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Yahoo has launched a tool it's calling "Ad Interest Manager" in beta. The tool is designed to provide transparency and let Yahoo users make decisions about how they want their information to be exposed to interest-based advertising from the Yahoo Ad Network.

Social networks such as Facebook are being used to express and communicate genuine personality, instead of an exaggerated identity, according to new research from psychologist Sam Gosling at The University of Texas at Austin. "I was surprised by the findings because the widely held assumption is that people are using their profiles to promote an enhanced impression of themselves," said Gosling of the more than 700 million people worldwide who have online profiles.

With blogs, online news publications, aggregators, and social media, there is a lot of information being produced at a more rapid pace than ever before. User-generated content is flowing onto the web at a ridiculous pace. That comes in the form of blog posts, articles, status updates, tweets, forums, wikis, etc. That doesn't even take into account personal messages in email, private messages, text messages, and on and on and on.

Some people tend to shrug their shoulders when presented with options.  Others know exactly what they want.  For this second set - or at least the members of the second set who work for advertising agencies - a new Video Targeting tool from YouTube promises to be of great use.

Opera is reporting that usage of its Opera Mini mobile browser has jumped 11% in just a month, around the world. In addition, they say data transfers have gained 16%.

Google Dictionary is in the spotlight because Google is now using it for its "definition" link on search results pages for word searches. Previously Google pointed users to Answers.com.

About three months ago, Google Russia lost its CTO to Mail.ru as she became the company's deputy CTO.  Now, it looks like a reunion of sorts may take place, as reports indicate that Google Russia and Mail.ru have reached a search deal.

Google has launched its new homepage, which looks generally the same, but removes everything but the logo, search box, and two buttons until the user moves the mouse. Google says most people go to the Google home page to search, and they wanted to remove the other distractions, unless users specifically want to see them.