Digital Marketing Forum

In response to a letter signed by 40 state attorneys general, the popular classified ad site [URL="http://www.craigslist.org/about/sites"]Craigslist[/URL] has taken additional steps to keep sex workers from using its site. Left unsaid, though, is that Craigslist had little choice, unless it wished to risk being made a party to illegal activity. …

If you like the Google Earth mapping application, there's now an application that works with it and provides information on [URL="http://earth.google.com/outreach/kml_entry.html#tMarine%20Protected%20Areas"]"Marine Protected Areas"[/URL] on the Earth. Installing the application shows all the various marine protected areas (MPAs); clicking on them provides some information, including a link to [URL="http://mpas.appspot.com/pa?id=agRtcGFzchULEg1Qcm90ZWN0ZWRBcmVhGJv9AQw"]more detailed information[/URL]. …

Stocks are mixed today, which isn't really bad news considering the overseas selloff we saw on Sunday night and early Monday morning. Helping U.S. markets was decent news from the housing sector, where home sales were up 2.7% for September, with some of the country's hardest-hit regions like the southwest, …

Wow. Let me say that again but with added exclamation marks: wow!!! Google has officially released a Google Earth client for iPhone and iTouch users. It's available right now from the iTunes [URL="http://www.daniweb.com/blogs/entry2767.html"]App Store[/URL], and best of it is free. Actually, scrap that, because the real best of all bit …

Google's stock is up 10% today, and the stock market is up over 250 points (at 2 PM EST), and I don't think the twin spike is merely a coincidence. Why? As I wrote yesterday, the market looks to major tech players like Google, Apple and IBM, just to name …

The stock market has responded favorably, relatively speaking, to the rumor that Microsoft is once again making a bid for Yahoo. Traders are buzzing over whether Steve Ballmer will make the same $33 per share offer now that he made a few months ago. Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if …

The group [URL="http://www.stopinternetpredators.org/"]Stop Internet Predators[/URL], claiming that the Street View 360-degree technology can be used by pedophiles to help stalk their victims, is recommending that municipalities "[b]an Street View from your neighborhoods until it is safeguarded to ensure children's safety and privacy." How Google is supposed to do that, the …

Last week, in the middle of the worst stock market meltdown since the 1930's, U.S. Secretary Henry Paulson called on some of the banking industry's leading lights to figure a way out of this mess. Paulsen, with Lloyd Blankfein (Goldman Sachs), John Mack (Morgan Stanley), Vikram Pandit (Citigroup), Jamie Dimon …

Wow! Now that really is a hard question to answer isn't it? If you listen to what 'Barmy' Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO and 43rd richest person on Earth, [URL="http://www.itwire.com/content/view/20745/53/"]has to say[/URL] then you might be forgiven for thinking it is Google (I'm going to f****** kill Google), or maybe Apple …

Over the last week or so, I've been exploring cloud computing. My basic thesis through this series has been that as the economy sours--it's darn close to curdling--cloud computing gives you access to sophisticated applications without expensive hardware. Sounds like a smart play on the face of it, but when …

Sometimes someone has something that's just a grand idea and everyone should have one. Take Google Goggles. The idea is that when you send an e-mail at certain times of day, particularly from home, they'll set you some [URL="http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2008/10/new-in-labs-stop-sending-mail-you-later.html"]maths questions[/URL]. Why would it do a thing like that? Why, to …

My post the other day, [URL="http://www.daniweb.com/blogs/entry3277.html"]Does Using Gmail Mean You're Stupid[/URL], produced some thoughtful comments from people that made me me think harder about the advantages and disadvantages of Cloud Computing. There are security risks and data ownership issues that you have to take into consideration. To get another point …

Of all the most cloying and over-rated virtues, for me self-deprecation is the worst. You know the sort of thing: people ask me what I do for a living and I tell them I write a bit, only when they press me do I confess that I write for most …

[URL="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman"]Richard Stallman[/URL], the founder of the [URL="http://www.fsf.org/"]Free Software Foundation[/URL], stated the other day that he thought Cloud Computing was stupid and we were all being duped by the cloud vendors. Specifically, in[URL="http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/sep/29/cloud.computing.richard.stallman"] an interview with London's Guardian[/URL] newspaper, he said, ""It's stupidity. It's worse than stupidity: it's a marketing hype …

The initial model for looking at Twitter was horizontal -- see everything that all the people you follow are thinking about. Now the model has been turned on its head 90 degrees -- see everything that anyone says, whether you follow them or not, that has to do with a …

Evoking [URL="http://www.daniweb.com/blogs/entry3059.html"]Internet ads[/URL] that some people wondered might be a clue to Republican presidential nominee John McCain's vice presidential pick, the campaign is now reportedly running ads claiming that McCain has won tonight's debate -- not only before the debate had occurred, but before the candidate had even announced he …

T-Mobile has today announced the international launch of the first Android powered cellphone in the world. It is available 'soon' say T-Mobile, for customers in both the USA and Europe. The [URL="http://www.T-MobileG1.com"]T-Mobile G1[/URL], as it is called, will feature full touch-screen functionality a combined with a QWERTY keyboard and the …

Buddhist writer Scoop Nisker used to close out his news reports on a San Francisco radio station by saying, "If you don't like the news, go out and make some of your own." Now, if you don't like political advertising, you can go out and make some of your own. …

Here we go again. The hypemeisters are in full swing, the prediction market is growing again - glory be, Android is coming to a phone near you tomorrow, or at least it's going to do so if you live in America. The launch is in New York, America will get …

Over the past year or so, [URL="http://twitter.com/"]Twitter[/URL] has become a full-blown communications phenomenon. For those of you who don't follow every social networking trend. Twitter is a micro-blogging site where you enter your thoughts, whatever they may be, in 140 or characters or less. Experts say if you aren't paying …

Day four at VMWorld was short for me due to poor planning on my part--my flight out of Las Vegas at noon. I entered the show early yesterday when it was mostly just the vendors hanging around waiting for the hoard to arrive. I walked through the floor with the …

Google quietly introduced an audio search tool called[URL="http://labs.google.com/gaudi"] GAudi[/URL] this week in [URL="http://labs.google.com/"]Google Labs[/URL]. For now, Google is using to the tool for experimentation purposes to index political content on YouTube videos, but chances are they are exploring this for more than good citizenship points and will expand it at …

ZDnet's Deb Perelman asks if it's a good idea to ask IT job candidates to [URL="http://blogs.zdnet.com/careers/?p=178"]prove they've got the technical chops[/URL] to do the job they're after. You bet your server farm it is. Perelman says, "...increasingly, IT professionals are asked to take some sort of test when they go …

[I]You have no friends named "palin".[/I] Sob. I had been so proud, the day after Republican presidential candidate John McCain chose her as his running mate, to be her friend on Facebook. I hadn't even done it cold, either; a friend of mine had recommended to me that I friend …

About the only upside to the weak economy these days is that community colleges across the country are seeing an uptick in enrollment. According to the American Association of Community Colleges, overall enrollment peaked at 11.5 million last year and is expected to remain high this year as well. As …

If you like using Google Maps and Google Earth in your applications, you're about to get better access to imagery. GeoEye Inc. of Dulles, Va., launched last Saturday a [URL="http://geoeye.mediaroom.com/index.php?s=43&item=304"]satellite[/URL] intended to provide high-resolution black-and-white and multispectral imagery. GeoEye and Google announced in [URL="http://www.reuters.com/article/internetNews/idUSN2837224420080829"]August[/URL] that Google had purchased the online …

Some headlines are just too good to pass up, and this is one of them. [URL="http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10036131-93.html"]According to reports[/URL] it would appear that an iffy Google News search was responsible for stock in United Airlines to crash. And crash is a pretty good description as the stock plummeted by 75 percent, …

Bravo to Google for daring to compete in the two-party system of the world's desktop browser market. And kudos for bucking the status quo to design a "modern platform for Web pages and applications," as its [release statement](http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/why.html?hl=en) read. But there's also skepticism out there about Google's bravado, and about …

For the record, I don't think there is a lot of money in web browsers. They don't draw a lot of advertising money (although many of the web sites they send users to make money via advertising) and nobody has found a great profit-making model out of browsers, either. Just …

In what has to rank as one of the most surprising outbursts of the summer, the [URL="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7586789.stm"]BBC[/URL] reports how the president of the British Cartographic Society has blasted online maps and accused them of "demolishing thousands of years of history." The remarkable rant took place at the Institute of British …

With dozens of freshly minted applications on hand to stock its shelves, Google's Android Market is all but ready to open-- right across the street from Apple's App Store. All Google needs now is for someone to start selling phones that use Android, its Linux-based mobile operating system. According to …

Google yesterday announced winners of the [URL=http://code.google.com/android/adc.html]Android Developer Challenge[/URL], which put up US$10 million in prize money to developers of the best applications for its nascent mobile platform. In doing so, Google also helped to stock the shelves of Android Market, a forthcoming online retail site for Android applications akin …

For the past couple of years I volunteered at my son's elementary school to set up blogs for his classroom, but the projects never got off the ground. Nervous school IT staff unable to find a platform that offered them the privacy and control they wanted, and knew parents would …

Why prebuying Google sponsored ads might be a bad idea. Google "lieberman mccain." Or, click [URL="http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=lieberman%20mccain&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8"]here[/URL]. The result, at least as of this writing? Sponsored Link Lieberman & McCain JohnMcCain.com/lieberman Senator Lieberman Joins McCain's Team. Learn Why You Should Join! Clicking the link takes one to "Citizens for McCain," an …

Google has just released their new Advertising program which works with your currently existing Ad Sense account. Google's new advertising program is called Google Ad Manager, and it is currently available in 32 languages! I had to get a Google Ad Manager account the second I heard about it and …

With gas still hovering at $4 a gallon, the Arctic ice caps melting, and our waistlines expanding, walking is more important than ever. But how to figure out whether a particular home or work location is a good one for walking? Well, there's a way. [URL="http://www.walkscore.com/"]www.walkscore.com[/URL] is another one of …

Web 2.0 came crashing into the enterprise a couple of years ago and was given the new moniker: Enterprise 2.0 (which was coined by Harvard Business School Professor [URL="http://blog.hbs.edu/faculty/amcafee/"]Andrew McAfee[/URL]). While business has come a long way when it comes to understanding social networking tools and how to use them …

The UK economy has [URL="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/uk-economy-grinds-to-a-halt-906524.html"]officially ground to a halt[/URL], and is in danger of heading for recession. In the second quarter of the year growth was, well, zero actually. That means that the longest period of economic expansion in British history, some 16 years of it, has come to an …

According to the San Fransisco Chronicle Verizon and google are making a deal to make Google the default browser for all Verizon mobile phones. Eflux Media says that Verizon will get part of the adwords revenue. Almost everyone loves Google but having Google as your only browser choice for your …

It looks like the browser wars may be hotting up as Microsoft has fired its salvo - it seems that by [URL="http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10020157-93.html?hhTest=1"]storing our previous search behaviors[/URL] it's going to beat Google at its own game. I guess this is a different approach. [URL="http://www.cuil.com"]Cuil[/URL] appears to be trying the 'if it …

Markets are down about 50 points in mid-afternoon trading on Tuesday, mostly due to investor worries about continued woes in the financial services sector. In short, nobody is buying the notion put forward by Wall Street optimists that the credit crunch – now one-year-old – is coming to an end. …

Remember the [URL="http://abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=3052158"]Great BlackBerry Email Debacle of 2007[/URL]? Yesterday's unexpected [URL="http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/11/systemwide-gmail-outage/"]Gmail outage[/URL] wasn't on quite the same scale, but if your business relies on Google's uptime to manage email, there were no doubt some tense moments around the water cooler. Was this a wake-up call for your company? Did it …

Anyone remember all the fuss back at the end of 2005 when, in December of that year, it was revealed that Google had managed to beat off the attentions of Microsoft to ensure that its relationship with AOL remained good? The [URL="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/16/technology/16cnd-aol.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1218404764-tWD3Cl9qLyg5YnYCxoIULw&oref=slogin"]New York Times reported[/URL] at the time how Time …

Google is doubling down on cookies. I like cookies as much as the next guy; I've got a box of linzer tarts next to me as I write this. But when a company as powerful as Google starts force feeding you with tracking agents, some might see that as unpalatable. …

If you have ever been vaguely interested in search beyond the simple 'where can I find x' type question, and perhaps more from an 'who is asking about y' or 'where is z the most popular' instead, then listen up. Google has announced the launch of [URL="http://www.google.com/insights/search"]Insights for Search[/URL] which …

Thursday saw another horror show on Wall Street, with the Dow tanking 200 points over the weaker-than-anticipated GDP number and the shaky job market (the U.S. unemployment rate rose to 5.7% today). Still, tech stocks seemed to navigate the tumult of bad news in surprisingly robust fashion. We covered Motorola …

Erik Anderson and Rob Landley are at it again. The guys who brought us the [URL=http://busybox.net/]BusyBox[/URL] toolset for resource-constrained Linux and Unix systems, together with the Software Freedom Law Center, have filed yet another GPL enforcement lawsuit for copyright infringement. This time it’s against [URL=http://www.extremenetworks.com/index.aspx]Extreme Networks Inc.[/URL], a maker of …

I just love stories like [URL="http://uk.reuters.com/article/internetNews/idUKSP20465620080731?feedType=nl&feedName=uktechnology"]this[/URL]. There's a survey in Australia that demonstrates how few companies bother responding to e-mailed queries. Apparently some 60 per cent of large organisations simply don't bother answering questions sent by mail. I have to declare some amusement here. In 1997 I edited a work …

When you make changes to your site design, it’s not always easy to figure out how the changes affect traffic and visitor behavior. That’s where the [URL="https://www.google.com/analytics/siteopt/new_expt?account=5119167"]Google Website Optimizer[/URL] tool comes into play. You can experiment with two or more designs and see which one works best to achieve your …

Claiming to be the biggest search engine on the web is a pretty confident thing to do on the day that your search engine launches, but that is exactly what the creators of [URL="http://www.cuil.com"]Cuil[/URL] have done today. Combining the "biggest Web index" with "content-based relevance methods" whereby results are organised …