The agreement will see Monster provide career- and job-related content on Yahoo’s homepages in the U.S. and Canada for three years.  Monster’s also getting the opportunity to negotiate similar agreements with other Yahoo properties worldwide.

Then, according to a press release, there may be "performance based annual payments calculated by clicks and expressions of interest, subject to annual floors and ceilings."  (No further details were given on this front.)

Anyway, Hilary Schneider, Yahoo’s Executive Vice President, explained the sale by stating, "The transaction with Monster enables us to continue to provide an important service to our users through the traffic agreement.  Yahoo! remains focused on its core businesses and delivering exceptional experiences to users, partners and advertisers."

Yahoo and Monster expect to complete the acquisition (and subsequently start the three-year traffic agreement) during the third quarter of this year.

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The theme this year is "If I Could Do Anything, I Would." Google says along with the winners Doodle appearing on the homepage on May 27, 2010, they will also receive a $15,000 college scholarship, a laptop computer and a $25,000 technology grant for their school.

Google has also put together a panel of expert judges. The Google Blog offers more details. "We’re happy to let you know that this year, we’ve also assembled a panel of well-known ‘Expert Jurors,’ including creative directors, cartoonists and famous animators ranging from Sesame Workshop to Pixar Animation Studios. Our Expert Jurors will help us narrow down the cream of the crop to 40 regional finalists, who will come to the Google office in New York City on May 26, 2010."

"For the second year, we’ll also be partnering with the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, where the top 40 regional finalists will get to have their artwork displayed in a national exhibit. And for the first time this year, we’ll give out eight Technology Booster awards to schools that submit maximum number of doodles per school by March 10th and have students in our 400 State Finalists."

Only schoolteachers or administrators can register their schools to participate.  Registration for the Doodle 4 Google contest closes at 11:59 Pacific Time on March 17, 2010, and entries must be submitted by March 31, 2010.

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"It’s important to realize that it’s not really actual robots or actual spiders out there…instead, it’s banks of machines …at Google’s data centers who open up an HTTP connection and request a page and then get it back," he says. "So any bank of machines (even 50 machines) could easily be requesting a bunch of different content."

"We try to refresh a large fraction of the web every few days," he adds. "So it turns out you really don’t need a ton of machines. Even a relatively small amount of machines operating in parallel and fetching pages in parallel can really be able to crawl of find new pages on the web in a very quick way."

Matt says that Google doesn’t give out the exact number, but that it’s somewhere between 25 and 1,000. I’m not sure what you can really do with that information, but it’s worth hearing a quick rundown of how it works for those who aren’t real familiar with how Google indexes content.

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Yusuf Mehdi, the senior vice president of Microsoft’s online audience business, talked to Reuters yesterday, and expressed a mixture of confidence and optimism on several fronts.  Much of that stemmed from his faith in a certain not-quite-cemented partnership.

"As soon as we close and implement the Yahoo deal, we have achieved a milestone: for advertisers, we are a credible No. 2," Mehdi said.

Later, Mehdi continued, "There’s no question we intend to make a profit. . . .  Clearly there’s a huge return in the search marketplace that can more than make up the investments we’ve put in to this point."

Bing (and perhaps Yahoo) fans should be happy to hear all this.  It doesn’t sound like Microsoft’s set its sights unrealistically high (note the "No. 2" comment), and at the same time, the company sees a way to make money off what’s generally been a losing proposition to date.

Now, of course, Microsoft and Yahoo just need to get regulators to approve their deal.

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The web, blogs, and social media have since opened up the floodgates of commentary, and there is really no stopping anybody from saying anything related to a specific news story and not being able to get that comment read. That could come in the comments on a web article itself, it could be on Twitter or Facebook. It could be a whole new post started on another blog. There is no containing conversation on the web.
All in all, that is a good thing. It means free speech, and it means that any fact, opinion, or slant can be heard, and perhaps more importantly disputed by the masses.

The worth of blog comments is a subject that is debated from time to time throughout the news industry and the Blogosphere. The subject has been thrust into the spotlight this week, as popular tech blog Engadget has decided to temporarily shut its comments down. In a post announcing it decision, Engadget wrote:

Hey guys, we know you like to have your fun, voice your opinions, and argue over your favorite gear, but over the past few days the tone in comments has really gotten out of hand. What is normally a charged — but fun — environment for our users and editors has become mean, ugly, pointless, and frankly threatening in some situations… and that’s just not acceptable. Some of you out there in the world of anonymous grandstanding have gotten the impression that you run the place, but that’s simply not the case.

Luckily, our commenting community makes up only a small percentage of our readership (and the bad eggs an even smaller part of that number), so while they may be loud, they don’t speak for most people who come to Engadget looking for tech news. Regardless, we’re going to crank things down for a little bit to let everyone just cool off, and we’ll switch them back on when we feel like we’ve shaken some of the trolls and spammers loose from the branches (AKA swing the banhammer in our downtime). See you on the other side!

Engadget has taken a fair amount of criticism for shutting down comments completely, even if it is only temporary. The fact that it is even a topic of debate shows the significance of comments to the way readers get their information. People want to see what others say. It adds to the story, and can often make the original piece more interesting. Even if the readers who actually comment are the minority, people still like to read what others have said. It can help them gauge the credibility of a story, or simply gain more insight into the topic being discussed.

Comments are not always useful or productive. Sometimes they are offensive. Sometimes they are just spammy. In fact, it has been discussed that such comments may actually hurt the search engine friendliness of your page. However moderating comments well can presumably help you avoid anything like that (although sometimes that is easier said than done).

Is such a risk worth closing the door on reader responses anyway? If people have something to say about an article or blog post, they’re going to find somewhere to say it. Allowing comments encourages that to be said right there, and frankly makes it easier to keep up with. If, for example, someone disputes a claim you make via Facebook or Twitter, you may miss it and not have a chance to defend that claim (granted, there are ways to incorporate the conversation from FB, Twitter, etc. into comments on a blog).

Stan Schroeder at the all things social media blog Mashable asks a good question, "How important are comments in this age where a lot of commenting is happening off-site — on Twitter, Facebook and other social networks?" He also points to Apple analyst John Gruber’s Daring Fireball blog, which doesn’t allow comments, but another site has been set up by others just to provide comments about the articles from that blog. According to CultofMac, it pulls in the articles via RSS (including the ads). It’s even called DaringFireballWithComments.net.

That is another clear indicator that not only will people find a way to comment if they want, but readers find the commenting process important. Do you agree? Should all blogs have comments? Should they ever be shut down entirely? How important are comments to your blog? How important are they to the news in general. We’d love to hear your thoughts.
 

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The majority (93%) of owners said they were "very satisfied" or "somewhat satisfied" with their device. Only 2 percent indicated any level of dissatisfaction.

Features are important to e-reader owners. More than half (60%) said wireless access was their favorite feature on their e-reader and nearly a quarter (23%) mentioned touch.

"Both the display technology and available content on e-Readers are optimized for those interested in books, said Ross Rubin, executive director of industry analysis at NPD.

"Pairing these optimizations with wireless technology for transparent access and touch screens for easy navigation has resonated with the avid readers that have been early e-Reader adopters."

Even with great features, e-reader owners are still looking for more in these relatively new devices. Some recommended improvements from owners include more book title availability (42%), longer battery life (39%), and color screens (34%). Content is important, with 46 percent of owners saying they were most satisfied with the selection of titles for their e-readers while 39 percent said they could find every title they were looking for.

E-reader owners are not completely tied to their devices to do their reading. About three-in-ten say they use at least one other device for reading e-books, such as a PC or a smartphone.

"As we have seen with music, photos and video, books and other printed matter are slated to appear on a wide array of devices that offer tradeoffs in such factors as screen size and battery life," said Rubin.

"As the recent introduction of Apple’s iPad demonstrates, applications now on smartphones benefit from larger screens, and industry leaders are recognizing the importance of supporting multiple platforms by supporting multiple clients and open standards."
 

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More than six months ago, reports indicated that Yahoo was trying to get rid of these divisions as Carol Bartz tried to focus on Yahoo’s core interests.  Intermittent reports since then hinted that Yahoo’s had difficulty getting other organizations to consider its asking prices.

Now, with respect to Yahoo Small Business, Jeff Bercovici wrote, "[A]fter finding a shortage of interest, the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Internet firm has put the sale on hold, according to a source close to the situation."

And Rafat Ali added, "Also, we have been hearing that its jobs site Hotjobs’ sale process is not going well . . . .  Not a single confirmed bid came in when the process started, our sources say."

So it sounds as if Yahoo’s garage sale wasn’t exactly successful.  The big question is whether the company will lower its expectations and try again, or decide to keep Yahoo Small Business and HotJobs, after all.

CORRECTION: Whoops, sorry everybody (including Yahoo) . . . turns out at least half of this information was wrong.  Monster announced its acquisition of HotJobs this afternoon.

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Cuban spoke at a keynote address this week at the AlwaysOn OnMedia NYC 2010 Conference, and is quoted by numerous sources as calling Google in particular a "vampire."

"When you think about vampires, they just suck on your blood," he is quoted as saying, reportedly telling newspapers and other publishers to "show some balls" and block Google News and, "There’s absolutely no reason for you guys to be indexed on Google News … if they don’t pay you."

Michael Arrington points out that at the TechCrunch50 conference in 2008, Cuban said he’d like to be an investor in TechMeme, which provides a similar service to Google News and other aggregators. In addition, Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land notes (in great detail) that Cuban is an investor in Mahalo, which actually "touts to advertisers how it taps into Google to generate page views."

While on the topic of the news industry debates, the topic of charging for news is always a conversation starter. The Wall Street Journal has taken down its pay wall for the day, giving users access to articles that would otherwise require a subscription to access. The effort comes as the result of a sponsorship from Acura (Via SIA).
 

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The figures come from a custom analysis by Nielsen Online for the Newspaper Association of America.  Newspaper websites users generated more than 3.2 billion page views during the quarter, spending more than 2.4 billion minutes sites.

"These strong and consistent audience figures come as newspaper publishers continue to transition their companies into multiplatform content providers to meet the needs of today’s audience," said NAA President and CEO John F. Sturm.

"As the economy begins to stabilize, newspaper companies are in position to leverage their trusted brands to reach a highly engaged audience and deliver maximum value to advertisers."

Time spent per person during the fourth quarter varied. In October users spent an average of 34 minutes and 14 seconds on newspaper websites. In November it was 32 minutes and 44 seconds. In December it was up slightly to 34 minutes and 52 seconds.

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"It appears that for a number of years, a person has been creating torrent sites that require a login and password as well as creating forums set up for torrent site usage and then selling these purportedly well-crafted sites and forums to other people innocently looking to start a download site of their very own," explains Twitter’s Director of Trust and Safety, Del Harvey. "However, these sites came with a little extra — security exploits and backdoors throughout the system.  This person then waited for the forums and sites to get popular and then used those exploits to get access to the username, email address, and password of every person who had signed up."

People commonly use the same password across multiple sites, which is essentially how they were able to get access to Twitter accounts, and why Twitter is reiterating a rule screamed by security experts for years: don’t use the same password for all of your accounts. 

"The takeaway from this is that people are continuing to use the same email address and password (or a variant) on multiple sites," says Harvey. "Through our discussions with affected users, we’ve discovered a high correlation between folks who have used third party forums and download sites and folks who were on our list of possibly affected accounts.  While not all users who were sent a password reset request fall into this category, we felt that it was important to put this knowledge out there so that users would know of the possibility of compromise of their data by a third party unrelated to their Twitter account."

Twitter is not considered as big of a security threat as Facebook by many companies according to a recent study, but that’s only because more people use Facebook. Any site that has a large userbase (and Twitter’s is growing), means there are likely more crooks and scammers too.

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