Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer announced the new partnership today in a post on the Yahoo blog. “Tweets have become an important information source for many of our users, so we are thrilled to announce our partnership with Twitter to bring Tweets directly into the Yahoo! newsfeed,” saus Mayer.

Look above. Notice anything different about the Yahoo newsfeed? I know, it looks the same – but look closer. Direct your attention to the third item on the main feed. Yes, there it is – at tweet from ABC World News, complete with a timestamp, link, and a follow button.

“As users explore our nearly endless stream of content, we will seamlessly include relevant and personalized Tweets alongside stories from Yahoo! and our other sources. With this greater breadth of compelling content, we’re excited to give our users even more opportunities to learn and connect. Users now also have an easy way to discover relevant and interesting people and publishers to follow on Twitter, personalized to their interests and preferences,” says Mayer.

Relevant and personalized – so that seems to indicate that users that are signed-in to Twitter will enjoy a more robust experience with the new integration. The types of tweets that will fill Yahoo’s newsfeed will come from all types of newsworthy areas including sports, entertainment, music, and more.

Mayer says that the Twitter integration will rollout to U.S. desktop and mobile users in the next few days. No mention on the terms of the deal, however.

Speaking of partnerships between Twitter and search companies (I know, but Yahoo is still primarily a search company), Google and Twitter had a famous falling out back in the summer of 2011. Thanks to an inability to reach an agreement Google’s realtime search, which leveraged tweets, got the ax. Google talked about it’s imminent return shortly after the failed deal, but nearly two years later Twitter and Google are still on the outs.

The Atlantic Wire has the absolutely bizarre tale of two anchors – Ashleigh Banfield of CNN and Nancy Grace of Headline News – holding an interview in the same parking lot. Now this wouldn’t be so strange if both women were in the same shot talking to each other. Instead, CNN has a split-screen set up indicating that both women are far away from each other. The background, however, tells a different story (gifs courtesy of The Atlantic Wire).

It’s painfully obvious that this interview is being held in the same parking lot. What makes it so sad is that these two anchors are not even that far away from each other. By watching the background car movements, you can tell that they are no more than 50 feet away from each other.

Some are taking this as a sign of wholesale deception, but that’s a little extreme. It’s probably just CNN being the sad kind of silly yet again. Either way, we’ll hopefully get another hilarious Jon Stewart spoof out of it.

Pearl Cantrell is 105-years-old and she really loves bacon. In fact, she eats bacon for every meal. She is also a bacon ambassador among her family and friends encouraging them all to enjoy pork-based meat.

It seems that her love for bacon caught the attention of Oscar Mayer. The company decided to take Cantrell’s love of meat to the next level by giving her what every bacon-loving child has ever wanted – a ride in the fabled Wienermobile. She was driven around town in the vehicle while waving to everybody.

A ride in the Wienermobile wasn’t the only thing Cantrell received though. Oscar Mayer also gave her plenty of bacon so she could continue spreading the bacon gospel throughout her hometown of Richland Springs, Texas.

After the events of the day, Cantrell says that she “will never, ever forget it, as long as I live.” Here’s hoping she lives for many more years so she can continue preaching the joys of bacon.

[h/t: kxan]

A newspaper company wants to add an archive with 200,000 pages. Should they add it all at once or in steps?

Cutts says, “I think we can handle it either way, so we should be able to process it, but if we see a lot of pages or a lot of things ranking on a site all of a sudden, then we might take a look at it from the manual web spam team. So if it doesn’t make any difference whatsoever to you in terms of the timing of the roll-out, I might stage it a little bit, and do it in steps. That way, it’s not as if you’ve suddenly dropped five million pages on the web, and it’s relatively rare to be able to drop hundreds of thousands of pages on the web, and have them be really high quality.”

“An archive of a newspaper is a great example of that,” he adds. “But, if it’s all the same to you, and it doesn’t make that much of a difference, I might tend to do it more in stages, and do more of a gradual roll-out. You could still roll them out in large blocks, but you know, just break that up a little bit.”

So it doesn’t sound like you’re going to have any major problems if you do it all at once (provided you’re not actually spamming Google with low quality content), but you might be raising a red flag with the web spam team, so it’s probably better to err on the side of caution, as Cutts suggests.

Of course, the most public consequence of the misinformation and false accusation swirling around on reddit in the Boston bombings’ aftermath involved a Brown University student named Sunil Triphathi. Reddit helped fuel speculation that he was identified as suspect #2 in the bombings, allegations that were quickly proven to be false. Of course, by that point much damage had already been done.

Reddit eventually shut down the r/findbostonbombers subreddit, where much of the misinformation and evidence-less speculation was occurring. They also blocked comment threads in other subreddits, like r/news, that made unfounded speculations about the bombers’ identities.

“However, though started with noble intentions, some of the activity on reddit fueled online witch hunts and dangerous speculation which spiraled into very negative consequences for innocent parties. The reddit staff and the millions of people on reddit around the world deeply regret that this happened. We have apologized privately to the family of missing college student Sunil Triphathi, as have various users and moderators. We want to take this opportunity to apologize publicly for the pain they have had to endure. We hope that this painful event will be channeled into something positive and the increased awareness will lead to Sunil’s quick and safe return home,” says Martin.

In reality, reddit’s actions didn’t really become a problem until things started to get personal, and the posting of personal info prompted an online witch hunt.

“A few years ago, reddit enacted a policy to not allow personal information on the site. This was because “let’s find out who this is” events frequently result in witch hunts, often incorrectly identifying innocent suspects and disrupting or ruining their lives. We hoped that the crowdsourced search for new information would not spark exactly this type of witch hunt. We were wrong. The search for the bombers bore less resemblance to the types of vindictive internet witch hunts our no-personal-information rule was originally written for, but the outcome was no different,” says Martin.

Still, reddit was a source of information during the attacks and its aftermath. An incredibly useful source at that. During many of the events that unfolded over the course of last week, redditors posting live police radio updates were more accurate and much faster than traditional news outlets.

But the witch hunts did occur, with scary consequences. And that cannot be denied or overlooked.

Martin closes with this sentiment, in which he hopes the reddit community can learn from this misstep:

“After this week, which showed the best and worst of reddit’s potential, we hope that Boston will also be where reddit learns to be sensitive of its own power.”

And that power will only continue to grow. Martin reports that at the time of suspect #2 Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s capture, reddit had 272,000 active visitors, nearly a third of which were glued to the main r/news thread of the capture. That’s a lot of eyes.

Follow @mattcutts

Matt Cutts
@mattcutts

A great article about why you should consider giving up news: http://t.co/p32BilNFxc

Follow @timbray

Tim Bray
@timbray

@mattcutts Except for, the world is run by people who care about what’s going on in it. Want to be one of them, or not?

Follow @mattcutts

Matt Cutts
@mattcutts

@timbray all I know is the two times I’ve given up news/social media for 30 days have been among my most productive months.

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10 hours ago via web · powered by @socialditto

If you follow the adventures of Matt Cutts, you no doubt know that he regularly engages in “30 day challenges,” in which he spends a month focusing on some goal. For January, his challenge was “no news, no Twitter, fewer emails, and no social media in general”). It was a quiet time for Google algorithm update news to say the least.

“In general, when I wanted to hop onto Techmeme or Google News or Hacker News or Twitter/Nuzzel, instead I opened up my to-do list,” Cutts wrote of his experience. “As a result, I got a ton of stuff done in January. I quickly learned that if something important was happening, I’d hear about it from someone else.”

The article Cutts points to in the tweet above comes from The Guardian, and is called, “News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier”.

According to that, news: misleads, is irrelevant, has no explanatory power, is toxic to your body, increases cognitive errors, inhibits thinking, works like a drug, wastes time, makes us passive, and kills creativity.

It’s an interesting read. I’ll give it that.

The transaction is valued at around $90 million, which is at the high-end of the “somewhere between $50M and $100M” range that we heard when rumors of the acquisition began swirling about a month ago.

With this move, LinkedIn says they want to be “the definitive professional publishing platform where all professionals can publish, discover, and share.”

Pulse’s Ankit Gupta and Akshay Kothari say that Pulse will remain the same, and their team is committed to improving upon their apps.

“With LinkedIn by our side, our team will continue to make Pulse the best it can be. We’re still working together on the product you love, and will continue to provide an innovative and visual news reading experience. For now, the Pulse apps will remain the same, and our two teams are excited to work together to create cool and useful new offerings.”

LinkedIn’s Deep Nishar explains what the Pulse acquisition means to them:

“We believe LinkedIn can be the definitive professional publishing platform – where all professionals come to consume content and where publishers come to share their content. Millions of professionals are already starting their day on LinkedIn to glean the professional insights and knowledge they need to make them great at their jobs. We believe we can help all professionals make smarter and more informed business decisions leveraging all the great business knowledge flowing through LinkedIn in the form of news, Influencer posts, industry updates, discussions, comments and more,” he says.

“Pulse is a perfect complement to this vision. Pulse’s core value proposition is to help foster informed discussions that spark the decisions shaping the world around us through news and information. This shared view that the power of professional information and knowledge can transform lives and the world makes LinkedIn and Pulse a particularly great fit. We couldn’t be more thrilled to be working side by side with the Pulse team to create new and better ways to help professionals contribute to and leverage this collective body of business knowledge to help them be great at what they do and from wherever they work.”

The first sign of integration comes in the form of a new “LinkedIn Influencer” feed on Pulse.

Pulse was founded back in 2010. Since then, it has amassed 30 million users in over 190 countries. It also boasts content from over 750 publishers.

Reuters is reporting:

Alberico Fernandes, head of the Portuguese Confederation of Social Communication Media, told Reuters that the global Internet services group’s Iberian and Portuguese units rejected the demand at a first meeting last week but agreed to continue negotiations.

He said Google “showed readiness to collaborate with media groups to help us modernize and make our content more profitable”, something it had agreed to do in France earlier.

Earlier this year, Google announced an initiative to “help stimulate innovation and increase revenues” for French publishers. Google agreed to create a €60 million fund called the DIgital Publishing Innovation Fund to “help support transformative digital publishing initiatives for French readers.” Google said it would also “deepen” its partnership with French publishers to help increase their online revenues using Google’s ad technology.

The announcement followed a similar one Google made in December, when it reached an agreement with publishers in Belgium after six years of litigation, which saw publishers sue Google claiming that it violated their copyrights by displaying snippets in Google News and linking to cached copies of their pages in Google search.

As part of the agreement in Belgium, Google said it would advertise its services on publishers’ media, and publishers would optimize their use of AdWords. Google would also work with Belgian French-language publishers to “help increase publishers’ revenue,” collaborating on ways to make money with Paywalls and subscriptions, and with AdSense and the Ad Exchange. Google would also work with Belgian publishers to implement Google+ social tools and launch YouTube channels.

At the time, Google said it would like to come to similar terms with publishers around the world. Perhaps Portugal is next.

“‘Big Data Download’ is a daily digital program that taps into the big data revolution to deliver valuable information to everyday investors and business decision makers,” Yahoo says in an email. “The show, which will air twice each day, will draw upon sources including Yahoo! Search data, social sentiment and investing algorithms created exclusively for this program from the Yahoo! Labs team.”

“The inaugural episode of, ‘Big Data Download’ examines whether the housing market is really in recovery, by looking at both housing stocks and Yahoo! Search data,” the company says. “In the second episode, ‘Big Data Download’ drills into gas prices. Are you being ripped off at the pump? ‘Big Data Download’ explores oil, gas, distillate inventory numbers to shed light on where prices should be and which companies will get a lift when the price goes up.”

Thursday’s episodes will look at “key economic indicators that tell where the S&P 500 should really be right now,” and a controversial new program at Bank of America.

The show will air regularly Monday through Friday at 11AM and 2PM Eastern.

Last summer, Yahoo Finance and CNBC announced a partnership to reach a wider audience, and share information and ad revenues.

Essentially, Meltwater’s service displays content with links and snippets in a similar format to Google News and other search engines and aggregators, which is why this case could have broader industry significance.

Last month, we saw newspapers like The New York Times, Gannet and McClatchy get on board with the AP.

Mike Masnick at TechDirt, who shares the court document, highlights a section where the court says:

“Next, Meltwater argues that the extent of its copying is justified because its purpose is to serve as a search engine. But, Meltwater has failed to show that it takes only that amount of material from AP’s articles that is necessary for it to function as a search engine. Indeed, the evidence is compellingly to the contrary.”

Masnick writes that the court “seems to think it knows how to run a search engine,” adding, “I’m curious. What is ‘the amount necessary to function as a search engine?’ One might reasonably suggest that a search engine would be wise to index everything. Yet the court here seems to be suggesting otherwise. I’m curious how many search engines the judge has built.”

“Basically, Meltwater points out that what it does is no different than a search engine, and the court says (without much basis) that it doesn’t think Meltwater really is a search engine, and thus these defenses don’t apply,” he adds. “But this is extremely troubling for actual search engines, because you can take each of the pieces out and then try to apply them to a basic search engine, and you’ll find that if this ruling stands, it makes being a search engine much more difficult as well.”

Meltwater will of course be appealing the judge’s decision. AFP quotes CEO Jorn Lyseggen as saying, “We’re disappointed by the court’s decision and we strongly disagree with it. We’re considering all of our options, but we look forward to having this decision reviewed by the Court of Appeals, which we are confident will see the case in a different way.”