It hasn’t received that much attention, but ICANN, the domain naming authority, is considering a proposal to lift price controls on .org, .info, and .biz domains. In essence, the registrars of these domains could charge what they think the market will bear. Ultimately, this could lead to a company that has spent years of effort and countless dollars developing a domain could be told they have to ante up a five or six figure sum to renew their domain name. Here’s some text from the summary announcement: Continue reading »
Aug 282006
Microsoft (MSFT) has been targeting Google’s (GOOG) lucrative web search (and search advertising) business for a while now, and doesn’t seem to have gained much ground. While search experts find MSN’s search results to be better than they were in the early stages of development, Google has held its market share against all comers; only Ask.com, with its aggressive television advertising and sponsorship campaign, has shown signs of life in the market share contest. Now, Google is targeting Microsoft’s cash cow: MS Office. Google has announced Google Apps for Your Domain, a suite of web-based tools for the small and medium business market. (One wonders how much they paid their name consultant to come up with THAT clunker.)
Aug 232006
Microsoft [MSFT], after losing the MySpace advertising deal to Google [GOOG], has scored at Facebook, according to CNET News.com: Microsoft lands Facebook ad deal. This is a nice score for Microsoft, though hardly on the same scale as their rival’s MySpace deal. In the battle of social networking heavyweights, MySpace has 100 million users to Facebook’s 9 million. Still, the college-oriented demographic of Facebook.com’s members is bound to be attractive to advertisers.
Aug 162006
Even as Google devises ever more clever algorithms for automating processes in novel ways, that company, Yahoo, and others are trying to put human intelligence to work in improving search. In Low-tech searches: you ask, someone answers, MSNBC.com republishes a Washington Post article that describes efforts underway to created useful human-powered search functions.
Aug 152006
We’ve heard a lot about “user generated content” as part of the Web 2.0 discussion not to mention how wise crowds are, but one firm is taking these concepts to a new level. Ckrush, Inc. announced in their press release, Moviemaking Goes Virtual as Social Network Meets Hollywood, that users of LiveMansion.com would “produce” the firm’s next movie. Members of the site can audition for acting gigs or even for the coveted director slot; most will probably opt for the “producer” role, in which they get a vote on talent selection and other key decisions in the making of the film.
PC industry pundit John Dvorak turns his eye to social networks and forums in The Mystery of the Online Community, and wonders whether it’s possible to establish an online community without fakes and phonies. Dvorak speculates that in some communities more than half the members may be participating under false identities.
Aug 082006
MySpace is a social networking juggernaut. At its current pace of signing up 250,000 new users a day, their only limit seems to be the number of people on the globe with some kind of computer access. Google has been a different kind of juggernaut, not only dominating Web search and increasing market share even as competition stiffens, but revolutionizing the way sites are monetized. Publishers have allocated ever more ad inventory to (or in many cases created sites for) Google’s AdSense, which automatically finds the most relevant and productive ads by analyzing the content of each Web page. Now, these two juggernauts have agreed to join forces in a major ad deal. In Google in $900m ad deal with MySpace, FT.com says that the deal guarantees nearly a billion dollars in ad revenue by 2010 to News Corp’s Fox Interactive Media. The article quotes Peter Chernin, News Corp’s president and chief operating officer: Continue reading »