by Mike Krumboltz Romanticus Interupticus! " Harry Potter " star Emma Watson recently split with longtime boyfriend Jay Barrymore . But wait, there's more! Now, the rumor mill is reporting that Ms. Watson, currently studying at Brown University, has "grown close" to fellow student Rafael Cebrian . Nothing is confirmed, but that hasn't slowed the searches. Web interest in Mr. Cebrian, apparently a musician of some renown , is at an all-time high. Over the past several days,

People who are Facebook fans and Twitter followers of a brand are more likely to buy the brand's product or recommend it to a friend, according to a new study by Chadwick Martin Bailey and iModerate Research Technologies. The study of 1,500 consumers found that 60 percent of Facebook fans and 79 percent of Twitter followers are more likely to recommend those brands since becoming a fan or follower.

FTC Commissioner Pamela Jones Harbour will leave the agency next month, but that's almost surely not soon enough for Google. Today, Harbour criticized Eric Schmidt and the rollout of Buzz, and also asked her colleagues to adopt a tougher stance on some privacy-related offenses. In fairness to both Google and Harbour, other companies and products, including Facebook, Flickr, and Hotmail, were identified as problematic. Plus, the commissioner could have been much harsher.

by Mike Krumboltz They're not as bad as mechanics or lawyers, but taxi drivers do have a bit of reputation for inflating their fares. But is this true or just an urban legend designed to keep Midwesterners out of Times Square ? Unfortunately, it appears to have a ring of truth to it. We're not saying all taxi drivers are scamming. Far from it. But a recent story about New York cabbies overcharging their customers has set off a firestorm of buzz.

Legend has it that St. Patrick performed a miracle by driving all the snakes out of Ireland. Now, it seems that YouTube's accomplishing an amazing feat of its own just by functioning. A director of product management revealed this afternoon that a whopping 24 hours of video are now uploaded to the site every minute. Hunter Walk (who, we must note, once worked for Conan O'Brien) wrote on the YouTube Blog , "Today, we're announcing that you've done it!

by Vera H-C Chan Welcome to your Top 12 on " American Idol ." Someone bring the defibrillator. The Fox reality show's ratings are down compared to last year's big stage debut. Yahoo! Searches on Season 9 contestants have fallen by more than half compared to Season 8's crew. Even frontrunner Crystal Bowersox pulls in only 27% of the lookups that Adam Lambert did in Top 13 week (a strange 2009 twist, but essentially same as Top 12 week).

As you may have heard,

Yahoo said today it is acquiring social sports site Citizen Sports in an effort to strengthen its strategy of aggregating and distributing social content online. Terms of the acquisition were not released. "Yahoo! is in a unique position to combine our deep expertise in content and aggregation technology to offer a highly personalized social experience," said Bryan Lamkin, senior vice president, Consumer Products Group, Yahoo!.

Interacting between both students and faculty is convenient and easy with the Market Motive social media course I am taking. I know some of you are reading this thinking "I would hope people would be interacting within in a social media class because after all, isn't that where the social part comes from." Let's not jump to judging and assume that everyone who enrolled is familiar with social networking.

Facebook, which recently racked up a 10 percent month-over-month gain in searches for February, is rolling out an autosuggest feature to its improving search engine. Soon, when users type a query into the search bar, they'll be offered results for people, Pages, events and groups they're associated with, as well as the connections of friends and other Web results. Essentially, Facebook is adding a feature that Google,