European online Christmas shopping season got off to a strong start this year in the U.K., France and Germany, according to a new report from comScore. Visits to retail sites were up 18 percent during the first week of November compared to an average week during the prior two months, and increased even more throughout the month to reach a 41 percent growth rate during the week ending November 29. France saw solid gains,

Earlier this year, we spoke with Lime Wire CEO George Searle about the music industry and the company's future, as it offers one of the most widely used file sharing services. Now we have engaged in a Q&A with Zeeshan Zaidi, who came to Lime Wire as the company's Head of Global in July, with a background as a record label executive, a musician, and a lawyer. WebProNews: We're told the LimeWire software has been translated into Arabic and will soon be translated into Persian,

As if the real-time search results indexing Twitter tweets, news and blog posts weren't impressive enough, Google Dec. 11 also began surfacing more results in its Google Suggest utility. Google Suggest started out as a simple pull-down menu that suggested search terms for users do they didn't have to finish typing their queries. In May, Suggest began showing suggestions relating to the current results page, personalized and navigational suggestions, and ad links.

Many small businesses go online to take advantage of Internet marketing tactics to "try it out" and see if it works. News: It works. But it doesn't work if you're just trying it out. You have to make it work. And that requires a level of seriousness, just like it does for the rest of your business. I don't mean to be blunt, but here's the deal. Imagine your local fire department showing up at a house fire with their fire trucks, ladders,

Google changes faster than you can blink right now. Just some buzzwords that will bug you in 2010: Google Caffeine Google Real Time search Google Personalized search results Google Living Stories Google Phone I could go on like for a while. It's not my intention to confuse you even more though. I want to shed some light on the near future of Google, search and SEO. It's a daunting task as I'm overwhelmed as well. Thus I picked 30 resources on Google,

In this week's Twitter Friday column I want to dissect the news that Twitter traffic is dropping for a few months in a row . Is it true? Well, in case you rely on Compete.com data only you will probably say yes. Compete.com is quite reliable but also known to measure US traffic. They rather count the people who really mater to the advertisers at home. I usually don't look up Alexa stats either to get a grip on the global traffic.

When you hit the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button on the Google homepage without entering any search query, Google will now show you how many seconds there are left before we're switching to a new decade. (Reportedly it may not work with every browser. On a side-note, you can enter something like 1692142 seconds in days into Google to let the Google Calculator offer you the direct result.) [Thanks Aery and DeSalvionjr!

Google has started to offer certain onebox features or special results - like Google Q&A or the Google Calculator - right within the auto-completion box on the homepage. For instance, when entering weather shang , Google completes the query to "weather shanghai" and immediately shows a visual weather forecast for that city. Two other phrases producing this kind of direct frontpage result are e.g. "capital of taiwan" or "100 eur in usd". [Thanks WebSonic ,

by Mike Krumboltz In between the breathless updates on the Tiger Woods fiasco , several other stories inspired strong Searches and big buzz. This week, one of the most famous (and beautiful) couples in the world welcomed a baby boy, the inspiration for a famous cinematic character passed away, and an already-huge family got a little bit bigger. It's family time with the Buzz Week in Review.

by Claudine Zap There probably isn't a metaphor big enough to express the enormous anticipation around James Cameron's 3-D space epic, " Avatar ." Let's just say it's big. But without an actual film to see (opening day in the U.S. isn't until next week), the crowds are going wild for, wait for it, "Avatar," the review . The alien love story starring Sam Worthington as the human and Zoe Saldana  as the alien previewed in London.