Fox Interactive Media (FIM), a division of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., has acquired interactive advertising-technology company Strategic Data Corp (SDC).

SDC’s system automatically optimizes the selection of creative for each impression to maximize profitability by combining sophisticated statistical and predictive algorithms, demographic and geographic segmentation, and performance tracking.

The Google Webmaster Central blog has a post "Tips on using feeds and information on subscriber counts in Reader." The post talks not just about the blog feeds, it talks about many sites, which have frequently updated content, resorting to feeds. If you have a feedreader for your site, you can get the number of Google Reader and Google Personalized Homepage subscribers.

Larry Page spoke before the Annual American Association for the Advancement of Science conference on Friday, and he made some fairly standard remarks about working harder to solve humanity’s problems. One mildly interesting thing popped up, though: Page mentioned that Google is developing artificial intelligence.

Final interesting article in DM Review this month – Dealing with Data: Data Analytics: A Huge Opportunity by Shari Rogalski. She does a nice job of summarizing the research and makes some good points. A couple of things I wanted to highlight:

* You must move to a predictive mindset, not an analyze-the-past mindset. Check out my predictive analytics FAQ if you are not sure what this means

Last week, Yahoo launched its new Panama search platform amidst much buzz throughout the blogosphere. As part of the new model, Yahoo will be implementing a scoring system to determine ad quality, which will in turn have an influence on bid prices for keywords.

We’re less than two weeks into Panama, and already Yahoo has been more forthcoming with information concerning its quality score calculation that Google was within the first two months.

Ever since Google stopped showing accurate backlink (aka incoming link) counts to websites webmasters and SEOs have been forced to turn to other, more accurate tools like Yahoo.

This hasn’t really been all that bad in my opinion but it is refreshing to hear that Google has finally launched a new backlinks analysis tool within Google Webmaster Central.

Back in December, I caused a little bit of a ruckus when I posted information from Google that suggested click fraud rates were a fraction of a percent.

In many different scenarios we need to check if a string can be converted into an integer e.g.

Hot off the press comes news that Google has officially selected Lenoir, in North Carolina, for the site of its $600 million data center.

Google has announced plans to open a new data center in Lenoir, N.C., according to state officials. Local residents hope that Google’s presence in the region will boost the local economy and spur job growth.

According to new comScore data, both Google and Yahoo have something to celebrate today, they each gained search engine market share – Google up 0.4% to 47.4%; Yahoo up 0.3% to 28.5%.

Oodle will today announce the launch of the Oodle Index, a real-time pricing guide for online classified listings.

Interesting Netratings data on ClickZ for the month of December 2006.

When you write data, it doesn’t necessarily get written to disk right then. The kernel maintains caches of many things, and disk data is something where a lot of work is done to keep everything fast and efficient.

From large scale stat providers right down to the smallest detail it is easy to take a statistic out of context and draw false conclusions from it.

So a few days ago I posted a question on the BlogCFC blog about whether I should add “crash protection” to the BlogCFC entry editor.

Bob sent in an interesting email to me:

I have an old Perl project that goes out to a Government web site, ftp’s some files, massages them in various ways, and spits out some output. Over time, the project grew, and now does more than it used to.

Being a father of two young girls, I’m more than a little familiar with Alphabet books. You know the ones I mean.

Why in this day and age of enormous hard drives and portable storage drives that can be carried in your pocket without even realizing it’s there would anyone want to trust an off site data storage site?

It has been confirmed that Google is testing displaying some quality score values to AdWords advertisers.