Online advertising has risen by nearly 30% in May, according to PaidContent.org which also publishes other financial highlights including for About.com.

American Apparel which has 130 stores in real life is opening its first in the online game Second Life.

Wikimapia is a mashup which allows users to annotate Google maps. I can image great things which could be done with it, especially in vertical contexts.

Steve Rubel blogs on the rumoured decision by Om Malik to leave Business 2 and turn free agent. He draws some parallels with other big personal media brands. Om’s Gigom blog is apparently the 85th largest in the world.

TagFetch is a great new site which aggregates tags from the major sites which have them. Steve Rubel has only two complaints: it doesn’t have an RSS feed generator and it doesn’t allow other sites to be added. Still, maybe these features will be in v2. A great resource for journalists to keep on top of key subject areas.

A newly relaunched Netscape.com includes Digg-like story voting and other community features. Meanwhile Digg announced it is to add more categories to broaden its appeal beyond technology.

Unique visitor numbers for the biggest social networking sites have been released by comScore Media Metrix. The numbers are truly staggering: out of a total internet audience in the US of 172m, Myspace has 51.4m visitors, Classmates and Facebook 14m each and video site Youtube 13m.

Tech site CNET writes about how companies should respond to employees blogging and using camera phones and iTunes at work. They provide some ideas on how guidelines could be developed.

Picasa Web Albums releases on limited test. This is Google’s Flickr-killer, although there’s a way to go; Flickr broke the 100 million images barrier a while ago.