The social networking arena is poised for a shakeout. Consider the fortunes of two sites: The Facebook and Friendster. The Facebook, a popular college social networking site, just raised $13 million for expansion from 800 to all 1,400 four-year colleges…
In something of a coup for small business portal AllBusiness.com, the company landed Peter Horan as its new CEO. Horan was the CEO of About.com until it was acquired for US$410 million by the NY Times. Horan will bring instant…
In yet another in a series of dizzying announcements in the search world, Yahoo! introduced a "contextual search" tool, Y!Q, that allows users to conduct a secondary/search within results by highlighting text on a page. The current offering (in beta,…
Earlier this afternoon I was on a panel at the iMedia Connection Summit about the "future of search." Moderated by the humorous and ever-insightful Kevin Ryan, the panel ran the gamut of topics from search-ad agency relations to adjunct targeting…
Big news, harbinger of more to come across the industry.
Barry Diller more than hints that Ask Jeeves will be rebranded (a good move as part of a global strategy). Ask.com (the company's URL anyway) will likely be the new name. Would Barry Diller rather put an Ask search box…
Danny Sullivan pointed to a very interesting thread on the Webmaster World forum about Google advertising in the Kansas City market for Google Local. I had heard a rumor about this from an Advertising Age reporter a few weeks ago.…
This week both the WSJ and NY Times ran articles on the dynamics of "traditional media" competing with "new media" (the Internet) and the likely impact of the latter on the former (Neal Polachek blogged about it below). I'm usually…
Google confirms its local Kansas City-area advertising on behalf of Google Local. Thanks to Blogdigger's Greg Gershman for pointing out the post on, of all places, Google's own blog!
The deal was announced today. YellowPages.com, SBC SMARTpages.com and BellSouth RealPages.com advertisers will be featured and recieve "priority placement" on InfoSpace-owed Switchboard, which has consistently been one of the most-visited IYP sites. More on this in our Local Media Journal…
I missed Blogdigger's announcement about the addition of local a few days ago. Local.blogdigger.com appears to be a mix of local search, blog/news search and community. The results of my few quick searches weren't very impressive. But the concept is…
Nothing radical in one sense, but the development is very interesting and another harbinger of -- dare I say it -- TV-Internet convergence. (Actually there won't be true convergence, but some mixing of TV and Internet on both mediums). Separately,…
My Google is here. Though that's not the official name, that's what the new home page personalization features seem to amount to. While the move is not a tremendous surprise -- we speculated about My Google when Google News personalization…
Largely because the Internet (and cable, which started it all), television will be forced to move from reach to targeting. (See related online broadband "channels.") It's somewhat more complicated than that statement suggests, but, directionally, that's what's going to happen.…
The Gray Lady will introduce "TimesSelect" in September. TimesSelect will require users to pay $49.95 annually to get access to "Op-Ed and news columnists on NYTimes.com, easy and in-depth access to The Times's online archives, early access to select articles…
Saw this today: Lostclicks.com. It's been set up by the lawyers in the click fraud class action.
VeriSign, the e-commerce infrastructure provider, announced that Mother's Day-related spending hit US$4.4 billion this year, during the period from April 25 through May 8. That represented a 24% increase over Mother's Day 2004. I didn't see a detailed category breakdown…
Take a look at Chris Gaither's LA Times now widely circulated piece about how the Web is stealing advertising from TV. Competition from online and cable, declining audiences, rising prices and a lack of accountability are a kind of perfect…
Google CEO Eric Schmidt told shareholders in Google's first annual meeting that the company would focus on developing overseas markets, where growth is outstripping the U.S. Approximately 66% of Google revenues are generated from U.S.-based advertisers. Currently, most of its…
Google acquires Dodgeball. More from Loren Baker at Search Engine Journal. Yet more from ClickZ and from PC World. Twenty-four hours ago almost no one had heard of this company/site and now you can't get it to come up 'cause…
