Visual Knowledge

Geo-Targeted RSS Ads Surprise Advertisers:
"Google has quietly been running geo-targeted contextual ads in RSS feeds for several months, but many advertisers, agencies, and analysts contacted by ClickZ were surprised to learn about the placements.

'I don't think most advertisers know it's going on,' said Kevin Amos, director of product management at search marketing firm Impaqt. 'There's a lot of confusion in contextual advertising in general, and adding in RSS feeds makes it more confusing.'
AdWords documentation online doesn't specifically mention ads being distributed to feeds, other than a reference to ads showing up on content sites and 'products.'

'AdSense for feeds is part of the Google content network, so if an advertiser's campaign is opted into the content network, their ads are eligible to show in feeds,' Shuman Ghosemajumder, business product manager at Google, told ClickZ News. Ghosemajumder notes that the geo-targeting has been part of the AdSense for feeds distribution since its launch.

Geo-targeting has been an option for ads that run on Google's content network for the past two years, when regional targeting was introduced. Later, city-level and customized targeting became available in April 2004. AdSense for feeds, launched in May 2005, includes a site's feeds along with the site in the content network, so ads that would appear on a given site could also appear in the site's RSS feeds..."

Online Publishers Association: Newsletters:
"Zenith: Global ad money spooked higher
One of the more conservative estimators of Internet ad spends, ZenithOptimedia, decided it had been too conservative with its predictions for Net ad money in 2005 and beyond. The firm upgraded the Internet's share of global advertising this year from 4.1% to 4.3%, and from 4.7% to 5% for 2007 -- and the Net will account for 16% of global ad growth in 2005. Part of the blame for the revision is due to inflation fears, though overall ad growth will be highest in Brazil, Russia, India and China, accounting for 27% of worldwide ad growth. Zenith doesn't believe the rise in Internet advertising's market share will come at the expense of TV, instead eating into the share of newspapers and radio, both of which will lose share this year.
» Blue Skies Amid Stormy Weather: Zenith Boosts Ad Outlook (MediaPost)
» ZenithOptimedia Raises Internet Forecast (ClickZ)
» Emerging economies, internet spike ZenithOptimedia ad spend forecast (Indiantelevision.com)"

Online Publishers Association: Newsletters:
"Blogs beguile Corporate America -- but beware of splogs!
Blogs scare the jeepers out of big companies, but also offer a way for companies to reach out to customers in unprecedented ways. Thus, the dilemma. So fast food giant McDonald's decided to launch some corporate blogs, but only on its intranet until the fast food giant could study their effects, ClickZ reported. The New York Times reported on consumers who set up blogs to cover their favorite products and services, such as Barq's root beer, Gatorade and Netflix. While the companies don't endorse or support the blogs, the blogs provide valuable feedback as an informal network of consumer opinion. Plus, Intelliseek's BlogPulse made a deal with AOL to provide it with hot topics in the blogosphere so AOL could keep its readers up on the latest trends.

But while blog readership is soaring, it's also eating into work time, according to an analysis by Ad Age. The magazine estimates that U.S. workers will spend the equivalent of 551,000 years in 2005 reading non-work-related blogs while at work. "Traffic rockets at 8 a.m. EST, peaks at 5 p.m. EST and then slides downward until L.A. leaves the office," Blogads founder Henry Copeland told AdAge. "At work, people can't watch TV or prop up their feet and read a newspaper, but they sure do read blogs." The other downside for blogs is the recent surge in "splogs," or spam blogs, created by scraping content from other blogs or news sources and selling ads against it. Wired News recently explained how to detect and report splogs so they don't gain traction in major search engine results.
» McDonald's Dips Toe In Blogging Waters (ClickZ)
» Brand Blogs Capture the Attention of Some Companies (NY Times)
» AOL to take Blogs' Pulse via Intelliseek (ClickZ)
» What Blogs Cost American Business (AdAge)
» MHow to Fight Those Surging Splogs (Wired News)"

Online Publishers Association: Newsletters:
"Earnings frightfully good for Google, Yahoo, WSJ
The booming online ad market helped push up revenues at Google and Yahoo to new heights, but it wasn't just ads leading the calvacade in interactive revenues. The New York Times Co. started to take in money for its TimesSelect paid content -- though it didn't disclose subscriber numbers -- while the Wall Street Journal Online added 64,000 net paid subscribers to hit 764,000. Dow Jones reported revenue growth across its Electronic Publishing unit, and its Consumer Electronic Publishing division soared with MarketWatch numbers, hitting $43.7 million in the third quarter, up from $19.2 million in the year-ago quarter without MW. The earnings for print operations weren't as robust, as the New York Times Co.'s overall net income was down by half, while its web sites saw revenues rise 31% and About.com's profit hit $3.8 million.
While old-line companies were touting digital growth, native Net companies were swimming in ad money. Google saw its revenue nearly double from the year-ago quarter to $1.58 billion, while profits were up sevenfold to $381.2 million. Plus, the revenues were shifting to money made on Google's own sites, taking a 56% share compared to 53% in the previous quarter. Yahoo's revenues were up 47% to $1.3 billion, with brand advertising and search up 46% -- though its profit was flat at $245 million. Meanwhile, MSN's ad revenues were up 20% in the quarter, while its overall revenues and profit were up only marginally.
>>DJ Electronic Publishing Rev Up 30.1 Percent For 3Q05 (PaidContent)
>>Web Buoys a Weak Quarter for NYT (ClickZ)
>>Google's Profit Jumps Sevenfold (WSJ; paid subscription required)
>>Google shares soar on hearty revenue report (News.com)
>> Yahoo! Revenues Rise, Profits Remain Flat (ClickZ)
>> Microsoft FY1Q06 Profits Up 24 Percent; Street Expected More (PaidContent)"

Please God, Just One More Bubble Value T-shirt > Quotes > Google Blogoscoped Shop | CafePress:
"Please God, Just One More Bubble Value T-shirt"
Sound familiar?

Russell Beattie Notebook » Where’s The Ambition?:
"All these startups in my feeds lately are killing me! There are tons of them, but none seem to be doing anything particularly special. I mean, it’s nice that there’s a sort of rebirth of small startups, but there’s absolutely no sort of wow factor that I’ve seen. And no, this isn’t an anti-Web 2.0 style backlash: I really believe in the idea of the web as a platform. Amazon and eBay’s web services are perfect examples of platforms which have created huge value for both companies, as well as the developers using their APIs. That’s not the problem. It’s all these Flickr-wannabes, flip-it-quick companies that are bugging me...

My general problem is not really with the effort involved in the above types of apps and companies, I’m sure they’re all working hard as hell in their own way. It’s just both the innovation and the ambition of this stuff is so lacking. They all seem to be aiming at the quick hit. The simple win. Someone said to me today, most of these sites are just sort of features not actual services, and it’s true. It’s so depressing.

It just seems that no one is trying to change the world any more. No one is aiming to create “insanely great” products or do the impossible. Why not? Why are so many people grasping at the low-hanging fruit, when there’s so much more goodness for everyone if they just stretched a little higher?

That’s just on the product functionality side - I haven’t seen anything interesting on the business side either. No one seems to be coming up with the next interesting new business model. I’m not looking for anything wacky, but there’s got to be better ways for your site to make money than waiting for Google to send you an AdSense check every month. Seriously, everyone seems to think the Text Ad Train is just going to keep on rolling forever. It’s not. Where is the new innovation to keep things moving? Remember, Google stumbled upon the way to do it right, but someone came up with the Contextual Advertising concept first and his name was Bill Gross. Where is that type of new innovator?

Actually, where are all the personalities, period? Where is the hubris of Jobs? Where is the unrelenting focus of Gates? Where is the arrogance of Ellison? Come on, let’s get some new budding tech-industry stars out there! I want to see someone’s face on the cover of freakin’ Time soon, you know? It’s been at least a year since Larry and Sergey… Come on! Who’s next?..."

Scobleizer - Microsoft Geek Blogger » Beattie not finding startups with any depth:
"Russell Beattie, who works at Yahoo, has a great post today where he takes on a lot of the hype around new companies that are springing up like mushrooms around the world. I visited a few of these startups this week and I too didn’t find the next Microsoft or Google. But, if I took you back in time to 1998, would you have believed me if I said that Google would be a business with a $100 billion market cap within seven years? I don’t think so.

I look for small things that I’d like to use. And, there are definitely some things coming that fit that bill. I do judge everything by Jeff Sandquist’s seven day rule. What new apps are surviving your seven-day test?"

Pew Internet & American Life Project Commentary: "Speech at Internet Librarians conference
Wednesday, October 26, 2005

I just got back from the Internet Librarians conference in Monterey, California, where I gave a talk about some of the recent work we have done at the Pew Internet Project and some of the subjects that have preoccupied us as we consider future research.

It was the ninth conference of the group, an interesting and growing mix of academic, corporate, medical, and public librarians. It was my third time there and these librarians never fail to be engaging, inquisitive, smart, and exceptionally friendly. It's just what you'd want librarians to be.

My full speech text can be found here."

Selected quotes from his speech:
"Somewhat surprisingly, when we asked people to tell us the specific reason why their use of the internet was helpful there was a close-to three-way tie:
· 34% said the internet put them in touch with other people who provided support and advice.
· 30% said it provided information that allowed them efficiently to compare options.
· 28% said it helped them find professional or expert services.
In other words, the internet was most of all a tool of social networking, rather than simple information retrieval."

"Those are several of the subjects we have tackled in recent months and I’d like to wrap up my comments by talking about four internet trends and several ideas that we’re trying to figure out how to incorporate into our work.
Trend 1: is that more and more people AND things will be connected to the internet...
Trend 2: Not only will more things become attached to the internet, but the user’s internet will become more wireless and mobile...
Trend 3: Content creation and content sharing will increase.
More than two years ago, we found that 44% of internet users and 57% of those with broadband at home had created and shared content on the internet – their postings on web sites, their music files, media creations, pictures, pieces of creative writing. We are going to repeat that survey this fall and I’m sure we will find that the numbers have shot up because so many more people have broadband connections and because there are so many more ways now for people to manipulate and share digital content Yahoo! alone generates 5 terabits of data per day now.
Trend 4: Search power will improve and become more socially oriented.
The technology is getting better and the social systems we are building for data tagging and organizing are getting more powerful by the day. The rise of Flickr,
Deli.cio.us, and other tagging systems like MyYahoo! are a harbinger of how sociallyconstructed taxonomies of digital material will begin to coexist with the traditional forms of sorting information that have served us well for generations – think Dewey Decimal
System.

The growing use of reputation systems online, of wikis, and of Google-map hacks
are also signs that filtering, sorting, and labeling data is moving into the social realm..."

"A third idea has been promulgated by Linda Stone, a former Microsoft executive who has begun to argue that modern life is characterized by what she calls
“CONTINUOUS PARTIAL ATTENTION.” She describes it this way: “Continuous partial attention is not the same as multitasking; that's about trying to accomplish several things at once. With continuous partial attention, we're scanning incoming alerts for the one best thing to seize upon: ‘How can I tune in in a way that helps me sync up with the most interesting or important opportunity?’..."

"Internet librarians – and librarians in general -- strike me as institutional actors who are well-placed to help our culture find a balance work and leisure of the kind Pieper was describing. The very model of libraries embraces these two worlds and encourages balance between them. On the one side, you focus on managing your collections and making them available to users. One the other side, most of the libraries I know have reading rooms, which provide an environment conducive to thought and reflection.

So, maybe you can help us all figure the right mix between
· being connected and being contemplative;
· doing research (or being open to inputs through continuous partial attention) and pausing to reflect, absorb and muse on the things we have encountered in that research
· being on top of the most important information and being aware of the restorative power of “turning things off” when that flow of information becomes debilitating.
I think librarians are among the few institutional actors who might help the culture move away from this kind of environment to what Professor Levy calls an “information habitat” where there is more time for rest, for reflection, and contemplation...”

Search Engine AnooX - machine generated, majority People Vote augmented

"Search with Anoox

Three reasons why you should search with AnooX
1. Better search results - due to our machine generated and People Voted results. More
2. Share in our Ad revenues - when you make AnooX your preferred search engine. More
3. We give most of our profits away, for benefit of the People. More..."

*michael parekh on IT*: ON PAYMENT FOR PEER PRODUCTION:
"PAYMENT IN KIND

A subject discussed at the Union Square Ventures' event (see earlier post) was the issue of who gets paid what and how for 'peer production' in a web 2.0 world. It's a subject worth some exploration.

Most of the discussion to date focuses on how the web services themselves can make money from peer production.

But the broader question for me is how users are eventually compensated for their 'peer production' today and over time.

Payment for our peer participation and production to date on services like Wikipedia, Flickr, blogs and the like are primarily in non-cash terms.

Specifically they can be classified in the following categories:

1. Convenient functionality for all (e.g., Flickr, Del.icio.us, Wikipedia and of course, Google).
2. Reputation as in the case of bloggers, reviewers and commentators on the web (aka vanity).
3. Generosity, as highlighted by Tom Evslin in the discussion at the USV session. Good example here are the mostly anonymous contributions by countless folks to entries in Wikipedia.
4. Monetary compensation direct and indirect, as in the case of eBay sellers who get direct cash from sales and Google advertisers, who presumably get transactions from the leads they pay for through Adsense and Adwords on the service and affiliates..."

Should Flickr (And Lots of Other Web 2.0 Sites) Pay You?: "... a new search engine, Anoox. It's pitching itself as better than Google, of course, but the wrinkle that caught my eye is that it's promising to share the ad money that it generates, as long as you use it as your main search engine.

Michael Parekh may be right when he suggests that the Web 2.0 companies that find a way to share their revenues with their users will have the best chance of becoming Web 3.0 companies."

CNN.com - Group publishes anti-spyware guidelines - Oct 27, 2005:
"NEW YORK (AP) -- A coalition of anti-spyware vendors and consumer groups published guidelines Thursday to help consumers assess products designed to combat unwanted programs that sneak onto computers.

The Anti-Spyware Coalition released the guidelines for public comment and also updated a separate document that attempted to craft uniform definitions for 'spyware' and 'adware' in hopes of giving computer users more control over their machines.

According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, Internet users have become more cautious online because of worries about spyware and adware, which can bombard users with pop-up ads and drain processing power to the point of rendering computers unusable.

Nearly half of adult online Americans have stopped visiting specific Web sites that they fear might infect them with such unwanted programs, and a quarter have ceased to use file-sharing software, which often comes bundled with adware.

In addition, 43 percent of Internet users say they've been hit with spyware, adware or both, with broadband users generally at greater risk.

The new guidelines from the coalition assign risk levels to various practices common with spyware and adware..."

Traffick: Was $1.00, Now Only $0.25! | Search Engine Enlightenment: "Apparently, CPM rates aren't what they used to be, especially on crap sites.

To recap: Google came out with the new Site Targeting content targeting option, allowing advertisers to show ads on specific sites. Cool program, but the minimum bid was $2 CPM. Unfortunately, for my clients who are succeeding with the traditional content program, we are enjoying effective CPM's of below $1, and often around 25 cents.

The next thing Google did, as outlined here, was to drop the price to $1.00. A bit later they allowed advertisers to specify sections of sites, or specific pages, even.

But they weren't done! Today I'm seeing the minimum bid has been slashed to $0.25 CPM.

Because this is finally low enough to give advertisers the chance to experiment, they may be able to enjoy a few bargains now. (As long as you're tracking), go for it! Buy some extra exposure for cheap. If you're not tracking, you might still be getting a brand lift. I suspect more so if you're using larger graphical creative.

Speaking of which, an attendee at SES Stockholm asked -- in a session about Creating Compelling Ad Copy for paid search campaigns -- about banner design. Her complaint is that there really aren't any good books available on that subject. Whether that's true or not, all this talk of banner campaigns and $0.25 CPM's is giving me that "2000 all over again" feeling."

BugMeNot.com:
"Bypass Compulsory Web Registration"
How does a site protect themselves from something like this?

Attack of the Blogs - Forbes.com:
"Web logs are the prized platform of an online lynch mob spouting liberty but spewing lies, libel and invective. Their potent allies in this pursuit include Google and Yahoo.
Gregory Halpern knows how to hype. Shares of his publicly held company, Circle Group Holdings, quadrupled in price early last year amid reports that its new fat substitute, Z-Trim, was being tested by Nestlé. As the stock spurted from $2 to $8.50, Halpern's 35% stake in the company he founded rose to $90 million. He put out 56 press releases last year.

Then the bloggers attacked. A supposed crusading journalist launched an online campaign long on invective and wobbly on facts, posting articles on his Web log (blog) calling Halpern "deceitful,""unethical,""incredibly stupid" and "a pathological liar" who had misled investors. The author claimed to be Nick Tracy, a London writer who started his one-man "watchdog" Web site, our-street.com, to expose corporate fraud.He put out press releases saying he had filed complaints against Circle with the Securities & Exchange Commission.

Halpern was an easy target. He is a cocky former judo champion who posts photos of himself online with the famous (including Steve Forbes, editor-in-chief of this magazine). His company is a weird amalgam of fat substitute, anthrax detectors and online mattress sales. Soon he was fielding calls from alarmed investors and assuring them he hadn't been questioned by the SEC. Eerily similar allegations began popping up in anonymous posts on Yahoo, but Yahoo refused Halpern's demand to identify the attackers. "The lawyer for Yahoo basically told me, ‘Ha-ha-ha, you're screwed,'" Halpern says. Meanwhile, his tormentor sent letters about Halpern to Nestlé, the American Stock Exchange, the Food & Drug Administration, the Federal Trade Commission and the Brookhaven National Laboratory (involved in Circle's anthrax deal).

But it turns out that scribe Nick Tracy of London was, in fact, a former stockbroker in Oregon named Timothy Miles--and Miles himself faces SEC charges that he took part in a pump-and-dumpstock scheme in 2000. He was tried in June and awaits a verdict. No matter:Circle Group stock fell below a dollar in a year of combat with Miles and the anonymous bashers on Yahoo (and after Nestlé dropped Z-Trim). Halpern's stake is down $75 million, and he blames Miles and his acolytes; he has sued for defamation. "Some of these bloggers have just one goal, and that is to do damage. It's evil," he says...

...After anonymous attacks spread to Yahoo, Halpern moved in court to force Yahoo to reveal who was behind the sniping. In September a state judge in Illinois ordered Yahoo to reveal the names. A lawyer for the secret posters is trying to settle without turning over their names, Halpern says. Yahoo declines to comment on the case, but Halpern argues that Yahoo and other carriers should step up: "They make money selling ads on these message boards, and the controversial material generates the most traffic. So they're benefiting from this garbage. I think they should take responsibility for it."

Halpern has had less luck getting anyone inCongress to listen to his plaint. He says that may change if a few politicians get a taste of what he has gone through. "Wait until the next election rolls around and these bloggers start smearing people who are up for reelection,"Halpern says. "Maybe then things will start to happen." "

One poorly converting site can "smart price" an entire AdSense account - JenSense.com:
"One poorly converting site can 'smart price' an entire AdSense account

Google has said very little publicly about Smart Pricing secret sauce which results in some publishers earning more money for a click while others earn less (and yes, the advertiser will also pay less accordingly).

Here is the basis of how smart pricing works:..."

Search Engine Journal » Google AdSense and Yahoo Publisher Network’s Fight For Publishers:
"The battle for publishers between Google AdSense and Yahoo Publisher Network is heating up beyond CNN and Washington Post as Google AdSense representatives are now telephoning some old AdSense users who made the switch over to Yahoo Publisher Network. Google is asking publishers to come back to AdSense and possibly even negotiating higher payouts with premier publishers, something that Google AdSense has done in the past (no link, but have had discussions with such premier publishers).

This explains the latest ‘TIP’ which Google is showing in the AdSense interface(to the right of Today’s Earnings when you log in) : Is your phone number correct? Please visit the account settings page and make any necessary updates to ensure that you can be reached at the phone number associated with your account.

JenSense, the Goddess of Contextual Advertising, highlights the importance of such phone calls, showing that Google is taking the loss of their AdSense publishers quite seriously.

It shows that AdSense actually is paying attention to which publishers have left AdSense for YPN, and taking steps to bring them back to AdSense… And perhaps YPN will start phoning those who have signed up for their publisher service yet haven’t made a big switch from AdSense to YPN.

Next thing you know Chitika eMiniMalls will be having Darren Rowse calling Google AdSense and Y!PN publishers about the notion of switching over to Chitika.

Posted by — Loren Baker, Editor @ 6:54 am "

Search Engine Journal » Chitika eMiniMalls Google Listing an Affiliate Link:
"Heard of Chitika eMiniMalls yet? Well they are one of the hottest forms of contextual advertising since AdSense or Y!PN and have stormed various blogs and publisher sites as an alternate form of garnering high click thru rates and high PPC’s. The interactive ads seem to work best on product review sites or sites targeted to specific consumer industries.

We tried them here on Search Engine Journal, but they didn’t cut the mustard since most of the ads were either irrelevant to our news stories or showing email marketing software. Not to belittle eMiniMalls in any way, since not all forms of advertising work on all types of sites, and the search engine industry is a very niche target, different from the consumer / shopping world which Chitika ads seem to work best with.

Ok, back to the news. If you do a search for “Chitika eMiniMalls” on Google you’ll see that some lucky duck’s affiliate referral link has the #1 listing instead of the normal chitika.com site. Chitika eMiniMalls affiliates receive 10% of all referred earnings for 12 months. I wonder if this affiliate planned the Google placement or has just fallen headfirst into affiliate riches. Here’s the listing:

Chitika, Inc. - The Leader in Impulse Merchandising
Chitika’s flagship service, eMiniMalls, is the industry’s first impulse product merchandising service. Based on a proprietary patent-pending product …
chitika.com/mm_overview.php?refid=mmx74"

Scobleizer - Microsoft Geek Blogger » Anil wants Flickr to pay:
"Interesting little debate going on the blogs this morning. Anil Dash wants Flickr to pay its users, particularly the ones who put the most popular content onto the service. Caterina, co-founder of Flickr, answers back, says more to life than money.

That sounds cool, but there certainly is a belief among mainstream big company publishers I’m listening to that “user generated content” (I HATE that term) is how they are going to build profitable businesses. Basically, they are looking at bloggers and photographers and others as cheap labor. Get the stuff for free, stick ads next to it, and make a ton of money. That basically explains a large percentage of the Silicon Valley startup’s business plans lately too.

I feel the same about these folks as I felt about the folks who talked about “making sites sticky” in the late 1990s. They created business opportunity by being selfish and greedy. Which is sorta funny, when you think about it, isn’t it?

The real way to create a sticky site turned out to be to send people away from your site more often than anyone else.

It’ll be interesting to see if the best way to build a really great Internet business and a great Web-based community just might be to pay people to write, take photos, record podcasts, and give their knowledge into the system. Hmmm, what are the two of the hottest companies? eBay and Google. They pay their users, particularly ones who are popular (I have friends making $10,000+ a month off of Google ads, for instance)."

ResearchBuzz: Microsoft Jumps on the Book Indexing Bandwagon: "Microsoft has announced that they're going to launch MSN Book Search. It'll launch next year. In conjunction with that, MSN has announced its intention to join the Open Content Alliance, which would align them with Yahoo, etc..."

ResearchBuzz: Pudding in a TagCloud:
"...Thanks to Google Blogoscoped for reminding me about TagCloud, which generates clouds of tags based on RSS feeds you specify. The service is free and available at http://www.tagcloud.com/

TagCloud allows you to provide lists of RSS feeds. From there it'll extract the relevant information and generate 'clouds' of tags based on the feeds. In addition to being heaps of syntax fun, this strikes me as in interesting way to broadly compare the content of different news sites/blogs...."

Search Engine Lowdown :: News: Google Confirms Base + Base News Roundup:
"This is from a post on Google's official blog:

You may have seen stories today reporting on a new product that we're testing, and speculating about our plans. Here's what's really going on. We are testing a new way for content owners to submit their content to Google, which we hope will complement existing methods such as our web crawl and Google Sitemaps. We think it's an exciting product, and we'll let you know when there's more news..."
[summary of other reports follows]

Search Engine Lowdown :: News: Google, The Ultimate Travel Affiliate Site?:
"Google Airfare FeatureGoogle is rolling out new features and updates so often these days it is just mind numbing, but I guess that’s par for the course when you have 4,989 employees. One of their latest is a new airfare feature that links directly to Expedia, Hotwire, and Orbitz when you search for two cites or airport codes. I’d be willing to bet that someone in Google is going to be getting a bunch of calls from travel sites wanting to get in on this deal."

Search Engine Lowdown :: News: Bidding Ended: jux2.com:
"As initially reported the meta search engine Jux2.com was up for sale on eBay. Well the bidding has ended and the engine pulled in a cool $101,000 from eBay user 3vcap. Just a wild guess, maybe a venture capitalist in the Valley?"

John Battelle's Searchblog: "Yahoo Adds Tool to Social Search

From Yahoo's Search Blog: Save to My Web is a simple, sociable button you can add to any and every page of your blog or website. Users click to save your content and add it directly to their stored pages on My Web 2.0. From there, the page is easy to retrieve, and easy to share with others. ...

For bloggers and publishers, it's a great way to distribute content to a larger community of connected users and make your pages instantly searchable on Yahoo! Just copy and paste this code into your blog templates anywhere and everywhere you want the button to appear on your pages.

Note this: 'it's a great way to... make your pages instantly searchable on Yahoo!' I think this is a neat tool, but I don't plan to put it on my site. Why? Well, it's too...focused on one place. I dunno, but I want something else. Something non-denominational. Clearly Yahoo is a major player, and that alone creates weather but....it feels like playing favorites. I guess that's just me. What do you all think?"

Search Engine Lowdown :: News: Google Base = Google Borg: "Resistance is Futile

Insert your own all your base are belong to us joke here. In all seriousness though, that's exactly what Google Base seeks to do: own all others. One Wing to rule them all! (...because the 'all your base' thing came from the game Zero Wing, and Tolkien’s one ring to rule them all ... um, yeah, not all the jokes can be winners, work with me here...)

According to Google’s official Blog, Google Base is a “way for content owners to submit their content to Google.” Analysts speculate that this is going to be a new aggregation of content that runs the gamut. I expect that we’ll see many, if not all, of the following:

* Individual items for sale
* Blogs
* Flight prices
* Auctions
* Job postings
* Real estate
* Uploads database

And you can guess that if Google wants you to submit it now, they’ll be spidering it all themselves in short-order.

What’s Old is New Again

Remember how, in the late 90s, everyone talked about the internet being a “global village”? If it feels like an outdated concept, then I hope you like nostalgia. Possibly soon to come: the new global village, complete with gated communities and spear-headed by Google Base..."

Search Engine Journal » Google Cozies Up To Older Sites:
"Patrick Gavin from TextLinkAds just posted a theory on the LinkBuildingBlog about how Google is giving preferred rankings to trusted sites which have been in existence for over three years. Such older domains have been around long enough to gain a status of being an authority based upon links built to the site over time, .edu and .gov domains referencing the site, and perhaps even the date the domain was registered.

The exact year is of course debatable and there are countless exceptions to this rule but I do agree with the general thesis: when it comes to domain names, the older the better.

In my very unscientific test I looked at two commercial searches that I track regularly. I looked at the top 10 results from each of these searches and took each of the 10 domains in the results over to Whois Source to check to see when the domains were registered. The average domain in Set A was created in 1998 and the average domain in Set B was created in 1999! The most recently created domains out of the top 10 of either search was 2003.

But does such trust by Google and other search algorithms lead to older domains taking advantage of such authority and adding pages specifically targeted towards search rankings for high valued keywords?

Gavin ponders about “this growing trend where people with old domains are adding new sub pages, building links at will to these pages without mixing anchor text or doing any ‘natural link building’ and these pages seem to be on a rocket collision course to the top of the Google SERPS.“

If Patrick’s theory on Google being into old domains is true, I’d expect publishers will begin to start reporting on the date their sites were registered and year to year Google rankings when selling older sites."

Search Engine Journal » Google OpenOffice Rumors Squashed?: "Ever since the Google and Sun Microsystems press conference earlier in the month there has been a world of speculation around Google’s role in distributing Sun Microsystems software and a new addition to the Google application suite. The obvious rumor spinned from the partnership between the two tech powerhouses was that of a Google OpenOffice Suite to challenge Microsoft Office.

Beyond that initial speculation also came the excitement of the possibility of a web hosted Google OpenOffice application, powered by Sun and “distributed” by Google. An article in eWeek quotes a source who says that there is no plan for such an online version of OpenOffice.

“A hosted desktop productivity offering has not been well-received when it has been tried in the past, and those have been beset with problems, including a lack of network bandwidth and speed,” said one source.

“There are also currently quite a number of existing user options, from Microsoft Office and Microsoft Works to Corel’s WordPerfect Office, Sun’s StarOffice and the free OpenOffice.org, so what benefit would a hosted offering bring?”"

Search Engine Journal » Wikipedia and Answers.com Partner for 1-Click Answers Search Tool: "Answers.com and The Wikimedia Foundation announced a partnership to feature one-click access to Wikipedia, the free-content, user-edited encyclopedia. Answers, which provides the content for Google Definitions links, will create a software-based co-branded version of Answers.com to be called 1-Click Answers, Wikipedia Edition, from which advertising revenues will be split with The Wikimedia Foundation.

Wikipedia will create a Tools page on its English-language site to promote useful tools that access Wikipedia, and 1-Click Answers, Wikipedia Edition, will receive charter placement on that page.

“We are pleased to partner with Answers.com, encouraging software that improves access to Wikipedia,” said Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia founder and Wikimedia Foundation President. “Bob Rosenschein and his team have created an innovative technology which helps users click on any word in any application to look it up in Wikipedia. We expect that our users will appreciate the extra convenience.”"

Search Engine Journal » Google Base Info & Screenshots:
"When I first heard that the Google Base url was running I immediately thought that Google was offering a Googlefied version of the Basecamp calendar project management platform. Instead, it seems that Google is offering some sort of personal database where users can upload and store all kinds of content.

Judging by the description copied from the Google Base site, which was reportedly live yesterday for a short period of time and then taken back down, Google Base sounds like more of a personal classified, blog, management application built upon the database, like one would with MySQL.

From Google Blogoscoped : “Is Google putting a layer in-between dynamic web sites and their databases, replacing MySQL/PostgreSQL/MS SQL, and creating a new GoogleSQL… possibly, with their ads in it? I can’t wait to try it.”..."

Google Base, the spirit of our times:
"[Oct 25, 2005] Google's just launched 'Google Base', a service to insert and share all types of content: events, housing, jobs, products, second-hand vehicles, ... (view image). The information will be included in the main Google search index and other Google products like Froogle and Google Local.

This new tool will be introduced during the 'Google Zeitgeist'05 Partner Forum' to be held today at Google HQ in California.

We expect that 'Google Purchases' --the new micropayments service among users-- will be also introduced as a complement to 'Google Base'.

UPDATED: Philipp Lenssen predicts that 'Google Base' will be a big DataBase, creating a new GoogleSQL, and points to this this screenshot (seweso.com), where Google asks us to type some atributes of a house to be rented or sold.

Google wants to become a meeting-point where users share their information, instead of crawling it with their robots by accessing webpages.

UPDATED 2: Gary Price received a mail from a Google spokesperson, who claims that today's webpage is "en early-stage test of a product that enables content owners to easily send their content to Google, but we don't have anything to announce at this time".
Google Base is online again. Shots: [1], [2], [3]"

Search Engine Journal » Google Base : User Reviews, Auctions, Classifieds, Real Estate & More:
"Google Base is coming, but what is it? Some folks have called it an eBay Killer. Others, the next Google Classifieds. Or will it be Google Auctions? And will Google Wallet launch to give all of these possible scenarios a payment system? A hub for user generated content which will be integrated across the Google neetwork and put Yahoo’s user reviews to shame? Google tested their Base.Google.com page for about an hour Tuesday and then again last night,which gave some Googlers a sneak peak - but Google Base is still a mystery.

Were the live tests of Google Base a ploy to strike up some industry buzz and put the fear of God into eBay’s Meg Whitman and send Amazon.com up the river during after both companies stock fell due to third quarter earnings? Google enjoys what little have, the ability to shock the world in the blink of an eye. They leak the news of a new database program that no one in the public has even realy used yet, and speculation of the end of eBay due to Google Auctions and Classifieds go through the roof..."

Search Engine Journal » Competitive Intelligence : Domains, Hosts and WHOIS:
"Sometimes it is hard to figure out who your online competitors are, or worse, what they are doing to beat you. Sometimes it feels like you are beating your head against a wall because no matter how hard you try you just can not figure out how they are doing it.

Today I will look at some of the tools you can use to gather competitive intelligence about your competitors and the online market space in general.

I received a lot of positive comments about a Google article I wrote a few weeks ago on Google’s domain name strategy and what it could indicate as future Google plans. Using a freely available tool (and applying my wildly active imagination) I was quickly able to look at the domain names purchased, and surmise where Google could (And likely will) be moving into in the months and years to come..."

John Battelle's Searchblog: GoogleBase: Structured/Vertical/Domain Search Ain't The FreeWeb:
"(More thinking out loud....)

I recently spoke to a reputable person who is a senior exec in a major structured database company ( I promised not to name this person or the company/industry.) I can't go into specifics, but the company owns a very large repository of valuable industry listings, and has an web-based interface that allows folks to search those listings. Think Autobytel, or even Craigslist, but this is a vertical player in a very information intensive business. The data this company owns is locked behind a registration wall, search engines can not get to it through normal crawling techniques. It's part of the paid or 'dark' web: not freely available. The company has spent a lot of time and money creating specialized search interfaces that are useful to its target market.

Anyway, a few months ago or so Google approached this person and asked if the company would want to work with Google. In essence, Google asked the company to upload its entire database into Google, which would then be mashed up, perhaps, with Google Maps and Local, and given a structured search front end and a structured database backend. When GoogleBase story broke, the person put two and two together. This is what Google wanted to do - upload the company's data into GoogleBase, this person told me. But at the time of their discussion, Google made no mention of that product.

When Google comes calling asking for your entire database, one might reasonably wonder what the company which owns that database might get in return. In this case, and in other cases I've heard about, the answer was "give us your data and you'll get lots of traffic in return." No discussion of syndication models, or shared revenues."

The UK Speeds Up:
"Published: October 27, 2005
(After November 04, 2005, this article will only be available to eStat Database subscribers.)

Broadband usage exploded in the UK over the past 12 months.

Almost three-quarters of home Internet users in the UK have a broadband connection, according to new data from Nielsen//NetRatings. This is a positive development for Web site owners, as broadband users spend twice as much time on their computer as narrowband users, and view 3.5 times as many pages.

As users switch away from dial-up, or get Internet access for the first time, most are moving into broadband with speeds over 512 kbps. (Broadband definitions vary, with some putting the broadband cutoff at 200 or 256 kbps, and others higher or lower; Nielsen calls everything faster than 128 kbps broadband). Usage of slower broadband speeds ranging from 128 to 512 kbps actually declined slightly between 2004 and 2005.

As of the second quarter this year, the UK stood sixth in the world in terms of broadband subscribers based on data from Point Topic, and the continued migration of Internet users to high-speed means that the UK will remain locked in with France as the top broadband markets in Europe. eMarketer predicts that the UK will be the largest broadband country in Europe by 2008.

Although Germany has a larger population base than France or the UK, its market is monopolized by Deutsche Telekom and is much less competitive and innovative. And while the UK's broadband population has grown, the country still only has about one-fifth the number of subscribers as the US, and about one quarter as many as fast-growing China.

"With local loop unbundling beginning to happen and infrastructure competition coming from the leading cable TV providers, NTL and Telewest, as well as alternative providers such as Bulldog Broadband, the UK is undoubtedly one of the most competitive broadband markets in Europe," says eMarketer Senior Analyst Ben Macklin.

For an in-depth look at the broadband sector in Europe, read eMarketer's Europe Broadband report."

Worldwide Ad Spending to Top $400 Billion:
"Published: October 26, 2005
(After November 03, 2005, this article will only be available to eStat Database subscribers.)

Citing growth in emerging markets, ZenithOptimedia increased its growth projections for global ad spending.

The media buying firm said it now expects global ad spending to increase 5.2% this year, up from its previous estimate of 4.7%. ZenithOptimedia expects growth of more than 6% in both 2006 and 2007.

ZenithOptimedia estimates that worldwide ad spending will rise to $406 billion in 2005 - up from $386 billion last year.

By virtue of sheer scale, the US is the largest contributor to global advertising growth, providing 30% of this year's ad cash expansion. The next six largest contributors to ad growth are Brazil, Russia, India, China, Saudi Arabia and Indonesia.

The G7 countries are contributing less to advertising growth than the much more dynamic 'BRIC' economies of Brazil (where there is a consumer credit boom), Russia, India and China. The Saudi/Pan Arab region (where expensive oil has an advertising upside) is contributing nearly as much as India. Together, the BRIC and emerging Muslim markets account for approximately a third of the growth in global advertising.

The report is not all good news, however. ZenithOptimedia predicts that worldwide spending on both newspaper and television advertising will fall slightly, and remain flat for the next two years.

For all the relevant figures in advertising, read eMarketer's new Ad Spending Trends report."

ACM News Service:
"'Workers Highly Individualistic IT Users in 2015: Gartner'
Computerworld Australia (10/18/05); Crawford, Michael

A recent Gartner study has concluded that the commoditization of IT will be so widespread by 2015 that the key differentiating factor in the workplace will be the way individuals employ technology. Technology will become simply a tool to get the job done, while the human will be the 'engine of innovation,' according to the research group's Betsy Burton. Successful companies will place a premium on innovative employees, and will view technology only for its utility, much the same way that we look at a toaster today. The belief that technology holds no intrinsic value means that executives will have to create a workplace that encourages worker empowerment. Instead of controlling the use of technology such as instant messaging, the CIO should instead outline effective usage policies and leave it up to the workers to follow them. While technology will undeniably be critical to the future of business, IT managers say that it will never replace the common sense of a human. Computers instead will be more likely to take over the menial tasks that require minimal thought and decision making. Databases could take over many of the functions of today's analysts, for example, though they likely won't be as accurate.
Click Here to View Full Article"

Online Ad Spending, and Prices, Move Higher:
" Published: October 24, 2005
(After November 01, 2005, this article will only be available to eStat Database subscribers.)

According to a new study released by Deutsche Bank and MediaPost, third quarter online ad spending rose about 10% over the preceding quarter.

The study was based on a survey of 87 media executives on MediaPost's advisory panel in early October. The majority of respondents reported increased spending on online advertising, and more than one-third said spending had increased by at least 11% over the previous quarter. About one-quarter said spending was flat.

Looking ahead, about three-fifths of respondents felt that they would spend more in the fourth quarter than in the preceding period, and over one-third of executives predicted growth would be better than 10%. Overall, the survey suggested that spending will grow 9% in the quarter on a seasonally adjusted basis.

Ad prices were seen as increasing in most categories. Some 40% of respondents said that prices for paid search cost-per-click ads rose up to 10%, with 18% seeing increases of 11% or more. But 11% said they paid less.

Prices for premium display ads were up as well, but more than half of respondents said prices for run-of-network ads were flat. Two-thirds of the executives said they paid more for impressions on home pages, vertical channels and rich media. Over one-half of respondents saw higher costs for premium inventory, with a weighted, average price increase of 7%. For run-of-network ads, the overall average cost increase was about 3%.

For an in-depth look at the online advertising market, read eMarketer's Ad Spending Trends report."

Internet Sector Paces Ad Growth in the UK:
"Published: October 25, 2005
(After November 02, 2005, this article will only be available to eStat Database subscribers.)

Overall ad spending in the UK is expected to log minimal growth this year, but the online sector is a different story.

The UK's Advertising Association scaled back its projections for advertising growth to 2.3%, well below the 3.7% gain it had predicted in June. The association cited disappointing economic growth for the revision. It expects growth to accelerate in 2006, predicting an overall increase of 4.4% at current prices.

The Advertising Association's forecast, compiled by the World Advertising Research Center, predicts that ad revenues for business and professional magazines, radio and direct mail will decline in the UK. Online ad spending is forecast to rise by more than a third, or 39.6%. Outdoor and cinema, up 7.4% and 4.9% respectively, are set to show the largest gains amongst traditional media.

Although the projected growth rate for online ad spending is strong, it is well short of the growth reported recently by the UK Internet Advertising Bureau (UK IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers, which said that online ad spending in the UK logged growth topping 60% in the first half of 2005.

If you need more information on this subject, check out eMarketer's just-published Ad Spending Trends: The Internet and Other Media report."

Search Engine Journal - Craigslist Blocking Oodle : Destination vs.Aggregation:
"Craigslist has been the proverbial poster child for friendliness, openness and online cooperation. However, as John Battelle reported, Craigslist has apparently blocked Oodle CEO Craig Donato’s Craigslistassifieds aggregator from crawling and indexing Craigslist’s listings. Currently, the local marketplace accounts for a large percentage of Oodle’s listings (haven’t done the count, but it’s significant).

It’s a bit of a surprise that Craigslist, rather than Cars.com, for example, would do this. But, on the other hand, consumers need not visit Craigslist if they can get Craigslist + everything else from Oodle. This is the central dilemma for all “destination sites” that permit their content to be scraped and presented by aggregators. Indeed, this is the dilemma for directories and newspapers in pushing their content out to search engine results..."

AOL lays off about 4 percent of staff | InfoWorld | News | 2005-10-19 | By Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service:
"From 700 to 800 jobs will be eliminated

By Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service - October 19, 2005

America Online (Profile, Products, Articles) Inc. (AOL) has cut more than 700 employees, or about 4 percent, from its workforce of nearly 20,000 employees, a company spokesman said Wednesday.

Most of those losing their jobs worked in providing support to AOL members, whose numbers have been decreasing. For example, as of March 31, 2005, AOL had 21.7 million U.S. subscribers in its fee-based service, down 2.3 million from the same period in 2004 and down 4.5 million from the first quarter of 2003.

The cuts respond to AOL's "ongoing process to better align our resources and continue to respond to a changing marketplace," said AOL spokesman Nicholas Graham, reading from a prepared statement. "As a result of these structural and strategic transformations, we believe AOL to be better positioned to remain flexible and competitive in the market, thus enabling us to expand existing audiences, and reach new ones, online."

Graham declined to be more precise when asked for a specific number of layoffs and whether the figure was closer to 700 or to 800 jobs. A 4 percent cut from a workforce of exactly 20,000 would mean that 800 jobs were lost.

AOL has been shifting its business strategy away from one focused on generating revenue from subscriber fees to one focused on generating revenue from online ads. In an effort to achieve this, the company has been beefing up its public, free Web portal AOL.com with content and services previously available only to its paying subscribers.

AOL, a Time Warner Inc. unit, has been reportedly in recent weeks in talks at different times with Google (Profile, Products, Articles) Inc., Microsoft (Profile, Products, Articles) Corp. and Yahoo Inc. over those companies' reported interest to acquire all or part of AOL. The reports, by various media outlets including The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, have been based on information provided by anonymous sources."

Revelations: FolkMind – a killer app for the Web 2.0 era: "Explosion of content on the Internet

Currently, a lot of information is being published in the Internet as blogs, which are rich in content, frequently published and scattered across numerous sites. MSDN Blogs alone hosts around 2000 blogs. It is very difficult to aggregate this information and get a consolidated view of the same. RSS readers and content aggregators have tried to help us achieve this to some extent, but these tools cannot scale up to handle the voluminous and widespread content in the Internet.

The brain as a better model for describing the Internet..."

Google Yahoo Chasing Real Estate Data:
"If the company can get a commercial real estate service on board, it could display more detailed property images on Google Earth.

CoStar Group, the largest provider of commercial real estate data, has already licensed some content to Google. Now the company is chatting with Google and Yahoo about other deals, Mercury News reported.

While CoStar's content, created with teams of photographers and laser-equipped surveyors, would be a top-class addition to either search engine's map products, it's possible that content could lead to a big push into commercial classified advertising.

Businesses looking for specific square-footage and locations could get a list of those places via a search engine. Then there could be an option to visit them online, using CoStar's content to provide a virtual tour.

The search engine would make money from the classified advertising, and then possibly an additional fee to access the high-end CoStar information. CoStar sells its data for thousands of dollars to brokerage houses and corporate clients, so any deal would have to be equally lucrative.

One might wonder if the discussions between the company and the search engines may lead to CoStar being acquired instead, should either Yahoo or Google have a model in mind to monetize such a purchase."

Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Google backs down in email dispute: "Google has backed down in a trademark dispute over its new email service, forcing it to rebrand its UK service as Google Mail.

The internet giant said it had refused to bow to 'exorbitant' demands - believed to be around $50m - from a British company that has applied for the Gmail trademark and would rename its UK service from this morning..."

Blog Spammers Take Aim at Google:
"Google Inc.'s free BlogSpot service has become a happy hunting ground for spammers cashing in on the easy integration of AdSense advertisements into the 'push-button' publishing tool.

Over the past few days, the situation has spiraled out of control, prompting outrage from bloggers and third-party blog search providers and an acknowledgement from Google that there's a 'tricky problem' to be solved.

An automated spam blog (splog) attack over the weekend was first flagged by Lockergnome's Chris Pirillo, who accused Google of hosting a 'crapfarm' of fake blogs.

'In the past few days, I've been inundated with an enormous amount of subscribed search spam for designated keywords. To the tune of hundreds, if not THOUSANDS, of bunk entries,' Pirillo railed, arguing that Google must 'start putting some resources behind an effort to curb this train wreck.'..."

Search Engine Lowdown :: News: MSN Adcenter Beta - Preview:
"Microsoft has begun its paid search pilot program by rolling out its' beta pay-per-click interface, a product they call AdCenter. In order to review thier product I signed up for an account via their Singapore page.

At first glance, AdCenter is reminiscent of Google's control panel, but further inspection shows us it is way more then just a spin-off of the Adwords interface. Microsoft has obviously spent time doing market research finding out what users would like in their console and taken it a step further by adding features that are unprecedented in the search space.

Some of the features that I find most astounding and that I believe users will find most helpful are:

Geo-Targeting - Which will allow you to target from the country level all the way down to the city level. A feature that local business will find very helpful in maximizing their online advertising budget.
Demographic targeting (age and gender) - Adcenter also lets users add additional increments to their bids based on the age and gender of a user search. Providing you additional exposure to the user-profile that best fits your business.
Time-targeting - pretty straight forward, bid a little bit more during your business hours, instead of wasting money when your business is closed.
Bid Matching - Adcenter makes it easy to bid on exact..."

AP Wire | 10/19/2005 | Yahoo's profits continue to accelerate in race against Google:
"SAN FRANCISCO - Yahoo Inc.'s profits keep accelerating, but the Internet icon still can't seem to grow fast enough to keep pace with online search engine leader Google Inc.

The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company delivered another quarter of stellar results Tuesday, reporting net income and revenue that exceeded analyst expectations for the three months ended in September.

'The whole business is going gangbusters,' Dan Rosensweig, the company's chief operating officer, said Tuesday in an interview.

Now Yahoo can only hope it's not upstaged Thursday when Google - probably its biggest rival - is scheduled to detail its third-quarter performance.

Since Google went public 14 months ago, its financial growth has consistently outstripped Yahoo's - a pattern that has been reflected in the stocks of the two companies.

While Yahoo's market value has declined by about 10 percent so far this year, Google's has climbed 56 percent.

'Investors have been leaving Yahoo and moving to Google,' said Piper Jaffray analyst Safa Rashtchy. He predicted that trend will end if Yahoo continues to perform as it did in the third quarter.

Yahoo earned $253.8 million, or 17 cents per share, for the period. That was essentially unchanged from net income of $253.3 million, or 17 cents per share, at the same time last year when Yahoo realized a $129 million windfall by selling part of its stake in Google.

Yahoo has since sold all its holdings in Google and used the proceeds to invest in other ventures, such as Chinese e-commerce firm Alibaba.com. The company also is competing against Google to buy a minority stake in Time Warner Inc.'s AOL.

Revenue for Yahoo's latest quarter totaled $1.33 billion, a 47 percent increase from $906.7 million last year..."

Investor's Business Daily: Breaking News: " Ipselon, Brand New Meta Search Engine, Breathes New Life Into an Industry
(http://www.ipselon.com) combines a meta search function with its own proprietary search engine. Users can search Ipselon and four different search engines simultaneously.

But that isn't all that sets Ipselon apart from the crowd. The site excludes pay-per-click results from its meta search engine and offers no pay-for-placement in its own database. Accuracy and importance drive query results, not profit.

'We strive to produce the most relevant results possible,' explained Toni Cantallops, Ipselon business manager. 'Pay-per-click and pay-for-placement results, by definition, are not always relevant to a given search, so Ipselon chooses not to include them.'

What's more, Ipselon is a true meta search engine, including a wide range of content and geography. A search on Ipselon returns results from the four leading search engines along with the Ipselon search results. The user-friendly interface can be viewed in six different languages and allows users to search in seven languages. Ipselon can search their choice of the Web, images, Wikipedia or the Ipselon directory. The site currently searches Web content from over 87 countries.

'The integration of top search engine results with our own meta search engine allows us to offer Web searchers a superior product," said Cantallops. "We are excited to launch Ipselon and look forward to becoming the search engine of choice for people around the world."

To see Ipselon in action, visit http://www.ipselon.com. "

Inform Presents an Auto-Filtering System for News Searching - Softpedia:
"Good news for those that want to be informed at all times
By: Tudor Raiciu, Technology and Science Editor

The Internet is crammed with information, regardless of the field of interest. The majority of users already have a bookmark menu filled with addresses they have to go through in order to find out the latest information. And there are many times when the search
engines only conceal the information a user is looking for.

Still, Inform comes with good news by presenting an extremely efficient solution for news and blog searches, depending on the text content provided by the user.

Inform indexes and classifies several elements of the same article, criteria which make it easier to find than by using solutions like Google News or through RSS (Really Simple Syndication) systems.

The solution presented by Inform stands out due to the database filtering method used for establishing criteria like category, industry, people involved, locations and companies. Depending on these factors, the site creates links to other material that makes reference to the same field.

The system even manages to find articles published in different languages on the same topic, so if somebody searches after "Cote d'Ivoire", the returned results will also include entries containing "Ivory Coast"."

Sci-Tech Today - Computing - Inform.com Takes on Google, Yahoo News Aggregation:
"Information Technologies has thrown down the gauntlet to Yahoo Latest News about Yahoo and Google Latest News about Google news services with the beta release this week of Inform.com, which uses proprietary technology to tag, score and aggregate news articles.

The site offers content from some 1,000 news organizations and 100 blogs Latest News about Blogs. The New York start-up is seeking to expand the traditional realm of Internet news aggregators and revolutionize the user experience.

The free Web-based service provides users with the same level of customization as sites such as Google News and Yahoo News, allowing users to select categories such as technology, business, or entertainment. The differences, however, between Inform.com and other news sites can be found in functions and capabilities.

Tagged, Ruled, and Ready

Neal Goldman, CEO of Inform, explained how the site's technology transforms the content it collects from online sources. For instance, a 10-page article from The New York Times first is stripped of extraneous HTML coding. The reconstituted single capsule then is pushed through millions of rules that "crunch it down into elements and score it."

Next, the technology pulls out information about people, companies, topics, places, and industries, and gives each component another score. That information then is put into a series of algorithms.

On the front end, the user does not see a hint of the metatagging. He or she sees an interface reminiscent of Amazon.com's Latest News about Amazon.com one-click shopping cart. Inform.com also provides recommendations for related articles and topics.

"We convert news into math and the resulting metadata enables a new user experience," said Goldman. "Scientists have been trying to create a common semantic, or invent a mathematical schema for describing the English language for years. We're doing it."

News You Can Choose

Goldman acknowledged that, in its current incarnation, the site will attract predominantly news junkies and users whose professions demand access to multiple news sources. However, he pointed out that the purpose of the beta period is "to expose [the technology and Web site] and get a much broader base of usability."

"The challenge for us now is making it usable for the average user," Goldman said. "The challenge is to take something that is powerful and make it easy it use."

Plans are in the works to provide a higher level of customization. The next level of the service will aim at personalization Latest News about Personalization of news stories, much in the way TiVo Latest News about TiVo suggests TV programming geared to a user's particular interests, Goldman said."

ResearchBuzz: Google Librarian Center:
"Tip o' the nib to the nice people at the TVC alert for the pointer to the Google Librarian Center at http://www.google.com/services/librarian_center.html . From the page: 'Librarians and Google share a mission: to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. We support librarians like yourself who work each day to further that mission. This page is a first step toward improving and expanding that support.'

Yay, only I wish it had happened about five years ago. And hopefully there will be a little love for archivists and teachers too. There's not much on this page yet, but you can sign up for a mailing list that'll be just for librarians. They also want links to lesson plans that librarians have prepared related to Google. "

ABC News: Google Offers Glimpse at Data Collection:
"...Google Inc. is now disclosing more details on how it collects and uses data obtained from users, but it is remaining silent on several key questions that concern privacy advocates.
...

But it remains remains silent on how long information is kept. That's an area of growing concern as Google offers more and more services that potentially collect and store a wealth of personal data, making the company's servers a prime target for abuse by overzealous law enforcers and criminals alike.
...

The new policy, issued Friday, states that Google may use personal information to display customized content and advertising, develop new services and ensure that its network continues to function. The practices aren't new but weren't explicit before.
...

Chris Hoofnagle, senior counsel with the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said the changes do nothing to diminish his worries that Google is amassing "quite a trove of transactional and personal data" through its various services, which include e-mail, driving directions, photo-sharing, instant messaging and Web journals.

Because storage is cheap, data from these services can be retained practically forever.

Wong said Google could not set a general time limit on data retention because needs vary by service..."

Google Founders Sell Shares On The Seashore?:
"Sergey Brin and Larry Page have been on a Google share selling spree over the past year, since the search engine went public.

Brin is the first past the billion dollar post selling a staggering $1 billion in Google stock at the start of this month. Page is catching up fast with $978.4 million in share sales.

Mercury News reports Brin broke the 10-digit mark when he sold 400,000 shares at market prices ranging from $309.25 to $321 from Oct. 3-5 for a total of $126.1 million.

Omid Kordestani, Google's senior vice president for global sales and business development, sold 175,209 shares at $307.75 to $314.82 a share for $54.69 million, bringing his total gains to $461.6 million. David Drummond, Google's general counsel, sold 40,100 shares at $313.95 to $319.69 for a gain of $12.7 million, bring his total to $103.6 million.

Well done boys...now, about this sandbox.."

Google revises privacy policy | CNET News.com:
"Google has made changes to its privacy policy that appear to be more stylistic than substantial.

The updated policy, posted on Friday, now says employees, contractors and others with access to personal customer information may be fired or prosecuted if they violate confidentiality obligations, rather than merely saying employees would have access to the information on a 'need to know'-only basis.

It also urges customers to read the privacy practices of Google's affiliated sites, which may be different from Google's..."

Yahoo! Search blog: Yahoo! and Whereonearth Get More Relevant Together:
"In an offline world 80-90% of purchases happen within 8-10 miles of your home. We believe this will carry over into the online world and in an increasingly personalized internet, users should expect their search results to reflect their lives more precisely. Same for advertisers – they need to target users with more meaningful, relevant ads based on the user’s locality.

To that end, today we have signed an agreement to acquire local online search and advertising technology company, Whereonearth as part of our effort to provide consumers and businesses with the best internet experience possible.

Whereonearth’s very talented team of software engineers and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) experts have worked hard to develop sophisticated technology that contains a unique combination of global data and software algorithms that make local search possible. Together, we’ll be able to provide the most geo-relevant information across all of Yahoo!’s products and services.

With that, I welcome Whereonearth into the Yahoo! family. Keep an eye out for future implementations of this technology - you’ll soon find these enhanced services in search marketing, search, local/maps, mobile and personals.

For additional thoughts directly from the source, CEO Dev Patel, head on over to Whereonearth.

Bassel Ojjeh
Vice President, Strategic Data Solutions, Yahoo!"

Wanna Buy a Search Engine?:
"Posted by Jennifer October 18, 2005

Not long after being dubbed the 'best meta search engine' by Search Engine Watch, the owners have decided to put it up for sale on eBay. The owners put the site up with a starting bid of a penny and no reserve and bidding has been active. The sale includes everything from the graphic files and software code to the legal rights to full use of the brand name and URL. No physical assets are included.

From the eBay listing:

Why are we selling? We started jux2 in our spare time as a research tool to answer questions we had about search. jux2 succeeded both as a research tool (generating thousands of searches per day and providing rich data that answered our questions) and with the search cognoscenti. We felt honored to receive critical acclaim and favorable reviews from many power searchers. To do justice to the opportunity ahead of jux2 would take more time than any of us has right now. So, we’re hoping this auction will put jux2 into the hands of someone who can take it to the next level.

As of this blog post, bidding is at $6,605.00 with a little over eight days to go. Search Engine Watch moderator and Spanish SEM extraordinaire Nacho Hernandez is currently in the lead... If you ever wanted to own your very own search engine, here's your chance. Right now it will cost you less than most used cars."

You Could Look It Up:
"Published: October 19, 2005
(After October 27, 2005, this article will only be available to eStat Database subscribers.)

Wikipedia and other education and reference sites are seeing big traffic gains.

Nielsen//NetRatings reports that Wikipedia's unique audience increased from about 3.3 million in September 2004 to 12.8 million by September 2005. Wikipedia, which bills itself as "the free encyclopedia," is a constantly growing and changing compendium of information about hundreds of thousands of topics. Unlike standard encyclopedias, the content comes from the Web site's users, who can create, edit and delete information on the site at will. The site has administrators who monitor these changes and prevent, or correct, abuse or incorrect updates.

Yahoo! Education, while trailing Wikipedia's overall traffic, also experienced significant growth, rising to second place among educational reference Web sites. Yahoo! Education contains reference materials such as an encyclopedia plus information about schools and colleges.

Users of these sites tend to be over 35, and to have at least some college background. "The 'wiki' phenomenon offers the added element of user interaction, which appeals to college-educated Web users' sense of altruism by allowing them to add or correct online content," said Gerry Davidson, senior media analyst, Nielsen//NetRatings.

Wikipedia has become one of the top sites referenced from search engines. According to Hitwise, it ranks number nine among sites accessed directly after Google, and 71% of visitors to Wikipedia arrive from a search engine. The top 20 list of search terms that brought visitors to Wikipedia from search engines during September 2005 is fairly diverse, including queries about current events, history and concepts.

To learn more about how people are educating themselves through the Web, try a search for "education" in the eStat Database."

Web Growing Faster Than Ever:
"Published: October 13, 2005
(After October 21, 2005, this article will only be available to eStat Database subscribers.)

The World Wide Web, as measured by the number of domain names, is growing faster than at any time in its history, reaching nearly 75 million sites.

The Internet stock bubble may have burst, and certainly no one is going to put it back together again, but the interest and involvement of people and businesses in all things online is at an all-time high.

The Netcraft "October 2005 Survey" found 74,409,971 sites, an increase of 2.68 million sites from its September survey. The gain makes 2005 the strongest year ever for Internet growth, with the Web adding 17.5 million sites, easily surpassing the previous annual mark of 16 million during the height of the dot-com boom in 2000.

The measure passed the 70 million mark for the first time in August, as the Netcraft survey marked its 10th anniversary. The August gain of 2.8 million hostnames, together with the July's increase of 2.7 million sites, marked the biggest two-month increase in the history of the survey and came just five months after the survey crossed the 60 million mark in March 2005.

The first Netcraft survey in August 1995 found only 18,957 host sites.

The survey includes domains that have been registered but not used, which usually means they are represented by only a simple holding page. On the other hand, there are instances where multiple sites use the same Web address. Still, as ZDNet writes, "Despite these drawbacks, Netcraft's figures... are still a handy guide to the development of the Web."

Rich Miller, a Netcraft analyst, told the BBC that the boom in Web sites is partly driven by more small businesses getting online. "There's a lot of innovative projects going on out there and very clearly folks are making money now rather than just buying Super Bowl commercials," he said.

This point of view is backed up by the new "Science, Technology and Industry Scorecard 2005," just released by the OECD, which shows that businesses around the globe are committed to the Internet. Sweden leads the way with 82.1% of its businesses having their own sites.

The report also found that the use of the Internet by businesses with 10 or more employees had become fairly standard practice.

In most OECD countries, close to 100% of large businesses (those with 250 or more employees) have access to the Internet.

For more information about online business trends around the world, search the eStat Database."

UK Online Ad Spending Soars:
"Published: October 13, 2005
(After October 21, 2005, this article will only be available to eStat Database subscribers.)

The UK online ad sector topped radio last year and is overtaking the outdoor market this year.

According to the bi-annual advertising spend study issued by the UK Internet Advertising Bureau (UK IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), Internet advertising expenditures in the UK for the first half of 2005 reached £490.8 million and will go over the £1 billion mark by the end of the year.

The study found that online revenues increased by 62.3% on a like-for-like basis when compared to the same period in 2004, far outstripping the 3% growth in overall UK advertising spending. Although television remains the largest single advertising medium in the UK, with expenditures of £4.7 billion last year, the total amount of online ad spending for just the first half of 2005 was higher than for the whole year of 2003, which was £407.8 million.

In addition, online advertising in the UK — having surpassed radio spending last year — has now also overtaken the market share of the outdoor advertising sector. For the first half of 2005, online represented a 5.8% share of the market compared to outdoor's 5.1%.

"These results have surpassed our expectations," said Guy Phillipson, chief executive of the IAB. "At the end of 2004 the IAB predicted online would overtake outdoor by mid 2006 and we've beaten this target. Now the internet looks certain to be a £1 billion medium in 2005."

When asked to identify the key drivers behind the online advertising growth, Mr. Phillipson pointed to broadband adoption and the resulting increased connection speeds. "Broadband is experiencing record take up this year, which has fuelled internet consumption and in turn attracted a greater share of advertisers' spend," he said.

Broadband take-up has more than doubled in the UK in the past twelve months, with over eight million homes now connected — outstripping dial-up. In fact, the UK is now ahead of the US in terms of percentage of households with broadband.

Other key drivers include:

*More Engaging Creativity — as marketers engage customers with video streaming, personalization, interactive formats and localized search to extend brand conversations.
*Overall Online Retail Boom — as retailers and manufacturers steadily invest more online in order to get closer to the point of purchase and influence what people buy and where they buy it.
As Mr. Phillipson said, "Marketers are recognizing the Internet's full potential and are actively diverting budgets into online advertising."

For more up-to-date information on this subject, read eMarketer's recent report, Ad Spending Trends: The Internet and Other Media."

Yahoo taking on Google, Microsoft for AOL? | CNET News.com:
"Yahoo reportedly has left the sidelines and entered the struggle with rivals Google and Microsoft for a piece of America Online.

Yahoo is in talks with AOL, according to an article on TheStreet.com, which cited unidentified sources. The prize: AOL's millions of search and portal users and the related $380 million in ad revenue that now goes Google's way.
Representatives of Yahoo and of AOL, a unit of Time Warner, declined to comment on the report. The word comes on the heels of rumors that first Microsoft, then a Google-Comcast partnership, were in discussions with AOL..."

Coupon Clickers:
"Published: October 14, 2005
(After October 22, 2005, this article will only be available to eStat Database subscribers.)

Nearly two-thirds of consumers in the US clip or print out coupons at least once a week, mostly from newspapers, magazines, circulars or inserts. But many are interested in procuring their coupons online.

A survey conducted by Prospectiv found that 96% of respondents clip or print coupons, and 62% do it once a week. About 30% of consumers said that they would like to receive coupons through online channels, and more than half would like to receive coupons this way if the offers were tailored to their interests.

Jere Doyle, president and CEO of Prospectiv, notes: 'Leveraging online coupons can be one of the most effective methods for making that important connection that helps marketers - particularly in the grocery, health and beauty, and retail industries - attract the right customers and keep them coming back.'

Currently, 10.5% of US consumers get their coupons from online sources, including Web sites (5.7%), e-mail (4.4%) and banner ads (0.4%).

While consumers still favor newspapers/magazines and direct mail as a source for coupons, e-mail is not far behind. However, only about 10% of respondents said they would prefer to get their coupons from Web sites and just 1% wanted to get them from Web site banner ads.

A study by the e-tailing group from April 2005 indicates that 43% of promotional e-mails sent out by online retailers in the first quarter of 2005 contained coupons.

eMarketer's eStat Database contains hundreds of charts and articles on e-mail and online marketing. Sign up for access to the most complete and up-to-date aggregation of e-business, online marketing and emerging technology statistics and articles anywhere."

Yahoo tests podcast search tool | InfoWorld | News | 2005-10-10 | By Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service:
"Yahoo began testing on Monday a service for searching podcasts, which are audio files created for distribution using syndication feeds such as RSS (Really Simple Syndication.)

Yahoo thus joins a crowded space of providers that offer podcast searching, including RapidSolution Software (http://www.PodSpider.com), TVEyes ( http://www.Podscope.com), Blinkx (http://www.blinkx.com), Active8 ( http://www.podnova.com), Perpetual Advancement (http://www.podfeeder.com), PodcastAlley (http://www.podcastalley.com), Podcast Networks ( http://www.podcast.net), and Odeo ( http://www.odeo.com).

The Yahoo service features a podcast directory and lets users rate and review podcasts."

ACM News Service:
"'Social Computing Drives Emerging Applications'
PC Magazine (09/28/05); Hines, Matt

Experts at MIT's Emerging Technologies Conference expect a new era of intrapersonal communications to arise from the advent of social networks and applications that assess personal behavior and gauge basic human traits such as honesty and likeability. MIT Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences Dr. Sandy Pentland noted that MIT and other institutions are developing voice recognition software that can already determine whether a person is lying over the phone, failing to engage an audience's interest, or more likely to break up with their spouse. "By engaging in reality mining, or paying attention to patterns of movement, activity or a person's tone of voice, to examine the way people truly feel, we can build better forms of social software," said Pentland. Dodgeball.com creator Dennis Crowley pointed to the emergence of geographically aware social networks thanks to a resurgence in locative technologies, Dodgeball being a case in point; the social networking application enables people to hook up by sharing personal information through their computers and wireless devices. Meanwhile, Del.icio.us Web site founder Joshua Schachter said the rapid adoption of email, instant messaging, and mobile devices is converging to pave the way for new applications that try to take advantage of human intelligence to some degree. IT.com CEO Mark Cordover said he anticipates the development of new social rules that address challenges to privacy and eavesdropping opportunities presented by social computing applications. Many conference presentations cited socially beneficial technologies: Entrepreneur Nolan Bushnell detailed his latest brainchild, an educational software system designed to make learning more fun and interactive by exploiting kids' love of video games.
Click Here to View Full Article"

EETimes.com - Sun evangelist, social activist:
"Sun Microsystems Inc. co-founder John Gage holds the type of title — chief researcher — that allows him to explore advanced computing and networking concepts on a cross-corporate, cross-academic basis one day, while advocating social-policy goals the next. ...

...Gage: We're very interested in some of the industry projects, like WGBH-Boston's metadata project, developing a standard way for describing what's held in a digital-media repository. I'm still waiting to see more efforts to tie this kind of asset management into the communications network — and into what the hardware vendors are doing to define the metadata at the moment of image creation....

...I'm not trying to say Sun is a model of altruism, but when we want to help schools, communities, the disadvantaged, we'll help sponsor something like NetDay [the program Gage founded to bring technology to underprivileged schools]. When one guy at Sun tried to brand a portion of the effort, I almost had him fired. You can't be doing this kind of thing to give your company immediate publicity...."

Web Sites Work:
" Published: October 07, 2005
(After October 15, 2005, this article will only be available to eStat Database subscribers.)

A new survey finds that not only are small and medium-sized businesses going online — they are depending on it more for marketing and profits.

The "Summer 2005 Small and Medium-sized Business Barometer," a nationwide survey of 780 leaders of small and medium-sized US businesses from Interland, found that 96% of them had Internet access, and most had high-speed connections.

Of the 72% of respondents with a business Web site, more than half are using or interested in using e-mail marketing (60%) and search engine optimization (54%).

Additionally, 78% report their business is healthier — has a competitive advantage or stronger economic footing — because they have a Web site, and 76% say their Web site generates leads for their business.

The strongest indicator of how businesses have taken to the Internet, however, is the fact that they are making money online. Of the 32% of the respondents who sell products or services online, 82% reported receiving monthly revenue from their Web sites.

"These results demonstrate that business leaders understand the importance of the Internet, Web sites and online marketing tools and are acting on that knowledge," said Jeffrey Stibel, CEO of Interland. "Since first introducing the Interland Small and Medium-sized Business Barometer in 2003, we have seen significant growth of businesses using online tools and offerings to attract, service and satisfy customers."

With 53% of small businesses with Web sites saying their sites are primarily to provide company credibility, and 29% saying the sites provide a critical building block for developing the products and services, the Barometer revealed how central Web sites are becoming for businesses.

When asked how Web site success is evaluated, 54% said through customer and prospect comments, 48% site activity, traffic and number of visitors, 36% sales leads, 24% online sales and 21% said efficiencies of internal processes such as faster payment processing or fewer phone calls.

Surprisingly, despite today's ongoing battle with computer viruses, worms and spam, 42% of the small business leaders said they have experienced no computer-performance issues over the past year. Slightly more (44%) say their computers have slowed down, and 30% reported instances of freezing or crashing that require the computer to be shut down or restarted.

One possible reason why these numbers are lower than one might expect could be that a whopping 97% of the businesses surveyed said they have virus software installed on office computers, and 70% they update that software weekly.

For more information like this on e-business in countries around the world, browse eMarketer's eStat Database."