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If you are not on the list of any parties this New Year then MySpace has something really interesting to keep you up all night. It’s the My Space Presidential Poll.

MySpace aims at involving and engaging teens and young adults with this mock election. Social networks and social media have become a serious means of communication for political figures and MySpace extends the same through the mock elections to be held on the dawn of the New Year. This election would even help candidates gauge their standings in the election year. The best part is that before the virtual election MySpace will also conduct straw polls of its members.

So this New Year’s Day, feel free to participate in the poll and participate in one of the most memorable online events in the history of the World Wide Web. The voting  opens at 3:01 am EST, Jan 1, 2008 and closes at 11:59 pm EST, on Jan 2, 2008.

Yahoo! is one of the contenders vying for the position of the most visited online news site. As per the research conducted by comScore, Yahoo’s news site is at the top position in the list of news providers. It had almost 35 million visitors last month. The closest competitors are MSNBC, which had a ‘footfall’ of 27 million people and CNN, which witnessed 26 million visitors. However, the statistics provided by Nielsen Online claim that CNN is at the top of the charts followed by the Time Warner-owned firm witnessing around 33 million visitors. Yahoo! News and MSNBC feature third and fourth in the list with 31 million and 30 million viewers respectively.

Mr. David Payne, senior vice president and general manager of CNN.com, commented that there are substantial disparity between the sites and the Reuters reports. He said that Yahoo! News is basically an aggregator of a variety of news articles. Yahoo! News provides stories, a majority of which come from services such as the Reuters, Associated Press and Agence France-Presse. Its home page is connected to a various different portals. On the other hand almost 90% of CNN users visit the site directly. He also noted that though MSNBC published quite an amount of original content, most of its headlines are connected through the MSN portal.

Japanese Mobile Giant DoCoMo to tie up with Google
The Japanese are ever-demanding. They love changing and setting trends. So when the Japanese customers were not satisfied with their internet functions on their mobile phones it was time for cellular giant NTT DoCoMo to do the obvious. DoCoMo Inc. will partner US search-engine major Google to offer a wide range of internet options and functions to the discerning Japanese subscriber. This step will surely help DoCoMo fight its competitors and in turn upgrade its service.
DoCoMo is all set to update its famed “i-mode” internet service by incorporating Google’s search and e-mail features. Through this arrangement DoCoMo users will get access to Google search, e-mail, scheduling and photo features.

DoCoMo aims at regaining its lost customer base with this move. It’s a win-win arrangement for both parties as by teaming up with DoCoMo and gaining better access to mobile users, Google will be able to expand its services on the mobile platform. It will also be able to offer mobile platform to its advertisers.

The Web continues to evolve at a rapid pace and more of our core functions and actions move online. To enhance the online experience, Mozilla Labs has just launched a brand new online service ‘Weave’.
The firm believes that Web browsers such as Firefox can and need to do more for brokering rich experiences even while increasing users’ control over their data & personal information.
The idea behind Weave is putting in sync personal information like bookmarks, passwords etc with the user’s Mozilla account via Firefox.
‘Weave’ will give an opportunity to developers for building ‘innovative online experiences’. The way Mozilla enables innovation by making Firefox open on several levels, it aims to do exactly the same with Weave project by developing an open extensible framework for purpose of services integration.
One crucial area for exploration is the effective blending of the Web and the desktop through deeper integration of the browser and various online services.
According to Chris Beard, the Mozilla Labs GM, the broad goals of Weave are:
• Providing a basic set of optional Mozilla hosted online services.
• Ensuring that it gets easy for users to set up their own services with help of freely available open standards based tools.
• Providing people with the ability to control, customise their online experience. This includes whether & how their personal data should be shared with others.
The idea is to respect privacy; to leverage prevalent open standards & propose new ones as required, and build an extensible architecture such as Firefox.

The fall out between Viacom and Google has made waves in 2007. The row was over copyright-infringing content that appeared in YouTube owned by the search engine king. A $1 billion lawsuit has been slapped on Google. To further worsen the situation, Viacom has announced a five-year advertising deal with Microsoft. The deal is worth $500 million. Microsoft will help Viacom place ads across the latter’s network including MTV.com. Microsoft has been provided the license to serve Viacom-owned content through their Xbox Live and MSN services. Microsoft had acquired Atlas as part of its $6 billion Aquantive deal. As per the deal, Viacom will be able to use Atlas’ technology to deliver ads.

As per the deal, online advertisement firm DoubleClick will be replaced. This is a huge boost for Microsoft against its archrivals yahoo and Google. Microsoft believes that the sector of online advertising will be roughly worth $80 billion by 2010. Both Viacom and Microsoft are working together on promotions and sponsorships for MTV networks and BET Networks award shows. Viacom’s range of original content and sturdy consumer brand associations are believed to complement Microsoft’s web as well as digital advertising assets. The deal includes guarantees, revenue sharing along with content licensing. There is provision to further develop the business transactions in the future.