Internet Explorer 9 (beta) was launched to the public this week, and it’s gotten a lot of buzz and high marks. It’s also gotten a lot of web properties doing things to utilize its features. Microsoft’s own Bing features are certainly interesting. 

There’s been a lot going on in web news over the last few days, and there have been some things worth looking at that I haven’t gotten a chance to cover, but I’d like to point out just in case you missed them. 

Google has launched Stats for Blogger, a Blogger feature that was previously available in the experimental version of Blogger, Blogger in Draft. The feaure is fairly self-explanatory in that it provides Blogger users with stats about their blogs.

More specifically, Stats for Blogger provides stats like real-time tracking of each time your blog is viewed, and insights about your audience, such as top search keywords, countries, browsers, etc. The user interface comes with easy-to-read graphs and charts.

In a nutshell, NewsBasis is a site where journalists and bloggers can find sources, while experts and companies can find journalists and bloggers to write about them in their articles.

WebProNews had a conversation with NewsBasis Founder and CEO Darryl Siry (who also happens to be a contributor to Wired, and was formerly CMO of Tesla Motors) about how the site has performed since launching at the beginning of the month.

VigLink has acquired outbound traffic monetization company Driving Revenue, which brings over $100 million of merchandise transactions to the company. VigLink says this makes the combined entity the "definitive leader" in the space.

VigLink is a company that is backed by Google Ventures, Google’s venture capital arm. It’s a content monetization and affiliate marketing company aimed at bloggers. 

Search Engine Land Editor-in-Chief Danny Sullivan points out how poorly Google handles those gaming Google News, using Google Trends as a starting point.

Do you find Google News to be too heavily polluted? Share your thoughts.

Update 2: CNET’s Greg Sandoval now reports that users could see their blogs again, but Blogetery likely won’t be hosted by Burst.net in the future.

Burst.net CTO says that the service has not resopnded quickly enough to abuse claims in the past, which appears to be the reason the whole service was shut down in the first place. More on the story here.

Americans who use Twitter are more likely than the average adult to be highly active on the Internet and in their communities, according to new survey by Gfk MRI.

Wordpress has just introduced a new feature that lets you update your blog by calling a phone number speaking. Wordpress users can go to the My Blogs tab, enable "Post by Voice" and get a special phone number to call for their blogs.

Calling the number and recording a message will post an audio file to the blog, which can then be published to Facebook, Twitter, etc. with the Publicize feature.

More than one-third (34%) of Americans are "tuning out" social networking sites, with 39 percent doing so because of rude behavior, according to a new survey by Weber Shandwick and KRC Research.

Every so often, an argument and ensuing discussion erupts in the Blogosphere over whether or not it is ethical to block comments on a blog post and what value they actually add to content.

Would you rather have blog comments or Facebook "likes" and retweets? Let us know.

Update: Google has announced tah the Blogger Template Designer is now available to all (not just Blogger in Draft).

Original Article: Google has launched the Blogger Template Designer, a way to customize the look and feel of your Blogger blog.

What is fair use? It’s a question that doesn’t seem to go away. Traditional media publications often throw blogs under the bus for borrowing quotes and spreading news to their own audiences. While there are certainly plenty of cases in which blogs do trample on the concept of fair use, to say that blogs in general follow this practice is simply absurd.

Should mainstream media be held to different standards than bloggers when it comes to crediting sources? Mainstream media agencies have frequently turned their noses up at bloggers, essentially claiming that they steal and repurpose the work of their hard working journalists. While this may be true in some cases, it is hardly fair to say that this is true in general. In fact, this week, we’ve seen a clear example of the hypocrisy of this notion, because mainstream media publications are clearly just as guilty as blogs when it comes to improper crediting of sources.

In a recent article, we asked, "Should mainstream media be held to different standards than bloggers when it comes to crediting sources?" This question stemmed from an incident in which Blogger Danny Sullivan broke a news story, only to have mainstream media publications run with it without giving him credit.

Lots of bloggers and online reporters have experienced this at one time or another. We’ve certainly had it happen to us here at WebProNews more than a few times. You break a story, then it’s all over the web, but you don’t get the credit.

Back in January, the New York Times announced that it would be gravitating to a metered paywall system at the beginning of 2011. This would let readers access an as-of-yet unspecified number of articles for free each month, until requiring payment for further access. Meanwhile, print subscribers would have full access to content online.

Many blogs depend on the practice of sharing for survival, or at least profitability; they can’t count on millions of people to find their own way to every article.  And it turns out that, when it comes to "share" buttons, popular blogs depend more on Twitter’s than any other option out there.

Here at SXSW, we attended the session "CrowdControl: Changing the Face of Media or Hype?" At the end, one of the speakers asked the crowd, which they thought it was. Almost everybody responded with the former, while maybe one or two raised their hand for hype.

Facebook wants to keep users on Facebook. So far, they are doing a pretty good job of that. More and more people are spending more of their online time on Facebook, not to mention, spending more time connected to the web in general (at least partially due to rising use of smartphones).

How much time do you spend on Facebook in a month? A week? Let us know.

Update: This article is nearly a year old, but pretty much the same thing is happening again (or still). A number of popular music blogs have been removed from Blogger, some are saying without warning. When we covered this before, Blogger Product Manager Rick Klau left us the following comment (as seen in the comments section):