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Despite a hectic past two months fighting off a proxy battle with investor Carl Icahn, Yahoo is rumored to be sending out buyout feelers for social-networks company Demand Media.

Yahoo's Hilary Schneider, who was recently promoted to oversee the company's U.S. go-to market operations, traveled to Demand Media's Santa Monica, Calif., offices a couple weeks ago to gauge Demand's interest in a $1.5 billion to $2 billion buyout, TechCrunch reports, citing unnamed sources.

But Demand Media didn't bite, TechCrunch notes, adding that company founder Richard Rosenblatt is said to be seeking a price in the $3 billion range.

A post in All Things Digital casts a different perspective on that meeting.

In an interview with All Things Digital, the Demand Media founder said: "There is a lot of potential here, and I want to build a big company for the long-term."

All Things Digital also cites Yahoo sources as saying there has been "no offer floated" to acquire Demand Media.

But both reports note that a hook-up between the companies wouldn't be a bad idea.

Says TechCrunch:

It just so happens that what Demand Media is good at--generating lots of advertising impressions and creating niche social networks for media sites, may be a perfect fit for at least some of what ails Yahoo.

But should Yahoo want to make a play for the company and force a deal, Demand Media doesn't have the same pressures as Yahoo, which is in its own fix with Icahn. Demand Media isn't publicly traded, at least yet...

Open-source Web conferencing provider Dimdim has raised $6 million in Series B funding, the company is set to announce on Wednesday.

The funding round, which was led by current investors Index Ventures, Nexus India Capital, and Draper Richards, will enable Dimdim to introduce enhancements to the free service and expand its market reach.

Dimdim competes with fee-based services like Webex. Because it is open source, it could become a platform for real-time communications if it garners enough developer support, my CNET colleague Rafe Needleman predicts.

Since its private launch 10 months ago, Boston-based Dimdim has attracted more than 500,000 users in more than 180 countries, the company says.

Fans of microblogging service Twitter are apparently impervious to repeated outages and technical problems--and their enthusiasm is spreading.

Research firm Hitwise on Tuesday reported that traffic to the Twitter site increased 500 percent the week ending July 5, 2008, compared with the same period last year. That's a significant jump for a service that's continually up and down--and still lacking a clear revenue stream.

What's more, many users of the service appear to be unruffled by Twitter's technical issues. The share of returning visitors has averaged approximately 53 percent over the past four months, according to Hitwise.

Twitter also still has a leg up over its few rivals in the microblogging space. Twitter traffic last week was 12 times higher than that of Plurk and 24 times higher than FriendFeed, Hitwise says. So even though Tweeters may be getting restless, not all of them are abandoning the service in favor of similar finds.

"Despite user complaints about outages, Twitter has remained the most popular among the micro-blogging services," Hitwise said in a statement.

Earlier Tuesday, rumors escalated that Twitter was in the throes of buying Summize, a Twitter search engine. Neither Twitter nor Summize have commented on speculation of a possible merger.

Flickr on Tuesday entered a partnership with Getty Images to offer its users a way to potentially make money off their photography.

The Yahoo-owned photo-hosting community will be a new resource for Getty, which can now contact Flickr members directly through the site and ask them if they want to share one or more of their images for use in a special Flickr-branded Getty collection.

Flickr members interested in getting their images featured in the special Getty gallery will have to simply wait to be contacted. Otherwise, Getty and Flickr are encouraging aspiring photographers to post their content on the Getty-owned iStockphoto, which also happens to have been a hotbed for Flickr photos in the past.

Flickr-hosted images that have been chosen to be included in the new collection will get a special link to the Getty page where they can purchase a license to use the shot.

In order to get paid and allow their images to be used, Flickr members must sign a Getty Images contributor contract, which stipulates that the photographer is the owner, and has any necessary model releases and originals. It also outlines the various rates based on size and intended commercial usage.

Those rates, not yet available, are likely to follow some of Getty's standard rates. As part of the deal, the only transaction is being shared directly between the photographer and Getty, meaning Yahoo will not be getting a share of that fee. According to Yahoo's rep, "Getty and Flickr have a separate business relationship."

The move is a special deal for Flickr, which currently does not allow for commercial transactions on the site outside of using partners for services such as photo printing. It's long been expected that Flickr would get around to implementing a system like this, if only to take advantage of the size of its collection, which averages thousands of user uploads every minute.

Update: Changes have been made to this article since it first posted regarding the link to the Getty purchase pages on Flickr as well as the nature of the business partnership between Getty Images and Yahoo.

Google on Tuesday said it is now using an e-mail authentication technology to keep phishers from luring Gmail users to fake eBay and PayPal Web pages in order to steal usernames and passwords.

The technology, DomainKeys, uses cryptography to verify the domain of the sender of an e-mail. It allows e-mail providers to validate the domain from which an e-mail originates, and it enables easier detection of phishing attempts by helping identify abusive domains.

Last October, Yahoo announced that it was protecting Yahoo Mail users with eBay and PayPal accounts from phishing attempts using the same technology.

The DomainKeys technology is covered by a patent assigned to Yahoo. The company released it under a dual-license scheme that allows the companies to use it royalty-free under the GNU General Public License (GPL 2.0), which enabled the Internet Engineering Task Force to approve it as a proposed Internet standard.

XML, it seems, has run out of steam for Google.

Google said Monday that it has created an open-source project for a data interchange format called Protocol Buffers.

The software is meant to solve the problem of sharing information in a wide range of formats between servers at high speed. It's also designed to let companies like Google upgrade software on a network of connected servers without causing hiccups.

Google thought of using XML as a lingua franca to send messages between its different servers. But XML can be complicated to work with and, more significantly, creates large files that can slow application performance.

Protocol Buffers is an alternative way of describing the format of data that is being sent over the network or stored to a hard drive. Unlike XML, it's a compact format and is designed to be simple to use, according to Kenton Varda of Google's Software Engineering Team.

Varda wrote in the company's open-source blog:

Protocol Buffers allow you to define simple data structures in a special definition language, then compile them to produce classes to represent those structures in the language of your choice. These classes come complete with heavily-optimized code to parse and serialize your message in an extremely compact format. Best of all, the classes are easy to use: each field has simple "get" and "set" methods, and once you're ready, serializing the whole thing to--or parsing it from--a byte array or an I/O stream just takes a single method call.

Matt Cutts, a software engineer who heads Google's Webspam team, said in a blog late Monday that Protocol Buffers automatically generates Java, Python, or C++ code:

Think of Protocol Buffers as a very compact way of encoding data in a binary format. A programmer can write a simple description of a protocol or structured data and Google's code will autogenerate a class in C++, Java, or Python to read, write, and parse the protocol. Given a protocol buffer, you can write it to disk, send it over the network wire, and do any number of interesting tricks. Any medium-sized company (and quite a few startups!) should find Protocol Buffers very handy.

The software is available the Apache Software License 2.0.

Like a lot of what Google's engineering team does, this seems to make sense. XML has long been criticized as being too slow, which has led to controversial efforts to standardize XML compression.

But given the huge investment in XML, it doesn't look like Protocol Buffers will replace it. Instead, it will be used--certainly by Google and likely others--for Web applications that need a very efficient way to move around data in multiple formats.

Microsoft detailed on Tuesday its road map and pricing for Web-based software suites built for big companies and growing businesses.

Enabling telecommuting, which many employers and workers increasingly favor, is likely to be a selling point for the productivity and "deskless worker" tools within the Microsoft Online Services lineup.

The move is part of Redmond's push to integrate online and desktop software, shifting much of the heavy lifting to the "cloud."

"Microsoft Online Services is a key component of the software plus services initiative, and we're seeing customers, partners and even competitors embrace this flexible approach to the cloud," Stephen Elop, president of the Microsoft Business Division, said in a statement.

Details were unveiled Tuesday in Houston at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference.

Microsoft's per-user monthly fees for its online business services.

(Credit: Microsoft)

For $15 per month per person, the business productivity suite offers an Outlook-integrated Exchange Online for e-mail and calendars, Office SharePoint Online collaboration, messaging via Office Communications Online, and Office Live Meeting video-enabled Web conferencing.

The software giant will charge another $3 per month per user for the Deskless Worker Suite, which combines flavors of SharePoint Online and Exchange Online. The SharePoint portal offers access to internal company sites and search. E-mail, calendars, security filters, and Outlook Web Access Light are included with Exchange Online Deskless Worker.

Microsoft aims to simplify otherwise complex corporate tasks managed by engineers or IT technicians. For instance, a WYSIWYG interface would enable an IT worker to give a new employee access to the company tools in a series of steps that could be shorter than setting up, say, a free Hotmail or Yahoo e-mail account.

One can sign up online to try the beta services.

Exchange Online and Office SharePoint Online remain in beta, with final availability set for sometime in the second half of 2008, when Office Communications Online beta is also due. Microsoft plans for international availability in 2009.

The company offers to pay resellers of its Online Services 12 percent of the price of each contract secured during the first year, and 6 percent per subscription year thereafter. Interested companies can learn more at Microsoft's QuickStart Web site.

Microsoft partners and resellers of Online Services include Accenture, CDW, and Unisys. Nokia is among the companies using the online tools for messaging and collaboration.

Microsoft Online Services includes these tools.

(Credit: Microsoft)

R.J. Pittman, Google's director of product management for Consumer Search Properties, shared some details of future versions of image search. In the interview with Beet.tv's Andy Plesser, Pittman said that Google is developing visual crawling software that can be used for facial recognition and scene analysis. In addition images can be matched with display ads and utilize geotagging information for various applications.

Watch the video

Flash has not been easily searchable until now, but Adobe Systems is working with leading search engines Google and Yahoo to solve the problem. CNET News.com Editor in Chief Dan Farber and reporter Elinor Mills discuss the impact of making Flash pages more visible to search engines. One question is whether Microsoft, which developed Silverlight, a competitor to Flash, will also index Flash files in its search engine.

Watch the video:

See also:

Uncloaking 'invisible' Flash Web content

Adobe unveils Reader 9 with Flash

Adobe released on Tuesday the first Reader application to bake movies and animation into the Portable Document Format.

With Adobe Reader 9, users can play Flash movies, Shockwave animation, and other rich media content without needing to open a third-party player.

With Reader 9, one click would play a Flash movie embedded in the PDF shown here.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

PDFs are reaching new levels of interactivity with this release. Past versions of the nearly ubiquitous and free application, by contrast, have enabled dynamic forms but served largely to open print-ready PDFs.

The update is supposed to load more quickly than version 8, addressing the gripes of many users who felt that Reader slowed down Web surfing.

Adobe has described this release as potentially leading to a one-size-fits-all media player. Acrobat 9, released in June at between $299 to $699, will embed video and animation within PDFs.

Acrobat 9 document-creation software can embed videos and animation as well as custom-developed applications alongside maps that preserve geospatial data, 3D models, images, word processing documents, spreadsheets, and presentations in common formats. The priciest, Pro Extended flavor of Acrobat can convert multiple video formats into Flash.

Security enhancements to the refresh of Acrobat and Reader include support for digital signatures and 256-bit AES encryption.

Adobe's launch of an online word processor and conferencing tool via Acrobat.com in June enables users to comment and collaborate simultaneously on documents, and to convert documents to PDFs.

The Adobe Reader 9 download for Windows and Macs requires at least 128MB of RAM on either a Windows 2000 SP4 or newer system, or an Apple Mac G4 or newer running OS 10.4.11 or higher, respectively.