comScore (NASDAQ : SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today reported holiday season retail e-commerce spending for the first 34 days of the November â?" December 2009 holiday season. For the holiday season-to-date, $15.3 billion has been spent online, marking a 4-percent increase versus the corresponding days last year. The most recent week saw three individual days eclipse $800 million in spending, led by Cyber Monday, with $887 million in spending,

Eric Totherow, the platform evangelist in our program management group, talked to developers at PDC about the adCenter API, Bing APIs, and the opportunities for developers in the advertising and publishing business. The presentation is best viewed in full-screen resolution.

About three months ago, Google Russia lost its CTO to Mail.ru as she became the company's deputy CTO. Now, it looks like a reunion of sorts may take place, as reports indicate that Google Russia and Mail.ru have reached a search deal. Yandex, the dominant search engine in Russia, has been Mail.ru's default search provider since January of 2006. However, that deal will soon expire, and apparently Google convinced Yandex that it provides a better search experience.

It seems that Google is always trying to improve. But sometimes the improvement is not really an improvement. The search engine recently changed its home page to "fade in", which means that all you'll see upon landing on the page is the search box. Then, after a few seconds you'll start to see all the navigational links at the top of the page. Is this good?

Just a heads up that Trac commits will be pretty low over the next couple of days, as all the core committers are in Orlando: Matt, Ryan, Andrew, Peter and Mark. We all came for WordCamp Orlando (fun!) and are staying a couple of extra days to discuss the vision for WordPress in the coming year, the merge, canonical plugins, the WordPress.org site, community stuff, and all the other things that are important but that we never seem to have time to address. Since when things like this come up in the IRC dev chat or in various forums there’s inevitably a point at which someone says, “We really need to have [insert a core committer name here] here to make a decision,” we thought it would make sense to get together and figure out where everyone stands on all these ideas so that we can move forward a little more efficiently. Also, not all the committers had met in person before (and I’d never met Andrew or Peter), so it’s also a chance for us to just get to know each other a little. Watch this space around Tuesday or Wednesday for a post summarizing the things we’ve discussed, and the beginning of planning for how members of community can get involved in (or spearhead) the things that interest them.

Google will be opening up its Chrome Extensions Gallery to the public sometime in the next week according to two sources and TechCrunch, possibly during the Add-On-Conference where Google Chrome is a sponsor of the event. Google Chrome had opened up its Extensions Gallery to developers in November, and the gallery seems to almost be ready for prime time. The addition of extensions to Google Chrome will not just make many casual users of Google Chrome happier,

With blogs, online news publications, aggregators, and social media, there is a lot of information being produced at a more rapid pace than ever before. User-generated content is flowing onto the web at a ridiculous pace. That comes in the form of blog posts, articles, status updates, tweets, forums, wikis, etc. That doesn't even take into account personal messages in email, private messages, text messages, and on and on and on.

Google recently announced their fade in homepage . From a marketing perspective I think it is interesting to try to figure out why they did that. Marissa Mayer wrote: the variant of the homepage we are launching today was positive or neutral on all key metrics, except one: time to first action. At first, this worried us a bit: Google is all about getting you where you are going faster â?" how could we launch something that potentially slowed users down? Then,

Google Analytics recently announced, on December 1, that there is a new code in beta. It's the Google Analytics Asynchronous Tracking Code . If you have a Google Analytics account then you can start using the code right away. But what does it do? According to the Google Analytics blog, it increases your page load time, uses enhanced data collection, and eliminates some tracking errors.

Recently on Twitter a couple people mentioned that we should create tools similar to our Firefox extensions for Google Chrome. Then on TechCrunch there was a comment "As soon as I see the SEO Book toolbar for Chrome, I'll be glad to uninstall Firefox." I read that and thought news to me . First of all I think it is a bad idea because if Google owns the search engine and the browser then maybe that is not the best spot to have your SEO research stuff hooked up,