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My 2 featured articles for the week ending Mar. 17, 2006:

Archived blogs for the week of March 13, 2006

1130 - March 16, 2006 - 8.51 AM EST

Googling on the wireless Internet

Google is trying its hand at the mobile browser business, formatting Internet sites for users surfing the wireless Web.

Google has developed software that modifies Web sites for the smaller screens of cell phones.

Users who perform a Google search on their handsets and click on resulting links are provided access to stripped-down versions of the sites that are reportedly more efficient to deliver and easier to read.

“If you search for something in an ordinary browser on your PC, your first result is this complex, graphics-rich page,” Google Software Engineer Roger Skubowius posted on the company’s blog.

“Search that same phrase on Google with your mobile phone, though, and your top result is this lightweight, phone-friendly version of the same page.

Posted on Businessblog™

1129 - March 15, 2006 - 10.05 AM EST

MSN testing its LiveSide advertising network

Microsoft is building what it calls the Web’s largest advertising medium which includes Office Live, Windows Live Mail and MSN Spaces.

It appears that this ad network will be more about the global branding experience across multiple Microsoft channels and not about garnishing individual clicks via ad network partners.

Results of some of the multiple ad formats being tested will help determine which ad offerings provide the best ROI for marketers, while adding value to the overall consumer experience.

With the mix of mail, blogs, and Office applications, the Windows Live advertising experiment hopefully will lead to a stronger branding sponsorship of the overall Live experience, as opposed to the horrid ads being served across Hotmail and MSN services of yesteryear.

Posted on Businessblog™

1128 - March 14, 2006 - 5.12 PM EST

Google acquires @Last Software

Google has acquired a 3D modeling software developer that teamed up with it to make a plug-in for Google's desktop service.

Financial details were not disclosed, nor were there any indication as to Google's plans for @Last's sole product called SketchUp, which enables people to model design concepts in 3D.

The tools are meant for a general audience, not just design professionals, and include a plug-in for Google Earth that was released this year.

In a posting to customers on @Last's Web site, Brad Schell, co-founder of the 7-year-old, Boulder, Colo., company, said it would continue to develop and sell SketchUp, which costs $495.

"Google's resources will allow us to serve our current users better, and Google's reach will allow us to expose more people to SketchUp in one year than we could have touched in 10 years on our own," Schell said.

"'3D for Everyone' is becoming a reality; we're bringing the '3D' part; Google's contributing the 'Everyone.'"

Posted on Businessblog™

1127 - March 14, 2006 - 3.05 PM EST

The DoJ and Google

Google's confrontation with the Department of Justice over the company's refusal to hand over specific search records heads to court today.

Google wants to argue that the right to the public's privacy far outweighs the government's requirement for the information.

The Department of Justice and Google were scheduled to make arguments before a U.S. District Court judge in San Jose, Calif.

The Justice Department seeks to force Google to comply with a court order that several of its competitors, including Microsoft and Yahoo, have already fulfilled.

Judge James Ware had scheduled an hour to hear oral arguments from both sides. No decision is expected immediately, though the tenor of the discussion may indicate Ware's leanings in the case.

Federal investigators want the search records to help bolster their arguments to the U.S. Supreme Court that a law relating to Internet access to child pornography is Constitutional.

Google believes the order, which seeks a random sampling of 1 million addresses that can be reached through Google's search engine and a sampling of 1 million search queries submitted to the Google Web site during a single week, is too broad and amounts to a so-called fishing expedition rather than a focused investigation.

Google has further argued that the information will not help the government's case, saying in a brief filed last month that it will "without a doubt, suffer a loss of trust among users" if forced to "compromise its privacy principles and produce to the government on such a flimsy request its search query and URL data."

The DoJ has countered by saying the privacy issues are not relevant since it has asked for only anonymous records.

At issue is the Bush administration's efforts to bolster the arguments behind the Child Online Protection Act , which seeks to restrict material that could be deemed harmful to minors from being posted on commercially available Web sites.

Read the story here.

Posted on Businessblog™

1126 - March 14, 2006 - 11.48 AM EST

Yahoo upgrades its Yahoo Publisher Network

Yahoo has upgraded YPN and added new features. In addition to offering a revenue generating contextual advertising channel, Yahoo Publisher Network also includes the following offerings:

* Take advantage of Yahoo Publisher tools, services and programs
Integrate other Yahoo services into your web site, including Add to My Yahoo (RSS), Y!Q and more to come soon.

* Help shape what Yahoo offers to the publishing community
Yahoo's mission is to deliver products and services based on the needs of the publishing community.

YPN, in an effort to deliver more Yahoo generated content to publishers, has recently added a Yahoo! Developer Network link within the “Content” tab of the portal.

Posted on Businessblog™

1125 - March 13, 2006 - 4.42 PM EST

Internet search up almost 40 percent this year

According to new numbers compiled by Nielsen/NetRatings, in January of this year, Internet users made 2.73 billion Web searches using Google. As a whole, Nielsen/NetRatings is estimating that about 48 percent of the 5.7 billion Internet searches made by Americans in January were done using the Google search engine.

It also thinks that 39 percent more searches were done in January 2006 than in the same month last year.

"Internet users are searching more not because they can't find what they're looking for, but because search as a utility has become deeply ingrained into people's everyday lives", said Ken Cassar of Nielsen/NetRatings.

The unwritten implication here is that Google too has assumed huge importance in the lives of many web users.

For some, Google is all they know of the internet because via its various projects that they do their searching, shopping, e-mailing, blogging, picture storing and chatting.

But Google is not just important to lots of web users, it matters to rivals of the search giant too.

"There's a standard way of using search engines that Google has introduced to the market," said Adrian Cox, head of Ask, formerly Ask Jeeves, in the UK.

But, he said, what has become clear is that search is now just the starting point for that relationship people have with the web.

No longer do the different search sites compete on how many results they can provide to people not least because, as even Google admits, most people get what they want in the first five results returned to them.

Which is why all the search sites, Google, MSN, AOL and Yahoo are branching out and trying to tempt users to live their online lives via their particular portfolio of services.

Most of these companies make their most significant amounts of money from advertising and that only comes from having a large, well-defined community.

Click here to read the rest of the story.

Posted on Businessblog™

Copyright © Serge Thibodeau 2006. All rights reserved.

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