By James Kwak

On Monday the Treasury Department (various officials, including Geithner, in shifts) had an informal meeting with eight prominent finance or economics bloggers. I’ve only read the accounts by Tyler Cowen, Steve Waldman, and Yves Smith; Waldman names all of them and links to other accounts. This is Smith’s sum-up:

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Note: The Hitwise data featured is based on US market share of visits as defined by the IAB, which is the percentage of online traffic to the domain or category, from the Hitwise sample of 10 million US internet users. Hitwise measures more than 1 million unique websites on a daily basis, including sub-domains of larger websites. Hitwise categorizes websites into industries on the basis of subject matter and content, as well as market orientation and competitive context. The market share of visits percentage does not includeA traffic for all sub-domains of certain websites that could be reported on separately.

By Leena Rao

Last week Google (GOOG) launched the Music Onebox — a special new music search product that lets users stream songs in their entirety for free. Thursday, Yahoo Video is answering by improving its music video search offering. When you search for a song or artists, Yahoo (YHOO) will extract music videos of the most popular songs and albums for that artists or band. It appears that most of the songs are pulled from YouTube, Last.fm and other music sites.

click to enlarge

Note: The Hitwise data featured is based on US market share of visits as defined by the IAB, which is the percentage of online traffic to the domain or category, from the Hitwise sample of 10 million US internet users. Hitwise measures more than 1 million unique websites on a daily basis, including sub-domains of larger websites. Hitwise categorizes websites into industries on the basis of subject matter and content, as well as market orientation and competitive context. The market share of visits percentage does not include traffic for all sub-domains of certain websites that could be reported on separately.

click to enlarge

Note: The Hitwise data featured is based on US market share of visits as defined by the IAB, which is the percentage of online traffic to the domain or category, from the Hitwise sample of 10 million US internet users. Hitwise measures more than 1 million unique websites on a daily basis, including sub-domains of larger websites. Hitwise categorizes websites into industries on the basis of subject matter and content, as well as market orientation and competitive context. The market share of visits percentage does not include traffic for all sub-domains of certain websites that could be reported on separately.

Google News just added a neat new feature that can help you keep track of news that’s of interest to you, alongside the rest of the day’s regular news item.

Clicking the new “Add a Section” link brings up the following page that allows you to add pre-programmed news modules, or build your own. When you build your own, you’ll be presented with the following options:

Ancestry.com (ACOM), a subscription-based online community for researching family histories, is expected to go public this week. According to the New York Times: "The genealogy Web site hopes investors will provide $100 million in an initial public offering, valuing the whole thing at $572 million. That seems too high for Ancestry to cement a happy legacy with investors."

[Update: ACOM on Thursday priced midrange at $13.50.]

NBC is gearing up for the 2010 Winter Olympics with some changes to its mainstay site, NBCOlympics.com, scheduled to go live Wednesday. (See screenshots below). Once again, just as it did with the 2008 Summer Olympics, NBC will be using a video player based on Microsoft Silverlight technology to offer full HD videos. Except this time, the video player will have DVR-like functionality, with the ability to rewind the video, highlight clips and save them.

By Brandon Clay

Technology stocks have done well this year. The Technology Select Sector SPDR (XLK) bottomed out in March and by late October was up more than 60%. Tech has performed better than any other sector year-to-date – up 33.7% as of Friday’s close.

Incredimail (MAIL) raised guidance today to $27MM in revenues for 2009 and $11MM in operating profit. Per the Company's press release, MAIL is highly profitable and cranking on all cylinders, as I have written before.

The continued increase in expected revenues is driven by the growth in search generated revenues. IncrediMail’s expected increased profitability and higher bottom-line guidance, is a result of anticipated increasing revenues and effective cost management, maintaining an operating income margin of above 40%.

A new report from media researcher Interpret indicates that if cable operators are successful with their “TV Everywhere” push, it could leave 7.7 million viewers unable to access TV programs online.

TV Everywhere is an initiative under way by Time Warner (TWC) and Comcast (CMCSA) to make cable TV content available across all devices to cable subscribers. If successful, it could potentially allow cable subscribers to access their favorite cable content on other devices, but it would also require that they are cable customers in order to view the content

The average online American visited 87 web domains, had 53 internet sessions, surfed 2,645 pages and spent 57 seconds per page in September 2009, according to data from The Nielsen Company.

Tuesday I took a sales team from a portfolio company to meet with a couple of senior IT executives at a major retail company. Towards the end of the meeting, it started to become quite clear to me the effect that Google (GOOG) and the web has had on IT to date and where it was going. In an oversimplified way, it seems that there have been 3 distinct phases to how the web and Google have impacted the enterprise, first starting at the app layer and increasingly diving deeper into the core infrastructure.

Phase 1 - Consumerization of IT - all internal corporate users are consumers first and then employees second. We have all seen how consumers have gotten used to using browsers and SAAS-based applications and how successful startups have been able to provide web-based applications that users can pull into the enterprise environment starting at a department level rather than having to go out and sell and push technology into enterprises.

Yahoo (YHOO), it appears, is discovering what news media companies have known for generations. Producing original quality editorial content, others will notice - whether readers, other news outlets or even advertisers. And by grabbing that sort of attention, the company also gains some credibility.

During a presentation at Yahoo’s Analyst Day, company execs talked about the new respect that Yahoo Sports has received by breaking news, landing exclusive interviews and even creating original, on-the-fly content to accompany video clips or other daily highlights. (Techmeme)

Today, I’m out at the Yahoo Analyst Conference in San Jose, California. This morning, we’re mixed in with the financial analysts, and the day kicked off with CEO Carol Bartz introducing the day. I thought her tone was refreshingly honest, and worth passing on, especially given Yahoo’s (YHOO) presence (and subsequent challenges) in the Anywhere Economy. Here are some highlights of the things she said.

“Yahoo was the big shining star in the 1990s and mid-2000s. But then we become not so shiny. We have kind of lost your respect over the years, whether it’s our 6% operating margin (which is pathetic) or something else.

Remember when Yahoo (YHOO) started to roll out its new homepage last summer? It’s been live for all users for about three months now, and Wednesday Yahoo’s annual Analyst Day, senior vice president Tapan Bhat gave an overview of how the redesigned homepage is performing. In the past three months, pageviews are up 9 percent, and time spent on the homepage is up 20 percent.

IAC/InteractiveCorp (NASDAQ:IACI) CEO Barry Diller is bullish on content production for the growing Internet and traditional broadcast television models. The brash executive is so excited about the area that he sees his firm getting more for less, saying he's willing to spend less than 10% of his company's $1.8 billion in cash reserves on deals for content production companies.

Diller's ambition to make small deals in content production companies was overshadowed Tuesday by his other announcement that he was willing to part ways with struggling search engine Ask.com.

As many readers already know, I'm not a big supporter of the notion that TV Everywhere is going to do much to change our industry. Some vendors in the online video industry disagree with me and want to tell me how TV Everywhere is going to change their business, providing the catalyst for them to really grow their revenue.

While that sounds nice, for the vast majority of vendors, it's a pipe dream. None of these vendors I speak to seem to be able to tell me what the size of the market could be, how many MSOs would want to offer a TV Everywhere type service or how they actually make any money. I get the sense that many in the industry now think they have to use the phrase TV Everywhere to sound cool or to make it sound like they "get it", even though no one seems to be talking about the business side of the offering. (Definition of MSO: Multiple System Operator. It's the industry term for cable company.)