Many of you may follow our monthly posts on ReadWriteWeb. At least I hope you do. Make sure to check out our most recent post on the introduction of Microsoft Retails Stores. Enjoy!

Sure, one-to-one “iChat” and video conferencing have been around for a while. But combine IM, Web cams, chat rooms and online video – and what do you get? Live video chat rooms. Whether for business, social networking or even chatting online with your kids, it seems that free Web chat rooms are an idea whose time has come.

Today, we’re ‘chatting’ with Craig Kilgour of Camfrog Video Chat based in Austin, TX:

Aplus.net: Who uses Camfrog ­– and are they located mostly in the U.S./North America?

CK: Camfrog is a very diverse community that is composed of people from all over the world. For some reason, our software is very popular in Asia and Europe, and also in Turkey.  We have localized versions of our software in the major European languages along with Thai and Turkish, and we are working on adding even more languages. (more…)

Every time you use a search engine, data from your search is collected. It doesn’t matter if you’re logged in to any account or not — even if you’re using a public computer, the search engine compiles data from that IP address for future reference. (more…)

The inevitable has finally happened: Search engine results can now be customized to suit your personal tastes. Last month, Google launched its new but highly anticipated SearchWiki function. (more…)

Inspired no doubt by this week’s news that Yahoo’s CEO is stepping down — and the uncharacteristic jump in stock value that greeted the news — Channel Web today published a very informative summary of the recent tribulations of Yahoo. (more…)