Proponents of the latest Web trends were warned Tuesday that the rest of the world may not have a clue what they are talking about. A survey of British taxi drivers, pub landlords and hairdressers -- often seen as barometers of popular trends -- found that nearly 90 percent had no idea what a podcast is and more than 70 percent had never heard of blogging. "When I asked the panel whether people were talking about blogging, they thought I meant dogging," said Sarah Carter, the planning director at ad firm DDB London.

If you found yourself needing an old biology textbook and couldn't locate your battered copy from college, you'd have a few options. You could go to a university bookstore and snag a used copy; you could drop a few dollars on a new one at Amazon.com; or you could track down some old college chums and ask for their copies. But if Jimmy Wales and his colleagues at the Wikimedia Foundation have anything to say about it, you could have another way to go--the Wikibooks project. It's their attempt to create a comprehensive, kindergarten-to-college curriculum of textbooks that are free …

As part of its effort to make search marketing more appealing to brand marketers and other traditional marketers, Yahoo! has begun offering its larger advertiser and agency partners more advanced tools for choosing keywords. The company has been quietly beta testing two new tools with 10 to 15 of Yahoo!'s top advertisers and agencies for the past two months. Buzz Index -- not to be confused with the company's existing consumer-facing tool of the same name -- is a keyword discovery tool with attached demographic data, and Search Share of Voice is a metric analogous to the traditional marketing measurement. …

Banc of America Securities said it continues to believe that the Internet "is in the midst of a multi-year share grab of ad dollars, with Yahoo! and Google poised to be among the biggest beneficiaries." On the newspaper side, Banc of America said that companies with the strongest franchises and "more-national exposure" will see Internet-advertising revenue approach 10% of total ad revenue over the next two years, but some of that growth will come at the expense of the print side.

Despite tricky legislative hurdles, lists offering marketers the chance to prospect via text messages to cell phones have come onto the rental market, though traditional direct marketers seem hesitant to take that step. The legal issues involved in text messaging, also known as short message service, are twofold, said Ian Volner, an attorney at Washington law firm Venable LLP, which serves as counsel to the Direct Marketing Association on teleservices issues.

In the latest convergence of prime time and online, Google Inc. GOOG.O on Monday began offering exclusive video streaming of the new UPN television comedy "Everybody Hates Chris" -- a first for the network and the popular Internet portal.

Google Inc. said late on Monday that it was tripling the number of Web pages that its system can search, seeking to upstage rival Yahoo Inc. in claims to be the world's widest Web search. But Google also said it would no longer publicize the number of Web pages available from any search -- calling a halt to what analysts say has become an increasingly meaningless size competition.

The search engines are all about blogs, but turning that traffic into a selling vehicle is another story. Not so for eHobbies.com, which says it has watched its conversion rate double from the normal 2 percent to 4 percent whenever site users visit one of its blogs. Since adding blogging to its site in May, 5 percent of the company's overall traffic comes from its main blog destination, www.ehobbies.blogs.com. In addition, 5 percent of all orders have recently tracked to a blog-based coupon.

Its technology is beloved by illegal downloaders and file sharers. Now the outfit is raising venture funding in a bid to go commercial.

Internet media company Yahoo Inc. said on Monday that it launched business columns from nine writers on its finance page. The columns will cover topics including personal finance, economic trends and investing -- adding to Internet content it can call its own.