Digital Marketing Forum

In what might be characterized as a big ‘Duh!’ [URL="http://tinyurl.com/4lhngv"]Mac World reports[/URL] that Google and Adobe cited a trend at the [URL="http://www.web2expo.com/"]Web 2.0 Expo[/URL] conference in San Francisco this week, toward enabling offline access for online applications. Gee, you think? In my article last month in [URL="http://www.econtentmag.com"]EContent Magazine[/URL] on [URL="http://tinyurl.com/3fjykm"]online …

Mark Furber, MD of a UK strategic online marketing company called [URL="http://www.netcallidus.com"]NetCallidus[/URL], is warning anyone who might be listening that the publicly funded [URL="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero"]QUAERO European search engine research project [/URL]is doomed to failure. Expensive failure at that: Furber says that the project, hyped as at the Euro equivalent of Google …

This morning's Tech Ticker drew a bead on short-sellers who saw a wounded beast in Google and bet that the stock would go down this month - even though sellers weren't really sure what Google's 1st quarter financials would look like. Well, they know now. As I said yesterday, Google …

According to the [URL="http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB120776803032602423-lMyQjAxMDI4MDA3OTcwNjk4Wj.html"]Wall Street Journal today[/URL] Yahoo could be talking Google about the outsourcing of search advertising sales. This comes as, so the report suggests, as part of two pronged strategy to fight off the Microsoft acquisition threat. The other prong being a deal with AOL to combine Internet …

Surprising news from the Yahoo camp late this afternoon, with Yahoo announcing that it will begin a limited test of Google Inc.'s AdSense for Search service, which will deliver relevant Google ads alongside Yahoo’s own search results. According to a statement from Yahoo, the test will apply only to traffic …

[URL="http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/20080408/tc_pcworld/144243"]News is breaking[/URL] that the European Commission could push for laws to restrict the personal search data held by search companies to no longer than six months, after which it must be discarded. The EC Article 29 data Protection Working Party seems to be heading for a confrontation with search …

It would appear that [URL="http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hq6FlGb4RaKA8uNU0xIMPsrNOgPAD8VR8Q8G0"]Google is being sued[/URL] by the owners of a house in the Franklin Park suburb of Pittsburgh because the search giants photographed the property and included it in the [URL="http://maps.google.com/help/maps/streetview/"]Google Maps street view[/URL] feature. Why anyone would want to take an interest in the boring house, …

Google has finally implemented something that I've been requesting for quite awhile ... The ability to group statistics by day, week, or month. This is an immensely useful tool when trying to chart trends and patterns. For example, instead of just being able to group statistics by day, we now …

If you don't know anything about the microblogging phenomenon called [URL="http://twitter.com"]Twitter[/URL], it's about time you started. The idea behind microblogging is that you summarize your thoughts in 140 characters or less -- you're actually limited to the space available. Blogs with 250 word minimums need not apply. Twitter has taken …

It's kind of a quiet Monday morning on Wall Street, with Treasury Secretary Henry Paulsen's proposal to further regulate and consolidate the U.S.'s financial markets (by bringing heavier Federal Reserve oversight over bank lending, hedge fund risk assessment, stricter controls over the stocks market and currencies market - even tighter …

[URL="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/03/insight-into-youtube-videos.html"]Google has today announced[/URL] the launch a tool to answer the kind of questions anyone posting video clips to YouTube are always asking, such as: who viewed my video, how did they find it, where did they come from? YouTube Insight is free, and enables anyone with a YouTube account …

I just logged into my Google AdWords campaign management to find a new feature: [url=https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=80588&hl=en_US]demographic bidding[/url]. This new feature allows you to bid on, or exclude, certain demographic groups, such as users of a certain age or gender. A new reporting tool in the campaign management settings shows you a …

Figures released earlier by ComScore reveal that Google's web-search market share dipped Janurary to Feburay overall; even though the US share was up slightly. Google's lions share of the search world still sits at 62.8% though; down from 63.1% in Janurary. The number of searches going through Google is also …

Information Week is out with a new story ranking the top Internet search firms (by number of searches) for the month of February, 2008. The results may indicate why Microsoft wants a piece of Yahoo so badly, even though Bill Gates & Co. seem unwilling to up their share-per-price bid …

File under: shock, horror or perhaps irony. According to a press release from [URL="http://www.gss.co.uk"]Global Secure Systems[/URL] that I received today, it has "uncovered the alarming reality that UK school children are studying social networking websites during their lessons instead of what they should be concentrating on." In fact, the release …

To everyone who thought the social networking revolution had started to falter, Bebo has 850 million reasons to disagree after AOL agreed to acquire them for $850 million in cash. Analyst eMarketer predicts that by 2011, $4.1 billion will be spent worldwide for social network advertising, and in 2008 alone …

According to a [url=http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSN1325839520080313]story on Reuters[/url], it appears that Google is planning on using their newfound acquisition of the DoubleClick ad server to launch a new (and free) Ad Manager service ... essentially providing a free ad server to publishers (mind you a service that mid to large size online …

I was so wrapped up in the AOL hoopla yesterday that I forgot to mention how well technology stocks are doing so far this week. Sure, today's trading session wasn't exactly stellar: Microsoft, Apple, AOL and others all lost ground - but only by a little. Monday and Tuesday were …

The [URL="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/03/11/BU10VHR0N.DTL&type=business"]San Francisco Chronicle reports[/URL] that Google has finally got the go ahead from European regulators to close the acquisition of DoubleClick for $3.1 billion. The deal has immediately been closed, therefore, as the decision by the European Commission removes the last hurdle standing in Google's way.

More turmoil at AOL today, as the technology giant fired the head of its Platform A ad-network business yesterday. Blodget, reporting on the ever-valuable Tech Ticker portal on Yahoo.com’s finance site, says that Curt Viebranz, was canned, but there was little love for AOL's senior management. One reason why Viebranz …

I logged into my Google Analytics account tonight only to be presented with a new option: Benchmarking Beta. Apparently you can opt into a program that lets Google anonymously datamine all of your statistics. (At first you're always thinking why on earth you would want to opt into this.) However, …

Google, in my opinion, made a couple of mistakes in Q1 with the way they've handled changes in Google AdSense. For example, they made the change of making only AdSense titles and urls clickable instead of the entire ad unit, saying that it will lead to fewer people clicking accidentally, …

According to [URL="http://www.myWorkLight.com"]WorkLight[/URL] newly published [URL="http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/mar/05/digitalmedia.youtube?gusrc=rss&feed=networkfront"]research[/URL] into the success of social networking sites such as Facebook released this week proves the business interaction case for using these portals at work. Given that WorkLight have the audacity to describe itself as an 'Enterprise 2.0 Company' my gut reaction is to think: …

Google has opened a new research and development centre, based in Zurich (Switzerland), which is home to more than 300 engineers which makes it Google's largest engineering centre outside the U.S. and promises to be a hub for ongoing product innovation and development. Google has announced its intention to hire …

Are technology companies getting a raw deal over a new international accounting rule? Plenty of tech company CFO's seem to think so. In a survey released this week by BDO Seidman, LLP, an accounting and consulting group, about half - 49% - of all chief financial officers at U.S. technology …

Lots to talk about today. You've probably already have read about Microsoft's $45 billion buyout of Yahoo. Obviously, Microsoft is giving up on its MSN web portal and throwing it's weight and capital behind Yahoo. For Yahoo, which has seen its stock slide precipitously in the last year, the deep …

In an attempt to wean her students off of what she calls ‘white bread for the mind’ one University of Brighton professor has banned her students from using either Google or Wikipedia in their research for the first year of study. Instead, in what many will consider a neo-Luddite move, …

According to security researchers at [URL="http://news.bitdefender.com"]BitDefender[/URL] a new Trojan has been discovered which hijacks text based Google adverts and replaces them with ads from a totally different provider. Trojan.Qhost.WU acts by modifying the infected computers' Hosts file to include a line which redirects the web browser from the expected .googlesyndication.com …

Yesterday I wrote that Google was ranked dead last in a national survey of Internet search engine companies when it comes to consumer privacy rights. I also notes how Congress was taking a closer look at Google's privacy practices, particularly in light of its proposed merger with Doubleclick. Now it …

A recent study on the privacy rankings of big internet search engine providers reveals that Google might have some ‘splainin to do, especially if Congress gets its way. In the process, its proposed merger/buyout with Doubleclick might be in trouble. First, Google’s privacy problems, as defined by some privacy experts. …

[URL="http://www.truphone.com"]Truphone[/URL] has announced the first free telephone application for Facebook users. The Call Me application does not require a Truphone account, l nor a special phone, just a Facebook account. It works by enabling the user to choose a number on which they want to take inbound calls, and the …

Retail stocks should see even a bigger bump this month -- and possibly into 2008 -- due to an increased demand for a product that basically didn't exist a dozen years ago -- gift cards. That's the big news coming out of "Black Monday", the newest holiday on Wall Street's …

The holiday shopping season seems to have started out with more of a bang than a whimper - - especially online. That wasn’t the scenario painted by the ever-negative mainstream media, who published wave after wave of articles bemoaning the lousy economic climate and predicting a disastrous holiday shopping season …

At simultaneous launch events held in both London and New York today, [URL="http://www.bebo.com"]Bebo[/URL] announced its Open Media vision for social media and entertainment to provide media companies totally free access to its community of some 40 million users. In return, those 40 million members of the social networking community who, …

The last few days have been interesting ones for those of us who have nothing better to do than follow online gossip and trends. Especially so when you consider that the big gossip in the world of search has been how some rather well known sites have seen their PageRank …

According to the [URL="http://adsense.blogspot.com/2007/10/coming-soon-make-ad-changes-without.html"]Inside AdSense blog[/URL] better management tools for AdSense users are on the way. The new tools will allow you to manage your ad units from within your AdSense account, meaning that settings such as colors and channels will be saved in your AdSense account every time you …

Google has [URL="http://mail.google.com/support/bin/topic.py?topic=12760"]added IMAP support[/URL] to its free webmail service Gmail. Users can now access email from client applications using the Internet Message Access Protocol, and at the same time automatically update the message status within Gmail itself. This is something that many people who access Gmail messages via the …

Many of the world's leading Internet and media companies, including CBS Corp., Dailymotion, Fox Entertainment Group, Microsoft Corp., MySpace, NBC Universal, Veoh Networks Inc., Viacom Inc. and The Walt Disney Company, have pledged their support to a set of collaborative principles that are designed to foster the growth and development …

There can be no denying that Social Networking has been the Internet phenomena to watch over the last couple of years, displaying explosive growth around the world. In fact just about anywhere that people have an Internet connection, people have embraced social networking. It is true to say that most …

Yahoo! has complained to the [URL="http://ec.europa.eu/comm/competition/mergers/cases/index/m94.html#m_4731"]European Commission[/URL] that Google's $3.1 billion acquisition of Doubleclick, the online advertising business, could reduce competition and ultimately push up pricing for European customers. The fear, naturally enough considering that Google has always been in the advertising business just as much as it has the …

Like the title suggests, it's a good news/bad news scenario for holiday retailers this year. The good news? More people than ever are buying their holiday gifts online, thus opening up an even wider revenue pipeline from web sales for retailers. The bad news? The holiday shopping season is shaping …

In the customer service game, perception is everything. It can spell the difference between a company recording its annual revenues in black ink or red. I read a story once in USA Today about a guy named John Barrier, who didn’t like the way a bank manager in Spokane, Washington, …

According to analysis from web security company [URL="http://www.scansafe.com"]ScanSafe[/URL], a third of employers are now blocking social networking sites to prevent staff poking each other in the workplace. Amongst its corporate customer base it has seen the number blocking such sites rise by 17 percent from this time last year. Poking …

[URL="http://www.comscore.com/"]comScore Media Metrix[/URL] has published its monthly analysis of US online consumer activity showing that education related sites spiked during August as schools and universities began another academic year. With lottery jackpots reaching record highs, lotto and sweepstake sites also proved popular as did the sports genre what with the …

Microsoft has been keen to get me to take a look at a new experimental site launched to showcase the potential of its Silverlight technology. [URL="http://www.tafiti.com"]Tafiti[/URL], which apparently means 'do research' in Swahili, is the site in question. An exploration of two trends: search specialization and the Web 2.0 rich …

Google has announced a new feature for users of its Google Earth application, and it goes by the name of Sky. Thankfully Rupert Murdoch has not done some dastardly deal with the search giants, but rather Google is enabling users to 'float through the skies' via Google Earth. What this …

Dan Meredith and Andy Golding are software engineers at Google, working as part of the News Team responsible for developing the Google News service. They might just have made one of the most important statements to come from the direction of Google for a long time. Posting on the official …

Although Google itself refuses to budge from the official company line of confirming or denying nothing, it looks increasingly likely that a Googlephone is in the offing. Several sources are now claiming that prototype phone devices have been touted around the US mobile carriers in recent weeks (ironically you need …

Has JK Rowling created a lovable hero or out of control monster in her Harry Potter character? Amazon would probably suggest the former considering that it has just announced, with no surprises whatsoever, that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows has become the 'largest single-product distribution in Amazon.com's history.' Even …

[URL="http://www.privacyinternational.org"]Privacy International[/URL] has accused Google of embarking upon a smear campaign within the media to discredit both PI and a report, to be published in full later in the year, which ranks the privacy performance of the top Internet service companies. The interim results which were [URL="http://www.privacyinternational.org/article.shtml?cmd%5B347%5D=x-347-553961"]published[/URL] on the 9th …