Mobile Internet use has reached “critical mass”
Jacqui Cheng, also of Ars Technica, reports on a study by Nielsen Mobile that calls for increased marketing efforts to take advantage of the popularity of mobile phones. “Using the Internet from mobile devices is a lot more popular than some of us realize, and even more surprising is the fact that the US leads the pack when it comes to mobile Internet usage.”

Microsoft Climbs Higher Into the Cloud
Tech News World reports on the growing cloud computing industry and the impact of Microsoft’s more aggressive efforts in this space. “Microsoft is offering some of its most popular acquisitions via cloud computing with the rollout of Microsoft Online Services. Like many vendors adopting this delivery mode, Microsoft is seeking to exploit companies’ eagerness to downsize their internal IT and computing infrastructures to the greatest extent possible.”

Search War: Yahoo! Opens Its Search Engine to Attack Google With An Army of Verticals
ReadWriteWeb talks about Yahoo!’s latest move in a bid to increase its share in the all-important search market. “Yahoo! is taking a bold step tonight: opening up its index and search engine to any outside developers who want to incorporate Yahoo! Search’s content and functionality into search engines on their own sites.”

Battle of the iPhone Apps: MySpace vs Facebook
The social networking war rages on a new front – the iPhone. Mashable makes a side-by-side comparison of the two competing applications. “Which bears better features? And which bears a more pleasant physique, etc., etc.?”

Testing the Long Tail’s First Test
O’Reilly Radar scrutinizes a Harvard study that casts a bad light on the long tail business model. “Web entrepreneurs have been relying on the Chris Anderson’s long tail hypothesis even before he published his ideas, so it’s good to see that the academic community has begun to study the effect and test for its existence.”

The “Participation Premium”
Robert Scoble analyzes his and Michael Arrington’s Twitter and FriendFeed habits in order to find what it takes to be popular in social media. “What this is telling you is that you can easily get noticed in any community simply by participating. Yes, other factors do matter, but just by participating you’ll build an audience that “the popular kids” can’t get to.”

Gosh, How Many Diggs Does It Take To Get To The Home Page, Anyway?
A story with over 900 diggs that failed to make it to the frontpage prompts Michael Arrington to look back at how the site has changed over time. “Back in June 2005 when I first wrote about Digg (six days after starting TechCrunch), it took just 15 diggs and a story was automatically sent to the home page of the then small and innocent site (there are lots of old screen shots of Digg in that post). Today it takes an average of 150 or so to get to the Digg home page, although that varies considerably based on the user who submitted the story and the domain name being pointed to.”