Behind the Scenes at YSM

I attended a seminar on various aspects of managing Yahoo Search Marketing (YSM, formerly known as Overture) campaigns yesterday. For those of you unfamiliar with YSM, it is a paid search advertising system that allows advertisers to bid for position within the sponsored listings area of several major search engines (including Yahoo,...

The Internet Remote Control

The Center for the Digital Future has some interesting statistics about Internet usage in their recent five year report:

• 78.6 percent of Americans use the Internet and

• Nearly two thirds of Americans are connected at home (more have it at work)

More interesting to me is that Internet users are going online without a specific task or destination in mind....

Working and Living the Second Life Way

I read Business Week every week. Not necessarily from cover to cover, but pretty close to it. Although I think that it is a quality publication and clearly I derive value from reading it regularly, honestly there is not too much in there that really surprises me. This week’s edition is definitely an exception to that rule....

Hollywood Invades the Blogosphere (and iTunes)

Last week, USA Today published an interesting article about how the television industry is using blogs to provide obsessed fans with loads of extra information about their favorite shows and characters. Blogs are now produced by television shows like Grey’s Anatomy, The Office and That 70’s Show. The trend is for the blogs to be done in character,...

AOL Spends Too Much on Julia Roberts

Earlier this morning, I learned something very disturbing. According to a CNN.com article, Julia Roberts is the voice of AOL. Roberts didn’t volunteer to do this as part of some Time Warner movie studio crossover media deal and she wasn’t paid market rate for her work, which is typically $15,000 to $20,000 for a commercial that would be broadcast nationally....