Early Friday morning it looked like Sacha Baron Cohen had done it again with his new film Brüno. With post-midnight ticket sales in the neighborhood of $1.6 million some Hollywood insiders were predicting around $50 million for the opening weekend.

Buying ads on ad networks is standard practice these days. In fact, according to an article from AdAge, 65% of ad buys will pass through ad networks in 2009. Even in tough times like these that’s a lot of money.

Today Microsoft announced the creation of the Publisher Leadership Council, a group of Web publishers who will consult on the development of Microsoft PubCenter, its next-generation advertising platform for digital media publishers.

I just spent the entire day distracted by Windows Vista Service Pack 1, namely not getting any real work done while my computer was busy installing it. You should install SP1, too, just be aware of the time it might take.

Online shoppers researched product information 11 percent and 27 percent more on Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday respectively than they did on Cyber Monday, according to research from WebCollage.

Social networking is so popular online that it’s spilling into the physical world – at actual stores. Called social retailing, the concept debuted at the National Retail Federation’s (NRF) show last January 2007. Recently, the concept, by IconNicholson was selected by Time Magazine as One of the Best Inventions of 2007.

Google released a chart generator service they are calling the Google Chart API. Usage is quite straightforward: you link to an image in the form of a parameterized URL, e.g. (line break added)

It’s been awhile since we had any Wikipedia controversy, so maybe it’s about time for a pile-on — you know, something about how Jimmy Wales doesn’t care about quality, or how he runs the “open source” encyclopedia as his own personal fiefdom, or how people run around using strange technical terms that no one outside the Wikipedia cabal can understand (okay, that last one is totally true).

This time it’s the revelation of a top-secret… wait for it… mailing list only for insiders! According to a breathless piece in The Register: