Danny Sullivan asks if Yahoo! Answers may not be the next big thing on the web. He points out that it is growing nearly as fast as YouTube and MySpace (albeit from a smaller base).
Via Steve Rubel

Wired News reports that License Plate Tracking technology, for now the province of US police departments, is set to go public.

The systems, which cost about $25,000 are about the size of a can of baked beans and are powered by a cigarette lighter. Attached to a laptop they can check up to 60 plates a minute against a database, says Wired.

Wired quotes former policeman Andy Bucholz, who’s on the board of Virginia-based G2 Tactics, a manufacturer of the technology, saying the price is coming down and companies like ChoicePoint, who already provide masses of personal information on people, will be chomping at the bit to get hold of real-time locational data.

Online advertising spending is set to grow 25 per cent worldwide in 2006 says a report from Carat, quoted by the AOP.

Internet advertising will continue its rapid ascent in 2006 and help prop up growth in the ad market as a whole, according to a new report from Carat International.

The Aegis-owned network said in its latest “Global Market Update” that the online medium will grow 25 per cent year-on-year worldwide, and will overtake the amount of ad revenue generated by newspapers in the US by 2008.

In the UK, it overtook outdoor advertising in 2005 and is likely to outstrip magazines this year. For early adopters like Sweden and South Korea, the internet is forecast to become the third biggest advertising medium this year, after television and newspapers.

According to PaidContent.org Amazon.com’s movie service will launch in mid-August.

[The service], which has been in the works for some time now, will launch mid-August, report AdAge. The service, called Amazon Digital Video — or Amazon “DV” — has evolved over the past year from a music-themed offering to a video-centric one, mainly because of competing services. It will have movies and TV shows, and will have subscription and la carte download (download to own plus burn) options.

PaidContent.org notes the explosion of small live gigs which are being streamed live to satisfy the demand for niche content – another example of the democratisation of the medium. There are a number of companies springing up to satisfy the desire more more specialised content like Network Live and Livenation. The Long Tail is making itself known in virtually all media.

Zoli’s Blog was first with the news that Technorati has updated its UI, even stealing a march on David Sifry who was now has more details up.

iJeff Jarvis makes much of the fact that Nielsen report on the lowest-ever ratings by the network TV companies in the US and its co-incidence with the news that YouTube is now serving 100 million videos a day. “Insert apocalyptic punchline here,” he says.

Robert Scoble, the ex-Microsoft blogger, has an interesting post on the coming “developer wars”. He believes there are a few essentials: developers need a platform that is fast, has a load of storage, has powerful APIs and is cheap/free. He assesses the current players against these criteria. The winner? Probably Google, but don’t count out the others, he says.

Interesting collaborative voting system at AmigoFish. Worth a look.

Dabble, a video search service, launches in “private beta” – which means give them your email address and you might get invited to try it out.