Hurricane Katrina overwhelms Web sites

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Several U.S. weather and news Web sites were deluged by heavy traffic as hordes of people went online seeking emergency information and news on Hurricane Katrina, which battered the U.S. Gulf Coast.

Some of the graphic content on weather.com was not available from 6 p.m. to 9:15 p.m. on Sunday night (2200 GMT Sunday to 0115 GMT Monday), as the storm was approaching its Louisiana landfall, according to Keynote Systems Inc., which monitors Internet performance.

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How To Avoid The Google.com Duplicate Content Filter?

by Christoph Puetz

More and more webmasters are building websites with publicly available content (data feeds, news feeds, articles). This results in websites with duplicate content on the Internet. In cases of websites build on news feeds or data feeds you can even find websites that match each other 100% (except for the design). Several copies of the same content in a search engine does not really do any good and so Google apparently decided to weed out some of this duplicate content to be able to deliver cleaner and better search results.

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Digital Agencies Hunt for Video Talent
By Kevin Newcomb

With more advertisers looking to enhance their online ads and Web sites with video, more agencies are looking both inside and out to find talent to bridge the gap between offline video and online rich media.

Online video is growing dramatically, with increased broadband penetration creating a larger audience, leading more advertisers to consider adding video to their online efforts. Jupiter Research expects that after reaching $121 million in 2004, online video advertising will hit $657 million in 2009. Rich media technology provider PointRoll recently reported that it has served over eight times more video ads in the first half of this year than during all of 2004.

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The Age of Egocasting
By Shelly Palmer

About 20 years ago, I attended a benefit for the Bat-Dor Dance Company. The founder, Baroness Batsheva de Rothschild, was in a particularly jovial mood that evening. She was dressed impeccably and, as one could imagine, was wearing some exquisite jewelry. Of note, was her necklace, which was made up of pearls that started at about 7mm and graduated up to a 25mm monster in the middle. It was so extreme, it almost looked fake. I simply could not resist the malapert query, "... those aren't real, are they?" The Baroness gave me a wry smile and replied, "I'll never tell."
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Roper: Readers Of Online Papers More Outspoken Than Public At Large
by Wendy Davis

ALMOST HALF OF ALL U.S. online readers of the NYTimes.com can be considered "influentials"--meaning they're both opinionated and eager to share their views, according to a Roper study released Tuesday. For the report, Roper this June asked 4,120 registered NYTimes.com users a battery of 10 questions designed to evaluate their interest in swaying others, such as whether they had voted in the last year, written or called politicians, sent e-mails to companies, made a speech, and the like.

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Do Marketers Really Need RSS?

by Rok Hrastnik

The recent Forrester Research study, which claims that only 2% of online households in North America use RSS, took the internet marketing world by storm. Does this data really mean that marketers can still afford to ignore this channel?

Soon after the Forrrester study became public, I received a press enquiery asking whether marketers should be interested in RSS now that so few online adults use it.

Is this the correct question to ask? Let’s take a look at the bigger picture …

1. THE FORRESTER STUDY VALIDITY
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Yahoo!'s Claim To Largest Search Index Draws Mixed Reactions
by Gavin O'Malley

YAHOO!'S CLAIM THIS WEEK THAT its search index now includes over 20 billion Web documents and images has drawn mixed reactions from experts and rivals alike. Until the announcement, it was assumed by many that Google had by far the largest search breadth. A Google spokesman said the company is currently investigating Yahoo!'s claims.

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Brand Democratization
By Cory Treffiletti

As the landscape changes and business moves to being based on consumer-generated content, one thing becomes more and more apparent: The consumer is in charge of your brand. I read an article recently from BusinessWeek and I heard them coin the term brand democratization. This is a very powerful term and one I think will stick.

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Jupiter Research: Internet Ad Spend To Reach $18.9 Billion By 2010
by Wendy Davis

ONLINE AD SPENDING WILL SURGE to $18.9 billion by 2010--up about 59 percent from an estimated $11.9 billion this year, according to a report released Monday by Jupiter Research. But despite the uptick in online revenues, Web advertising will account for just 7 percent of all ad spending in 2010--compared to 5.6 percent this year, according to the report, "U.S. Online Advertising Forecast, 2005-2010." With its latest forecast, Jupiter Research joins other researchers to predict continued strength in online advertising. In May, Forrester Research estimated that ad spending would climb to $14.7 billion this year and $26 billion by 2010. Research firm eMarketer forecast a total online ad market of $12.9 billion this year, while financial company Goldman Sachs pegged this year's Web ad spend at $12.3 billion.

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Using Independent Conversations as Brand Assets
By Tom Hespos

In the realm of highly-considered purchases, the expectation of a click-to-buy online advertising model can be quite unrealistic. While big-ticket items can sometimes be sold successfully online, such purchases usually require a combination of both compelling persuasion and consumer confidence to succeed. Things like travel packages, jewelry, and consumer electronics are usually not bought online without careful consideration.

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Google Tests New AdSense, AdWords Formats
By: Christine Blank
Contributing Editor
cblank@dmnews.com

SAN JOSE, CA -- New pilot programs from Google aim to give advertisers more control over the types of ads that appear, Gokul Rajaram, a group product manager for AdSense, told DM News during the opening day of Search Engine Strategies 2005 here yesterday.

AdSense is testing a program with a few publishers, letting them send more "signals" about their Web site, to better tailor ads. Though AdSense already uses signals based on the content of Web sites, such as headlines and font sizes, to generate ads, this would let advertisers tailor ads based on their users' demographics and other signals, which are yet to be determined.

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RSS Advertising on Blogs
by Scott Rafer

AT CHICAGO'S AD:TECH CONFERENCE, IT was reported that marketers indicated a deep ambivalence towards blogs, saying that their companies urgently want a blog presence but, at the same time, fear the consequences of letting consumers freely express their opinions.

This is not an unreasonable reaction. What right-thinking company wants their message running on a Web site where they can't know with certainty that the content won't be offensive or may even attack the advertiser's own brand?

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Macromedia Upgrades Flash, Dreamweaver
by Shankar Gupta

MACROMEDIA, MAKER OF THE POPULAR Flash and Dreamweaver applications, is expected today to release a major upgrade to its most popular products. The new release, Version 8 of Macromedia Studio--which includes Flash 8, Dreamweaver 8, Fireworks 8, Contribute 3, and FlashPaper 2--contains a host of new graphical effects, as well as extra support for XML. The Flash player, which is used for many rich media ad units, is getting a number of new graphical refinements--including blue, drop shadow, beveling, and glow, along with an improved text rendering tool.

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Short Term vs Long Term Marketing

by S. Housley

In order to create consistent sales cycles and a positive growth trend businesses usually engage in both short and long term marketing efforts.

Short-term marketing efforts tend to cause sudden sales spikes which rarely last. These sharp sales increases are usually the result of a targeted marketing campaign or time limited offer. While short-term marketing produces sales, long-term marketing efforts must be mixed in to sustain sales.

Short Term Online Marketing

Mentions
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FCC: Telecoms Need Not Share DSL Lines
by Wendy Davis,

THE FEDERAL COMMUNICATIONS COMMISSION RULED Friday that telecoms need not share their lines with other Internet DSL providers. The decision came less than two months after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a separate case that cable companies don't have to allow rival broadband carriers access to their lines. While the FCC's move is seen as positioning telecoms to better compete with cable companies, it's also viewed as setting up the potential for duopolies between telecoms and cable companies. Some fear that players such as EarthLink and America Online could be forced out of the market.

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Writing Articles - Two Aspects Of The Surge

by Elaine Currie

Writing articles for publication on the Internet is, at the time I write this, every Internet marketer's favourite way to get free publicity for his website. If you are an Internet marketer and haven't heard the buzz that's going around about writing articles, where have you been? No, forget I asked, there can't be a single Internet marketer hasn't heard that writing articles is an essential part of website promotion.

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Podcast: David vs. Goliath
Indie shows are struggling to stand out amid the influx of media giants

Adam Kempenaar and Sam Hallgren's 15 minutes of fame lasted exactly one month. It began when Apple Computer Inc. (AAPL ) opened its iTunes music store to podcasts on June 28, and the duo's Cinecast movie review show was one of the site's featured offerings. The exposure, along with a plug from podcast guru Adam Curry, sent their show skittering up the iTunes' list of the top 100 podcasts, peaking at No. 13. Thousands of fans listened to them review films such as War of the Worlds and spar over whether The Matrix or Dark City was the better flick. The Chicago friends were flooded with fan mail and dreamed their hobby could become a moneymaker.

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Google Website And Web Page Indexing For Dummies

by Michael Turner

You may have heard how important it is to have your website optimized for search engines, especially Google, which is currently the most popular worldwide. The reason for this is so your website will be ranked high in the search engines and people will see your site first, click on it, and increase your traffic and ultimately your sales. You might think this all sounds like a wonderful idea and want to get your web site optimized for Google, but you may have no idea how to go about it.

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You Say You Want a Web Revolution

By Ryan Singel

The Netscape threat that led Microsoft to wage the browser war and cross swords with antitrust regulators around the world is -- at long last -- poised to become reality.

Software experts say recent innovations in web design are ushering in a new era for internet-based software applications, some of the best of which already rival desktop applications in power and efficiency. That’s giving software developers a wide open platform for creating new programs that have no relation to the underlying operating system that runs a PC.

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Bridging the Google Ad Gap

By Adam L. Penenberg

If you think about it, Google, with its $82 billion market cap, offers just a hint of the potential for online advertising.

The average web surfer spends less than 5 percent of his time using a search engine, according to the Online Publishers Association's Internet Activity Index. That means Google earns almost $3 billion a year from people who devote 95 percent of their time on the internet to doing something else.

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Yahoo tests blog search in Korea

By Stefanie Olsen
Staff Writer, CNET News.com

Yahoo has quietly begun testing blog-search technology in Korea, a sign of coming tools for the U.S. market that will take on existing players such as Technorati.

In recent days, the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company has introduced new search technology on its Korean blog site, which is designed to let people sign up to publish personalized Web journals.

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Podcasting: Flavor of the Month
BY David Cohen

This industry continually latches on to the next great thing, sensationalizing it until it's larger than life. No doubt podcasting has crossed your radar. If you're on the agency side, you're probably on your third POV document; if you're a marketer, you've at least considered including podcasting as a line item on the 2006 flowchart.

But what is podcasting? And why are people gaga over it?

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Yahoo! Takes On AdSense, Launches Publisher Network
by Wendy Davis

MORE THAN TWO YEARS AFTER Google launched AdSense, Yahoo! today will unveil a beta version of its own network for small and mid-size publishers. Yahoo! plans to invite about 2,000 smaller publishers into the new offering, Yahoo! Publisher Network, before expanding further by the end of the year, said Will Johnson, general manager-vice president of Yahoo! Publisher Network Online.

At launch, the program is designed for publishers whose sites receive fewer than 20 million page views per month, said Johnson. The initial publishers will represent a wide range of sites, including e-commerce, travel and car verticals, and Web logs. To date, Yahoo! has been testing the program via its own employees who have blogs.

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MSN Shopping Adds Price Comparisons, RSS Feeds
by Shankar Gupta

MSN MONDAY UNVEILED AN OVERHAUL of its shopping site, Shopping.MSN.com, with new features that include a comparison shopping engine and RSS feeds to update customers on new product launches in the categories that they shop for most. The comparison shopping feature allows users to examine products and prices in multiple stores. The new release also includes user ratings and reviews; at launch, the site had 70,000 product reviews and 170,000 merchant ratings.

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Jeff Jarvis vs. Dell: Blogger's Complaint Becomes Viral Nightmare
by Shankar Gupta, Friday, Aug 19, 2005 6:00 AM EST

JEFF JARVIS IS NOT HAPPY with Dell Computer Corp., and he's letting everyone know. Starting last month, in a series of posts entitled "Dell Hell," Jarvis enumerated on his blog, BuzzMachine, his struggles with Dell's customer support service. Jarvis, creator of Entertainment Weekly magazine, wrote at length about Dell's refusal to replace or fix his broken computer. On Wednesday, Jarvis published on his blog an open letter to Dell Chairman Michael Dell and Chief Marketing Officer Michael George, in which he recounted his struggles with customer service and lambasted the company. While BuzzMachine frequently receives more than 5,000 visitors a day, Jarvis' "open letter" was the third most linked-to post on the blogosphere on Thursday, according to Intelliseek's BlogPulse. The post was also either linked to or discussed by at least .01 percent of all blog posts written Wednesday, according to BlogPulse.

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RSS Advertising
by Scott Rafer

IN THIS NEW AGE OF advertising accountability, ad agencies are in a difficult spot. They have reams of data showing how various traditional and offline media perform for advertisers. And so, with some degree of accuracy media buyers can predict how a campaign will perform (though they acknowledge that the quality of the creative can have a profound and unknowable impact on the performance).
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Google Employee Seeks Patent For RSS Ads
by Wendy Davis

GOOGLE APPARENTLY WANTS TO OBTAIN patent protection for the idea of serving contextual ads in RSS feeds, according to documents made public late last week. Google employee Nelson Minar, on Dec. 31, 2003, filed an application for a patent for embedding ads in syndicated content. The application was made public last Thursday (The U.S. Patent and Trade Office publishes applications 18 months after they're filed, unless the applicant has requested they remain confidential.)

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Why Niche Marketing Yields Good Profits

by Evelyn Lim

Have you ever been told to find your niche? In business, finding your niche can prove both profitable and personally rewarding.

Niche marketing is the key to many successful organizations. From the small company that focuses on their niche, putting all their efforts towards it, to large companies with countless product lines, niche marketing is extremely important. For example, if you are a company that produces fishing products, you may have several different product lines and market segments or niches that you sell to. You have fresh water fishing, deep sea fishing, fly fishing, etc. You don't want to market your Fly Fishing gear in a publication whose niche is deep sea fishing or vise versa. Therefore, it is important to focus your marketing dollars in each individual niche. There are certainly larger publications that cater to a much general audience rather than a niche one. However, are you going to capture your niche market as well as if you practiced niche marketing?
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It's the Fox podcasting network

By Chris Marlowe

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Fox Broadcasting Co. is embracing podcasting in a big way, creating free programing that fans can download and play any time and anywhere they want.

On Thursday, the network began offering audio episode recaps for all of its series in what Chris Carlisle, Fox Broadcasting executive vp marketing and promotion, said was just the first step.

"Podcasting is a phenomenal concept, and it's going to explode," Carlisle said. "We're approaching it from a very, very aggressive point of view. You already have an audience plugged in to these devices and this delivery system. We want to reach them where they are and give them what they want."

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Variants of Spreading Windows Worm Emerge

By GREG SANDOVAL, AP Technology Writer

AN FRANCISCO - Several new variants of a computer worm emerged Wednesday to attack corporate networks runningWindows 2000 operating system, just a week after Microsoft Corp. warned of the security flaw.

As experts predicted, the Windows hole proved a tempting target for rogue programmers, who quickly developed more effective variants on a worm that surfaced over the weekend and by Tuesday had snarled computers at several large companies.

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Defining the Relations Between Blogs, E-zines, RSS and E-mail

by Rok Hrastnik

Although RSS and blogs are slowly reaching mainstream, they are still missuderstood by most marketers in relation to eachother and in relation to their relatives, e-zines and e-mail. How do these four really relate and what does this mean for your internet marketing strategy?

The most common missconception is comparing blogs and e-mail, with many bloggers actually touting blogs as a replacement for e-mail. The truth is, there’s no comparison at all, just like comparing apples and oranges.
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Andrew Kantor: CyberSpeak - The future of television lies on television, not the Net

Andrew Kantor, USA TODAY

There are a group of technologies that are finally ready for prime time, and that together are going to reshape the way we watch television.

A couple of weeks ago, CBS announced that it was going to start putting more content on the Web - audio, video, etc. - and it would allow people to choose what they wanted to watch.

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Something new from Forbes.com. The ingenious folks at the online magazine, not the print magazine (they want you to know that), came up with a listing of the best blogs as part of the Forbes.com Best of The Web.

Forbes.com-ers came up with their picks for the best blogs in 20 different categories including art, autos, blog tools, careers, marketing, media, music, technology, and video games. Of course they had to winnow their picks down from a mountain of well-known and lesser-known titles. We think this special online report will be a great resource for readers and marketers looking to focus on quality content in the blogosphere.

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AOL Taps Feedster For RSS
by Gavin O'Malley

AMERICA ONLINE TODAY IS EXPECTED to announce the beta release of "My AOL," an RSS-ready home page on AOL.com. With the help of RSS search engine Feedster, the site is what Kerry Parkins, AOL's director of audience products, called one of AOL.com's three front doors. "Our strategy is to give users their choice between the ready-made AOL.com, the make-your-own-experience at My AOL, and the visually rich video page," Parkins explained.

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Does Your Marketing Have "Skanky Scrunchie Syndrome"?
by Alexandria K. Brown, "The E-zine Queen"

Last year I spoke at a large marketing conference in Atlanta, Georgia. One woman approached my display table to ask a few questions. Honestly she was so attractive it was intimidating. Tall with a pretty face, understated jewelry, a blue designer suit with beautiful shoes and a high-end bag. She looked like she'd just stepped out of a catalog. I thought to myself, "How polished! This woman really puts out a winning image. She must do very well with her business."

Then, as she turned to walk away, I spotted it...

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BusinessWeek Online Adds Style Section
by Gavin O'Malley

SHOOTING FOR SYNERGY, BUSINESSWEEK ONLINE launched a new innovation and design section this week to accompany the magazine's Creative Corporation report now on newsstands. Kathy Rebello, the Web site's new editor-in-chief, said the "channel" addresses the keen aspirations of businesses to stand out in an increasingly crowded and commoditized marketplace. "As markets mature and products become more commoditized, innovation and design are becoming must-have competencies for corporations," Rebello said.

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How to Get a Website Indexed Fast

by Russell Savige

Get Indexed Fast. What does getting indexed mean?

The search engines keep a cache of every web page in their index.

In English, this means: The search engines make a copy of every web page they visit and put in their records… ummm, I think that’s what I mean.

When you use a search engine the results list relevant pages to your search, usually ten results per page.
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We Are the Web

The Netscape IPO wasn't really about dot-commerce. At its heart was a new cultural force based on mass collaboration. Blogs, Wikipedia, open source, peer-to-peer - behold the power of the people.

By Kevin Kelly

Ten years ago, Netscape's explosive IPO ignited huge piles of money. The brilliant flash revealed what had been invisible only a moment before: the World Wide Web. As Eric Schmidt (then at Sun, now at Google) noted, the day before the IPO, nothing about the Web; the day after, everything.

Computing pioneer Vannevar Bush outlined the Web's core idea - hyperlinked pages - in 1945, but the first person to try to build out the concept was a freethinker named Ted Nelson who envisioned his own scheme in 1965. However, he had little success connecting digital bits on a useful scale, and his efforts were known only to an isolated group of disciples. Few of the hackers writing code for the emerging Web in the 1990s knew about Nelson or his hyperlinked dream machine.

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Why You Should Be Podcasting, Two Reasons: Choice and Convenience

by Jeff Mills

Interested in a new, cutting-edge tool that can reach millions of potential customers? Then you are looking for podcasting!

A podcast is an audio file stored on the Internet that customers candownload to their computers or MP3 players and listen to whenever theywant. Now, you may be thinking, 'So what - MP3 files have been available for download from the internet for years!¨

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Blog Measurement Company Refines Analytics
by Shankar Gupta

BUZZ-TRACKING FIRM UMBRIA WILL UPGRADE its Buzz Report, which tracks conversations about brands on blogs and message boards, by offering users more refined demographic information and an enhanced method for dealing with blog spam. Buzz Report, which monitors about 11 million blogs and 100,000 public message boards, already analyzes posts to determine writers' genders and ages. The new release will also measure such factors as geographic location, ethnicity, and income level. Those new demographics will be rolled out over the course of several months, said Dave Howlett, vice president of product management.

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RSS: What Is It And Why You Should Care Part I
by Scott Rafer

IN THE RELATIVELY SHORT LIFE span of online advertising, a lot of new technologies ladened with over-promises have been left on the doorstep of advertising and media agencies in hopes of a quick and loving adoption.

Think what we have asked! We have asked agencies built on the notion that "you can't get fired for buying network TV" to embrace a totally new medium at a time when audiences are disbursing to a multitude of other new media unimagined even 10 years ago: digital video recorders, pay-per-view, podcasting, handhelds, mobile phones, 300 channels of cable, and yes, the Internet.

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PointRoll Rolls Out Sequential Web Ads
by Gavin O'Malley

ON THE THEORY THAT THREE ads are better than one, Gannett Co.'s PointRoll recently launched an ad sequencing feature that allows clients to control the progression and delivery of multiple ad units all within one campaign over a set time frame. The tactic, which is believed to deepen the user experience, has been applied by rival rich media shops for some time. Since its initial launch, PointRoll has put sequencing to use for the Gatorade Company's Propel beverage brand. "For the Propel campaign, sequencing was crucial to make sure the interaction between the brand and the consumer would be as layered and riveting as possible," Andy Ellenthal, PointRoll's senior vice president of sales, said.

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RSS - The Intelligent Marketing Medium

by Brendon Turner

Are you new to RSS? If so here is a introduction to what RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is and how your website will benefit from offering an RSS feed to your visitor's.

RSS is a smooth channel of communication between publishers and visitor's. Since RSS has grown in recent popularity, more website owners are beginning to experiment with and use RSS feeds to deliver content in new and exciting ways. Usually RSS feeds contain news headlines and small content summaries. The summaries have just enough information to allow the visitor to decide whether he or she would be interested in reading the entire contents without overwhelming the visitor with excessive details. If the visitor is interested they can click on the headline in the RSS feed and access the website which has additional details.

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For Times, Journal, Online Revenues Outshine Print
by Gavin O'Malley

ONLINE REVENUE GROWTH TROUNCED PRINT in the second quarter of this year for both The New York Times Company and the Dow Jones Company, their earnings reports revealed Thursday. For the Times Company, online ad revenues were up 27 percent, while its new property About.com is estimated to have increased ad revenue by 39 percent. About showed an operating profit of $2.5 million on total second-quarter revenue of $12 million. The Times Company purchased About.com from Primedia earlier this year for $410 million.

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To Blog or Not to Blog?
By Seana Mulcahy

No matter where you look, people are talking about blogging. What are they? Who writes them? Are they credible? Did you hear about the employees that were canned for writing about their fellow employees and the company?

Like much of the Web, many companies don't have rules in place for blogging. In fact, blogging took them by surprise. As of recent, many big companies have put rules in place for employee blogging.

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OPA: Consumers Spent More Time On Content, Less On Search, In June
by Wendy Davis

CONSUMERS IN JUNE SPENT SLIGHTLY more of their Web-surfing time visiting content and communications sites, while decreasing the proportion of time spent at e-commerce sites and search engines, according to the Online Publishers Association monthly "Internet Activity Index," released Wednesday. Online users spent an estimated 557 million hours last month visiting content sites, including news and entertainment pages such as CNN.com, MapQuest, and Windows Media Player--up from 536.4 million hours in May and 500.8 million in June of 2004. Time spent at content sites represented 36.9 percent of all online time in June--a slight increase from both May's 36 percent and 36.5 percent in June of 2004.

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Emotionally Rich Media
BY Dorian Sweet

Do you get a little choked up over a good Hallmark commercial? Would you reach for that tissue box if you saw the same spot online, while checking up on where to order monogrammed gifts for your clients?

Traditional broadcast advertising has proven time and again creating an emotional connection with a brand affects purchases and purchase intent. People look favorably on brands they can personally identify with. No medium has done this better than TV.

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Top 5 tips for Marketing Your Real Products in Our Virtual World

By Kim Bloomer & Dee Kreidel

It can be a challenge to market real/tangible products in the virtual world. And, it’s certainly much different than marketing services or virtual products. We have put together a quick tip list that every tangible product based business needs to consider when selling in a virtual market.

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Intelliseek To Track Information Flow In Blogosphere
by Shankar Gupta

BUZZ MEASUREMENT AND TRACKING FIRM Intelliseek is expected to announce today several upgrades for its free BlogPulse tool that, taken together, will allow users to evaluate how much clout particular bloggers have. The new features include the capability to determine which sources bloggers link from most, which other sites they most influence, and common keywords recently used by bloggers. Intelliseek Chief Marketing Officer Pete Blackshaw said the tool can serve advertisers and sellers by allowing them to evaluate how much influence a blogger has over their brands. "The more you know about an author or blogger, the more informed choice you can make about whether you want to sponsor their blog--or, more importantly, should you fear this person," Blackshaw said.

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How to Keep your Marketing Strategy and Sales on Course

by Charlie Cook

When a company announces that they’ve lost a billion dollars in the first three months of the year, as General Motors did two months ago, it is a good indication that they are way, way off course. While Ford and Daimler/Chrysler weren't in the hole for a billion dollars, their profits were down by 50% or more for the quarter. Their cars just aren't selling.

Why are these companies having such a hard time selling their products and what does it have to do with your marketing?

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Changing Channels and the Rise of Podcasting
BY Mark Kingdon

Reaching a mass digital audience is getting easier as megaportals and search engines capture an ever-larger number of eyeballs. But crafting a compelling message, separating yourself from the competition, and reaching time-, and attention-, starved audiences are getting more complex as wholly new digital constructs gather momentum.

The digital medium is experiencing the same channel proliferation TV faced a decade ago, to the power of 10. The staggering number of programming choices isn't the only challenge. The real killer is there isn't a single remote control, screen, or access device, as there is with TV.

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SEO Content Distribution Linking For Newbies

by Joel Walsh

The new buzz on the internet is all about getting one-way links by distributing content to other sites in exchange for backlinks. As with every other SEO or website promotion technique ever devised, there are plenty of newbie myths about it that can ruin your chance for success before you even start.

Newbie Myth 1: The 'Duplicate content penalty.'

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Personalized media changes adaptation
By Diane Mermigas

CHICAGO -- Traversing the minefields of change always is tricky business. But shifting disciplines is a whole other thing. It's the difference between catering to the masses and to the individual, advertising a product and actually selling it, randomly browsing rather than searching for specifics and delivering what you think consumers want versus what they know they want.

Those kinds of paradigm shifts are rattling all aspects of the media and entertainment industries in ways that the advent of color TV, Imax, transistor radios and videocassette recorders never did.

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RSS, XML And Feed Readers? Huh? Help!

by Reba Collins

Have you seen them yet? The little orange graphics that say XML or RSS? Have you ever wondered what the heck they are? Yeah, me to. And, being as curious as a cat, I had to find out!

It wasn't hard to get most of the info I needed. All I did was search for RSS at Google and a ton of resources came up. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. Hmmm...really simple? Yeah, it really is pretty simple and it makes keeping up with news, sports, entertainment and business, well...really simple.

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TV Ad Spending 'Peaks,' Looks Peakish Relative To Online
by Joe Mandese

A LEADING GLOBAL AGENCY MEDIA network Monday revised its U.S. and global ad outlooks, one again lowering overall ad spending expectations for 2005, but dramatically increasing estimates for online ad spending in the U.S. and worldwide. While it said demand for traditional media generally remains "firm," ZenithOptimedia Group said the real momentum is coming from the Internet, which it now estimates will account for $16.4 billion in worldwide ad spending during 2005. That would represent 4.1 percent of ZenithOptimedia's current 60-country global forecast for 2005, an increase from the 3.8 percent share it was predicting online would take in its last forecast. Much of that revision is coming from the U.S., where ZenithOptimedia added $1.2 billion to its online forecast, noting, "This upgrade is sustained in 2006 and 2007. We have tended to underestimate Internet advertising."

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Increase New Customer Traffic To Your Business

by Joy Gendusa

One person tells another, who tells another, who tells another and so on. You get the idea. Let’s see how to make that an actuality.

You have a great company and you provide the highest level of customer service. But as the old cliché says: 'A happy customer tells a friend, an unhappy customer tells 10 friends.' You don’t have to worry about the unhappy customer telling 10 friends because you always do a great job and keep your customers happy. But how do you increase the number of friends that your happy customers are sending your way?

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Charity blogging event stumbles but lives on

Coordinators hopeful for Blogathon's future

By Stacy Cowley, IDG News Service
August 02, 2005

NEW YORK - Last year was a watershed for blogging. Online news, opinion and diary sites proliferated, readershipm skyrocketed, and a Pew Research Center study found that one in 10 Internet users posted to a blog at least once. While the blogosphere grew, one of its quirkier and nobler community endeavors, now scheduled for Aug. 6, nearly died.

Blogathon started in July 2001, when blogger Cat Connor rounded up 101 participants to raise money for charity by updating their blogs round-the-clock or 24 hours. It was a geek reinterpretation of the run/walk/bike-for-a-cause fund-raiser, with emphasis on creative writing, augmented by caffeine. The group raised more than US$20,000 for an assortment of organizations such as the Human Rights Campaign and the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network.

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Deutsche Bank: Online Ad Spending Up 11 Percent in Q2
by Wendy Davis

ONLINE AD SPENDING CONTINUED TO surge in the second quarter, according to a new study conducted by Deutsche Bank in conjunction with MediaPost. The strong growth appears to be the result of a combination of growth in marketers entering online advertising with a scarcity of premium inventory. The report, released today, shows that marketers spent more on Web advertising in the second quarter of this year than the first three months--when they spent more than in the last quarter of 2004.

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SEO Web Content: Good Writing, Good Business

by Joel Walsh

There's a deadly myth about search engine optimization and writing for the web: that good SEO and good writing don't go together.

As a website copywriter, I hear this myth repeated back to me all the time by new clients and prospects. 'Don't bother search-engine-optimizing the content,' they say. 'Just make sure it is well written and the keywords will flow naturally into the content.' Or, they repeat the words of so many self-styled gurus: 'don’t write for the search engines, write for the people who will be reading what you write.'

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ITunes Mints Podcasting Stars

By Steve Friess

Self-proclaimed tech geek Brian Reid got an MP3 player for Christmas and decided after fiddling with it for a while to start a little podcast called Sex Talk that focused on one of his passions: gender issues.

The suburban Washington, D.C., stay-at-home dad did a few broadcasts, touching on such sonorous topics as the Roman Catholic Church's stance on female priests, and then gave up back in April when his audience failed to grow beyond a few subscribers.

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Upscale Men Dominate Adult iPod Ownership

A national phone survey of adults over the age of 18 by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, found that more than 22 million American adults own iPods or MP3 players. 29% of them have downloaded podcasts from the Web so that they could listen to audio files at a time of their choosing.

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Nielsen: Display Ads Grew 4.2 Percent In June
by Gavin O'Malley

THE OVERALL NUMBER OF ONLINE display impressions grew by 4.2 percent to 97.1 billion in June, from 93.1 billion and 91.4 billion in May and April respectively, according to new data from Nielsen//NetRatings' AdRelevance unit. Display impressions last reached 97.1 billion in March. Social networking site MySpace beat out heavyweights MSN Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail as the leading site for advertisers to promote their wares in June, with a 7.9 percent share of ad impressions. In May, MSN Hotmail led with 7.4 percent of ad impressions, compared with MySpace's 6.3 percent.

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RSS as a Change Agent

by Rok Hrastnik

To better understand how RSS is changing the way companies and individuals deliver and consume content on the macro scale, let us first remember how content is traditionally delivered and consumed.

People subscribe to e-mail newsletters or e-mail update services to get content delivered directly to their inboxes. It's (or better yet, was) convenient, easy and simple.

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Hello Online Marketers! My friend, Penny Haynes, who I like to refer to as the audio queen, has opened the virtual doors of DigBizBooks.com today. This is an incredible place to get ALL your online needs from web design to branding, from podcasting to RSS, DigBizBooks.com will deliver to your desktop all the tools needed for your business! Now the cool thing is everything is priced for the shoestring budget. Not only that but from today, August 1 through August 5, 2005 Penny is offering some great gifts to anyone who makes a purchase TODAY. AND you'll be entered into a drawing to receive MORE gifts. Heck I tried to bribe Penny behind the scenes to get her course on Podcasting! Darn, she will only do this fair and square so come on and join the fun and get some great tools for your business and maybe even win one of the great BIG prizes...Read all the way to the end for the details....

Starting a new business can be overwhelming and expensive as you search for information on how to be successful. But at Digital Business Books, the focus is providing affordable
business information for entrepreneurs. What makes this site different?


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E-commerce begins to come of age 10 years after birth

LOS ANGELES (AFP) - A decade after Amazon.com led a cyber-shopping revolution that threatened to demolish bricks-and-mortar stores, rash web sites have perished while the sage have evolved to survive.

As consumers begin to trust the Internet to satisfy their shopping, travel and banking needs, cyber business is expected to account for 7.7 percent of total US consumer spending this year, experts said Thursday.

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Competition is Good, Copying is Bad

by Sharon Housley

I've always been of the opinion that competition is a good thing. It encourages all of us to be better and make better products. While it might be true that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, copying someone else's work is simply wrong.

We recently came across a competitor using our sales copy. The competitor was using a web graph showing the traffic on one of our sites, along with our sales copy to promote their competing application. Digging a little further, I realized that their competing application was, in both form and function, identical to our application. The competing program contained identical screenshots, custom program icons and our help documentation. While the code of the program was, in fact, different, it was clear that our copyright had been violated.

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