Stevel Rubel reports that big advertisers are insisting on independent 3rd party traffic audits using sites like Hitwise or ComScore and that by 2008 they will want auditing of ad serving technology being used.

The first business magazine is launching in Second Life, says Steve Rubel. Called SL Business it bills itself as the “Premiere Virtual Branding Magazine”.

ToolURL.com is a new site which aggregates performance tools for webmasters.

The internet grew by 4.4 million host names in July reports Steve Rubel (quoting Netcraft) , the largest such rise in one month – ever. And he says the rise has been driven by blogging with Microsoft adding 858,000 new “Spaces” and Blogger adding 568,000 new blogs.

The AOP reports on a YouGov survey which shows Brits now spend an average of 20 hours online each week.

John Battelle reports on Google’s newly published paper on click fraud. The 17-page white paper addresses what it claims is huge over-reporting of clicks by the specialist firms which have sprung up to help advertisers get a grip on the scale of the click-fraud proble. John has helpfully uploaded the full document here.

Check out this promo for the k800 phone from Sony Ericsson which has Blogger built in.

Yahoo! has just launched Yahoo! Search Builder, a tool which allows easy implementation of custom search on a site.

The Google AdSense blogs offers some advice on how not to bother your users with ads…

The Google Talkabout blog waxes enthusiastic about the Sony mylo. “The Sony mylo (short for ‘my life online’) is a sleek handheld device that allows you to access a fun set of features from a WiFi network. With 1GB of memory you can store music and photos, browse the web, or use email and IM (the QWERTY keyboard comes in handy here). The mylo comes with built-in Google Talk IM support so you can see who’s online and available, manage your contacts, and hold multiple chat conversations at once. It also features quick access to Gmail.”