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Yesterday and this morning, reports indicated that Yahoo wasn’t having much luck selling its small business unit and HotJobs.  HotJobs has, however, found a new home.  This afternoon, Monster announced that it’s agreed to acquire the property for $225 million, and Monster’s reached a traffic agreement with Yahoo, too.

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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Politicians are perhaps not the best people to talk to about privacy; they intentionally thrust themselves into the spotlight, and can be responsible for annoying commercials and phone calls that bother the rest of us at home.  Still, Facebook arguably accomplished something today by discussing privacy with six politicians and the CEO and of the Family Online Safety Institute.

In recognition of Data Privacy Day, Facebook posted quotes from the Chairman of the French Data Protection Commission, the Australian Privacy Commissioner, the Information and Privacy Commissioner for Ontario, and three U.S. representatives (along with the aforementioned CEO).  This demonstrates that Facebook’s at least thinking about privacy.

It also indicates that Facebook is on fairly decent terms with all of these individuals.  Most of the quotes were meaningless and/or self-promotional, and we won’t bore you by repeating even half of them.  But the fact that the politicians supplied them is interesting; you probably wouldn’t find these folks dealing with a company they disliked or considered too controversial.

So a couple of takeaway points might be that Facebook has your best interests at heart and possesses friends in high places. 

As for privacy-related advice, we’ll just relay the words of Stephen Balkam, the Family Online Safety Institute’s CEO.  He wrote that too few people "read privacy policies and set privacy settings.  Data Privacy Day is a good time to think about what information you are revealing about yourself on the web and take the time to talk to kids about the content you are posting and where you are posting it."

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Last year, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada investigated Facebook as a result of several complaints.  Then the Privacy Commissioner made some recommendations, Facebook followed them, and all in all, both sides remained quite friendly.  Only now another probe’s been launched, and the privacy advocate sounds less patient this time.

This investigation was prompted by another user complaint, and Assistant Privacy Commissioner Elizabeth Denham (who led the original inquiry) explained in a statement, "The individual’s complaint mirrors some of the concerns that our Office has heard and expressed to Facebook in recent months."

Apparently the complaint came as a result of the reworked privacy controls that Facebook introduced not too long ago.  As more than a few bloggers noticed, Facebook’s recommended settings would in certain cases cause users to share more information than they had in the past.

Facebook may not have too much to fear, however.  As we noted in June of last year, Canada’s privacy commissioner is only able to make recommendations, and not collect fines or create laws.

Plus, since the privacy controls changeover is pretty well in the past, it’s hard to see any point in making a fuss over it now.

Anyway, according to the official statement, "The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada will investigate the complaint it has received, while continuing to follow up with Facebook as it introduces new changes to its site."

Facebook hasn’t yet responded to the new development.

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Rick Spencer of Canonical, which distributes the Ubuntu version of Linux, revealed that Canonical has formed a revenue-sharing deal with Yahoo, which will see Yahoo become the default search engine in the Mozilla Firefox browser in the upcoming 10.04 version (aka "Lucid Lynx") of the operating system.

Spencer shared the information via a public mailing list (hat tip to Ars Technica), where he said:

Note that this won’t in any way effect the ability of a user to choose and use the search provider of their choice. It’s literally 2 easily discoverable clicks to change this setting, a simple matter of switching to that search provider in the chrome by clicking on the icon and choosing the desired provider. Note also that Yahoo! does not share any personally identifiable or usage information.

I am pursuing this change because Canonical has negotiated a revenue sharing deal with Yahoo! and this revenue will help Canonical to provide developers and resources to continue the open development of Ubuntu and the Ubuntu Platform. This change will help provide these resources as well as continuing to respect our user’s default search across Firefox.

The move is an interesting one for both Canonical and Yahoo. Yahoo needs to do whatever it can to gain search market share, and Ubuntu is a popular version of Linux.

"Canonical is unusual among major commercial Linux distributors in the sense that it doesn’t sell an ‘enterprise’ or ‘pro’ version of its software," notes Ars Technica author Ryan Paul. "In an effort to make this approach sustainable, Canonical is experimenting with a number of different business models, including commercial support for end users, subscription-based Web services, and integration support for hardware makers. In the announcement about the search engine change, Spencer says that Canonical’s partnership with Yahoo will help to fund the ongoing development of the distribution."

Terms of the deal between Canoncial and Yahoo were not made available. Meanwhile, the search and advertising deal between Microsoft and Yahoo is still pending. The effects of that on Yahoo’s market share remain to be seen.
 

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Most estimates agree that there are almost 7 billion human beings on this planet, and even the biggest misanthropes must admit that a few of them are smart and capable.  Yahoo apparently wasn’t able to encounter any keepers, however, as it’s stopped searching for someone to lead the company’s international division.

This position opened up in February of 2009 as Carol Bartz really began to reshape operations at Yahoo.  Now, as reported by John Letzing, Bartz said during yesterday’s earnings call, "I didn’t find anyone who was up to our needs."

Some critics might take this as an admission of defeat; it seems a bit ridiculous that a year-long hunt didn’t turn up anything.  Or perhaps even scary, if Yahoo located some qualified candidates, but said candidates didn’t want to work for the company.

Still, the timing of Bartz’s announcement goes a long ways towards making things look better.  Yahoo’s Q4 report was pretty good, after all – its stock rose in after-hours trading and is still headed up this morning – so this position appears to be less than critical.

When everything’s said and done, the new plan is for three Yahoo executives (Hilary Schneider, Rose Tsou, and Rich Riley) representing the Americas, Asia, and EMEA to report directly to Bartz.

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Five reporters from radio stations in in Canada, France, Belgium, and Switzerland are going to spend five days locked in a French farmhouse with only Twitter and Facebook to get their news. It’s not a lame reality show, but an experiment looking at the quality of news from social media.

This experiment may be flawed from the start. One can almost imagine that people will purposely put out false information via Twitter and Facebook just to mess with these people (they can be followed on Twitter [updates in French]). Reporting on this story, AFP’s Marie-Dominique Follain asks if social media is really a serious threat to established media.

Is this a worthwhile experiment? Tell us what you think.

It appears that the credibility of social media as a way to get news is what is coming into question (not that this is the first time that has happened). "People tweet about fake events. Social media is rife with hoaxes," people will say. Yes, that’s true.

People do put out false information, but what seems to be overlooked is that Facebook and Twitter are just the platforms for people posting their updates. They often are accompanied by links to blogs and traditional news sources. While the group have agreed to only connect to the outside world through Facebook and Twitter, and no web surfing, they are reportedly still allowed to follow links to outside sites from these social networks. With the 140-character limit of Twitter in particular, linking out is often very necessary in getting the whole story across, or at least gaining access to that story from the reader’s perspective.

Maybe I will be proven wrong, but I don’t see any possible result coming from this experiment that indicates social media is not useful for finding news. I don’t believe social media threatens traditional media. It compliments it, in a variety of ways.

Sometimes stories break there before they are reported by a traditional source…that’s a source for that traditional channel. It could just as easily come from someone saying something in a crowded bar. If it’s newsworthy, it might be worth covering, but it might be a lie, and facts are worth checking. It’s just that with channels like Facebook and Twitter, those bars are as big as the entire world, and the patrons aren’t all there to relax, drink, and have a good time (though some of them certainly are). Some of them are there to spread news. And people know that they can get news there because of that very fact (a study last year found that news was a top priority of Twitter users).

Not all news breaks on social media (although the ever-increasing accessibility to social media through mobile seems to be greatly narrowing the margin), but social media is always there for open discussion about the news, which tends to make for a more rounded outlook on any particular event. It doesn’t eliminate the bias, but it provides a means for all biases to come together to form a more complete view of the story. Open discussion allows for points to be made that wouldn’t necessarily be made by a traditional news outlet because maybe that outlet does have some kind of bias, even if it strives not to. Some say everyone has some bias.

The fact that people do turn to social media for news emphasizes the fact that they do want a look at the whole picture, and do want to have open discussion on matters. True, some of that is pointless noise, but strewn throughout that are often important facts and otherwise unconsidered viewpoints.

So what can this experiment really prove? That you can limit yourself to social media for news sources if you want? Isn’t the point of social media (at least in the news sense) to strip away the limitations? Share your thoughts.

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Google recently announced that it was launching a new feature for Google Docs, which would allow users to upload and store any kind of file. What may not have been clear, however, is that this new storage from Google isn’t limited to just Google Docs.

The company is saying that Gmail and Picasa storage can also be used. Google Docs Product Marketing Manager Peter Harbison writes:

Each account will get 1 GB of free storage in Google Docs (in addition to the 1 GB of free storage in Picasa Web Albums and over 7 GB of free storage in Gmail) and will be able to upload any file up to 250 MB. If you’ve already purchased additional storage for Picasa Web Albums and Gmail, that storage is now shared with Google Docs as well, giving you more ways to use your online storage space. As we announced in November, additional storage is only $0.25 per GB per year. And because of the enthusiastic response, the Google Photos team has extended the special offer with Eye-Fi: users in the US or Canada who purchase 200 GB of extra storage for $50 will receive a free wifi-enabled SD card from Eye-Fi.

Google says the feature will be rolled out over the next couple of weeks. There will be a notification bubble when you sign into Google Docs.
 

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Google has put together a one-minute guide to using its Search-based Keyword tool. The tool was launched just over a year ago in beta. It lets paid search advertisers see what keywords they may be missing out on based on searches on their site.

"Millions of people use Google each day to find products and services by searching on various keywords," says Dan Friedman of Google’s Inside AdWords Crew. "This means that by including all keywords that are relevant to your product or service in your campaigns, you can ensure you can ensure that you will reach a greater set of potential customers. To help you do this, you can use the Search-based Keyword Tool to quickly identify relevant keywords which aren’t yet included in your AdWords campaigns."

The guide follows:

Earlier this year, Google made some improvements to the search-based keyword tool. The company not only expanded the reach to Australia, Canada, China, Japan, and New Zealand in addition to the US and the UK, but users can also now select the currency they’d like to see suggested bids in on the setting page.

Google also added some customization features to the tool this year that could lead to more targeted results for users. These include language/country-specific results and ad/search share filters.

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Twitter has partnered with Telstra to launch Twitter SMS in Australia.

"As always, it is free to receive notifications and standard text messaging rates apply to sending," says Twitter’s Kevin Thau. "It’s the same pricing as sending and receiving text messages from friends."

To use the feature, users can simply send "START" to 0198089488. This page shows all of the official Twitter Text Commands. Twitter recommends Aussies follow the following accounts:

@australian (News from The Australian newspaper)
@delta_goodrem (Musician)
@kyleandjackieo (Australia’s #1 radio show)
@DanniiMinogue (Team Minogue judge for The X Factor)
@KevinRuddPM (Prime Minister)

To follow via SMS, just send "FOLLOW" and the username.

Twitter says more countries and more carriers will be coming soon. Aside from Australia, Twitter already has such support for the US, Canada, UK, India, Indonesia, Ireland, and New Zealand.

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Amazon has released an iPhone app for the Kindle to over 60 countries. Now users in a total of 64 countries can read Kindle books on their iPhones and iPod Touch devices.

"We are excited to make the Kindle for iPhone App available to iPhone and iPod touch users in more than 60 countries, allowing them to access the vast selection of the most popular books, all available wirelessly from the Kindle Store," said Ian Freed, vice president, Amazon Kindle. "The Kindle for iPhone App is the perfect companion for customers who own a Kindle or Kindle DX, and a great way for customers around the world to download and read books even if they don’t yet have a Kindle."

Amazon says that with the app, customers in over 60 countries will be able to: 

- Purchase, download and read hundreds of thousands of books available in the Kindle Store.

- Read the beginning of books for free before they buy them.

- Add and automatically synchronize bookmarks and last page read.

- Access their library of previously purchased Kindle books stored on Amazon’s servers for free.

- Choose from six different font sizes and adjust words per line.

- Add and view notes and highlights marked on Kindle and Kindle DX.

- Read books in full color including children’s books, cookbooks, travel books, textbooks and graphic novels.

Countries where the app is available include: The United States, Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Estonia, Finaland, France, Greece, Guatemala, Germany, Honduras, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Korea, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, Norway, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Republic of Malta, Republic of Moldova, Romania, Russia, Spain, Switzerland, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Taiwan, Thailand, United Kingdom, Uruguay, Venezuela, and Vietnam.

Amazon says that in the coming months, they will be releasing Kindle for Mac and Kindle for Blackberry. Amazon’s Kindle reached record sales in the month of November.
 

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