If you ever set out to collect personal email addresses at a tech gathering, here's a tip: generally speaking, you can save time by typing or writing out the "@gmail" part before approaching people. But Compete provided a bit of a reality check today by showing that Hotmail remains in the top spot overall. Andrew Pearlman - who is himself a satisfied Hotmail user - wrote earlier,

More than half (51%) of holiday shoppers across 11 countries used their mobile phones for in-store activities such as comparison shopping, getting peer feedback, product information and coupons, according to a new study by Motorola. The survey found 64 percent of GenY (age 18 to 34) shoppers used their mobile phones for in-store shopping-related activities during the holiday season. In addition,

In an attempt to give our readers some real world application of all this social media theory swirling about we will be occasionally speaking with some real people who do the real work. How about that? Today we look at social media and the sports world. Regular readers of this blog know that I am a bit of a sports fan. I say a bit because I am no longer playing any fantasy leagues etc so I am not a sports fanatic.

Starting in mid-March, Yahoo Shopping will no longer be a solo act. Yahoo announced today that it's arranged to have PriceGrabber take care of some of the technical details, and it'll be able to make one more cutback thanks to the adjustment. A post on the Yahoo Developer Blog explained, "[W]e have decided to enter into a strategic partnership with PriceGrabber to power the Product Submit functionality of Yahoo! Shopping as of March 11, 2010. As a result of these changes,

Back in 2008, Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear announced that he wanted to shut down 141 Internet gambling sites in the state in an effort to stop unregulated online gaming. He filed a civil suit against the domain names and asked the court to force the sites to block access to Kentucky users or give up control of their domain names. "Unlicensed, unregulated, illegal Internet gambling poses a tremendous threat to the citizens of the Commonwealth because of its ease,

Not that long ago we released version 9 of the Alexa toolbar, which had a number of cool new features. But like most things there was room for improvement, and we were lucky enough to get some very constructive feedback on how to make the toolbar better. We listened, and today I am happy to announce a new version of the Alexa toolbar that incorporates many of those suggestions.

As marketing professionals, we usually have to justify ourselves to our bosses, our clients and everyone in betweenespecially in the less-tested, sometimes-hit-or-miss arena of social media. But now Ad Age wants accountability, too, as they ask if youre getting enough out of all the volunteer work you do for Biz & Ev and Mark, or, more specifically, Are we all just toiling mightily to make a bunch of rich nerds (Facebooks Mark Zuckerberg and his employees and investors,

For many in the online space these days the words Facebook privacy would be called an oxymoron. Then of course there would be the usual calling others at Facebook morons and then it would get worse from there but I digress. Michael Arrington recently interviewed the poster child for the Privacy? What privacy? movement, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Mashables Pete Cashmore tells us : Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg claims that if Facebook was starting out now,

As you may recall, News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch began talking about blocking search engines and news aggregators a couple months ago. This escalated discussions that have essentially been going on for over a decade about the online news industry and fair use. At the FTC's Journalism and Internet Workshop in December, Murdoch said ,

More than one in five taxpayers say they will go online to prepare their taxes according to a new survey by Opinion Research, conducted for CompleteTax. The survey found sixty percent of taxpayers plan to use an accountant or professional tax preparer. The number of taxpayers turning to online tax programs now slightly surpasses those planning to use packaged software with 11 percent saying they will go online compared to 10 percent saying they will buy a packaged program.