The blogosphere of 2010 is powered in many ways by social media, something that barely existed five years ago, and was likely an afterthought to most hobbyist bloggers of the day.

How did we get from there to here?

Read the full story here.

In a detailed blog post, software engineer Leonid Taycher outlined just how complex counting books actually can become. The first step is defining exactly what a book is. The company decided to discount anything that wasn’t an idealized bound volume:

“One definition of a book we find helpful inside Google when handling book metadata is a ‘tome,’ an idealized bound volume. A tome can have millions of copies or can exist in just one or two copies (such as an obscure master’s thesis languishing in a university library).”

Recorded Future scours tens of thousands of Web sites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still to come. The company’s “temporal analytics engine” goes beyond search by “looking at the ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events.”

When the data reveals a possible future event, Recorded Future can — so it claims — trace the online “momentum” for the event and predict where and when it might actually happen.

NYTimes: A six-year archive of classified military documents made public on Sunday offers an unvarnished, ground-level picture of the war in Afghanistan that is in many respects more grim than the official portrayal.
The secret documents, released on the Internet by an organization called WikiLeaks, are a daily diary of an American-led force often starved for resources and attention as it struggled against an insurgency that grew larger, better coordinated and more deadly each year.
The New York Times, the British newspaper «The Guardian» and the German magazine «Der Spiegel» were given access to the voluminous records several weeks ago on the condition that they not report on the material before Sunday.
The documents — some 92,000 reports spanning parts of two administrations from January 2004 through December 2009 — illustrate in mosaic detail why, after the United States has spent almost $300 billion on the war in Afghanistan, the Taliban are stronger than at any time since 2001. …

This third survey uncovers growing uncertainty over the future of print titles and increased interest in paid-content models. Over 50% of the journalists surveyed believe their titles will shift to online-only.

“Concerns about the viability of journalist’s traditional media channels (print, radio or television) have intensified,” the report reads.

The online ad business, excluding mobile ads, is set to expand to $34.4 billion in 2014 from $24.2 billion in 2009, according to the report.

The mobile advertising market also is poised for growth as wireless networks are upgraded and more Internet-enabled smart phones hit the market. Mobile advertising in North America is predicted to quadruple from $414 million in 2009 to $1.6 billion in 2014, according to the report.

Newspapers, meanwhile, continue to suffer from a decline in advertising revenue. According to numbers released by the Newspaper Association of America earlier this year, print advertising revenue dropped 28.6 percent in 2009 to $24.82 billion. The PwC report estimates that print advertising in newspapers will hit $22.3 billion by 2014.

The stats, which do not include data from Google.com and YouTube, detail the categories, users and page views for each of the top 1,000 sites on the Internet. They also tell which sites have advertising. Wikipedia and Mozilla.com are the only two sites in the top 10 that remain ad-free.

When it comes to non-Facebook social media properties, Twitter ranks 18th with 5.4 billion page views, Flickr is 31st with 1.8 billion views and LinkedIn sits in 56th place at 1.7 billion views.

China: Cyber-Spying Network Targeting India
Reports of a China-based cyber spy network targeting the Indian military and the consequent alert sounded by Army authorities may be only the tip of the iceberg – investigations have revealed a fully dedicated India- specific espionage system aimed at business, diplomatic, strategic and academic interests.
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Internet Users in China Reaches 404 Million
The number of Internet users in China, already the largest in the world, has surpassed 400 million and accounts for almost a third of the country’s population, state media reported on Saturday. The online population in the world’s most populous nation has reached 404 million, the official Xinhua news agency said, citing the State Council Information Office.
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Cellphone Payments – An Alternative to Paying with Cash
You have won a bet, but the loser does not have enough cash on him to settle it. If he has a credit card, and most people usually do, there is finally a solution. A number of big and small companies – including eBay’s PayPal unit, Intuit, VeriFone and Square – are creating innovative ways for individuals to avoid cash and checks and settle all debts, public and private, using their cell phones.
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Most Young Adults Routinely Engage in Risky Online Behavior
Despite possessing a high level of awareness about threats lurking on the Internet, young adults routinely engage in risky online behavior, says a report from RSA, the security division of EMC, based on a TRU Research survey of 1,000 18- to 24-year-olds.
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Eurozone governments will provide €80 billion under the three-year deal (2010-12), with the first disbursement to be ready before a crucial debt deadline on 19 May when Athens is due to pay back roughly €8.5 billion to bond holders. EU economy commissioner Olli Rehn said installments will be subject to a system of “quarterly reviews”.

The agreement comes after ten days of talks between EU, IMF and Greek officials regarding the lending terms were wrapped up in Athens on Saturday, with the centre-left Greek government subsequently announcing a fresh round of tax increases and spending cuts as part of its bid to bring the budget deficit to below three percent by 2014. The deficit currently stands at 13.6 percent.

The measures include the scrapping of bonus payments for public sector workers, an end to increases in public sector salaries and pensions for at least three years, raising VAT from 21 percent to 23 percent, and increasing taxes on fuel, alcohol and tobacco by 10 percent.