Yahoo has purchased online photo-sharing service Flickr, less than a week after the Internet giant launched a beta test of a new blogging tool. Vancouver, British Columbia-based Flickr lets users upload digital photos from computers and camera phones, put together photo albums, and post photos to blogs, among other things.

Agence France-Presse has sued Google Inc. for copyright infringement, alleging that the Internet search engine included AFP headlines, news summaries and photographs published without permission. In a suit filed in a Washington court, AFP sought damages and interest of at least 17.5 million dollars (13.1 million euros) and an interdiction on the publication of its text and photos without prior agreement.

The Association for Interactive Marketing (AIM) is no more. Today, it was absorbed by its parent, The Direct Marketing Association (DMA), which acquired AIM, officially founded in 1996, as an independent subsidiary in 1998.

Songs from Fiona Apple's latest album are widely available on the internet and are being played on the radio, but much to the chagrin of fans, the album can't be bought for love or money. Apple apparently finished Extraordinary Machine in 2003 but it was never released by her record label, Epic Records. (Epic is a subsidiary of Sony BMG Music Entertainment).

What if every other time you brought a book home from the library, you opened it up and it turned out to be a pop-up advertisement for a local dry cleaner? Cornell University researchers are trying to clear file-swapping networks of this kind of disappointment, with a new program aimed at filtering spam out of the peer-to-peer pool. But the tool could also ratchet up the antipiracy arms race, by filtering out the numerous "decoy" files used by Hollywood and record label allies to discourage illegal downloaders.

Online ads are so prevalent, advertisers are running out of room for them on Web sites. So they've found a new spot to park their ads: at the tip of your computer's cursor.

With interactive advertising coming back from the dead and clients boosting their online budgets, agencies and recruiters are having trouble hiring quality creative and media personnel. In particular, junior and mid-level posts are sitting empty. Several agency recruiters and executives report a paucity of senior copywriters and designers, as well as qualified media planners.

Mobile phone users around the world spent $400 million on pornographic pictures and video in 2004, an amount that is expected to rise to $5 billion by 2010, despite the tiny screen sizes, a survey found on Thursday.

Since search engines are usually the first stop for online shoppers (with 40 percent of them choosing Google), your business could very well be toast if it doesn't crack the top 10 -- preferably the top 5, which would require no downward scrolling. (Not unlike the increased readership an article that begins above the fold in a newspaper gets.) One study concluded that sites that appear on the first page of results attract six times the traffic they did before landing there and earn double the sales.

In the race to build the Web of the future, some developers are reaching back to the past. Start-ups and industry giants such as Microsoft continue to devise newfangled systems for delivering desktop-like applications over the Web. But search giant Google has taken a different path, using older technology to build its newest applications such as Google Maps and Gmail.