The Wall Street Journal discussed gripe sites, sites set up by consumers to complain about big companies, using the name of the company in their domain name. WSJ cited starbucked.com, ihatestarbucks.com, boycottwalmart.org and againstthewal.com. The article went on to say that companies are handling these types of sites differently. Xerox, for example, bought or registered about 20 unflattering … [Read more...]

The .ME Auctions, which have been going on since late July,  finally ended today, with projects.me selling for $1,410. By my count 2,140 domains were sold between $75 to $90,025. The registry hauled in just about $2.2 million dollars over the auction. These auctions were for any .me domain backordered by more than one person before the landrush. The complete list of .Me domains … [Read more...]

According to a recent survey by the Conference Board and TNS Global, online viewership of television broadcasts has almost doubled since 2006 to nearly 20% of Internet families, of which on average  72% watch programs online on a daily basis. The top five categories of programs watched were: News, drama, sitcoms/comedy, reality shows and sports. The most popular destinations for TV on the PC … [Read more...]

The Department of Justice has been looking at the proposed Google-Yahoo deal for a couple of months. There have been congressional hearings, testimony and lobbying on the issue. Now its your turn. You know what is at stake. Yahoo outsourcing its PPC advertising in large part to  Google. If allowed, Google will have a 90% market share of PPC advertising business Advertisers and … [Read more...]

A JP Morgan analyst lowered his online advertising forecast today citing broad economic weakness impacting the Internet sector. "In the first half of 2008, we have noticed macroeconomic weakness spilling into the internet sector. We feel that this weakness became more pronounced in 3Q and is spreading to international markets," said analyst Imran Khan in a client note. Khan predicted display … [Read more...]

According to Cnet.com, the auto suggest feature of Chrome will give Google a wealth of information on what people are searching for on the Internet Provided that users leave Chrome's auto-suggest feature on and have Google as their default search provider, Google will have access to any keystrokes that are typed into the browser's Address/Search bar, even before a user hits enter. Of even  … [Read more...]

Thanks to one of the readers of this blog, Dave, who pointed out that Google has a patent on the technology that combines a search bar and the address bar of the Browser. The general langauage of the Patent number 7,401,072 is: "Methods and systems allow users to enter natural language terms that describe a particular web site into an address field of a browser instead of a formal … [Read more...]