You may recall my interview with Wink CEO, Michael Tanne, back in January. Tanne sends word of a new look and features for the social search engine.

Tanne tells me new features include:

Collections – Wink Collections are a cool way for you to gather and share the best links on any topic. A collection can be about anything – hilarious videos, your favorite band, the best restaurants in your area, or research on a new gadget – you name it. You create a collection and add links to it and it shows up in search results.
Others can add links to the Collection – a great way for people to share what they know and improve search.

TechCrunch is reporting Six Apart, the blogging company, has acquired Rojo, a feed reader and blog search engine.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but our assumption was that this a less than $5 million deal. Six Apart is not planning on continuing to build out the core Rojo products. In the press release (sorry no link available yet), Six Apart says “Six Apart intends to sell a majority interest in Rojo’s newsreader services in the coming months,� meaning they will become a minority stockholder of the service. Rojo founder and CEO Chris Alden and CTO Aaron Emigh will joing Six Apart’s executive team.

Top 10 lists are already passé, Steve Rubel’s moved on to “A-Z” lists and offers-up his list of ways to make money from blogging.

Blogging Stocks is of the opinion that we may soon see a YouTube IPO. While the company is only 2-years old and not making a ton of money, other recent events suggest the company may be getting ready to go public.

Over the weekend the Wall Street Journal reported that YouTube hired Yahoo’s Treasurer, Gideon Yu, to take the role as the CFO. No doubt this is a critical role for a high-flier IPO.

In fact, over the past few months, YouTube has been staging a talent raid of Yahoo. The company hired away such names as Rob Solomon, Yahoo’s vice president of online shopping, and Tony Nethercutt, Yahoo’s National Sales Director.

I definitely think YouTube has enough momentum and buzz to consider an IPO, then again, so did Vonage.

Google’s just launched a News Archive which allows users to explore historical archives.

According to Google…

Users can search for events, people or ideas and see how they have been described over time. In addition to searching for the most relevant articles for their query, users can get a historical overview of the results by browsing an automatically created timeline. We provide two ways of searching: search articles, which presents articles in order of relevance to the query; and show timeline, which presents a timeline of events and articles associated with the query. The timeline is dynamically generated in response to each query.

It does appear they have a few glitches to work out. According to this screenshot, most “Google” news happened between 1890 and 1960!

ClickZ reports that online advertising outpaced all other media channels during the first half of 2006.

Internet ad spending grew by 49 percent during the first half of the year, leading all other media types, according to data released by Nielsen Monitor-Plus and Nielsen//NetRatings. Overall ad spending was up 5.1 percent for the same period.

That’s a huge percentage jump, especially as you consider that online advertising is starting to mature. It’s not like we started 2006 with a small figure.