WASHINGTON -

The federal government is wading into deliberations over the future of journalism.

With the media business in distress, the Federal Trade Commission is holding a two-day workshop Tuesday and Wednesday to examine the challenges facing the industry and to explore ways the government might help it survive.

While media executives hope to find new business models, government officials say they want to discuss ways to preserve a free press as a pillar of democracy.

Among the panelists at the FTC event are News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch and Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington.

SAN FRANCISCO -

Michael Jackson's stunning death made him Yahoo's biggest star this year.

The quest to find out what happened to Jackson in his final hours on June 25 and celebrate his legacy elevated the late entertainer to the top of the Internet company's annual breakdown of the most frequent online search requests.

The self-proclaimed King of Pop ended singer Britney Spears' four-year reign atop Yahoo's search rankings.

The list released Tuesday is meant to provide a reading on our cultural pulse. It may not be the best barometer, given that Yahoo Inc. ranks a distant second to Google Inc. in Internet search. Google plans to release its own list of popular searches later this month.

This won't come as a surprise to, well, anyone who has spent considerable time on the Web, but a new study found that people act much differently online than offline.

According to eMarketer, which published the report on Monday, 'cyberdisinhibition' has caused many Web users to behave much differently online than they would in a typical offline setting. In fact, the market-research firm, which cites findings from Euro RSCG Worldwide, says 43 percent of U.S.-based Web users feel less inhibited online. It also found that 'the effect is most prominent among females and users ages 25 to 54.'

It's getting harder to focus on the vision of cloud computing these days. While there are still plenty of critical and complex problems to solve, and many, many implications of this disruptive operations model that have yet to be understood, the truth is that we've entered a new phase in the evolution of cloud adoption. Real work now exceeds theory when it comes to both new online content and work produced.

This kind of snuck up on me, but it shouldn't have. I myself witnessed many of the early events that greased the skids for real cloud success: the introduction of revolutionary products from Salesforce.com and Amazon Web Services; great blogs that discussed practical applications of early cloud environments, followed by books that explained step-by-step what should be considered in application architectures destined for the cloud.

SAN FRANCISCO--Ahead of a key international summit on climate change, Google hosted a panel discussion at its offices here Monday on the need for the U.S. to play a key role in the development of the next generation of energy.

Energy experts from Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley, and MIT joined Google's Dan Reicher, director of climate and energy initiatives and energy venture capitalist Tim Woodward of Nth Power in a wide-ranging discussion on a very timely topic: how to transition the world toward a more sustainable form of energy consumption and production. They were later joined via video conference by Kristina Johnson, undersecretary of energy at the U.S. Department of Energy.

Companies running applications on Amazon Web Services can now monitor their environments using IBM's Tivoli Monitoring software.

"We're now providing enterprise-class resource monitoring for products that are launched on the Amazon cloud," said Dave Mitchell, director of strategy and emerging business for IBM.

IBM already offered several other products on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), including DB2, WebSphere Portal and IBM Mashup Center. On Monday, it said customers can also fire up Tivoli Monitoring as an Amazon Machine Image.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – The last in a wave of hundreds of shareholder lawsuits over the 2001 AOL-Time Warner merger was dismissed on Monday by a New York judge who found the claim was filed too late and failed to link investor losses to statements made by AOL's auditor, Ernst & Young.

U.S. District Judge Colleen MacMahon granted Ernst & Young's motion to dismiss the complaint brought against it in 2003 by private investigator and former AOL shareholder Dominic Amorosa.

Amorosa filed his case after time limits for securities fraud cases had expired, and failed "to connect specific statements made by the auditor" to stock losses, the judge wrote. Amorosa had originally sued AOL, Time Warner, the merged company, AOL European partner Bertelsmann AG, and 11 executives in addition to Ernst & Young. The other defendants were dismissed from the case in earlier proceedings.

Yahoo has given the head of its mobile division broader responsibilities, in a sign that the search provider plans to focus even more on mobile opportunities.

David Ko, formerly senior vice president for Yahoo Mobile, is now senior vice president of audience and mobile for Yahoo in North America, the company said.

In his expanded role, Ko will run the development of Yahoo's leading audience properties including News, Sports, Finance and Entertainment. He will also draw on his mobile experience to help Yahoo more tightly integrate mobile into the rest of the company, it said.

San Francisco -

Google on Monday detailed recent improvements to its Google Chrome developer tools, which include the addition of a heap profiler for JavaScript and a timeline tab offering overviews of where time is spent when loading a Web application.

The tools were introduced in the Google Chrome developer channel. Chrome is the company's entrant in the browser market.

[ Also on InfoWorld: Google is getting ready to offer a beta release of Chrome for the Mac. ]

Seesmic's Twitter reader app for Mac and Windows is looking at some serious renewed competition from TweetDeck.

The newly updated TweetDeck 0.32 (and AIR app for Windows and Mac,) packs in a host of changes that should make the desktop app more attractive to power tweeters. Chief among these is new behavior for retweeting, when users share a contact's tweet with their own list of followers in just a click. TweetDeck supports two formats, the 'new style' that spits out an identical post and displays both your photo and that of the original tweeter, and the 'original' style that lets you edit before you post the duplicated message. We like that TweetDeck can remember your preference, or that you can do nothing and choose fresh each time.