Author: Mike Boland

In case you haven't seen it, the Yahoo! home page has a new look. There is also lots of new ajax functionality baked in (similar to the recent enhancements to Ask.com). Here is coverage from CNET and Search Engine Journal.

The San Jose Mercury News has an interesting article today about cost-per-action advertising, and the relaunch of search engine Snap by serial entrepreneur and paid search luminary Bill Gross. Interestingly, cost-per-action could begin to receive more attention and use among…

Classified aggregator Oodle launched today in the U.K. The press release is here, and we'll have more after we get the chance to talk to the company later this week.

Business 2.0's Future Boy has a very interesting column about Google's possible plans for Google Earth. The company is moving toward letting users design and create objects on its virtual Earthscape using simple 3-D modeling software. These can be representations…

Google's second annual press day is going on as we speak. I've been watching bits and pieces of the webcast and will have more commentary later. You can watch it here, and read Philipp Lessen's live blogging of the event…

We spoke with Scott Randall, CEO of shopping engine Yokel, recently about the site's market positioning and some of the challenges of building an online shopping model (majority of conversions happen offline, difficulty in tracking consumer's, lack of inventory data,…

Here's an interesting piece from CNET about local advertisers marketing themselves on MySpace. In essence a business can set up a profile on MySpace in the same way that a teenager would. We wrote about this concept a few weeks…

CNET has a good wrap-up of Google's press day product launches. More to come.

To add to Wednesday's post of the same name, Om Malik has some interesting data about the battle that is heating up for bundled services between cable and telecom companies.

Om Malik also reports on the quickly consolidating telecom landscape and the corresponding branding game being played. It seems now that AT&T-owned Cingular could soon change its name to, well, AT&T. Many questioned the name change from SBC to AT&T,…

After months of testing, and a very limited rollout to an invite-only list of small businesses, Microsoft's today announced the details of its adCenter SEM platform. The press release is here. AdCenter's selling points include better targeting options than Google's…

A Wall Street Journal article today is receiving a log of attention for its speculation that Microsoft could be interested in a sizable equity stake in Yahoo!. The combined forces would be meant to battle Google. Here is additional commentary…

Just as Comcast's first-quarter revenue growth (announced last week) was attributed to bundled service packages, this CNet article today points out that Time Warner Cable has experienced something similar. Quadruple-play offerings (voice, data, video and wireless) will become standard in…

A new personalized news site called Spotback launched yesterday that will customize news based on the aggregate tracking of an individual user's behavior. This will involve tracking how users manually customize their news and rate stories they have read. Techcrunch…

On the Heels of McClatchy's purchase of Knight Ridder (and subsequent sale of four of its papers to MediaNews Group), the publisher announced a partnership with WebVisible late last week at the AdTech conference in San Francisco. WebVisible's Geneva platform…

Another player has launched in the online real estate vertical. MyNewPlace deals with rentals only and specializes in apartment complexes where it can form relationships with a single point of contact that represents many units. This strategy has allowed it…

Yahoo! and AT&T have extended their current relationship (Yahoo! exclusive content and an optimized My Yahoo! portal are offered to AT&T broadband customers) to now also offer integrated voice services. The voice-enabled Yahoo! messenger will be offered free to AT&T…

Some news from the past couple of days:—It's official: McClatchy has found buyers for some of the big market papers it acquired with its recent purchase of Knight Ridder. MediaNews Group (Publisher of The Denver Post) and Hearst are the…

Washington Post Tech columnist Leslie Walker has an interesting piece today about search engine optimization. Worth a read.

We've written about the concept of inserting advertisements in video games here. The Washington Post has a piece today about the current state of the art.From the article: While most online advertising revenue comes from banner ads or sponsored links…