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My 2 featured articles for the week ending Sep. 21, 2007:

Archived blogs for the week of September 24, 2007

1381 - Sep. 24, 2007 - 3.14 PM EST

Internet advertising continues to grow

This just in... According to recent numbers published by TNS Media Intelligence, on average, Internet display advertising grew almost 18 percent to $5.5 billion between April 1st and June 30th of this year.

But TNS Media also found that total ad spending in the first half of 2007 actually fell about 0.3% to $72.59 billion, versus the corresponding period last year.

Steven Fredericks, CEO of TNS said that "for the first time since the past six years, media advertising expenditures have actually declined for two consecutive quarters."

Fredericks added "given the many uncertainties about near-term economic growth and consumer spending, we expect that on average, core ad spending will continue to face challenges during the second half of 2007."

However, TNS research director Jon Swallen said "the results differ by industry. For example, financial services advertisers are moving more money to Internet display ads from other media. Overall, the Internet gets about 22 cents out of every dollar invested in financial services ad spending."

Swallen added that "by contrast, pharmaceutical firms are not making the same moves and are actually underallocating to display advertising." Read more...

Posted on Businessblog™

1380 - Sep. 24, 2007 - 11.03 AM EST

Yesterday's secret Google meeting...

Woo-Hoo, this really grabbed my attention: It is reported that a Google meeting yesterday was so secret that all attendees had to sign confidentiality and non-disclosure agreements that forbid them from discussing what was shown to them at the meeting...

On September 23, a group of about 15 industry luminaries attended a highly confidential meeting at the company's headquarters to discuss Google’s upcoming plans to address what is now dubbed “The Facebook Issue.”

Notwithstanding the non-disclosure agreement, three of the attendees went "off the record" in trying to explain a bit of what Google is planning to do with all of this. According to one of these attendees, the company’s goal is to fight Facebook by being even more open than the Facebook Platform itself.

The bottom line: if Facebook is 98 percent open, Google wants to be 100 percent open-source.

All in all, on November 5 Google is planning to announce a new set of APIs that will enable developers to better leverage Google’s social graph database. Developers will start with Orkut and iGoogle (Google’s personalized home page), and expand from there to include Gmail, Google Talk and other Google Web services over time.

We will likely see 3rd party iGoogle gadgets that will make use of Orkut’s social graph information, Google's basic implementation of what it is planning.

From that point on, we might see a bit more such as the ability to pull Orkut data outside of Google and into third party applications via the APIs.

Additionally, Google is considering allowing third parties to join the group at the other end of the platform, meaning other social networks such as Bebo, Friendster, Twitter, Digg and about a thousand others to give access to their user data to developers through those same APIs.

In the end, Google seems to be planning to add a social layer on top of the entire suite of Google services, with Orkut as their initial main source of social graph information and possibly adding third party networks to the back end as well.

On average, social networks would have little choice but to participate to get additional distribution and attention.

Amar Gandhi, who apparently wasn’t at the meeting and whose title is the rather unassuming “Product Manager, Orkut,” was previously at Microsoft where he unsuccessfully tried to integrate social networking features into Vista. You can read the whole story here...

Posted on Businessblog™

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