Not about to sit on the sidelines as other websites reap the influx of online shopping, MSN announced a “new and improved” MSN Shopping service with new comparison shopping tools, links to free shipping, and services for procrastinators. And if Danny Bonaduce rehab TV has left you cold, “America’s favorite mother,” Shirley Jones will be at your service with gift ideas.

A note at the SEW blog pointed out this little gem on Google’s web site, where users can view search metrics by industry as they plan their paid search campaigns.

The Portable Media Expo opens in Ontario, CA, today with a sizable attendance and a slew of significant tech names giving keynotes and hosting panels.

If Tokyo Broadcasting System, Inc. screams at the ravaging intentions of the pirate Rakuten, Yahoo Japan Corp. may become the fair television company’s white knight. It’s so romantic!

For anyone who thinks blogs are a load of hot air, the next potential Internet connectivity option could make that a more realistic point of view; natural gas pipes will be the latest way to carry broadband signals.

The proposal from Google to the leadership of its home city of Mountain View would place 300 transmitters on lightpoles to make the city one big wireless hotspot.

In response to user requests, eBay launched a new service giving buyers and sellers access to listing, bidding, and pricing trends in the marketplace to help them make more informed selling and buying decisions.

While instant messaging has increased across all user ages, teens in particular have been sending a lot more IMs than email; business users send nearly a billion IMs each workday.

In the aftermath of the Ray Ozzie and Bill Gates memos and emails I am seeing a few trends in the reaction.

An assistant professor at the University of North Texas working on a project to find information from scanned texts has scored a grant from the search advertising company.

Blog posts use up all of your best ideas. Right? You dream up the concept for your latest literary or technical masterpiece of a post, you write it into the blog posting interface, publish it, and voila.

In his posting titled Reading the Google Tea Leaves, Tristan compares various product offerings from Google against those of the “big three” (AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo!) and concludes…

A proposal similar to its September response to San Francisco’s request for information would have Google transform its home city into a free wireless hotspot.

Rand McNally has joined the likes of Google and Yahoo! by offering developers a chance to Incorporate maps & directions in Web Sites.

WCBSTV.com reports that President Bush has again been Google Bombed. A simple trick that takes advantage of the way Google ranks web pages …

A tongue-in-cheek parody of Quentin Tarantino’s sword-swinging films encourages users to switch to Firefox, but maybe it serves better as an object lesson in browser mythology.

The new look for the Chinese portal, removing a lot of its clutter and simplifying the home page, now resembles its search engine competitors in China.

The AskTheBuilder.com web site gets the Google case study focus, as the AdSense team trumpets the site’s jump from $10,000 to $30,000 in monthly revenue.

The searchable universe has expanded enormously over the past year. From the doubling or tripling of the size of search engine indexes to the evolution of several engines with unique focuses, the amount of data accessible by search engine users has grown faster this year than any other since the dawn of the public, commercial Internet.

It became clear to an Australia man a couple of weeks after the fact that Microsoft legal representatives hadn’t been exactly forthcoming about the purpose of having him sign over the rights to a product name. What he thought was a trademark case, turned out to be “give us that!” case.

Some activity in the Webmaster World forum is suggesting website operators can get out of Yahoo!’s penalty box for good behavior a bit faster and easier than they used to. Though the length of the penalty is unclear, Yahoo! may forgive and forget in less than a week.

Last night I saw a TV commercial for mobile phones with online video access. The brand name escapes me, but the image of people lying around anywhere and everywhere, watching videos on their mobile phones, stuck with me.