Reuters warns against the recent alliance between Yahoo and hundreds of newspaper sites. Under the deal, forged last November and amended in April, Yahoo will deliver ads across the network of sites, and feature certain stories in Yahoo News. The alliance was intended to boost readership and bring in more advertisers, but Reuters' Robert MacMillan says the partnership "will saddle [the newspaper publishers] with unproven technology and cost them some independence and flexibility." On the other hand, what else are they going to do? Smaller publishers are losing the battle for eyeballs to blogs and major online pubs like the …

Speaking at Google's recent (and exclusive) Zeitgeist conference, Eric Schmidt on Thursday dismissed the notion that social networking is just a fad. Quite the contrary--the Google CEO said the company has big plans for the Web's hottest trend. "People don't appreciate how many page views on the Internet are in social networks," he said. "It is very real. It's a very real phenomenon." Few in this country know it, but Google actually has a social network called Orkut, which is a huge hit in Latin America and Asia but effectively non-existent both here and in Europe, where MySpace and …

While the likes of CBS and NBC repurpose their nightly news programs online, ABC News is trying hard to adapt its Web programming to reach younger audiences. Its daily Webcast, simply called "World News," has an MTV bent to it--delivering news in a "raw" and more "personal" format, says The New York Times. At fifteen minutes in length, it's cut for the ADD generation, too--a perfect fit for iPod and cell phone viewing. Now 20 months old, "World News" has evolved from basic daily news to something more interactive, with first-person viewer essays and video blogs. It also covers many …

YouTube users can now peg videos set in specific locations to maps in Google Earth. So, if you go to Paris and scroll over the Eiffel Tower, a video overlay would pop up containing information about the building. The feature could be a real boon for tourism, enabling would-be travelers to surf the digital globe for information about potential vacation spots. Head to Maui and you might find snorkeling or surfing videos, hotel tours, or information about local wildlife. Producers enable the feature by adding geo-tags to their YouTube videos; Google Earth users will not be able to geo-tag videos. …

The Recording Industry Association of America better watch out: a new kind of fraternity is popping up at college campuses that advocates looser copyright law restrictions and free information exchange over the Internet. Called Students for Free Culture, the group has chapters at more than 35 colleges across the country. "We will listen to free music, look at free art, watch free film and read free books," reads the manifesto from its Web site, freeculture.org. "We refuse to accept a future of digital feudalism." Many founding members of the various chapters have been sued before by the RIAA for downloading …

Antitrust experts tell Reuters they expect Google's $3.1 billion DoubleClick merger to soon be approved by the Federal Communications Commission, which regulates mergers and acquisitions, despite opposition from Google competitors Microsoft and Yahoo. Both Mark Kovner, a lawyer, and consultant Steven Sunshine believe the acquisition will go through because advertising is still a huge market with many competitors. The DoubleClick acquisition may give Google a competitive advantage, but the combined company would hardly create a monopoly, they say. Sunshine adds that the deal should pass because it's "being reviewed by an administration that has been less aggressive than past administrations …

We are knee-deep in the digital revolution, yet marketers are still having trouble making the transition. A new study from consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton in conjunction with the upcoming Association of National Advertisers conference reveals that interactive marketing still lags badly behind consumer behavior. The Web has become an essential part of most consumers' lives--eight in ten Americans are online, and usage is nearly parallel to that of television, yet marketers on average allocate just 5-10 percent of their ad budgets to digital media. Moreover, less than 25 percent of the 184 marketers polled for the study said they …

Radiohead's revolutionary decision to spurn a recording contract in favor of distributing its new album on its own may have caused at least two major artists to follow suit, according to the London Telegraph. Jamiroquai and Oasis, both out of contract with their former record labels, are considering offering their new work for free--or at least on a "donation" basis, similar to what Radiohead is offering fans who download "In Rainbows," the band's new album. This is a serious headache for major labels like Warner Bros. and Universal, which depend on these major acts to sell millions of albums worldwide. …

In a CNET column, Michael Kleeman, a UC San Diego senior fellow, warns against the need for repairing the existing Internet infrastructure. If the information superhighway were as visible as a road system, he says "it would appear to be excellent in some places, but riddled with potholes in others; heavily congested at many times and locations; and in need of massive redesign." The problem is pure supply and demand: there's not a great enough supply of bandwidth to keep pace with the growing number of requests for large files delivered over the Internet. For a little perspective, Kleeman presents …

As novel an idea as the Facebook Platform certainly was, there's absolutely nothing stopping other social networks from opening their borders to third-party software developers, too. According to separate reports from TechCrunch, Google plans to take the "open" concept to the next level by allowing developers to create programs across its many Web properties and services, while MySpace is gearing up to launch its own developer platform sometime next week. MySpace's platform will work much like Facebook's in that developers will be able to create applications using Flash, iFrame and Javascript that run within MySpace and are stored on its …