New movers are increasingly turning to local search to get information about their new towns, according to a study conducted by Harris Interactive for Yahoo! One in every four U.S. adults have moved within the last three years, and 60 percent of new movers said the experience was stressful.

Reaching a mass digital audience is getting easier as megaportals and search engines capture an ever-larger number of eyeballs. But crafting a compelling message, separating yourself from the competition, and reaching time-, and attention-, starved audiences are getting more complex as wholly new digital constructs gather momentum.

Instant messaging has been popular among cell phone users for a while, but it also has become more important to business users in recent years, according to a study released yesterday.

Apple Computer Inc. on Monday said its iTunes online music service has sold more than 500 million songs since its inception over two years ago.

Google is at once a powerful search engine and a growing e-mail provider. It runs a blogging service, makes software to speed web traffic and has ambitions to become a digital library. And it is developing a payments service. Although many internet users eagerly await each new technology from Google, its rapid expansion is also prompting concerns that the company may know too much: what you read, where you surf and travel, whom you write.

Self-proclaimed tech geek Brian Reid got an MP3 player for Christmas and decided after fiddling with it for a while to start a little podcast called Sex Talk that focused on one of his passions: gender issues. The suburban Washington, D.C., stay-at-home dad did a few broadcasts, touching on such sonorous topics as the Roman Catholic Church's stance on female priests, and then gave up back in April when his audience failed to grow beyond a few subscribers. So imagine his surprise when, during the first week of July, Reid got an e-mail from an Australian reader of his blog …

America Online is expected to announce today Carat Interactive, Atmosphere BBDO, and The Martin Agency have been selected to execute a three-pronged ad campaign for the highly anticipated launch of the revamped AOL.com free portal.

After giving its Internet competitors a huge head start, Clear Channel is ready to play catch-up. The radio industry's dominant company, with more than 1,200 stations, has begun introducing its first meaningful online strategy after what could be the most protracted example of Internet indifference among major media businesses. At long last, Clear Channel is building more original programming and other features into its stations' Web sites to lure listeners and, it hopes, a new stable of advertisers.

"Mash-ups" -- homespun combinations of mainstream services -- are altering the Net.

Microsoft Corp. said on Thursday it won exclusive rights to develop and publish multiplayer online games starring Marvel Enterprises Inc.'s super heroes, including Spider-man, the X-men and the Hulk. The deal covers massively multiplayer online (MMO) game titles developed for Microsoft's upcoming Xbox 360 gaming console and published by the software giant's game studio.