Only halfway through December, we've already had it with year-end wrap-ups and trend pieces. But, unable to resist a good networking platitude or corporate cliché, we're eating up LinkedIn's most overused terms of 2010. Toppers include "innovative," "results-oriented," "dynamic," "proven track record," fast-paced" and "entrepreneurial." Love it! Still, citing employment experts, The Los Angeles Times suggests forgoing empty clichés for hard numbers and specific anecdotes to better convey one's professional prowess. The advice is timely considering that LinkedIn just launched a tool that lets members use their profiles to create professional resumes. According to The Wall Street Journal, …

Twitter is now offering potential advertisers a form to express their interest in buying Promoted Accounts, Promoted Tweets or Promoted Trends. "This may be the real time web, but real-time advertisers, apparently, are still best advised to pick up the phone with credit card in hand," ReadWriteWeb jokes. Interested advertisers are being asked to select from five categories of monthly ad budgets, from below $10,000 through over $100,000, as well as choose whether they'd like their campaigns to begin in 1 to 4 weeks, 1 to 3 months or 3 months from now. However, such a turn-key ad buying …

Despite a ton of well-funded competition, The Washington Post's Steven Pearlstein asks if it's too late to loosen Google's grip on the Web. "Google has already achieved a near-monopoly in Web search and search advertising, and has cleverly used that monopoly and the profits it generates to achieve dominant positions in adjacent or complementary markets," he writes. What's the solution to this perceived problem? Sure, the make pure capitalists cringe, Pearlstein suggests that the government get involved. "Where I have a problem... is in allowing Google to buy its way into new markets and new technologies, particularly when the …

With Microsoft expected to debut several new slate PCs next month, everyone's asking whether it can compete with Apple, or, at least, how it will try. For starters, one new Microsoft tablet made in conjunction with Samsung will offer a physical keyboard, sources tell The New York Times. Regarding the Samsung's design specifics -- which were first reported by a French blog last week -- Business Insider writes: "We didn't think much of it, because we didn't think Microsoft would really make something so ugly and embarrassing. But, it looks …

In September, Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley said the company was building a recommendation engine. Likely aiding that effort, the location-based social network is now looking for a data scientist with "experience with prediction or recommender systems, search and ranking algorithms, and classification algorithms." Data scientists are statisticians and/or computer scientists who specialize in working with large datasets, notes ReadWriteWeb, adding: "It's likely that Foursquare is looking for someone to turn its massive datasets culled from all those check-ins into something useful and, of course, monetizable." As ReadWriteWeb notes, investing further in data extrapolation is one way for …

In case you were wondering, Google Instant is entirely without brand bias. Google swears! "What we do at Google and what we've done for years is to not inject any subjectivity into these algorithms," Amit Singhal, Google Fellow and head of the company's search quality, ranking, and algorithm team, tells Fast Company. "We didn't want to introduce any bias into the mathematical modeling -- our modeling is predicting, given a letter, what's the probability of completion." Debuted a few months back, Google Instant is a results-as-you-type feature, which, according to Fast Company, "has been criticized for having …

DealBook's Andrew Ross Sorkin spends some time with Masayoshi Son, founder and CEO of Softbank, and, in his opinion, the "one person who holds the key to the future" of Yahoo. As Sorkin notes, Softbank owns big chunks of Yahoo's most valuable investment stakes, including Yahoo Japan and the Alibaba Group -- one of China's largest Internet companies. Analysts estimate that those assets, combined with Yahoo's cash, represent more than half of Yahoo's $22 billion value. "With all the speculation about Yahoo's future -- Will it be broken up? Will it be taken private? Will it merge …

Paul Butler, an engineering intern at Facebook has rendered the social net's social graph into a dazzling visual map of friendships. According to All Facebook, the map also proves Butler's theory that "geography and political borders influence where people live in relation to their friends." Writes Butler in a blog post: "To my relief, what I saw was roughly an outline of the world." Also of note, "What Butler did with the data is similar to -- although much more elaborate than -- what a programmer outside Facebook tried to do with some of the site's profile …

The World Cup, all manner of movies, and the abbreviated term HMU ("Hit Me Up") dominated "discussions" among Facebook's 500 million users in 2010. That's according to the social net's "2010 Memology" report, which dissects a year of status updates. "What we share, apparently, are big world moments (World Cup, Haiti and the rescue of the Chilean miners), playtime (shorthand for hanging out, movies and games), coveting Apple products and the future (although most status updates seem to be all about the present)," reports MSNBC.com. Year-over-year, the fastest growing trend was the use of a new digital …

By popular demand, YouTube is now letting users flag a video for removal because it promotes terrorism. To date, "YouTube and its parent company, Google, have been criticized by lawmakers for refusing to prescreen militant speeches and propaganda videos," the Los Angeles Times reports. "But rather than submit to policies that many argue would amount to an erosion of 1st Amendment rights ... YouTube is taking a decidedly more democratic path -- let the customers decide." Other material that YouTube considers flag-worthy includes nudity, sexual activity, and animal abuse. Still, this latest policy shift "puts YouTube in …