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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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