Twitterers in the United Kingdom, Ireland, the Isle of Man, and the Channel Islands will be happy to know that TwellowHood, the Twellow feature that allows Twitterers to connect with people in their own area, is now available in these areas. Until now, it has only been available in the US, Canada, and Australia.

Google is a master of online advertising, and in recent days, has more than ever been vilified as an enemy of the newspaper industry.  People were understandably surprised, then, to find ads for Chrome plastered all over a UK newspaper this morning.

The Metro is a free paper targeted at commuters in 16 cities.  It’s supposed to be the world’s largest free paper and the UK’s fourth largest paper of any sort, with 1.3 million copies distributed every weekday.

European online Christmas shopping season got off to a strong start this year in the U.K., France and Germany, according to a new report from comScore.

Visits to retail sites were up 18 percent during the first week of November compared to an average week during the prior two months, and increased even more throughout the month to reach a 41 percent growth rate during the week ending November 29.

France saw solid gains, resulting in the same 41 percent growth rate during the last week of November, while Germany showed slight lower growth at 16 percent.

Officials in the UK have announced plans to require children beginning at age 5 to be taught about online safety starting in 2011.

The new initiative called "Click Clever Click Safe" was created by the UK Council for Child Internet Safety (UKCCIS).

More professionally-produced, full-length programming (along with a lot of clips) is coming to YouTube, thanks to a deal with a television channel called Five.  Five, which operates in the UK, should bring more than 3,000 hours of content to the table.

MySpace is continuing to make big strides on the music front.  Or more accurately, the social network has made a huge, across-the-Atlantic leap, as late yesterday, MySpace Music launched in the UK.

If you didn’t read or somehow couldn’t guess from the title, LinkedIn’s hit a significant milestone, attracting its 3 millionth member in the UK.  This is a very good sign for the networking site that’s focused on connecting people aside from those who see each other at school or parties every week.

British police said today they have made Europe’s first arrests in the battle against an online Trojan which threatened to compromise thousands of computers in the UK.

The ZeuS or Zbot Trojan, a type of sophisticated malicious malware, is believed to have infected and accessed personal information from tens of thousands of computers around the world.

Microsoft has officially launched the UK version of its search engine Bing, taking it out of beta where it has been since late May.

During the past several months of beta testing, the Bing team has been working on making its search features more relevant for UK users.

"Bing is ready for the UK consumer, with our revolutionary way of searching the Internet proving very popular," said Ashley Highfield, vice president of Microsoft UK’s Consumer and Online Business.

Short stretches can really accumulate.  Did you know, for instance, that if someone comes back from lunch nine or ten minutes late every day, he (or she) will take the equivalent of free week of paid vacation per year?  And similarly, one IT services and technology company believes social networking is costing UK businesses $2.25 billion each year.

Google, eBay, and YouTube are all pretty big in the online world – monsters, really.  But in terms of page views – and in the UK – none of seem to them even approach Facebook’s popularity, as new Hitwise stats indicate that the social network receives about one-seventh of all page views.

New content – and quite a lot of it – will soon become available on YouTube.  The video-sharing site’s struck a revenue-sharing deal with Channel 4 that’ll give it access to full-length, recently broadcast shows along with about 3,000 hours of archive material. 

The UK High Court has found a new use for Twitter: serving legal injunctions.  It seems that an anonymous Twitter user was satirizing/impersonating another man, and the High Court decided that the easiest way to contact him (or her) was through the site.

Things are looking great for the online advertising industry. Several recent reports share data that is quite optimistic for the industry as a whole.

eMarketer points to research from GroupM, which claims that digital spending will be at 17% of total US ad spending in 2010. This would be an increase from 15.4% this year and 13.9% in 2008. GroupM also predicts 4% growth in US online ad spending in 2009, to $22.77 billion.

Paid Content UK conducted a Poll with Harris Interactive, asking respondents how much they would pay for online news, and what they would do if they’re favorite news sites started charging. The findings, perhaps not so shocking, indicate that users basically don’t really want to pay.

British news sites are starting to see a lot more traffic from the US. UK Internet visits to News and Media websites grew by 8% last year according to Hitwise, and US Internet visits to UK News and Media sites have gone up by 54%.

Google News had a record week in the UK last week. Hitwise attributes this largely to a big week for celebrity news.

Following a blackout period of about six months, music videos are set to make their return to YouTube UK.  YouTube’s worked out an agreement with PRS for Music, a trade body that collects royalties and at one point asked to be paid about 0.36 cents each time a clip was played. 

Twitter, media sweetheart and microblogging service extraordinaire, has another coup to add to its list: they’ve now beat out MySpace in terms of most visits in the UK.

Although the maximum length of tweets remains locked at 140 characters, Twitter itself is turning into something of a giant.  This morning, there’s news that the site managed to beat MySpace in terms of UK Internet visits, and it also seems to have caused a data center specialist to find new facilities.

Let’s hit the MySpace-related development first.  In truth, Twitter’s accomplishment here isn’t as impressive as it might sound; Twitter’s conquest is probably due more to MySpace’s fall than its own rise.

UK site Connected Internet this week found that BT Yahoo, which is an online portal for BT Broadband users, and is run by Yahoo, is using Google Search now, rather than Yahoo search, which has been in place.