Online ad spending is due to out pace TV ad spending in the UK by the end of '09 according to a study by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB), the UK online advertising trade body, in conjunction with PricewaterhouseCoopers and the World Advertising Research Centre.

Bloggers take note: "Blogging can kill". The NYTimes posted an article about the high stress world of professional bloggers. It cited two recent deaths of well known bloggers. Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology, dead at 60 from a heart attack and Marc Orchant dead at 50 from a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack last year.

A new study shows that men are more prone to Internet fraud than women. IC3 received 206,884 complaints of online crimes during 2007. Their findings show that men lost $1.67 to every $1 lost by women in online fraud. This is a $40 million increase in reported losses to law enforcement when compared to 2006.

Some high profile employees seem to be itching to get out of Google. The image of Google being "a utopian place to work" as Craig Silverstein, director of technology, (and Employee #1 at the company) said in an interview with CNBC, seems to be waning.

Some recent announcements make it clear that the utopian atmosphere may be fading. Just within the last few months we've seen their vice president of engineering, Douglas Merrill, VP for global sales and operations, Sheryl Sandberg, and their CFO George Reyes step down. (see a more comprehensive list in Appendix A)

A new survey from Forrester Research asked 50,000 large enterprise employees which browser they use on a daily basis. They found that over the course of 2007, Internet Explorer's overall market share in the enterprise decreased by 10%. During that same period they saw Firefox's share almost doubled from 9.8% to 18%.

The survey also showed that most companies are using the 6-year-old Internet Explorer 6. Only 23.4% of companies officially used IE7 as their standard browser.

The WSJ seems to put to rest the idea that Microsoft will sweeten its $44.6 billion offer to buy Yahoo! Microsoft feels that it can wait and is prepare to hunker down and battle till the end. They feel amid the turbulent economic times that their offer is more than fair.

The following is a list of the 100 oldest registered .com domains.

See if your favorites are here:

Rank -- Date Created -- Domain name

1. 15-Mar-1985 SYMBOLICS.COM
2. 24-Apr-1985 BBN.COM
3. 24-May-1985 THINK.COM
4. 11-Jul-1985 MCC.COM
5. 30-Sep-1985 DEC.COM
6. 07-Nov-1985 NORTHROP.COM
7. 09-Jan-1986 XEROX.COM
8. 17-Jan-1986 SRI.COM
9. 03-Mar-1986 HP.COM
10. 05-Mar-1986 BELLCORE.COM
11= 19-Mar-1986 IBM.COM
11= 19-Mar-1986 SUN.COM
13= 25-Mar-1986 INTEL.COM
13= 25-Mar-1986 TI.COM

Verisign will be increasing the wholesale price of .com domains from $6.42 to $6.86 and .net from $3.85 to $4.23. They are using the maximum 7% increase allowed under Verisign's contract with ICANN which runs through 2012.

You can bet registrars will be passing on the cost to consumers. The new prices are scheduled to take effect in October.

A survey from Symantec and Applied Research-West reported by Baseline show that younger workers (those born after 1980) pose a greater risk to corporate networks because of their tendency to want to run almost any device and install almost any software on their work machines.

Being able to monitor web traffic to your sites is very important. You want to be able to gather metrics like where are users are being referred from, how long users stay on your site, what ads are working or not. Being able to gather statistics helps you find out what types of things are working and helps you adapt and build content users enjoy.

There are several very expensive web statistics packages that do a great job, but there are also plenty of free tools out there that do very well.

Here we've compiled a list of some of favorites:

I came across a service called Twitter a few months back. At first I brushed it off thinking it was probably a fad that would slowly fade away. But after looking at it a bit more closely I think that this idea may have legs especially in a society where information overload has caused our attention spans to shrink.

Twitter is in a category called "microblogging". What is Microblogging? Basically it gives you the ability to send very short (less than 140 characters) messages to family, friends, co-workers, or other people in your network.

I'm a big fan of the Firefox web browser. It's far superior than IE or any other browser that I've used. I'm happy to see the release of v3 (beta) out today. It is available for developers and testers. Here is a link to some Firefox v3 screen shots.

IBM released their X-Force 2007 report today. The report details a rise and sophistication of organized crime units dedicated to capitalizing on Web vulnerabilities. These criminals are mainly after stealing identities and hijacking consumer's PCs.

According to the report, an complex underground network has been developed to aid in distributing tools and assist with camouflaging attacks so they can escape current detection mechanisms.