A New York man known for stirring up controversy on YouTube was arrested Thursday by federal authorities after allegedly claiming he’d instructed Gerber employees to lace baby food with cyanide.

Anton Dunn, a 42-year-old from Manhattan who goes by “Trashman” on YouTube, has a moderate following on the video …

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Using technology called SearchMonkey, Yahoo search results now spruce up some search results by default, including results with LinkedIn content.

(Credit: Yahoo)

Yahoo has begun using its SearchMonkey technology by default to give more prominence and potentially usefulness to search results involving LinkedIn contacts, Yelp reviews of businesses, and local companies.

Most of Yahoo’s search results are a plain, textual list of Web sites. SearchMonkey, though, lets Yahoo’s servers present some results with richer accompanying information, such as product prices at Amazon.com or movie critic ratings. If it works out as promised, that could make search results more useful, keep searchers coming back for more, drive more traffic to those sites that take advantage of SearchMonkey technology, and help Yahoo compete with Google.

The hitch for most companies that might want to use SearchMonkey to gussy up their own search results on Yahoo, though, is that they generally must convince users go to a SearchMonkey application gallery and enable that specific SearchMonkey behavior. But on Thursday night, Yahoo switched on three SearchMonkey options so all searchers will see enhanced results from Yelp, a site that lets members review restaurants and other businesses, Yahoo Local, which connects people with nearby businesses, and LinkedIn, which lets members keep in touch with contacts.

SearchMonkey relies on “semantic Web” technology that’s designed to label Web site information with tags personal can process, giving more structure to the data.

Yahoo said on its Search blog Friday that it’s judicious about which SearchMonkey applications it chooses to switch on.

“Before making an application ‘default on,’ we require a few things: access to the site’s structured data through semantic markup or a data feed, a well-designed and broadly useful application, and positive user metrics,” stated Amit Kumar, director of product management for Yahoo search.

And when Yahoo tested the applications on a subset of users, it found good results.

“To understand how a SearchMonkey app affects user metrics, we generally expose a small percentage of our users to a default-on experience and measure if and how it changes their usage. We started with Yelp, LinkedIn, and Yahoo Local because they were among our first partners to share structured data,” Kumar said. “Our tests uncovered that users found these apps useful; in fact, in some cases, we saw a lift in click-through rate of as high as 15 percent.”

Update 4:17 p.m. PDT: I removed an earlier illustration that didn’t in fact illustrate SearchMonkey.

Fore more visit Source: [webware]

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A federal court ruled Thursday that a lawsuit against the executives who sold social network MySpace to News Corp. can go forward, as Judge George King in the Central District of California rejected a motion to dismiss the case.

The case was brought forth by Brad Greenspan, who founded a digital-entertainment company called eUniverse in 1998. Greenspan served as CEO and chairman of the publicly traded eUniverse until late 2003, when he resigned amid financial woes that saw the company’s stock delisted from the Nasdaq index.

While Greenspan was at the helm of eUniverse, he oversaw the creation of MySpace, but it wasn’t until after his successor, Richard Rosenblatt, had taken over that MySpace gained mass appeal. Greenspan remained a shareholder, strongly opposed MySpace’s 2005 sale to News Corp. for $580 million, and has been targeting News Corp. and the Intermix executives who sold the company with legal action since 2006.

The current class action shareholder suit, Jim Brown vs. Brett C. Brewer et al., targets Rosenblatt, former Intermix President Brett Brewer, and venture backer VantagePoint Venture Partners as defendants (among others), with “Jim Brown” a representation of Intermix common-stock shareholders whom Greenspan claims were defrauded of billions. The real value of MySpace, Greenspan argues, was much higher than $580 million and not all of the requisite financial information was disclosed.

“It has been three years since I worked around the clock pleading with other MySpace-Intermix shareholders to vote against the sale of MySpace to News Corp. in 2005,” Greenspan said in a statement. “I knew that the value of the company was billions of dollars, however the deceptive practice of hiding MySpace financials by Intermix management robbed shareholders of their opportunity to adequately gauge the company’s value.”

Critics will likely state it’s a cry for attention and money, quasi-analogous to how they perceived the legal action that the founders of ConnectU brought against social network Facebook, claiming that founder Mark Zuckerberg had stolen code and trade secrets from them. That suit appears to have finally petered out last month. As for the MySpace suit, the decision is in the judge’s hands now.

Greenspan is now at the helm of Live Universe, an entertainment holdings company that has acquired struggling dot-coms like Revver, whose troubles he blamed on policy at MySpace that blocked its ad-supported videos.

Fore more visit Source: [webware]

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Bank Open Window For Deceit by Jim Willie, CB. Editor, Hat Trick Letter |July 31, 2008 As vacation season approaches in the Untied Says and Canada, the task of reading should give way to looking at pictures to tell a story, or gazing at scenery from a lodge or campground, or lazy afternoons at the beach. Among […] For more visit Source:www.investment-blog.net

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MySpace, the social network owned by News Corp.’s Fox Interactive Media, announced Wednesday that it has hired five new members for its executive team–three senior vice presidents and two vice president–in fields ranging from engineering to customer service. They’re coming from a mixed background of media and tech….

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BOSTON (MarketWatch) — Massachusetts Secretary of the Commonwealth William Galvin has filed a complaint against Merrill Lynch & Co. related to the sale of auction-rate securities, the market for which blew up during the credit crunch. Among other things, the complaint alleges Merrill co-opted its research department “to assist in sales efforts geared towards reducing its inventory of auction-rate securities.” […] For more visit Source:www.investment-blog.net

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In the high school cafeteria of Facebook apps, Scrabulous is like that girl who gets in trouble for showing too much skin, only to throw on a hoodie and be let back into the principal’s good graces. Sort of. The game has effectively returned, but with a redesigned board, …

Source [The social]

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Dell is showing off what might be one of the most mainstream, eco-friendly personal to date. It also looks really damm cool. It’s called the Dell Studio Hybrid, and it starts at around $500. You might have seen an early design concept featured before.

The Dell Studio Hybrid, available now, is about the size of a collegiate dictionary, according to Dell. It’s also stated to be the personal manufacturer’s greenest Computer to date.

Highlights in this particular area include the aforementioned small form factor (making it around 80 percent smaller than standard desktops), packaging made from mostly recyclable materials, and, most importantly, using reportedly 70 percent less power than a typical desktop. It is also stated to meet Energy Star 4 stipulations with a very efficient power supply.

The Personal computer, which can be set in vertical or horizontal orientations, comes with a choice of interchangeable external finishes. This includes a bamboo look, which would go nicely with your new, eco-friendly SimpleTech [re]Drive.

Technical aspects of the Studio Hybrid can include, depending upon the configuration, an Intel Core 2 Duo processor, digital/analog Television tuner, HDMI port, Wi-Fi, and a Blu-Ray disc drive. You also have access, as an option, to a Dell on the internet backup service.

For more visit Source:[green.yahoo]

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