The Mercury News reveals that “

[o]nline advertising revenues exceeded $21 billion for the first time in 2007, although preliminary data compiled by an industry trade group also suggests growth is slowing. The Interactive Advertising Bureau said its estimates show ad revenues grew 25 percent last year from nearly $17 billion in 2006. In dollar amounts, the estimated gain was $4.2 billion – less than the 35 percent and $4.3 billion growth seen in 2006 over 2005.  Analysts have said the growth rate was bound to slow as the Internet commands a larger share of the advertising pie, taking dollars away from traditional media like newspapers. By most accounts, the Internet still represents less than 10 percent of all U.S. ad spending, meaning there’s room for a lot more growth, even at a slower rate.”

The International Herald Tribune says that “[e]ven as it struggles to find alternatives to being acquired by Microsoft, Yahoo continues to push elements of a turnaround plan devised by Jerry Yang, the company’s co-founder and chief executive.  On Tuesday, Yahoo plans to introduce a service called Buzz that relies on users to help it compile the most popular articles from around the Web. Yahoo plans to include some of those on its front page, hoping to attract more users and turn it into a hub for driving traffic to other publishers.  Yahoo will also announce Tuesday that it will allow fuller previews of online publishers’ sites in search results. A search result displaying a user of the social network LinkedIn, for instance, could include links to that person’s connections and full profile, and a result displaying a restaurant may include direct links to a reservations page or reviews.  Both moves are part of a strategy Yang has been promoting to open Yahoo’s services to third-party publishers.”

The Wall Street Journal reports that “[s]eeking to head off a political backlash against huge investments in Western companies by Asian and Middle Eastern government-run investment funds, the U.S. is prodding two of the biggest funds to embrace a set of promises that they won’t use their wealth for political advantage.  Executives from the world’s largest sovereign-wealth fund — the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority — and from the Government Investment Corp. of Singapore met Thursday with a U.S. Treasury delegation led by the assistant secretary for international affairs, Clay Lowery. The talks are part of delicate global negotiations to draft rules to oversee the behavior of such funds, without discouraging them from investing in the U.S., Canada and Europe at a time of global financial turmoil.”

The Washington Post writes that “Sunday’s inadvertent disruption of Google’s YouTube video service underscores a flaw in the Internet’s design that could some day lead to a serious security problem, according to networking experts.  The issue lies in the way Internet Service Providers (ISPs) share Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routing information. BGP is the standard protocol used by routers to find computers on the Internet, but there is a lot of BGP routing data available. To simplify things, ISPs share this kind of information among each other.  And that can cause problems when one ISP shares bad data with the rest of the Internet.  That’s what happened with YouTube this weekend, according to sources familiar with the situation. BGP data intended to block access to YouTube within Pakistan was accidentally broadcast to other service providers, causing a widespread YouTube outage.”

According to the Register, “[t]he European Union is to pump billions of Euros into a number of key technology projects,” with the aim of bolstering Europe’s nanotech and embedded systems industries over the next decade.  “The European Commission (EC) is coughing up a staggering €2.5bn in industrial research in embedded microcomputers. The joint technology initiative, dubbed ARTEMIS, was given the green light by the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers at the end of last year.  EU Information society and media commissioner Viviane Reding described the public and private R&D investment in embedded systems, used in the likes of credit cards, mobile phones and cars, as a “very worthwhile” project. She claims the ten-year initiative will help push European development in the field of microcomputers to the forefront.”