Experian Hitwise released statistics yesterday indicating that “Facebook” was the most frequently searched term for the second year in a row, besting YouTube, Craigslist, and MySpace. Among the top ten searched terms, four were variations of Facebook, including “Facebook login” showing that users frequently search rather than entering the site’s URL or clicking a bookmark when they want to browse the site. The rankings of the top searched musicians closely mirror our PageData charts of the most popular Pages, showing that Like count may be an accurate measurement of public interest

According to an SEC filing today, the Chicago based Centro has just raised a whopping $22.5 million (rounded up) in equity only funding. Listed on the SEC form are Centro CEO Shawn Riegsecker and FTV Capita l Partner Eric Byunn as Director. Centro is a digital media and technology services company founded in 2001, serving over 350 ad agencies world wide 

Well, what a year it’s been in social commerce.

According to a recent comScore report, Canada has beaten out the US, the UK, France, and everyone else in the world in various metrics relating to broadband and internet use. While the conspicuous absence of the likes of Sweden, a perennial leader in these categories, fills me with suspicion, the numbers are still fun, and slightly surprising.

I’ve often wondered if the early Web pioneers had it all to do over again if Web companies would have put less of an emphasis on free. People have been conditioned against paying for services or content on the Web, and the Web elite only have each other to blame

We’ve reported before about how the escalating war for talent in Silicon Valley is effectively creating a kind of arms race between tech companies. For example, Google is offering employees a 10% pay increase for 2011; companies like About.me are getting acquired days after launch ; and job postings in the IT industry are shooting to astronomical levels. Even Google’s Eric Schmidt has admitted to this battle .

CNNMoney published an interesting piece by David Goldman this morning entitled, Google: Your new phone carrier?

Developer Roberto Martinez wanted an easy way to see what was popular on any given social content site on any given day so he built Rrrewind , which lets you see what was hot on Delicious, Digg, Hacker News, Reddit, Hulu, Yahoo Videos, YouTube, Dribbble, Flickr, Amazon and Yahoo Buzz for any day in 2010 and some in 2009. Like a snapshot in virality or a Popurls with a history focus, Rrrewind allows you to go back in time and see an archive of the most viewed items on the Internet.

TechCrunch50 demopit company Image Space Media (formerly Picad Media ) has raised $1 million in new funding according to an SEC filing. ISM’s ad network, which recently launched an analytics offering and a self service tool, helps publishers monetize images on their websites with ad overlays. Its proprietary technology allows for audience targeting and matches ads to the most appropriate images available.

Because everything eventually becomes an academic field (I’m still waiting for “Internet” to become a major), researchers from MIT, University of Southampton and Georgia Institute of Technology have teamed up to build Who Gives A Tweet , a Twitter app that allows users to anonymously rate their friends’ and strangers’ tweets in order gain more insight into status update perception. Kind of like Hot Or Not, but for tweets