Online aggregators are financial vampires sucking the lifeblood out of the news business! You know — evil digital upstarts like the Wall Street Journal, CNN, and the New York Times.

Software designer Tom Hume made use of the Guardian's API doohickeys to find out how often it's printing dirty words. Who knew Brits were so skittish about "wank"? [Chart via his Flickr]

The Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis has measured this recession against past ones and found it wanting. It will take more than twice as many layoffs before it counts as "harsh." Take that, doom-mongers!

With more than 120 million users, Mark Zuckerberg's social network continues to grow, kudzu-like. And yet it is worth far less today than the $15 billion it commanded a year ago. Why is that?

US News and World Report cites research showing—pleasingly for self-satisfied liberals—that followers of the posh magazines and radio stations are smarter than Joe Sixpack and the rest of America's dumb masses. The four "best-informed" news audiences are those of the New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper's and NPR, …

The market gyrations of recent weeks has nearly doubled traffic to financial websites. Bad news elsewhere should be good news for them, right? Wrong. Their most profitable advertising is sold in advance; neither publishers nor advertisers can anticipate swings in traffic, so the bumper crop of pageviews doesn't mean a…

If I run another illustration of the end of the world, I'm going to shoot myself. So, instead, here's a chart with some perspective. Note how miniscule a bump markets experienced during the supposed "crash" of 1987. Even after the today's drop in the Dow below 9,000 the index is roughly where one would expect it to be…

One goal of the Facebook redesign was to kill pointless widgets that cluttered user-profiles. It's working. When Facebook launched its platform last year, AllFacebook's Nick O'Neil created your typical one-trick app: the Bush Countdown Clock. All it did was sit on a user's profile like a badge, and yet it attracted…

The digital revolution promised us that the nation state would wither away. But the spread of social networks show that however much the Internet connects us, quirks divide us. Take, for example, the inexplicable popularity of Twitter in Japan. Tokyo out-tweets New York and San Francisco combined. Pingdom, a website…

Metrics firm ComScore reports that 132 million unique visitors logged onto Facebook in June 2008, up from just 52 million in June 2007. 117 million worldwide users visited MySpace during June 2008. Its Facebook's first definitive traffic victory, from a source advertisers actually pay attention to, over MySpace. Way…

Back in March, very special correspondent Paul Boutin revealed that the Olds were derisively referring to the insular San Francisco clique of Web hipsters — the sort of people who Twitter about how they wish FriendFeed had a better Plurk API — as "the 250." After learning that 806 people tuned in to watch Kevin Rose…

Reversing a long trend, one research firm says Yahoo and Microsoft have posted gains in search market share — at the expense of industry leader Google. ComScore reports that 61.5 percent of all U.S. searches went through Google in June 2008, 0.3 percent less than in May 2008. Yahoo saw 20.9 percent of the searches…

TubeMogul, a startup which allows content creators to post video clips to multiple sites at once and track aggregate views for the clip across sites, did a survey of over 200,000 clips and how much traffic they garnered after 90 days. The results? The average clip got more views on YouTube in three months (3,092)…

Google and Yahoo lawyers are in Washington today, trying to argue that a deal to outsource much of Yahoo's search advertising business won't give Google undue control over the market. A new Hitwise report released today should make their task a bit more difficult. It reveals that in June, Google searches accounted…

Tracking the number of reviews written for each iPhone application sold in the iTunes App store won't tell you how many times that application has been purchased and downloaded. It won't reveal that apps' volume writes Medialet's David Hill. But Hill contends tracking the number of reviews users give apps will give…

Is IAC's Vimeo, the video-sharing site founded by bizarrely charismatic (and just plain bizarre) New York entrepreneur Jakob Lodwick, missing its founder? In a word, no. Lodwick lost his job due to insubordination last November; his dare-you-to-sue-me funding of an IAC employee's music startup, in an apparent…

Among the more engaging features of Cityfile, the new directory of notables from media and business, are the lists. Obsessives can browse through New York celebrities who own Yorkies, for instance. (Taavo Somer of Freemans and dowager-gossip Cindy Adams: you have so much in common!) But the lists will be most useful…

Tribune Company's Los Angeles Times is one of the most hard-pressed big-city newspapers: the parent company is over-leveraged; the local market reeling from a real estate crash; and like all papers the LAT is suffering from competition from the internet. Even so, the 150 newsroom layoffs announced today are shockingly…

Another grim set of numbers for May-grimmer than a Goldman Sachs analyst's "most bearish dreams"-have left newspaper advertising revenues about 12% below last year's level. If business doesn't pick up, newspapers can expect to bring in about $37bn in 2008, down from $49bn at the height of the boom in 2000. But the…

New data from Hitwise plots the demographics who visit Yahoo Search against Google users. Groups in the top left are a particular strength for Yahoo; groups on the bottom right, for Google. Among America's "blue-collar backbone" and "struggling societies," Yahoo does particularly well. Google, on the other hand owns…