Eager to cut a deeper trench with its online ad business, Microsoft has opened its checkbook once again, this time to purchase YaData, an Israeli company specializing in behavioral targeting and customer segmentation technologies.

Along with the acquisition came the vague promise that YaData's technology would help Microsoft "provide more focused and relevant advertising."

Earlier this week, Microsoft announced a new feature called Engagement ROI, promising to give advertisers a better measure of how all their placements in a given campaign contribute to a customer's decision to make a purchase.

A Microsoft representative would not comment on how the acquisition specifically would improve Microsoft's Ad Center platform, providing only a statement saying that YaData's behavioral targeting technology "will help Microsoft provide better ROI for advertisers, higher yield for publishers and more relevant advertising for consumers through advanced targeting and optimization."

Details of the transaction were not disclosed, but the Israeli business paper Globes reported that the sale price was between $20 million and $30 million.

The eBay sellers' boycott has been extended another week. I say "has been" extended because I'm coming up a little short on what entity, exactly, is leading the protest action against the e-commerce giant.

There is a site, Powersellersunite.com, that gives the disgruntled sellers something of a unified Web presence, but they're not exactly a labor union. It's unclear what, if any, leverage the boycott will exercise over eBay.

At issue are the fee adjustments announced last month and, of greater pain, the fact that come May, sellers will no longer be able to leave negative feedback about buyers.

"Some people think it's more about the fees, but it's really more about the feedback policy," said Ina Steiner, an expert on all things e-Bay who runs the site Auctionbytes.com.

Incoming CEO John Donahoe said the feedback changes were needed because eBay found that sellers were leaving retaliatory comments against buyers at a much greater rate than buyers were about sellers, and that that was creating an inhospitable shopping experience. Instead, Donahoe said that eBay would provide recourse for sellers dealing with the proportionally small number of deadbeat buyers by ramping up its behind-the-scenes monitoring. Steiner said she pressed him on how, specifically, eBay would protect sellers after stripping their right to speak out against bad buyers, but that he offered no specifics.

While third-party tracking firms have claimed that sellers' listings on eBay have dropped 13 percent since the auction began, the company said that it has seen no discernible dip in seller activity.

Short of keeping the issue in the media, the real impact of the sellers' strike will be marginal, Steiner predicts. For one thing, the largest sellers probably aren't the one participating. They would be the ones who are also selling on Amazon and through their own Web sites. Those are the ones that eBay wants to keep, according to Steiner.

"eBay doesn't mind losing some of the unique items that they have right now," she said. "The way that they rolled out the fees, it favors high-volume commodity sellers."

The more expendable sellers -- the ones who are manning the virtual barricades -- are the ones who can ill afford the work stoppage, Steiner suggests.

"The biggest thing about boycotting as a seller it that it comes right out of your bottom line," she said.

Having completed its first round of venture funding, doubleTwist -- the company dedicated to "helping consumers liberate their media" -- has raised the curtain on its first product offerings.

doubleTwist's new desktop program claims it will liberate digital media from their DRM protections, so consumers can share content with their friends and sync it to any device they choose.

"When you receive an e-mail, you can read it on your Blackberry, Web mail or Outlook. E-mail just works," said Monique Farantzos, CEO of doubleTwist and co-founder of the company with Jon Lech Johansen, known in some circles as DVD Jon.

"With digital media such as video from a friend's cell phone or your own iTunes playlists, it's a jungle out there," Farantzos continued. "It can be an hour-long exercise in futility to convert files to the correct format and transfer them to your Sony PSP or your phone."

doubleTwist's other offering is a Facebook application, called "Twist me." Released in beta, Twist me allows people to share media with their Facebook friends and sync to a variety of portables, including Sony PSP and Nokia N series handsets, with support for the iPhone coming soon.

Available as a free download, the doubleTwist desktop detects and displays media from any peripheral device and "transparently handles any necessary file conversions." doubleTwist said that the product also integrates with Apple's iTunes store, so people could sync digital music bought through that application to a variety of devices, effectively working around the DRM restrictions attached to most music available on iTunes.

If it takes hold, and survives the legal challenges that could be waiting, the technology could come as a body blow to DRM, already on the ropes as the major record labels have already shown their willingness to license their collections without the restrictions to Amazon. The industry's alliance with Amazon MP3 is of course a calculated move to break Apple's vice-grip on digital music. However, doubleTwist is now offering a freely distributed technological workaround that would accomplish what Apple has not been able to through its licensing agreements: shed the usage restrictions from the music available through its wildly popular online store.

As released, the desktop application works with Windows XP or Vista. A version for the Mac operating system is expected in the second quarter of the year.

Yahoo is pressing forward with the "strategic workforce realignment" CEO Jerry Yang promised in last month's earnings call.

Reports are coming in from Sunnyvale today that every meeting room was filled with managers meeting with employees and handing out pink slips. The company planned to lay off about 1,000 employees.

Last month, Yang said that the company was facing "headwinds" as it entered a year of transformation. Of course, an asteroid crashed into Yang's strategic overhaul on Feb. 1, when Microsoft went public with its unsolicited acquisition bid.

That the layoffs are happening as planned is no great surprise. Yahoo has spurned Microsoft's bid, and is moving forward with initiatives like its ambitious mobile agenda, as we saw from its announcements at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona earlier this week.

Many analysts have predicted that there will be a personnel churn if Microsoft is successful in acquiring the company. They point to a clash of cultures. Quite simply, many Yahoos would never work for Microsoft. Should Microsoft go hostile in its bid, the bad blood could create an exodus.

No doubt these are heady times in the world of Yahoo. Given the precarious future of the company, it's easy to imagine that some of the now-former employees already had one foot out the door.

If Yahoo rejects Microsoft's $44.6 billion acquisition bid, as The Wall Street Journal has reported it will on Monday, CEO Jerry Yang is going to have to make a pretty strong argument to convince frustrated shareholders that he can turn it around, and fast.

Rejecting the bid could mean one of two things. Yahoo could be trying to lean on Microsoft for a higher offer, or it could be digging its heels in, signaling its commitment to remaining independent and fending off a hostile takeover. The Journal quotes an unnamed source close to the matter saying the bid "massively undervalues" the company.

The $31 per share that Microsoft offered was a 62 percent premium over the closing price of Yahoo's shares the night before it was announced. Since then, Yahoo shares have soared by more than 50 percent on reaction to the bid, closing at $29.20 on Friday.

Microsoft would already have to borrow -- for the first time ever -- to finance the transaction. It is uncertain how much higher it would be willing to go to purchase the Internet pioneer. There have been no takers on the short list of companies in a position to put in a rival bid.

Yahoo's shareholders are impatient. Jerry Yang replaced Terry Semel as chief executive last summer with the mandate of reversing the company's flagging stock price. He has not. Shareholders have filed suit against Yang and the board, claiming that it has breached its fiduciary duty. Rejecting the offer is likely to send them into orbit, and drive the share price in the opposite direction.

The Journal reported that Yahoo would send a letter to Microsoft detailing its reasons for rejecting the offer, which would likely include the lengthy regulatory review that could hamstring Yahoo as it continues to limp along independently.

The initial rejection could spur Microsoft to up its offer, or initiate a proxy battle in an attempt to oust the board.

A Yahoo spokeswoman reiterated that the board was "evaluating the Microsoft proposal in the context of all of the company's strategic alternatives."

What those alternatives might be -- and whether they might entail a detour over to Mountain View -- should soon become a little clearer.

Whether the Super Bowl ads struck you as amusing, annoying or just plain absurd, you can't argue with results.

Two new sets of research from marketing consultancy SendTec and online metrics firm comScore make a pretty strong argument that the Super Bowl TV spots succeeded in driving Web traffic. In marketers' multi-channel mix, the Web has become a complementary vehicle to television for promoting a brand, so directing consumers to the Web, if not the explicit goal of the TV spot, is certainly a positive result.

An estimated 97.5 million viewers tuned in to watch the Super Bowl, and many of them raced to the Internet to view the spots that struck them as funny, cute, curious or clever. Thirteen percent of Super Bowl viewers went online to watch an ad, comScore found. For GoDaddy.com, which devoted its entire spot to driving traffic to its Web site to view the ad that Fox wouldn't air, that portion rose to 38 percent.

For a company that has built a reputation for pushing the boundaries of acceptable content in its Super Bowl ads, this year's campaign exceeded even the chief executive's expectations. Here's what GoDaddy CEO Bob Parsons wrote in his blog:

"Before the game was over, we received right at 1.5 million visits to our Web site. We had a whopping 2 million visitors for the day. This compares to last year when we had less than 1/2 million visitors."

SendTec took a more empirical approach in its measure of advertisers' success in driving traffic to the Web. Tide's Web site took five minutes of refreshing before it loaded completely, the firm noted.

SendTec also looked at what the different companies were doing to supplement their TV-Web cross-promotion with paid search advertising. GoDaddy bid on terms like "Super Bowl ads," "Super Bowl commercials" and "domain."

Audi enhanced the reach of its spot -- a play on "The Godfather" -- by bidding on keywords like "Godfather," "Godfather Ad" and "Audi Commercial."

More metrics will be forthcoming, for sure, but it seems clear that the TV-Web linkage is working, and that the Super Bowl, celebrated for its TV spots, has become a fertile ground for multi-channel promotion.

So far the Super Bowl has been a fertile ground for News Corp. cross promotion. 

The cast of Prison Break finally escaped, tunneling up from under ground, breaking through the surface at midfield.  The eponymous curmudgeon from the medical drama House strummed out the licks from the Fox's NFL theme music on his electric guitar, then growled to the camera, "Wear a cup."  Then the latest machine dispatched from the Terminator franchise body slammed the Fox football robot.

From the ads not hawking a Murdoch brand, here are a few of the highlights so far:

Bill Frist and James Carville put their differences aside and came together over a Coke.  They rode around D.C. on a tourist trolley and watched the sun set over the reflecting pool.  In these politically charged times where polarization and divisiveness are the norm, the scene was refreshing, kind of like a Coke.

eTrade showed us a baby gloating about how easy it is to buy stock online.  Click.  "Look, I just bought stock."  Then the child spit up on itself.  The economy's tough all around.

SalesGenie.com put its $2.7 million (the going price for a 30-second spot on the game) to good use showing us pandas with ludicrously overdrawn (and borderline offensive, I'd imagine) Asian accents struggling to figure out how to build their business.  (Part of the secret turned out to be to stop eating the bamboo furniture.  The other part involved using some Web-based lead-generation service.  I forget the name.)

In case you missed any of the action (the ads, not the game), News Corp.'s got you covered.  You can review all te ads on MySpace, at myspace.com/superbowlads.