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An advertising industry group says revenue from Internet advertising in the U.S. hit $8.4 billion in the first three months of the year. That's the highest for the first quarter, up 15 percent from $7.3 billion in the same period last year.

Facebook went public last month on its prospects for growth. But in some areas, the social network's growth rates are already maturing. In particular, Facebook's user growth rate in the U.S. is slowing sharply. In April, U.S. unique visitors to the website increased to 158 million, up just 5% from a year earlier, according to research firm comScore Inc.

It’s been over three weeks since Facebook launched its $16 billion IPO, and as you’ve heard by now, it’s belly flopping on the NASDAQ. Wall Street and Silicon Valley VCs are in an uproar over the company's 30-percent stock decline and $25 share value, with some shareholders already looking to recoup their loses by suing CEO Mark Zuckerberg for withholding info on the company’s true value during its public outing.

Parent company Conde Nast may still think the web is not that important, but The New Yorker does. The 87-year-old magazine decided to make a “big investment” in its website six to eight months ago, Nicholas Thompson, editor of newyorker.com, says. The web team was expanded to 12 full-time employees, including Thompson, who was named editor in March after working “on the magazine side” as a senior features editor for two years. Editor-in-chief David Remnick thought he would be a good fit for the website in part because he had a background in technology coverage, having spent five years as a senior editor at Wired, Thompson says.

Online, searching for a bill in Congress feels a little like time travel: Go looking for legislation, and you wind up in the Internet of 1995. At Congress’s ’90s-vintage archive site, there’s no way to compare bills side by side. No tool to measure the success rate of a bill’s sponsor. And there’s certainly no way to leave a comment. Congress makes it hard for outside sites to do any of this, either, by refusing to give out bulk data on its bills in a user-friendly form.

Nine months ago, Salon.com's founder, David Talbot, took up the mantle of CEO, bearing with him a plan: By appealing to readers for financial support in the manner of NPR and PBS while keeping its content free to read, Salon could could diversify its revenue mix while maximizing its audience -- and thus its income from advertising.

It didn't quite work out that way.

LinkedIn confirmed Wednesday afternoon via its blog that user passwords had been compromised and eHarmony said the same thing.

Google rolled out a new warning for accounts it believes are the targets of "state-sponsored attackers," spurring discussion among a number of Chinese activists who said they received the alert.

A Russian hacker claims to have uploaded almost 6.5 million LinkedIn passwords, The Verge reports. LinkedIn in says in a tweet that "Our team is currently looking into reports of stolen passwords. Stay tuned for more."

Airtime, Sean Parker's new social video chatting service for Facebook, launched today with an event that totally unraveled into a complete fiasco. But what might rankle more than a rocky launch is the revelation Airtime will take “snapshots of users periodically to ensure site safety,” according to an Airtime spokesperson quoted in Forbes.