Advertisers came out against the potential ad deal between Google and Yahoo in a letter sent to the U.S. Department of Justice yesterday. The deal, announced in June, would allow Google to display text ads on Yahoo, with Yahoo deciding when and how the ads display and taking a cut of revenue. 

In its short announcement of the letter, the Association of National Advertisers stated the deal "will likely diminish competition, increase concentration of market power, limit choices currently available and potentially raise prices to advertisers for high quality, affordable search advertising."

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Zoho has finally added a central document management page called Zoho Docs to tie together its many useful online apps. The clean-looking, functional page looks much like the Google Docs start page, with a folder view on the left and all files - spreadsheets, documents, presentations, etc. - listed on the right.

You can create folders and drag and drop files among them, and also right-click files or folders to quickly share, tag, rename, etc. You can also sort the file list by created time, modified time or document type (such as documents or presentations). 

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If you use Firefox 3 and Yahoo Mail (the nice new interface, not Classic), you might be dealing with a bug I've noticed where the message pane scrollbar doesn't display.  It's not a game-breaker, as you can still use the page-down and page-up keys to navigate, but it's an annoyance. 

It was a mystery bug for me, as only my primary workstation suffered from it. Two other systems had no issues. Disabling all addons on my afflicted system didn't change the situation. Neither did starting in Safe Mode, which surprised me.

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Google got some serious gold, promotion-wise: Olympic cyclist and Gold Medalist Kristin Armstrong wrote that Google Earth was "invaluable" in helping her find a training route in Boise, Idaho similar to the Olympic course in Beijing.

Armstrong tipped the hat (helmet?) in a guest post in the Google Lat Long Blog, which covers Google Earth and Maps. In it, she describes how at her husband's urging, she took one of his GPS units on her time trial ride back in December. After exporting the GPS and elevation data and loading it into Google Earth, she "was then able to trace the entire course from the comfort of my home half a world away and find a similar route to train on back in Boise."

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StartupNation, a Web site for entrepreneurs, has begun taking applications for its 2008 Home-Based 100 contest. If you have your own company, the competition affords an opportunity to market yourself - and of course, be marketed to.

I found out about the competition from one of my own home-based business service providers, RingCentral. While there's no material prize for winning, the free advertising from a good ranking could be worth plenty.

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Hulu.com, a well-made site offering free, ad-supported streaming TV shows and movies through a Web browser, now tops CNN and Turner in U.S. video site rankings, according to Nielsen stats relayed by Silicon Alley Insider.

Despite an official launch only five months ago and a relatively small library of shows and movies, the site offered up 105 million streams in July, just behind ESPN's 106 million streams.

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Sure, Yahoo Finance rocks. But plenty of other, smaller sites offer good data for the online investor. Yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle outlined seven of them.

In Harry Domash's piece, most of the seven were new to me, though I had written about one of them (tickerspy.com) here previously.

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With the constant flow of me-too social networking sites these days, it's nice to see a well-made site that identifies a real need and meets it. For solar power planning, that's Roofray.com, which just launched this week. 

For your own custom plans, head to the site and start with a satellite view of an address you enter.  Then define the solar panel coverage area by adding successive points around space where you'd put panels. 

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Creative types have a new option for turning their efforts into income online. Open Salon, now out of private beta, allows anyone to post their work after a quick registration.

Those posts can earn money, but unlike Google's new Knol, income doesn't come from ads. Instead, readers can click a small button to tip the writer through a system called Tippem.

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The Mozilla Labs, which acts as the idea wing for the organization behind Firefox, is expanding its call for open-source contributions to those outside its base of community-minded coders and techies.  Now, they want to get designers and creative types in on the deal.

When I chatted with Chris Beard, Vice President of Mozilla Labs, he talked about how the basic browser UI really hasn't changed much. In part, that's intentional - when I've talked with other folks at Mozilla, the people with their sleeves rolled and their fingers typing as they get new versions pushed out the door, they tend to say that they and Firefox users are content with the basic browser design.

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