There are only a few days left until the holiday shopping season begins in earnest, and a new shopping search engine has made its presence known just in time.

After plenty of development, testing, and feedback, Yahoo has declared its Maps service ready to shed the Beta moniker and stand on its own.

The SF Gate has an article where David Placek, founder and CEO of Lexicon, disusses how his company came up with the name Zune. Some bullets:

When a particular campaign goes viral, where people forward a marketing message to others until it snowballs, the resulting traffic and awareness can be very impressive. Achieving a viral quality for a message is not something that can be just coded and pushed out the door; it takes a combination of efforts to reach that status.

Interesting concept…

I was just over at Robyn Tippins blog. She blogs for B5 Media and reports that Duncan Riley, vice president of development for B5 Media has left B5.

The Day 2 of WebmasterWorld PubCon 2006 was marked by various sessions like Local and Mobile Local Search, Duplicate Content Issues, Search Blog and Reporter Forum, Contextual Advertising Optimization, International and Euro Optimization, What Every Webmaster Should Know: PHP, PERL, ASP.net, Site Structure for Crawlability including more.

Google announced the addition of click to call technology to its Google Maps product.

Balakumar does a visual usability review (in the style of the recent Windows Live Mail review). He starts off his post with:

Or an important indicator, anyway. Webmaster Pubcon is packed this week.

Well, we all know that MySpace pages have the potential to drive a ton of traffic.

US District Court in Chicago dismissed a lawsuit against the Craigslist classifieds site. They had been accused of permitting discriminatory housing ads to be placed on its Chicago-local website. More at IFN. David Utter Staff Writer, WebProNews

Almost one year to the day after the Chinese government placed a ban on both the English and Chinese-language versions of online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, both have been lifted.

Wow, what a party! Yahoo had a very private, invite-only party last night at the Palms Towers in the Playboy suite.

For those who like nothing better than a little behind-the-scenes corporate intrigue in the blogosphere, the guys over at 10 Zen Monkeys have some more deets on the sudden departure of Nick Douglas from Valleywag – where he was replaced by another guy whose initials are N.D., and whose name rhymes with Nick Denton (for an earlier installment of the Nick Douglas saga, scroll down a few posts).

Breaking news today that Google, Yahoo and MSN have agreed to a single standard for XML sitemaps, according to Search Engine Watch.

Earlier this month, Google revealed a planned series of changes to the way that AdWords evaluates landing page quality. In the first of a two-part series, the Inside AdWords team attempts to address the bevy of questions that have accompanied the announcement.

A PubCon session entered a place beyond indexing and search traffic: The Duplicate Content Zone, where websites sometimes go and are never seen again. WebProNews tagged along as the session hosts played the Rod Serling role for the audience.

Watch the WebProNews exclusive video in which Chris Richardson interviews Tim Mayer of Yahoo and Vanessa Fox of Google. They talk about their new Sitemaps.org partnership.

In a nutshell: Economics, economies and economic theory have all been based on economics of scarcity.

ON24 announced a new product offering this week. It’s called Bannercast Live, and the concept in a nutshell gives users the ability to paste a live webcast directly into a website banner advertisement.

If you run a web site that allows comments, you are going to get comment spam – that’s just a fact of life in the current Internet.

Search Engine Roundtable is doing a great job recapping sessions from PubCon, including the panel I did with some of the best search bloggers in the industry.

Rohit has revealed that the Intel mystery blogger is none other than Robert Scoble.