Not content to leave Tom Cruise alone in a self-promotional Adwords Campaign, the American Government is buying Adwords units in defense of American Foreign Policy.

eBay (EBAY) has gone on the record saying that they will sell Skype if they fail to find ways of using Skype to support their core ecommerce business.

Richard Waters at the Financial Times got the scoop directly from eBay’s CEO John Donahoe:

Michael wrote about rumors of a Google/ Skype hookup April 1, a deal that would make a lot of sense. One that doesn’t are rumors that Google may be getting ready to bid for travel giant Expedia.

Amazon (AMZN) has launched Amazon TextBuyIt, a service that allows Amazon customers to purchase items via mobile phone text message.

Barnes & Noble (BKS) officially launched how-to site Quamut this week, and it’s already attracting link spammers.

The main service offers online guides that cover more than 1,000 topics written by experts in each field. Guides include illustrations and pictures and can be purchased as PDF’s or laminated how-to sheets. It’s a reasonable offering; nothing ground breaking but clean, thorough, and usable.

Figures released by the Newspaper Association of America show that the decline of newspapers is more rapid than previously thought, with total print advertising revenue in 2007 plunging 9.4% to $42 billion compared to 2006, the biggest drop in revenue since 1950, the year they started tracking annual revenue.

Online provides some solace for the dead-tree business, with internet ad revenue growing 18.8% to $3.2 billion compared to 2006, but a rate significantly lower than the 31.4% growth the year before, and not even close to replacing the losses from print. Online revenue now represents 7.5% of total newspaper ad revenues.

CNET (Nasdaq: CNET) has announced that it will cut 10% of its workforce, or 120 people, effective immediately, in a move said to help it “focus on long-term growth amid complaints from some investors.”

CNET has had no shortage of headlines recently, from changes at the top through to an ongoing battle for control against largest shareholder Jana Partners.

Google has soft launched Google Ad Manager, an ad tool that allows publishers to manage ad placement on their sites. (See the WSJ writeup.)

The service primarily competes with OpenX (previously PHPAds then OpenAds). Users add their ad codes to Google Ad Manager then include the Ad Manager generated code on their sites. The service then tracks the page views and CTR on each ad unit, complete with statistics and the ability to geotarget or other break downs on each unit. Google Ad Manager also supports locally sold ads, for example Ad Manager like OpenAds supports direct sale advertising as well.

Disney (DIS) CEO Bob Iger told the audience at the Digital Hollywood Media Summit today that that Disney has sold 4 million movies and 40 to 50 million videos through iTunes since signing up in 2006.

Peter Kafka at Silicon Alley Insider estimates that this equates to $122.8 million for Disney from Apple (AAPL), then writes:

Time Warner (TWX) Chief Executive Jeffrey Bewkes has said that Time Warner is open for a deal on AOL.

Bewkes acknowledged weakness in the AOL business and told the Bear Stearns media conference Tuesday that Time Warner was open to combining AOL with another company “whatever configuration makes it the strongest and the most valuable.”

PCs running a Google focused version of Linux have been dropped from sale in Wal-Mart stores.

The Everex gPC launched in October with a $199 price tag and an operating system that put Google front and center. The gOS Linux Distribution offered direct links into Google services such as Gmail and Google Docs, as well as links to Wikipedia and Facebook. We asked in November whether gOS is the direction computers were heading, where the Operating System is nothing more than a conduit to the cloud, with minimal local applications.

Rupert Murdoch is reported to have said that News Corp won’t fight Microsoft for Yahoo.

Talking to investors at the annual Bear Stearns Media Conference, Murchdoch said that “We’re not going to get into a fight with Microsoft, which has a lot more money than us.” Murdoch also gave support to Google as FIM’s ad provider: “We’re very happy to be in the Google camp. They sell our search advertising and pay us well for it.”

Mix Conference in Las Vegas. The event is Microsoft’s (MSFT) web focused get together where they talk coding and development with mostly white, geek guys (the only women seemed to be the Microsoft/ events staff), then there’s the occasional press person thrown in for good measure.

The coverage the event gets pales in significance to say an Apple (AAPL) event (Apple could open a door and probably still get more coverage) but the coverage doesn’t do it full justice because there were some interesting things (see our coverage as follows: keynote 1, keynote 2, Web 2.0 session, Mesh networking).

Facebook has announced the hiring of Sheryl Sandberg, previously Google’s (GOOG) Vice President of Global Online Sales & Operations, as COO. Sandberg will start at Facebook March 24.

According to Facebook, Sandberg will “be responsible for helping Facebook scale its operations and expand its presence globally. Sandberg will manage sales, marketing, business development, human resources, public policy, privacy and communications and will report directly to Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg.”

Nokia (NOK) has announced its intention to make Microsoft (MSFT) Silverlight available for S40 and S60 phones, along with Nokia Internet tablets.

The decision strengthens Silverlights position as a competitor to Flash, but more importantly (as I noted perhaps prematurely last week) readies Microsoft’s Silverlight platform for the one game that’s new enough that it might have a hope in winning: offline apps up against Adobe’s (ADBE) AIR platform. Rumor has it that we may well see an offline Silverlight announcement at Microsoft Mix this week.

Yahoo’s decision to purge 1000 staff members primarily from its United States operations (some in Europe) has been hot news this year. What we didn’t know when the announcement was made was that Yahoo (YHOO) was planning to expand its base in India.

Yahoo is establishing a new lab in Bangalor with a focus on long-term research. The lab will be “a center of excellence for next generation search and advertising technologies, focused on making the Web more relevant and simple for users and advertisers.”

AOL is to launch at least 12 new sites in the next six months, and between 20 and 30 new sites by the end of the year.

Bill Wilson, AOL Executive Vice President of Programming told Bloomberg that AOL wants “to be sure we are appealing to as many consumers as we can.” Ultimately it’s all about numbers; more web properties should equal more traffic and more advertising revenue.

After Google’s stock took a hit based on reports that Google ads are not being clicked on as much as they use to be, comScore now reports that the market may have got it wrong:

the evidence suggests that the softness in Google’s paid click metrics is primarily a result of Google’s own quality initiatives that result in a reduction in the number of paid listings and, therefore, the opportunity for paid clicks to occur.

Google (GOOG) has quietly updated the look of Google Docs, offering a more Microsoft (MSFT) Office (pre 2007) like interface.

The mobile phone versions of the Opera browser will now come with Google (GOOG) as the default search engine.

The new deal applies to Opera Mini and Opera Mobile; the desktop version of Opera already offers Google as the default search engine. Opera’s mobile versions currently have an install base of 35million users.