Yahoo has filed a patent that could see markers bid against one another to target the most influential social audiences.

Is Yahoo about to reinvent itself?

It wasn’t long ago that the cover of the TIME Magazine person of the year issue featured a computer monitor with the word “You,” lauding the ingenuity and creativity of the average internet user who posted and watched videos on something called YouTube. That was at a time, however, when online video ad spending clocked less than $500 million annually and the total number of unique video users was less than 80 million.

Last week I was asked to deliver a presentation on social SEO and what Google’s search formula tweaks now mean for brands and organizations looking to boost their visibility. This is a rapidly evolving issue, but there are some enduring points here that all organizations (and journalists too!) should keep in mind. Hopefully this guide will help you.

I’ve been exploring some of the implications of openness at large scale and identifying how value is created. One way to think about that is by positioning openness and empowerment against control and ownership.

We’re actually being slightly conservative here, given the new data from comScore. Incredibly, Facebook served up about one in every three online display ads served in the U.S. And that was just for Q1, a seasonally slow quarter.

What’s hot in social media investment this week? Social commerce, crowdsourced content hubs, apps specialists and, yes, social media monitoring. This week’s freshly funded startups brought in a combined $409.9 million, thanks mainly to SocialLiving’s massive $400 million haul.

Topsy provides a real-time search engine for social networking sites with particular focus on Twitter. It works through content and relevancy keywords, then it rates the discussion based on the influence and reach of the participating users. This, the company proclaims, is the forefront of Search 2.0.

What does it take to build a fully-functional social network from scratch? Users, and lots of them. But how do you convince the public that this new network is worth their time? For askalo, the new location-based Q&A network, the key is to hit the social niche with a game-based pitch. And, to go hyper-local.

Facebook is the first to say its new communications platform, Facebook Messages, is not email, nor is it some kind of “email killer.” Maybe not. Still, the web’s biggest email providers, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL, should be quaking today.