Last week Yahoo announced the acquisition of Zimbra, a web based email collaboration tool for organizations, ISPs, universities and more. Zimbra’s powerfool platform was chosen as a leading tool for the development of Comcast’s SmartZone (review) which should allow Comcast’s clients to manage their phone, email and intrernet accounts from a central area. Maurene Caplan Grey of ZDNET like to think that along with the benefits of acquiring Zimbra itself, Yahoo had seen further benefits in a further collaborating with Comcast whose in beef with Google anyways and may be able to use Yahoo to further enhance its offerings. After all Comcast is the second largest ISP in the US. [Read more]

Firefox 3.0 is almost out the oven and the word on the street says that it includes an anti-malware tool. Such a tool requires reporting to “base” of all visited URL’s and verification of each URL against existing database and it appears as if Google is going to be the beneficiary of this “feature”. If enabled, the browser will send Google all of the URL’s the surfer uses at all times. This is much like Google’s Accelerator tool which was launched with much hyped and proved to be just another data collection tool. It will be interesting to see the adoption rate of such tool given the average individual does not know what happens “behind the scenes”. [Read more]

comScore released its August “Web Ranking” report and Yahoo continues to rule the net when it comes to overall U.S. Traffic. The top 10 properties remained unchanged in August, as Yahoo! Sites topped the ranking with more than 135 million visitors. CBS Corporation experienced a 16-percent gain, lifting it 6 spots to number 24. Comcast Corporation also experienced a sizable jump, moving up seven positions to number 26 in the ranking with more than 25 million visitors. United Online enjoyed a four-position gain, drawing more than 26 million unique visitors in August. In the “Ad Focus Ranking” category, Google climbed to #7 in over all ads served. [Read more]

Google announced last week the addition of subscriber stats to its Google Webmaster Central: First of all, subscriber stats are now available. Webmaster Tools now show feed publishers the number of aggregated subscribers you have from Google services such as Google Reader, iGoogle, and Orkut. We hope this will make it easier to track subscriber statistics across multiple feeds, as well as offer an improvement over parsing through server logs for feed information. I’ve seen assumption that once Google gets his arms around these subscription stats, an implementation of this data into its Universal Search platform (& algorithm) would be a breeze, and it may as well happen. However, what do you do if you have no current subscribers or... [Read more]

Yahoo announced yesterday Yahoo Teachers, an online clipping service, part lesson planner, and part collaboration tool. The service is currently in closed beta. Here’s a quick introductory video off Yahoo Teachers: [Read more]