A tussle over antipiracy technology is looming over the young mobile phone content business, with big phone companies claiming that new music and video services could be derailed as a result.

U.S. online job ads grew slightly in April, posting their smallest increase in four months as economic growth appeared to hit a soft patch, the top job search Web site, Monster, said on Thursday. Monster said its employment index ticked up to 131 last month, its highest in the survey's 1-1/2 year history, from 130 in March

Yahoo and Google's ongoing rivalry turned to video search this week, with each company touting more searchable content and marquee partnerships.

Could Google's ad screeners be biased? The world of search engine marketing is fraught with stories of Google rejecting ads submitted to its system for all sorts of reasons, including trademark-infringement. Now RightMarch.com claims that the stringent Google censors were politically partisan in rejecting a text ad that featured the same exact copy as one placed by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

Vespa parent Piaggio USA is seeking scooter aficionados to blog about their lifestyle and their passions on its site. The company, with the help of PR and blog agency CooperKatz & Company, is developing plans to develop two separate blogs to be updated daily for at least a year. The site launches, expected in June, will be supported by PR, a paid search effort using lifestyle-oriented keywords, and an ad campaign on other blogs. Spending was not disclosed.

In honor of National Teacher Day, Google featured on its home page Tuesday a graphic of a chalkboard with an apple at its base. Quirky tributes like this are meant to engender goodwill among the Google masses.

Online consumer direct lender E-Loan this week launched an integrated advertising and branding campaign with the company's new tag line: "E-Loan. Radically Simple." The campaign will appear on local and national cable television, radio, online, and outdoor billboards, and at select music and community events.

Google is seeking to patent a technology meant to help its Google News section sort stories based on their overall quality, which could augment the current methods of ranking results by date and relevance to search terms.

A little sneaky law-making - and suddenly illicit downloading and file-sharing is a federal crime in the US.

When Bill Gates showed off the new Metro document format in Longhorn at a hardware conference last week, some analysts were quick to call it a PDF killer. Indeed, there's plenty of overlap between Adobe's popular Portable Document Format and what Microsoft is planning to include in the next version of Windows. Metro is designed to do things PDF already does, namely to allow for the creation of files that can be printed, viewed or archived without needing the program that created them.