The Participatory Marketing Network (PMN) and Pace University’s Lubin School of Business have shared some interesting findings from a study that found Generation Y (commonly considered the "Net Generation") would abandon social networks before abandoning email or texting.

Blogging, social networking and email newsletters all have one thing in common, they fall under the umbrella of Internet marketing.

(Coverage of the BlogWorld conference continues at WebProNews Videos.  Keep an eye on WebProNews for more notes and videos from the event this week.)

In the session "Internet Marketing for Smart People," the panel discussed the various ways to reach an audience online.

Security company Trusteer Research issued a security advisory this week, dealing with a stealth new Zeus/Zbot phishing attack, which is aimed at harvesting enterprise log-in credentials for web banking, financial, HR, and SaaS accounts.

It seems like just yesterday we were talking about how email was improving. Google has now added a feature to Gmail that lets you preview the contents of Google Docs documents, spreadsheets, and presentations in your inbox.

The Wall Street Journal Recently published the story, Why Email No Longer Rules. The writer, Jessica E. Vascellaro, talks a lot about the increasing number of people jumping on the social media bandwagon, and how that could have a negative effect on the way people use email today. Are people jumping on the social media bandwagon? You betcha! And why not? It’s free, easy to use, and you can communicate to the masses. But are they using email less?

ExactTarget released some new findings today about email use, finding that it is increasing, with social media and smartphones playing key roles.

Google has launched a new feature in Gmail Labs designed to spare users the embarrassment of sending an email to the wrong person. It’s probably happened to you at one time or another.

You’ve probably seen reports of big webmail phishing attacks over the week. A spokesperson for Symantec‘s Message Labs tells WebProNews, however, that most reports have glossed over a key point to consider. That is that the potential impact on other aspects of victims’ online lives are in jeopardy as well.

For the fourth quarter in a row email open rates were up across a number of industries, according to a new report by direct marketing firm Epsilon.

Open rates increased 18.2 percent from the second quarter of 2008 with click rates (5.9%) remaining stable.

The quarterly analysis was compiled from 6.5 billion emails sent by Epsilon in April, May and June 2009, across multiple industries and 200 clients.

Average volume per client rose 10 percent from last quarter and 20 percent year-over-year.

Consumers worldwide are using online communication tools and responding to permission-based email (PBE) in varying ways based on their country of origin, according to a recent study by Epsilon.

The study found North American (87%) and European (74%) respondent are more likely than their peers in Asia Pacific (APAC) (58%) to use email as their main online communications tool.

As the primary channel for communication, instant messaging is considerably high in APAC with 28 percent while text/SMS and social networking remain consistently low across all regions.

Nielsen set out to prove that social media use put a significant dent into email use, assuming that the more time people spent on social networks, the less time they were likely to spend using email. It didn’t quite work out that way in the firm’s experiment however.

Nielsen explains its methodology:

Today Google introduced a new Gmail Labs feature, which lets users hide labeled messages that have already been read, when browsing through labels. The ones that have been read can be found under the "more" menu.

"A lot of people want to see their labels in order to see which ones have unread messages, but they don’t want a long list of label names cluttering up the left hand side of their inboxes," says Gmail software engineer David de Kloet.

Yahoo is launching a new Yahoo Mail ad unit called "Tandem," to be reserved for "the most creative" non-profit campaign. The company has partnered with the Ad Council to launch the initiative, which it refers to as "Create for a Cause."

The majority of marketers are using multichannel campaigns, but less than half know what channels their customers prefer, according to a new study by Forrester Consulting, sponsored by ExactTarget.

The study found the key to selecting the best channels for customer communication is to know something about customer preference and behaviors. Only 32 percent of marketers know how customers behave across channels and only 37 percent know what channels their customers prefer to use.

Symantec’s MessageLabs revealed a list of the most spammed states in the US today, with some somewhat surprising results. And the award for state that receives the most spam is…Idaho.

It is an interesting time for email marketing right now. Though it is still a quite effective medium for marketers, there are many challenges to deal with. This was the subject of a session moderated by David Daniels of Forrester Research at the Shop.org summit in Las Vegas this week.