According to a study by Borrell Associates, the search advertising marketplace rose to $11.5 billion last year and is slated for continued growth as other media channels decline. Five times as many people use search engines on a regular basis
than they use the yellow pages to find a local business, and advertisers – especially the small and medium-size businesses
are rushing to search advertising. This is causing businesses to re-evaluate relationships with the Yellow Pages, newspapers, radio and direct mail, according to Borrell.

Over the next five years, their ad spending on these type of advertising media alone are forecast to fall 19%, representing average annual declines of $3.4 billion. But spending on paid search by local advertisers is forecast to rise 39%, representing average annual increases of $242 million.

But SEM has been oversold and mismanaged by resellers, leaving many local businesses, said Borrell. Churn rates are embarrassing for these resellers. Most of them lose half their customers within a year’s time. Some lose as much as 90 percent.

And yet, opportunities abound. Approximately two-fifths of all small businesses still don’t have a Web site, and the forecast growth in search-engine marketing by this sector is expected to be 39% over the next four years.

“We are obviously very pleased,” CEO Eric Schmidt gloated, during yesterday’s conference call with Wall Street analysts. But some insiders continue to say that Google has a rough road ahead in the ad biz sphere.

Schmidt said Google’s targeted ad business was responsible for the growth, saying international sales accounted for most of the company’s revenue – a first for Google.

Investors, who were prepared for a slowdown, rallied. In after-market trading, Google’s shares grew 17% to $525.96. (It’s currently trading at about $540).

In the earnings call, Schmidt also referenced the ad test with Yahoo, saying “It’s nice working with Yahoo and we like them very much.” Aaaw! Yahoo is set to report its earning on Tuesday and they will likely meet Wall Street’s expectations, industry watchers say.

Yahoo has said it expects to post revenue of between $1.28 billion and $1.38 billion. (Revenue for the fourth quarter last year was $1.83 billion). So, it is expecting a downturn, unlike Google, which posted $4.83 billion in its fourth quarter, significantly less than the $5.19 billion it’s touting now. But as Schmidt says, most of that growth was overseas, not domestic.

Industry watchers are still on edge about Google’s ad business – especially since recent comScore reports have indicated that Google’s paid clicks – their bread and butter – have declined precipitously. Google blames the decline on in-house initiatives to reduce bad clicks.

Google also said that the DoubleClick acquisition didn’t impact the company in the first quarter, but was likely to help grow its display advertising business.

The company pulled a rabbit out of its hat this time – it should be interesting to see how/whether the Yahoo-Google ad partnership pans out, and of course, if Microhoo teams up to take it down.

Some see rosy days ahead for Google and the industry overall:

“Google’s continued growth shows how digital advertising continues to prosper and offer efficiencies that attract advertisers and increased spend despite worries about the economy,” said Duncan Perry, director of corporate strategy at Steak Media. “Of particular interest is the growth in mobile searches mentioned by Sergey Brin on the earning calls with Wall Street; this is an area we feel is finally taking off for consumers and will continue to grow throughout 2008 and into 2009. We expect the integration of DoubleClick to lead to new tracking and targeting innovations this quarter and the next; it will also be interesting to see if a free ‘lite’ version of Doubleclick’s platform emerges in a similar vein to Google Analytics.”

In March, Google changed its AdWords algorithm, which means that some advertising are paying much higher rates … yet their conversion rates have hit the skids.

“If it were just a rate increase, I would have tolerated it. But my ad rates have doubled and I’ve got no business,” an anonymous tipster told Wired.com.

Google, for its part, says that its drop in paid clicks is … intentional. The Web titan justifies the higher ad rates, saying that serving fewer, but more relevant ads more than makes up for the lower conversion rates.

But advertisers ain’t having it, Wired reports.

“I am seeing large-scale advertisers whose general cost per clicks is trending up … and they’re seeing impressions go down,” Jeremy Chatfield, an analyst at Web marketing firm Merjis, told Wired.com.

Yahoo gathered about 12%, Microsoft snatched 10% and AOL plodded along with 5% of the market.

DoubleClick and Google will compliment each other in terms of the types of consumers they hit. DoubleClick has a 48% share of sites with more than 1 million monthly unique users (three times more than second-place Yahoo); Google has a 71% share of sites with less than 100,000 monthly unique users (eight times more than second-place Microsoft).

Attributor gathered its data by analyzing ad-server calls across 68 million domains captured from their January crawling programs. Their findings were added to Compete’s January unique user data.

The question on the tip of many tongues: are ad networks growing or fading? This isn’t the question the industry should be posing. The real question is about the value of different types of networks and whether that value will grow or decline.

I discussed back in January that 2008 will be the year online publishers will leverage the opportunity created by increased audience fragmentation and boutique independent publishing. Target audiences are becoming more elusive and advertisers are looking for new ways to reach them with relevant content in the right context.

Enter premium vertical advertising networks.

The networks ESPN is rejecting, i.e. the remnant, performance ad networks, serve a purpose for many publishers. They monetize unsold inventory where your ad sales team cannot – often because the inventory is comprised mostly of pages like forums, e-mail and non-premium content that advertisers will not pay premium rates to be alongside. Direct response, Google or behavioral targeting can often more effectively monetize these pages. Google is the largest contextual remnant ad network on the planet.

Vertical ad networks created by trusted brands and knowledgeable entrepreneurs efficiently deliver premium inventory from smaller, high-quality sites to advertisers. This helps the advertisers reach their target audience – and they know the quality of the content and placement is high (something a remnant network CANNOT provide). It also lets large publishers increase the audience they can deliver to advertisers in the face of fragmentation (where online users spend 64% of their time online OFF the top 20 sites according to comScore). Finally, this allows quality, smaller publishers to realize significantly higher rates than possible with any remnant ad network.

Companies like Forbes, Martha Stewart, NBC, IDG and more are expanding their reach with quality, exclusive vertical ad networks. Companies like Gay Ad Network, Good Health Advertising, Yardbarker and Gamers Media are creating new media companies based on their knowledge of the advertisers and publishers serving very distinctive audiences.

ESPN’s decision is an interesting one, but they are clear category leaders in their space who may be selling virtually all their inventory at premium rates and who have become experts at monetizing all types of inventory on their site.

Will every major publisher accomplish this? Unlikely – so remnant performance networks have their place leveraging technology to monetize remnant inventory for direct response advertisers. Vertical ad networks are next generation media vehicles bringing brand advertisers to the premium independent publishers that are attracting the audiences they target. Different types of ad networks for different objectives — and solving very different problems.

New to the report for last month were the percentages of Smartphone traffic globally. The statistics were accumulated from data from the several companies’ Smartphones including RIM, Nokia, Palm, Apple, HTC, HP, MITAC, T-Mobile, Samsung, Motorola and others. According to the data, RIM’s BlackBerry 8100 has the greatest percentage of worldwide traffic with 34% of Smartphone traffic share. Nokia’s Smartphones second with 29% share of traffic while Motorola’s Smartphone came in with 1% of traffic share.

iPhone traffic flattened slightly during the month of February, consistent with the theory that people use new devices a great deal in January, only to have traffic slow down in the following months.
 As far as manufacturer share trends are concerned, Nokia carried 29.4% of ad requests globally, in India with 66.7%, South Africa with 35.5% and Indonesia with 49.3%. In the US, Motorola took first place with 35% of all ad requests.

Jason Spero, VP of Marketing at AdMob said “AdMob is constantly working to better classify our network traffic to help our advertisers target. The February report has seen the addition of a few new data features that we hope will further empower advertisers and developers to leverage the mobile web.”

Microsoft has authorized a proxy battle for Yahoo this week, in a bid to lure the Web company’s shareholders into Microsoft’s camp. And if Yahoo doesn’t enter talks with Microsoft, the company will seek to nominate a new batch of directors to Yahoo’s board by March 13 – and oust the old board in the process, The New York Times reports.

The battle is expected to cost Microsoft between $20 million and $30 million, a much cheaper alternative to raising its bid. Upping the $31-per-share offer would cost Microsoft an additional $1.4 billion for every dollar added. Yang rejected the initial overture as “not in the best interests” of stockholders, saying the company is “uniquely positioned” to grow from $45 billion in 2007 to $75 billion in 2010.

Microsoft has watched its stock plummet 12.8% since the Feb. 1 bid and major Yahoo and Microsoft shareholders have questioned the deal’s merits and future and offered conflicting advice to the companies.

Leading stock-picker Bill Miller of Legg Mason, Yahoo’s second-biggest investor, said Microsoft should up its offer to reach a deal. Fund manager Robert Olstein, who owns 1 million Microsoft shares, wrote a letter to chief financial officer Chris Liddell that said, in part, “Under no circumstances should you raise your price,” The Guardian reported yesterday.

On Monday, Microsoft’s chairman Bill Gates told Reuters there was “nothing new” in the takeover process and that its initial offer was “very fair.”

Because Yahoo doesn’t have a staggered board, it is vulnerable in a proxy battle. All of the Internet company’s directors are up for nomination this year, The Times notes. And in a contested election, directors are elected by a plurality of votes cast.

Even more ominously, the very nature of this kind of heated and protracted skirmish will likely lead to a big body count at Yahoo, industry professionals anticipate. It is likely that Yang and other top executives will lose their jobs should Microsoft come out on top.

The firm believes that the bid undervalues the company and as an option, may be looking to revisit talks previously had with Google about a business partnership.

A memo to Yahoo employees on Friday was obtained by Reuters this weekend in which management wrote “We want to emphasize that absolutely no decisions have been made – and, despite what some people have tried to suggest, there’s certainly no integration process underway.”

It was reported in The Wall Street Journal that Google CEO Eric Schmidt called Jerry Yang to offer any help needed to kill Microsoft’s offer.

Regardless of who may gain any kind of upper hand on Yahoo: Microsoft or Google; either company will have a hard time going through anti-trust regulators as these three companies are the largest in the search and now online advertising business.

The effort being made b Yahoo to find an alternate bidder is also being speculated to be a tactic that could pressure Microsoft into offering more money. Jeffrey Lindsay, analyst for Sanford C. Bernstein was quoted in Reuters for having written in a research note that “the Microsoft bid of $31 is very astute,” adding that the true value could be worth upward of $39-$45 a share.

Terry Semel, former CEO of Yahoo, and Microsoft entered talks in late 2006 and continued to discuss an acquisition until Feb 2nd, 2007 when a letter was sent by Semel to Microsoft explaining that Yahoo didn’t feel it was the right move at this time. Analysts speculate that Yahoo saw more potential value than was being offered at that time. With Semel out and Jerry Yang in things changed. With the current battering of the price to as low as $18 a share, Microsoft has aggressively moved in an pulled a Murdoch by offering a premium price that is unlikely to be challenged by another. Some sources say that the bid could go as high as $40 a share.

Yahoo has had a tough year in 2007 with slipping search share, drastic loss of senior management, declining profits, and media attention focused on praising Google. It has made some bold moves in paying high acquisition premiums such as Right Media in order to stimulate change and growth inside the organization. However the stock price continued to slide and broke the $20 barrier last week.

Adotas will keep you updated on the unfolding events related to the acquisition as the day moves on.

$44.6B

There are only 24 websites offered as part of the beta program, ranging from well-known social networking sites like MySpace, Friendster possibly lesser known sites like CupidBay. Many, if not all, of these sites require online registration, which likely means that each website already maintains a database of demographic data about each user. Google then uses that demographic data to serve ads based on certain demographic criteria set by the advertiser.

While the Google demographic beta test is a welcome innovation for Google AdWords, there’s still much work to be done for demographic data to be integrated into the Google ad platform. Recently, there’s been a lot of discussion about search engines and their interest in Facebook and its advertising platform, which allows advertisers to target by age, interest and geographic location. On October 24, Microsoft invested $240M in Facebook – most likely to gain access to its advertising potential. Facebook, however, isn’t the only social networking site that allows demographically-targeted advertising based on gender, age, likes, and more. Other social networking sites, such as LinkedIn, allow advertisers to target their ads to an audience with a particular job title or job focus.

What is the benefit that these social networking sites have for the online advertising medium of PPC? PPC is immensely popular because advertisers only pay when its audience takes an action. Couple that with the power to ensure that your message reaches a very targeted audience and you’ve created a powerful advertising platform.

The potential is there for Google to eventually offer demographic targeting for ads served on its own search engine, instead of just through third-party sites. Google already is experimenting on its engine with “personalized search” – a way to serve more personalized organic search query results based on a user’s past search history. Personalized search hasn’t exactly taken off yet – but that may be due in part to the fact that personalized search does not include demographic data or preferences, which might give it more power.

Many AdWords advertisers have very specific demographic requirements for their advertising, and, for now, the only way to effectively target a certain demographic for ads served with Google searches is to pick very specific keywords or to set geographic targeting. This can really hamper an advertiser’s ability to reach its core audience – a problem that could be solved with demographic advertising for Google searches.

For example, recruiting firms might select the keyword “recruiting firm” as an AdWords keyword. However, both potential employers and candidates search for recruiting firms using this keyword. Why is that a problem? Recruiting firms don’t want to pay for clicks made by candidates looking for jobs. Candidates are more prevalent than potential employers, and candidates do not pay recruiting firms (in many cases) to find a job. So many recruiting firms really only want to target potential employers, focusing their advertising only to the audience that will generate revenue. Now imagine that the job data from LinkedIn were combined with that search term, allowing the recruiting firm to advertise, perhaps, to only HR professionals who search for the term “recruiting firm.” That combination would yield a much higher possibility of conversion and return on investment for the advertising recruiting firm.

I applaud Google for taking the first steps to offer demographic advertising in AdWords, but demographic advertising on the search engines has much more potential.

So, we scoured the forums, blogs, and Google’s own guidelines for increasing the number of pages Google indexes, and came up with our (and the community’s) best guesses. The running consensus is that a webmaster shouldn’t expect to get all of their pages crawled and indexed, but there are ways to increase the number.

PageRank
It depends a lot on PageRank. The higher your PageRank the more pages that will be indexed. PageRank isn’t a blanket number for all your pages. Each page has its own PageRank. A high PageRank gives the Googlebot more of a reason to return. Matt Cutts confirms, too, that a higher PageRank means a deeper crawl.

Links
Give the Googlebot something to follow. Links (especially deep links) from a high PageRank site are golden as the trust is already established.

Internal links can help, too. Link to important pages from your homepage. On content pages link to relevant content on other pages.

Sitemap
A lot of buzz around this one. Some report that a clear, well-structured Sitemap helped get all of their pages indexed. Google’s Webmaster guidelines recommends submitting a Sitemap file, too:

· Tell us all about your pages by submitting a Sitemap file; help us learn which pages are most important to you and how often those pages change.

That page has other advice for improving crawlability, like fixing violations and validating robots.txt.

Some recommend having a Sitemap for every category or section of a site.

Speed
A recent O’Reilly report indicated that page load time and the ease with which the Googlebot can crawl a page may affect how many pages are indexed. The logic is that the faster the Googlebot can crawl, the greater number of pages that can be indexed.

This could involve simplifying the structures and/or navigation of the site. The spiders have difficulty with Flash and Ajax. A text version should be added in those instances.

Google’s crawl caching proxy
Matt Cutts provides diagrams of how Google’s crawl caching proxy at his blog. This was part of the Big Daddy update to make the engine faster. Any one of three indexes may crawl a site and send the information to a remote server, which is accessed by the remaining indexes (like the blog index or the AdSense index) instead of the bots for those indexes physically visiting your site. They will all use the mirror instead.

Verify
Verify the site with Google using the Webmaster tools.

Content, content, content
Make sure content is original. If a verbatim copy of another page, the Googlebot may skip it. Update frequently. This will keep the content fresh. Pages with an older timestamp might be viewed as static, outdated, or already indexed.

Staggered launch
Launching a huge number of pages at once could send off spam signals. In one forum, it is suggested that a webmaster launch a maximum of 5,000 pages per week.

Size matters
If you want tens of millions of pages indexed, your site will probably have to be on an Amazon.com or Microsoft.com level.

Know how your site is found, and tell Google
Find the top queries that lead to your site and remember that anchor text helps in links. Use Google’s tools to see which of your pages are indexed, and if there are violations of some kind. Specify your preferred domain so Google knows what to index.

Seeing will be believing when it happens, of course, as Google is highly secretive about how its search engine calculates PageRank. If history is any indication, they’re already way ahead on behavioral factoring.

Nonetheless, Yahoo can afford the best search engineers in the business (if they can get them before Google does, anyway) and the patent filings shed some light on how PageRank is currently calculated and ways it might be improved in the future.

Bill Slawski, Director of Search Marketing at KeyRelevance, goes into painstaking detail of Yahoo’s user data challenges at his SEObytheSea blog. Patent language, especially when dealing with algorithms, can be confusing and dense, so we’ll just highlight a few interesting points and leave the lexicographical deciphering to you.

Some Yahoo assumptions about PageRank and flaws associated:

• Internal and external links are often weighed equally even though internal links can be less reliable and more self-promotional. Some links, like disclaimer links, are rarely followed.
• PageRank ignores that webpages are often purchased and repurposed, decay or become less valuable over time at variable rates.
• Current calculations, like TrustRank, are engineered more to combat webspam than to reflect actual user behavior.
• Sometimes PageRank deals with links in bulk, aggregating according host or domain, also known as blocked PageRank.

What Yahoo plans to do about it:

• Measure link weight – influenced by the frequency with which users follow a link
• Note when links are ignored and users leave (teleport) to another page of their choosing
• Calculate the probability that a user stops and reads a webpage rather than views it and moves on.
• Incorporate user data into the algorithm – “User Sensitive PageRank could reflect “the navigational behavior of the user population with regard to documents, pages, sites, and domains visited, and links selected.”
• Personalize PageRank based on demographic information – age, gender, income, user location)
• Emphasize recent information
• Weigh anchor text more heavily – the patent filing calls anchor text “one of the most useful features used in ranking retrieved Web search results”

For months, the speculation surrounded an apparent decrease in PageRank scores on Google’s Toolbar. It seemed the decrease in rank was connected to penalties associated with buying and selling links that passed on PageRank, a practice Google not-so-quietly condemned last autumn.

But what was more confusing was that though the toolbar scores were dropping, the actual search rankings looked to be unaffected. Google appears to have updated its Directory on January 8 along with PageRank scores that are significantly higher than listed on the toolbar.

Observers say the Google Directory update seems to be pulled directly from DMOZ, the open directory project. As a result, Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable joins others in discrepancy reports:

…it seems like the Toolbar PageRank of this site is a PageRank of 4. But if you look at the most recent Google Directory update, this site appears to be a PageRank of 7

There are few theories posted about why this is occurring, Andy Beard explains how this could be problematic for advertisers looking to assess the true value of a website:

It seems Google used their real dataset for PageRank for the Google Directory export, forgetting that they are telling their millions of users lies on their toolbar with manual penalties, which until now had no visible proof.

Google have the right to do whatever they like with their search engine, but this is another major demonstration of how Google are manipulating public and advertiser opinion.

Yeah, I was that cool back then too.

It was hard to sell web development services then as many of the small and mid-sized companies couldn’t understand why they would ever need to have a web site, let alone services like Internet marketing to drive traffic to that web site. Fast forward to 2008 and it amazes me that some figures estimate that we spend over 48% of our leisure time online – for most of us that’s over 125 minutes a day. I have also seen numbers bouncing around that the online ad spending for 2011 could hit between 40 and 50 billion dollars. Wow, times, they are a changin’.

When you factor in that a considerable amount of our time is spent on a search engine looking for things, it would seem logical that many companies would want to learn how to get their web sites ranked on the first page of sites like Google and Yahoo!. The companies that have learned how to do this are reaping the benefits at almost zero cost.

So, how do I get my web site ranked on the first page of search engines? Well my friend, this process is dubbed “SEO”, short for “search engine optimization”. Mastering this process could send your online sales through the roof and help put your brand in front of millions of people worldwide.

SEO, however, is not a onetime fix or magic bullet by itself. It is a process that starts before your web site is built and its tweaks are ongoing. It covers everything including; your domain name, the theme or topic of your web site, site architecture, and content. The SEO process gets further complicated when you add in the fact that there is no manual published from the search engines that guides you through the process.

Implementing SEO on your site basically boils down to two methods, off-page SEO (changes you make outside of your site) and on-page SEO (changes you make within your site). There are many different sides to this argument, but the most effective thing you can do to help build targeted traffic and higher rankings is off-page SEO. In a nutshell, off-page is focused on getting your web site linked on someone else’s site. This is called a “back link” and can be acquired in many different ways. The more back links you can get, the more your site appears popular to search engines. This popularity will help you rank higher and receive more traffic.

You should keep in mind that you want to get back links from sites that are related to the content of your site. This helps the search engines identify what you’re all about. When you start getting back links from related web sites, your site starts to look like an authority in its niche and it helps build a targeted profile of your site in the search engines. A good starting point would be to research your online competitors and find some of the places they have acquired back links.

On-page SEO requires a bit more work and involves a few more concepts, but it boils down to getting your site organized, so that search engines can understand your overall concept and how all of your pages are indexed. When you start to branch out from that main “theme” you need to incorporate new sections of your site related to that expansion. Each branch of your web site should be tightly focused on just that idea alone. And remember, it all comes down the quality of the written content within your site.

On-page SEO also looks at how your web site is structured. Having well-designed navigation will be needed so that the search engines can find your content easily. Make sure important sections of your site can be reached in several different ways and that every page of your site can be found without hassle. Having a sitemap is always a good idea too.

This may sound like a lot of work – and it is! However, the benefits you will gain far outshine any amount of time you put into it. Even though this is an entry level look at SEO, it will help you get the ball rolling on producing more and better targeted traffic to your web site from the search engines.

In the meantime, here’s what we think you won’t see next week.

1) Blu-ray drives on Mac computers. When Apple updated its high-end Mac Pro line this week, they didn’t include Blu-ray drives in any of the models. These are the Macs that creative professionals who might actually need Blu-ray drives are likely to buy. So we think Apple won’t be adding Blu-ray to their Mac lineup next week.

2) iPhone Nanos. Apple’s six-month-old, $400 iPhone is still the phone to beat in the wireless business. Would Apple want to broaden its appeal even further with a smaller, cheaper phone — say, around $200? We have no doubt that Apple’s phone lineup will grow this year, including a faster, “3G” iPhone. But we don’t think you’ll hear about an iPhone nano on Tuesday.

3) A Mac tablet. We think an ultra-portable MacBook makes sense. Apple still hasn’t replaced the 12-inch PowerBook, and a thin, lightweight laptop with a real keyboard could sell well. The company’s multi-touch screen technology is compelling, but we’re not convinced that a touchscreen mobile device needs to be any bigger/more expensive than the iPhone/iPod touch.

4) Apple HDTVs. We’re big fans of using computer displays as bedroom TVs, whether through a video port and set-top box, or just playing digital movie files off a computer. And we think that’s as far as Apple needs to go with their LCD displays. There’s not much Steve Jobs could do to improve today’s HDTVs that would justify the Apple price premium. We think the company should — and will — focus on improving its Apple TV set-top box, which works with every TV, instead.

5) Jay-Z/Apple record label. This stupid rumor popped up last week, and makes absolutely no sense. Apple has no need for a label. It won’t happen.

The company was founded in 1997 and has about 500 employees. The firm specializes in high-end online search and business intelligence systems used by companies globally.

President of Microsoft Business Division Jeff Raikes said in a release that “Enterprise search is becoming an indispensible tool to businesses of all sizes, helping people find, use and share critical business information quickly. Until now organizations have been forced to choose between powerful, high-end search technologies or more mainstream, infrastructure solutions. The combination of Microsoft and FAST gives customers a new choice: a single vendor with solutions that span the full range of customer needs.”

The new regulations decree that online videos can only be streamed or broadcast by state-owned/state-controlled companies according to WSJ.com. Sites that have online-content licenses in China are supposed to censor sites themselves before any complaints are filed by propaganda officials. Many video sites say that there is biggest problem is not propaganda, but pornography the report continues.

Besides figuring out exactly how to enforce these new regulations in the domestic market, there is also the question of the foreign market such as YouTube, which is popular in China. A spokesman for YouTube said to WSJ.com, “We believe that the Chinese government fully recognizes the enormous value of online video, and will not enforce regulations in a way that could deprive the Chinese people of its benefits and potential for business and economic development, education and culture, communication and entertainment.”

Also a concern is the threat online videos have to the control of the Communist Party over information said the report. The regulations say “Those who provide Internet video services should insist on serving the people, serve socialism…and abide by the moral code of socialism.”

“Online behavioral advertising continues to provide significant benefits to internet users by supporting an amazing array of free content and services,” said Trevor Hughes, Executive Director of the NAI. “At the same time, NAI members believe that revisions to the NAI Principles are appropriate in response to the explosive growth of the field, and changes to technology, business models, and practices in the marketplace.”

In addition to addressing the elements of the suggested “self-regulatory principles” released recently by the Federal Trade Commission, the NAI will target discussion on specific attributes of their 2000 Principles program, including:

– Scope & enforcement
– Sensitive consumer characteristics
– Choice-enabling technologies
– Consumer education
– Standards for use of personally identifiable information
– Membership outreach

Input from stakeholders will be sought on proposed amendments in the early months of 2008.

He continued to say that the tolerance for intrusion and capitalization of personal information for advertising has gone down. Anderson stated in an interview on BBC World Service to “Note the very humble pie apology from the founder of Facebook – terrified that in fact he might lose his entire franchise because he made a mistake with a new advertising product called Beacon.”

Although one of the latest trends in online advertising is investing in social networks, Anderson thinks that “There are more names than money so far. There are many more Web2.0 companies out there than will ever survive. We’ll see a lot of those companies failing this year.” The failure is coming from the reliance on advertising and a universal acceptance of it. There is a tipping point to everything, and for Web2.0 firms the time just may have come for theirs.

Wikia Search relies on a community to enhance search listings and activities, bringing the human element to results. If a community member deems a search result to be more relevant than another it will have a direct impact to placement.

The community method of refinement isn’t new, but is a direct challenge to yahoo, google and other search sites that rely on computers to make those editorial decisions.

The future launch is expected in early January.

Orkut has millions of registered users, some 700,000 of which were affected by the worm over a period of 24 hours.

The exploit was contained in a JavaScript file, aptly named “virus.js.” When Orkut users received e-mail about a new scrapbook entry and clicked through to the site, the browser downloaded and executed the embedded virus.js file automatically — without the need for any user intervention.

Sanitizing Rich Media

The malware seemed to do at least two things — send messages to friends to perpetuate itself and add the infected account to an Orkut community “Infectados pelo Vírus do Orkut,” which was created by the script author, according to McAfee.

“This clearly illustrates the issue with allowing rich content on social/professional networking sites, and not sanitizing it enough,” said Vinay Mahadik, a member of the McAfee Avert Labs team. “The ability to add Flash/JavaScript content to Orkut scraps was only recently introduced.”

Google did not return calls seeking comment, but apparently the company has remedied the problem. As of Thursday, Symantec reported, the virus.js script is no longer available on the site and it seems as if there have been adequate checks implemented by Orkut to validate content when posting a scrapbook entry.

Social Worms Rising

“Worms in social networks are certainly not a new concept. We’ve seen it in the past,” said Oliver Friedrichs, director of Symantec’s Security Response. Friedrichs noted that MySpace was affected by a worm early last year that allowed an attacker to add over one million people to the author’s profile.

Worms are becoming increasingly popular across social-network sites, he said. The good news is that these types of worms are not typically malicious, he explained, while the bad news is that users can’t do much to protect themselves other than stay off of social networks altogether.

“This is a little more difficult to protect against in that the social-networking site itself needs to take steps to prevent this,” Friedrichs said. “This is generally a shortcoming on the site itself rather than what consumers can do.”

Clicks are redirected to rogues servers that display third party ads instead of those from Google reports Reuters. Google made a statement on Wednesday stating “We have cancelled customer accounts that display ads redirecting users to malicious sites or that advertise a product violating our software principles. We actively work to detect and remove sites that serve malware in both our ad network and in our search results. We have manual and automated processes in place to detect and enforce these policies.”

The Trojan attacks Google AdSense. Virus analyst for BitDefender Attila Balazs said to Reuters “This is a serious situation that damages users and Webmasters alike.” He continued to say “Users are affected because the advertisements and/or the linked sites may contain malicious code. Webmasters are affected because the Trojan takes away viewers and thus a possible money source from their websites.”

The past few days, I’ve been working with a client who uses a project management application (online) for his work. The application has a lot of nice features like team work and area, time analysis, work analysis etc… But it has one big flow. I have no idea how to use it. Don’t think I am not computer savvy or something similar, I’ve build hundreds of websites and web applications and I downloaded and tested almost every open source application out there. With all this experience, how come I still couldn’t use this project manager. Simply, because of the bad software design.

Even though they have a web interface, I have to download their desktop application to submit comments and other information. So I downloaded their software, installed and tried to use it. Whenever I select any option, they open a web browser and ask me to login again. Finally, I go back to the website (where I started at). They’ve added so many steps to accomplish a very simple task, something like writing a memo or adding comments. Everything can be done from the browser, I don’t need to download a desktop application that will take me back to the website so I can add some comments.

The second “Big & Bad” issue they had, is the Not user friendly forms. I tried to add a note to the application, so I got a form (the note was about the process of work). The form had 2 fields “From” and “To” with no additional details. As anyone using this app for the first time, I assumed “From” is from me, and “To” is to the project manager, which was odd because there were no options, just text fields. After I completed the form, I got an error :O The “From” field was suppose to be “Started Work at” and the “To” field is “Until” to count the hours. Couldn’t they just say “Start Time” and “End Time” or even better, “How many hours”. I correct the form and I have all the fields read, I still couldn’t submit the note. This time it said “I need to add a user”. That’s when I gave up, what user, where am I suppose to add him/her, what the hell am I suppose to do?

After looking around, I found their help section, but the pages I wanted were a 404 (not available)

Let’s say you stuck in this situation and need some support or help. With all the open source apps, supports is hard to come by and not everyone knows what they’re talking about. A lot of my friends having hard time using their CRM applications and don’t know what to do. That’s when a professional software support company like Sage Software comes in handy. Software support is one of the most critical part of running a business now and getting cost effective support when needed is importent. If you are stuck with your application and don’t know where to go, just visit Sage Software and let them help you out.

The search engine’s homepage will feature a link called “AskEraser”. The link will also be on all search results pages with a choice whether the feature should be “On” or “Off” according to Reuters. Ask.com’s CEO Jim Lanzone said in an interview with Reuters, “We take significant steps to protect any data that’s stored in our servers, but for those people who want to take extra precautions, AskEraser let them take the issue completely off the table.”

When turned “On,” AskEraser deletes a user’s cookies, or identifying information from their computers. This feature has become available today in the U.S. and the U.K. and will become available globally next year.

We’ll tell the yellow pages firms and local papers why they are doomed in a moment.

Ok, Borrell Associates has released their 2008 Outlook: Local Online Advertising report. They estimated next year’s total local ad market will reach a whopping $12.6 billion in spending.

Of that figure, Borrell said $5 billion will come from local search advertising. Another $1.3 billion should arrive as the local online video market triples from 2007.

Now for the bad news for the yellow pages and local news publishers, from the report:

“Next year will be a perplexing one for local media companies trying to tackle the Web. Most yellow pages publishers, cable companies, newspapers, radio stations and TV stations are still pinning their hopes on their traditional sales reps being able sell online ad packages. But there is increasing evidence to support the idea that a greater investment in an independent online sales force will be necessary to continue the growth these properties have enjoyed for the past few years.”

There is one thing that can potentially help the publishers that have been mentioned. Borrell suggested the pure-play Internet companies, like Google and Yahoo, may have an interest in partnering with local firms to bolster their local advertising presence.

We have seen this in the classified field, where Yahoo and its HotJobs site have a number of newspapers as partners to help sell job listings. Perhaps 2008 will be the year where these partnerships broaden in number and scope.