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If you delete a social-networking profile, does it still exist?

Maybe they were pulled voluntarily due to embarrassing content, or involuntarily due to inappropriate material--either way, sometimes social-networking profiles get deleted. And a recent controversy in the U.K. has left some Web users wondering exactly what happens to them.

Here's how it started. A few Facebook members pointed out that the site keeps profile data intact after users delete their accounts so that they can be subsequently "un-deleted" if the addictiveness factor of Facebook proves to be too much. But what if they don't come back? We all know by now that Social Ads, the … Read more

OpenAds snags another $15.5 million in Series B funding

OpenAds, one of the world's most exciting open-source companies, just pulled in $15.b million in Series B funding. The valuation represents a major "up-round," say my sources (and I've got really good sources on this one). The round was led by Accel out of its Palo Alto office.

Why is this such cool news? Because OpenAds rocks the online advertising world, shaking up Google's cozy dominance of the industry:… Read more

Proximic signs ad deals with Yahoo Shopping, Shopping.com

Content-delivery network Proximic, which has a unique contextual matching system, now has ads to sell that can help bloggers and others monetize their sites.

The company was set to announce on Wednesday that it has signed deals to syndicate the product catalogs of the Yahoo Shopping Network and eBay's Shopping.com. This dumps nearly 50 million ad units into Proximic's advertising network.

Proximic, which launched in October, differs from Google AdSense and other keyword-based systems in that it automatically reads and matches relevant content according to "interconnected patterns" in documents that seem to be based more … Read more

Power Downloader: Best adventures of 2007

With the holidays over and only a few days to go in 2007, Power Downloader decided to take a look back at the year to relive some of his more exciting adventures. Always knowing which software to download in a given emergency is never easy, but having Download.com at his disposal definitely helps when on the trail of an Internet bad guy.

Looking through his case files, Power Downloader remembered the time when he had to get a new laptop computer. As with anytime Power needs to get a new computer, he knew he wouldn't be comfortable until … Read more

Microsoft, Yahoo, Google to pay $31.5 million for illegal gambling ads

Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google will pay a combined $31.5 million to settle allegations they accepted money for illegal gambling ads, according to the Associated Press.

All three companies said they stopped accepting ads for gambling years ago. The agreement settles an investigation launched in 2000 and conducted by the U.S. Attorney's office, the IRS, and the FBI.

Microsoft is paying out the most at $21 million, Yahoo is paying $7.5 million, and Google's share is $3 million. Part of the payment will go to the International Center for Missing and Exploited Children and for public … Read more

Openads turns 10,000

It's often difficult to find existing or new customers to adopt a new release. Openads, however, is having the opposite problem. With 10,000 publishers jumping onto the latest release of its ad network, the "problem" will be managing its growth:

I am very pleased to announce that, as of yesterday, over 10,000 publishers are using the latest Openads stable release (2.4). In the space of just 3 months we have reached this exciting milestone with publishers upgrading from the older releases and new publishers turning to Openads to manage their online advertising.

Think of Openads as the open-source Doubleclick. Except that it offers real choice for publishers:… Read more

Microsoft bringing ads to mobile devices

Microsoft is set to launch on Monday its first mobile advertising.

Going forward, people will be able to see mini banner ads optimized for their browser type and screen size on their mobile devices when they visit the MSN Mobile portal, which works on any mobile phone, said Phil Holden, director for online services for Microsoft.

The MSN Mobile portal offers news, information on weather and stocks, as well as movie reviews and listings. It also offers access to search, Hotmail, Messenger, and Windows Live Spaces.

MSN Mobile will also now enable users to buy movie tickets over the phone … Read more

'I'm a Mac' music

In the perennial Mac vs. PC debate, the Mac is coming on strong, moving into the No. 3 spot among U.S. computer manufacturers and growing sales eight times faster than the personal computer industry average (according to Gartner). Technical merits aside, those "I'm a Mac" ads are probably having an effect--or, if not, they're certainly entertaining, and occasionally brutal. (I wonder if Apple has any PR people and what they thought of this spot.)

But what you may not know is that the composer of the music in those ads--that happy little loop that you … Read more

Yahoo, Adobe team on PDF ads

Yahoo and Adobe are bringing pay-per-click ads to Adobe's Portable Document Format so that publishers can serve up ads inside PDFs distributed on Web sites and over e-mail that are contextually relevant to the content.

The text advertisements appear in a panel to the right of the content in the PDF and are subject matter matched using keywords and analysis of associated concepts. The ads are dynamic, meaning different ads can pop up at different times and clicking on an ad takes you to the advertiser Web site.

Publishers upload their PDF content into Yahoo's ad serving system … Read more