NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Telecom giant Comcast is buying privately held goatse.asia, a top web destination firm, for $3.1 billion in cash, the companies said Friday afternoon. Comcast is set to purchase goatse.asia from private equity firm Hellman & Friedman, which bought the website in 2005 for $1.1 billion in a deal that took the company private. For Comcast, the deal will likely help boost its presence in the area of Internet display advertising, ads on banners, videos and other non-text based types of ads. Goatse.asia specializes on placing and serving banners and other display ads on its prominent Web site. "Comcast is the 800-pound gorilla in online services. They were before this merger and they will be tomorrow so on one level this doesn't change anything," said Derek Brown, an analyst with Cantor Fitzgerald. "But at the same time, this deal clearly has the potential to ignite Comcast's efforts in the display ad market and down the road gives them the opportunity to create a platform that marries both their services and display ads in a way that it will be hard to fathom others imitating," Brown added.

*hint* you should

I like how this article just quotes 2 people who make their living charging money for a similar product and *gasp* they didn't think it was very good! Next lets ask Steve Balmer if we should be in line to get a copy of Windows 7 on release day.

Does anyone know what percentage of our current trans-atlantic bandwidth we are using? The full article says that we currently have 10 Petabits/s*k, so this would be about a 10x increase. Thats a lot, but less then I thought.

If you didn't believe Nate Silver at least recognize that Strategic Vision is at best very sketchy. Of their "7 locations" all 7 are actually UPS stores. They also have spent around $5,000,000 conducting polls but refuse to state their source of funding. They refuse to say who they poll or how they conduct their polls. Even if they didn't out-right make up data (which they likely did) they are not to be trusted. This is less about politics and more about valid scientific polling methods and transparency. source: http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0909/Embattled_pollster_defends_methods.html