripted website.

In most cases this is a GIANT Mistake.

The answer most web designers will give without even a hint of thought is 1024 X 768. While on the surface that may seem like logical choice since according to most website’s analytics, it’s the resolution group with the highest amount of visitors.

Zimbra’s “About Us” page is pretty nice – there are concise statements regarding what the company does, who it works with, and how to contact it.  The page may need an overhaul, however, as it also offers an option to “View Google Map,” and word has it that Zimbra was just acquired by Yahoo.

Today we learn that Superpages.com parent, Idearc Inc., has acquired Switchboard.com from InfoSpace Inc.

Around 87 percent of consumers conducting transactions online have experienced problems according to a survey commissioned by Tealeaf and conducted by Harris Interactive.