Skype’s biggest problem isn’t about being popular, it’s being popular with the wrong crowd. According to specialists, the VoIP software is used on a large scale by terrorists organizing their next hits.

Security agencies try to figure out terrorists’ communications and it seems that one of the most successful tools is Skype because it gives the users anonymity. Bear in mind Skype is the most popular VoIP tool around the world with over 100 million users.

Although experts have the knowledge to intercept conversations supported by VoIP, many areas around the globe which are considered dangerous and with high terrorism activity don’t have the technology necessary to intervene. Even the United States have a hard time tracking VoIP in real time even though they have the latest available technology. VoIP works very similar to the way email does, the information is broken into bits and transferred through the least busy route over the Internet.

Corporations aren’t too pleased with Skype either, considering approximately 17 million registered Skype users are using the service for business purposes. The fact that Skype can be used by hackers to penetrate the network is the main reason for business owners to put Skype on the black list of software, right next to peer-to-peer and instant messaging.

Last year only, the number of users that access search engines to track down information has increased so much that now online search is established as the second most used online service. The first and definitely undisputed most used online service remains email.

These statistics were provided in surveys published by Pew Internet and American Life Project. According to them, on any given autumn day this year, 63 percent of the American users accessed a search engine, compared with 56 percent in June 2004.

Until recently, the battle for the second place in this top preferences chart was fought by news services and search engines, but the huge amount of publicity and the great number of new services released by all major search engines raised the popularity bar a great deal and so news services have to settle for third place. Throughout the year, only 46% of the total number of internet users consulted news services.

Email is still king of all online services, 77% of the people questioned for this survey answered they check their inboxes on a daily basis. This is the service that people spend the most amount of time using, on an average basis an email checking session lasts 24 minutes, while an online search usually takes up to 4 minutes.

The uber-search engine Google has launched end of last week a new feature for the AdSense service that delivers relevant ads that are precisely targeted – on a page-by-page basis – to the content people find on your site. The new “Onsite Advertiser Sign-Up” feature allows AdSense publishers to persuade small advertisers to directly position ad campaigns on their sites.

This new service started being tested as of September and consists of adding an “Advertise on this site” link to the ads exhibited by AdSense publishers. When interested advertisers click the link, it leads to a Google-hosted page which the publisher can personalize. This page enables advertisers to sign up for a new AdWords account or insert a site-targeted ad campaign to their current account. This way, advertisers can add images and pictures to their otherwise text-only campaigns.

The main goal of this new feature is to allow sites closer contact with smaller advertisers while the production and billing processes are still taken care of by Google’s automated software.

The herd syndrome that all companies, websites and portals seem to experience once the holiday season approaches didn’t leave Google untouched. The online search giant is insisting on giving everybody a helping hand in the shopping process by launching a tool that will help buyers map out their local trips to the mall.

This new feature was presented today at Google’s Froogle shopping site and it will pinpoint the merchants selling a specific item within

a designated ZIP code. Aside displaying a map which unveils all the local shopping areas and the type of merchandise they sell, Froogle will also list price differences.

At first, Google will be using the information provided by a contractor to pull the inventory information from several hundred major merchants. The search engine hopes to make the service even more comprehensive by encouraging stores to submit their own customized merchandises list to the newly created “Google Base”.

Just came to know about WordPress Theme Toolkit from Ajay’s post about having it for connections reloaded. I dont know how far it will work for my theme. May be will have a look later. Just let me know if you used it.

As the usage of Ajaxian technology increases, we see lots of applications using ajax, now even a domain name service comesup with a search using ajax. Ajax makes it instant search. You dont have to click submit or anything. Pretty intresting. I hope i have a site like that
Link: Instant Domain Name Search

TechCrunch » Ajaxed Domain Names Search

TechCrunch » Google Analytics Swings at Measure Map

Its almost 24hrs now and i am still waiting to see the stats. anybody got a report working?

Its new and attractive.
I have my webmaster friends already discussing about where to add banners on their sites.

I am sure this system is going to help webmasters/publishers make some income and also help google find more publishers for adsense. Very smart idea. Even though Google statrs things lately, they comeup smart and their huge user database can increase users from 1 to a million in just a weeks time.

Its been some 9 years that I have celebrated Diwali for many reasons.
This time I went to my village and carried some crackers along because we hardly find good stuff in the stalls there.
We celebrated both on Oct 31st and Nov 1st and had a blast.

Hope all of you had a nice time.