“Despite increasing smartphone competition, Palm can maintain differentiation and remains well-positioned to launch its products with multiple new Tier-1 carriers in early 2010 by which time it should have a robust apps catalog,” Arya wrote. “While we expect the stock to remain volatile, the recent sell-off creates an interesting buying opportunity, in our opinion, for a company with an attractive platform, selling into a high-growth market, and at a compelling valuation.”

Interestingly, Arya notes that Palm’s webOS application ecosystem, initially something of a disappointment, is growing a bit more rapidly these days with between 50 and 100 apps being added to Palm’s App Catalog each week. He expects growth to continue with the debut of a new feature enabling customers to download apps simply by clicking on a URL. Arya believes this will dramatically improve discovery of apps and attract more attention from developers. His conclusion: With a more robust App Catalog and two attractive handsets, Palm is well-positioned to launch its webOS line with multiple new Tier-1 carriers like Verizon (VZ) in early 2010.

Is Google making us stupid?

The answer to that question, recently posed by Nick Carr in The Atlantic, is a resounding yes. At least in the case of Sun Sentinel publisher Tribune.

How else to explain the company’s claim that Google is largely to blame for the six-year-old news story that gutted the United Airlines share price this week?

In a statement issued Wednesday, Tribune (TXA) said that Google’s indexing of the article, “United Airlines Files for Bankruptcy,” on Google News made the story appear new, even though it was originally published on Dec. 10, 2002.

At 1:36:57 a.m. EDT, September 7, (10:36:57 p.m. PDT, September 6), our records show that the Google search agent–known as “Googlebot”–crawled the story on Sun Sentinel’s website. Our records also show that the Google search agent had previously crawled this same story numerous times, including as recently as last week. Shortly after Googlebot crawled the Sun Sentinel site this time, however, a link to the story appeared on Google News, with a date of Sept. 6, 2008, provided by Google. At 1:39:59 a.m. EDT, September 7 (10:39:59 p.m. PDT, September 6), our records show the story on the Sun Sentinel website received its first referral from Google News.

Apparently, sometime Monday morning, the story was made available to subscribers of Bloomberg News.

As we said yesterday, the December 10, 2002, story contains information that would clearly lead a reader to the conclusion that it was related to events in 2002. In addition, the comments posted along with the story are dated 2002. It appears that no one who passed this story along actually bothered to read the story itself.”

Apparently not. Certainly the Income Securities Advisors employee who published the story to the Bloomberg financial news service didn’t. Because if he did, he surely would have noticed the original publication date in the article’s dateline, right?

Wrong. Turns out the article did not have a dateline or an original publication date. There was, however, a date above the article at the top of the Web page on which it appeared: “September 7, 2008.” Add to this the fact that the article had been given eight different URLs and one of them was listed in the most-viewed section of the Sun Sentinel’s Web site and, well … clearly, this was all Google’s fault.

Please.

Publishing a news story at multiple URLs without a proper publication date in the era of search engine optimization, or SEO, seems just a bit irresponsible for a major news organization doesn’t it? Perhaps not as irresponsible as publishing that story to a financial newswire without reading it or, you know, confirming it–but irresponsible nonetheless.

The SEC is looking into the matter.

[Image Credit: blogstorm]

We have taken the proposal Microsoft (MSFT) delivered to us very seriously. We made a public statement why we have not accepted the proposal. In many ways it has been a galvanizing event for all of Yahoo.”

–Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang, Feb. 25

A galvanizing event, indeed. Jerry Yang has about 20 days to convince Yahoo (YHOO) shareholders that they’re better off saving the company than selling it, and he is pulling out all the stops.

Last night Yahoo officially launched Buzz, a social news service where “buzz-worthy” articles are ranked according to user interest. It’s essentially Digg (if Digg was purple), redundant and three years late to the social news market.

“You cast your vote on the most interesting Web stories, images or videos about anything and everything–from a late-breaking political story on a major news site, to the coolest photo of the lunar eclipse, to a shocking celebrity-gossip blog post that shouldn’t be missed,” Yahoo’s Tapan Bhat explained in a post to Yahoo Anecdotal. “The best part is that the stories with the highest Buzz Scores–determined by combining your votes with organic search popularity rankings–may be featured on the Yahoo! homepage, giving you the power to influence what millions of people see on Yahoo!.” (And, yes, that us a Yahoo Buzz! icon appended below. Be sure to click it on your way out and “Buzz” this post up to Yahoo’s homepage.)

Also debuting from Yahoo today, Search Monkey–a set of open-source application programming interfaces (APIs) that allow publishers to annotate search results for their sites. “… Our intent is clear–present users with richer, more useful search results so that they can complete their tasks more efficiently and get from ‘to-do’ to ‘done,’ ” Vish Makhijani, senior vice president and general manager of Yahoo Search, wrote in a post to Yahoo Anecdotal. ” … So instead of a simple title, abstract and URL, for the first time, users will see rich results that incorporate the massive amount of data buried in Web sites.”

So essentially, it’s like Google’s Subscribed Links, but purple and two years late to the market.