A new Web site lets users lend money to and borrow money from other people at what it claims are better interest rates than those available at banks, reportedly averting some of the risk inherent in typical person-to-person loans. The New York Times calls Internet start-up Prosper.com a "mixed brew of eBay, Friendster and the local bank." The idea works like this: prospective borrowers register with the site and let the company review their credit history. They then post a loan request of up to $25,000 along with a limit for the amount of interest they're willing to pay. Loans …

Amazon and Google are both reportedly in talks with music industry executives about developing their own respective digital music services. The market is utterly dominated by Apple Computer's iTunes music store, which claims a 70-80 percent share of the digital music market. According to a Financial Times report, senior music executives welcome the idea of new competition in a market that has failed to produce any serious challengers to Apple. One unnamed music industry CEO reported "active communications" with both companies in the last 60 days. "I do believe Amazon and Google will do something serious," he said, adding that …

Bill Gates reiterated Microsoft's desire to challenge Apple Computer's iPod portable music player. You'd be forgiven for not even being aware of Microsoft's attempts to enter the Apple-dominated market. Nevertheless, Gates, speaking to a group of minority students on Friday, said: "I don't think what's out on the market today is the final answer. Between us and our partners, you can expect some pretty hot products coming out over the next few years." Gates applauded Apple for its success, but said Microsoft was working with hardware partners to create a cheaper product that connects easier and handles video and photos …

In yet another sign of the eroding influence of newspapers in the classifieds market, a new study claims that just five percent of new hires last year came from newspapers while the Internet was the source of 51 percent of new hires. The study, commissioned by technology consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, found that of that 51 percent, the highest-quality candidates came from employers' own Web sites and from employee referrals. Internet hiring practices were broken down even further: 21 percent of new hires came from corporate employment Web sites, 15 percent came from general job boards, 6 percent from …

Yahoo on Wednesday confirmed it polled users of its Yahoo Mail service about what they would want in exchange for making Yahoo their primary search engine. That's right folks, Yahoo is asking its users how it could bribe them away from Google. A Yahoo representative confirmed that it sent a survey to a random sampling of about 5 percent of its Yahoo Mail users. According to the survey, the company is launching a program to reward people for doing the majority of their searches on Yahoo, which would yield some kind of monthly reward. Users would have to log into …

Microsoft's plans to rebrand certain MSN services under the name "Live" could be interpreted as a sign of weakness, according to an Associated Press report. MSN Chief John Nicol begs to differ, saying the changes will allow MSN to focus on providing more entertainment services, including more opportunities to create and contribute its own content to the portal. MSN will be more community-rich, he said, containing user videos and reviews of things like hotels. Analysts aren't quite sure what Microsoft is up to by divorcing MSN from many of its core former services. MSN Hotmail, MSN Search, MSN Spaces and …

Internet Explorer users are as much as 21 times more likely to end up with spyware on their computers than those who use Mozilla's Firefox browser, academic researchers said. Two University of Washington professors and two graduate students sent Web crawlers to scour 45,000 malicious Web sites for executable files that exposed unpatched versions of IE and Firefox to so-called drive-by downloads. When prompted to download a file they'd never requested, the group's IE computer was infected 1.6 percent of the time when responding "yes." Even when the group clicked "no," 0.6 percent of the domains installed the drive-by on …

The Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization recently published a surprising industry study that said just 11 percent of search marketing dollars are spent on search engine optimization, with the vast majority--83 percent--being spent on pay-per-click advertising. The findings are surprising, a Search Engine Guide columnist says, because SEO can produce a significantly higher return on investment than SEM. It's also cost-effective; but one of the main problems with SEO is that it often requires (sometimes major) changes to the company Web site, when many clients just don't want to hear that. SEO is also a long process, with results …

It looks as if Boston will be the next city to roll out a municipal Wi-Fi network. The city is awaiting a report next week from a nonprofit organizing the initiative. The city's mayor announced a 22-member task force to spearhead the project, made up of representatives from business, the community and the city's universities. Business and academic leaders had been disappointed with the previous lack of enthusiasm for municipal Wi-Fi after hearing about the plans in Philadelphia and San Francisco. Nevertheless, there is a danger in jumping into such a project too quickly, as was evident in the collapse …

MySpace.com, News Corp.'s social networking media darling, has a dirty little secret: the site is rife with sexual predators targeting tweens and teens. So when advertisers ask the crucial question, "How do you intend to deal with sexual predators?" the answer, unfortunately, would have to be something along the lines of "We're working on it." As Robert Young, a former Delphi exec, says, "This is a huge problem; as large as anything a Web community will ever deal with." The troubling fact is there is very little News Corp. can do to eliminate sexual predators on the site, he …