Inc.com writes that “Federal officials and business leaders this week dismissed calls by the Democratic presidential candidates to renegotiate NAFTA, saying free trade deals help American small businesses and the U.S. economy grow.  ‘All the trend lines before and after NAFTA are positive,’ U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab told small-business owners gathered in Washington for Small Business Week, an annual series of workshops and award ceremonies hosted by the Small Business Administration.  ‘If you have aspirations to grow, there are a lot of opportunities out there,’ she said, calling U.S. economic isolationism a threat to economic growth.  House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has delayed a vote on a free trade deal with Colombia that eliminates tariffs on U.S. exports. Goods from Colombia currently enter the U.S. market duty free under a long-standing agreement that federal lawmakers extended last year.  More than 80 percent of about 9,000 U.S. companies that exported goods to Colombia last year were small and midsize businesses, accounting for more than $1.7 billion in trade, according to the Commerce Department.  ‘If this agreement doesn’t come up for a vote, we’ll have lost a major opportunity for small and midsize companies,’ Schwab said.”

The Register reports that “YouTube has vaporized a popular user account dedicated to criticizing The Church of Scientology.  Last Thursday, the world’s most popular video sharer removed the 10,000-subscriber-strong ‘Xenutv1’ channel run by Mark Bunker, a television journalist/well-known Scientology naysayer. Earlier in the week, Bunker posted a teaser for his three-hour interview with Jason Beghe – a film and television actor who recently defected from the world of Scientology – and the account was yanked just before Bunker was due to broadcast the interview in full.  The channel did not contain any copyrighted material.”

The Silicon Valley Watcher today has an interesting post on the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco by Tom Foremski.  Foremski, who did not himself attend the conference, writes that, on Wednesday, “I popped back to San Francisco to catch up with some friends that were in town for the conference. I asked around about the show and I was surprised at the lukewarm, almost tepid response. The reports I got about the show were surprisingly bland or maybe beige is a better description.  This surprised me because the build up to the show was very impressive. There was a D-Day scale PR assault on the local press corps, promoting the glories of the coming Web 2.0 show–way, way more than usual. It seems as if the hype machine couldn’t, or maybe didn’t, want to get off the beach.”

According to Reuters, the Googley-eyed monster has now set its sights on the mobile advertising market:  “Google Inc said on Wednesday it has introduced brand-image ads for mobile phones, in a bid to extend beyond the computer-based Web market into the emerging market for advertising on phones.  In a statement on the Silicon Valley company’s Web site, the company said it had designed mobile images to look like standard graphical display ads for desktop computer Web pages, but made them smaller to fit on mobile phone screens.  The company said all mobile image ads are targeted according to the keywords users type into phones to search for information. The ads are priced on a cost-per-click basis, and must link to Web pages optimized to work on mobile phones.”

In a different article, Reuters reveals that, according to Chinese state media “China has surpassed the United States to become the world’s largest Internet-using population, reaching 221 million by the end of February.  The number of Internet users in China was 210 million at the end of last year, only 5 million fewer than the U.S. Internet users then, Xinhua news agency said, quoting the China Internet Network Information Centre.  ‘Despite a rapidly increasing Internet population, the proportion of Internet users among the total population was still lower than the global average level,’ Xinhua quoted the Information Ministry as saying.  The proportion was 16 percent at the end of 2007, compared with 19.1 percent for the world average.”