The YouTube subscription service Google won't talk about -- yet -- continues to grow with content. On Wednesday the site announced an extended lineup of sports channels, adding Bleacher Report, KickTV and The NOC to the content announced last month.

Trying to convince a brand to spend millions -- even thousands -- to build a campaign with an emerging technology isn't always an easy sell. Traditional marketers may not understand the benefits behind using virtual reality, or short-wave radio frequencies to serve up ads on a smartphone running the Android operating system (OS) Ice Cream Sandwich. At first glance, it might not be apparent why Apple would want to purchase a semiconductor manufacturer, or Google a smartphone maker.

Google+ Engineering Director David Glazer and the development team give us insight into what we can expect from features and integration on Google+.

While at a friend's garage sale last weekend a man stopped to check out the merchandise. He pulled out his smartphone, took a picture of a porch swing and sent it to his wife for approval before making the purchase. The fastest-growing activities for mobile point to retail, commerce, search, and sharing content. In December, comScore estimates that three out of five smartphone owners used their phone to take photos, and slightly more than one in four captured video.

comScore reported that explicit search queries for January rose 5% to 17.8 billion, excluding slide show, contextual, and instant searches. No surprise that Google continues to dominate market share with 66.2% in January -- up from 65.9%, sequentially -- but marketers might find it surprising that the question-and-answer site Ask.com continues to gain market share, and the rate of overall mobile click share continues to grow.

Search expert Tao Zhang joined Covario from Baidu in February to support North American companies that want to expand paid search campaigns internationally. The account director for the digital marketing agencies based on Beijing said he aims to help U.S. companies understand the cultural differences that can hinder success in the country.

Google's influence continues to wane a bit across the Internet when it comes to referral traffic, but as of January 2012, the company still remains the No. 1 traffic source for 23 of the top 30 Web sites that Citigroup Investment tracks across six vertical market segments. Sixteen percent of traffic to the sites comes from Google. By contrast, Yahoo, No. 2, and Microsoft, No. 3, account for 11% and 6% of traffic, respectively.

Googlers are the types who never really leave the classroom, explains Jordan Lloyd Bookey, head of global K-12 education outreach at Google, in a recent blog post. Perhaps Mr. Floyd, an Edison High School teacher in Huntington Beach, Calif., will help produce some of those Googlers through his mobile classroom on YouTube.

Former Atlanta Falcons linebacker Will Overstreet is the creator of Voices Heard Media, a company that has developed an interactive platform to help keep visitors on Web sites, Facebook pages, blogs and more, increasing interaction through questions and answers, polls, and contests. Users are encouraged to share experiences, results, and recruit others to join in. This week the company released an analytics package designed to track interaction, engagement and statistics.

Tablets garner conversion rates greater than 10% compared with PCs, and average order values of more than 30%, according to Matthew Mierzejewski, vice president of pay per click at Rimm-Kaufman Group (RKG), a digital marketing agency supporting paid-search campaigns. Owners tend to have disposable income for entertainment-related services, and appear to be more competent with shopping online, especially on iPads.