Interesting little “tidbit” on TechCrunch today about the $928 million sale Zappos to Amazon.com. Seems that Amazon snapped up the domain name Clothes.com while they where at it.

Regardless of the branding considerations, there is no doubt that most serious domainers would like nothing less that to own such a premium name. While Google seems to have discounted the sale, it’s still a pretty amazing buy. Of yeah, plus they got a great company with the domain name to boot!

VenureBeat has an interesting post about premium video site Hulu. While the post raises some important questions about the site’s future, it is most definitely one company to watch. Let’s see if Hulu can “take it all the way.”

It’s even hard not to be impressed with the 19.7 percent increase in unique visitors the site had in the month of March – evil plot none the less.

With all the attention Twitter is getting lately, you can’t help but wonder when the micro-blogging service will announce it’s upcoming “business model.”

Making light of the service is not currently in vogue because no one wants to burst the Twitter bubble by posting about potential competitors. Well almost no one. LOL.

You can’t blink these days – otherwise you might miss the huge amount of daily press coverage afforded micro-blogging service Twitter. Even Oprah Winfrey is getting into the service, and according to Hitwise – increased unique visitors by forty-three percent last Friday.

Everyone knows that when Oprah plugs a book, retail outlet, or website on her popular show, you can pretty much conclude that you’ve finally hit the big time. But according to Compete.com, when compared to the monthly uniques of behemoth Facebook.com, it’s easy to see that Twitter has much more growth potential still to be realized. Sure makes you wonder just how ubiquitous micro-blogging will end up becoming.

According to both All Things Digital and Tech Crunch, billionaire financier Carl Icahn bought up another 6.7 million shares of Yahoo earlier this week. Icahn owns Yahoo stock that has lost about $900 million in value since he bought about five percent of Yahoo earlier in the year.

Whether Yahoo is close to announcing a new CEO or not, the purchase of 6.7 million more Yahoo shares for about $65 million by Icahn over the last several days, clearly shows he is still committed to the company for some time to come.

Kara Swisher broke news that Facebook and Twitter have ended several weeks of “serious talks,” in which Facebook was offering to acquire Twitter for $500 million of its stock. It appears the talks broke down because Twitter executives and Facebook couldn’t agree about actual worth of Facebook stock.

TechCrunch also reported that at the recent Web 2.0 Summit, moderator John Battelle asked Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg on stage if Facebook would be interested in buying Twitter. Zuckerberg’s response was: “we’re really impressed by what they’ve done”, and that they have “a very elegant model”.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP (PwC) today announced that Internet advertising revenues reached almost $5.9 billion for the third quarter of 2008. Such growth represents an 11 percent increase over the same period in 2007, while quarter-to-quarter growth is slowing.

As you can clearly see in this chart – growth flattens in each quarter of 2008, unlike the sharp growth of previous years. This is simply confirming what we already know, spending on internet advertising has seen a serious slow in growth rates.

Starting in February 2009, PC Magazine will become a 100-percent digital publication. PC Magazine which was started in 1982 and introduced software and hardware reviews, will claim the jobs of about seven employees with the closure of the print edition.

ReadWriteWeb reports that “A number of publishers have been experimenting with digital editions similar to PC Magazine’s. The New York Times, for example, has its Times Reader application, which allows offline access to the paper.”

Jerry Yang has decided to step down as CEO of Yahoo! While Jerry has received a bashing this last year over his decision to pass on the Microsoft deal, Yahoo is still one of the most trafficked sites on the Web -“and still makes more profits than most companies in the sector.”

Yang announced that “I’ll be returning to my role as Chief Yahoo and board member once my successor is named,” and “that I will always bleed purple.” Although Yahoo! stock may have taken a bashing this year along with Yang, it still has some of the Internet’s most valuable digital properties – including the Flickr photo service.

There’s a lot of buzz over the Financial Times article on how News Corp backed video site Hulu is showing greater profit growth than competitor YouTube. MediaMemo and PaidContent both dig a bit deeper into the analysis behind the claims.

While Scott Karp over at Publishing 2.0 gives his ten “observations” about what this means for the future of media. I have to agree with number ten – “Six years after Google perfected search advertising, there has been no innovation in online advertising that even comes close to the same scale.”