by Mike Krumboltz Earlier in the decade, Spider-Man was all the rage. Seven years and three movies later, folks have moved on to vampires and transforming robots. Still, rumors that the web-slinger will face off against a new pair of villains in " Spider-Man 4 " has sparked some tarantula-sized buzz.

The good news, in terms of Twitter's performance and reliability, is that the fail whale hasn't made an appearance today. The bad is that random people's tweets are showing up in the timelines of non-followers, and employees may not have much of an idea why. A post addressing this matter popped up in the Known Issues section of the Twitter Support site, and in it,

Recently my team conducted some pretty fascinating research comparing the advertising impact of campaigns on Xbox LIVE to traditional video including TV. If you've been following the trade news today, you may have seen the announcement . The study, conducted with Initiative, a division of Mediabrands, sought to address an issue that has long vexed advertisers and publishers alike: how to measure advertising impact across media types using a consistent method . For years,

Google recently partnered with BabyCenter on a joint research study looking at how moms use search. Google says they arrived at four truths about moms and search: 1. The stork delivers search 2. Moms become black belts in search 3. Search is Mom's GPS to Store 4. Search is Mom's back up brain. "These truths reveal to marketers that motherhood creates a unique search window during which a valuable connection can be made," says Jenny Liu on the Google CPG blog.

PBS has partnered with YouTube to create a channel for its long running nightly NewsHour program. The YouTube Blog offers more details. "The PBS NewsHour channel on YouTube will host nightly reports from the NewsHour television broadcast, posted the same night the broadcast airs on PBS." The NewsHour will also create original web videos on its YouTube channel featuring its new online correspondent Hari Sreenivasan.

For the second year, PayPal is running the Regift the Fruitcake campaign, an effort to raise money for charity through the sharing of a virtual fruitcake. The slogan is, "By giving the gift no one wants, you're giving the gift that everyone needs." PayPal is asking people to participate by logging onto the site to create a fruitcake on behalf of a featured charity (there are 25 of them), make a donation to a charity using a PayPal account,

It's easy to forget sometimes, when you hang around the cool SEO blogs, that there are those of us who are just starting out - learning for the first time the ways your website code and inbound links effect the likelihood that your pages will rank. Like most of us I stumbled into SEO. I was working at a web development company, and the president asked me to look into this "SEO stuff.

Although local shopping search engine Milo.com has been around for two years already, it is only now that the site is going full blast as it leaves beta stage. Before you start thinking that Milo.com is just another local shopping search engine that will only tell you specific online deals, well actually it does more than that. Milo also gives you available inventories of products available on stores near your location. Sounds good, right? Wait, there's more.

As big and popular as it is, YouTube could probably engage cruise control (in terms of feature releases, design updates, and so forth) and stay in front of the video-sharing competition for at least a couple of years. Cofounder Chad Hurley was interviewed onstage at LeWeb '09, and that isn't at all what he has in mind, however. Reducing the amount of time it takes to find something other than a song you don't like or an annoying kid is one priority.

Google has just launched Google Groups to Google Apps Premiere and Google Apps Education Edition.  This will give business enterprises which are using Google Apps for their company's enterprise wide collaboration/communication system a facility for their employees to create Groups within departments or sub-units easily. Employees within a company can start creating their own mailing lists as well as use Google Groups facility for sharing documents, spreasheets,