It seems altogether fitting that admissions numbers for the Class of 2011 have come out at a time when Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong's handling of the lacrosse case is again making headlines.

After all, the incoming group of freshmen was the first to fill out applications after the lacrosse scandal broke. These stats are, in short, the ones everyone's been waiting for.

And they weren't too shabby after all. Although the statistics were not as jaw-dropping as Duke News may make them out to be, the numbers do indicate that the "Duke lacrosse scandal" did not deter prospective students from applying and probably hasn't struck as big a blow to the University as some had anticipated.

Perhaps, in short, Bloomberg News didn't tell the whole story when an article it ran May 2 asserted that according to students and parents, the so-called "Harvard of the South" was "not the magnet it used to be."

To the contrary, a total of 21 percent of the 19,206 high school seniors who applied to Duke were accepted this spring-the lowest "admit percentage" and second-highest number of applicants in Duke's history.

Optimizing Your Online Investment

Optimizing your online investment doesn't have to be expensive or overwhelming. With the right planning and the right solutions, your site can begin to work for you in ways unimaginable. All it takes is a little planning and foresight. Saul Ives is founder and CEO of Voicewalk, a full-service production company dedicated to developing online software and Web-based demos.

Decentralized Commerce

Decentralized commerce has a different paradigm. Rather than bringing more people to your site, the goal is to allow customers to buy merchandise from your store wherever they are. While affiliate networks have long gotten products in front of people via other sites, pushing the actual checkout process there as well is somewhat new.

The MP3 player is much more than that, however. It contains dynamic pricing information and allows users to sign in, register, and buy music directly from the widget itself. Because of some inherent security issues in the way Web 2.0 technologies talk to each other, credit card information is still processed via an SSL (define) page.

Yahoo!'s Project Panama sees imminent UK launch

Yahoo!'s (NASDAQ: YHOO) Project Panama is the web giant's attempt to re-thread its entire text-based advertising system to emulate Google's AdWords system. Google's system lets advertisers compete on customer relevancy and click-through rather than on advertised keyword bid price. Obviously, Google's relevancy model is the clear winner here, after Yahoo!, which spent over a billion smackers to buy Overture years ago, has admitted that keyword bidding just doesn't work as as well -- the customers (not the advertisers) have to be in charge.Yahoo!'s new text advertising system went live in the U.S. during the last calendar quarter of 2006 and is looming on the horizon to be launched in the UK (and other markets) soon. Yahoo! still receives quite a bit of traffic to its network (search not so much) and wants to monetize more of that with advertising methods that actually work well.

.com Domain Names Don’t Get Cheaper than This; Daily.co.uk Drops ...

London, United Kingdom, May 26, 2007 --(PR.com)-- UK Domain Name provider Daily.co.uk today announced a huge price drop for Top Level Domain Names. For a limited time only, Daily.co.uk will be selling .com, .net, .org, .biz and .info domains for just £4.99 per year."For years UK domain name providers have made a fortune from selling .com domain names," commented Daily.co.uk MD Abby Hardoon. "They’ve placed a higher margin on .com, .net, .org domains in order to sell .co.uk’s for pennies. We’re now selling both for pennies!"Daily.co.uk is also offering many free features with domain name registrations, including free POP3/IMAP email box, free Google AdWords Search voucher credit, free one page website, and full DNS management via our easy-to-use control panel.".com is the world’s most popular type of domain," says Abby.