Internet marketing news commentary

Boom for legal music downloads sector

The market for legal music downloads has taken off
With Apple selling 4.5 million iPods in the last quarter, this is hardly a surprise - but where are Sony on this, the creators of Walkman culture... It never ceases to amaze me that Sony and all of their R & D building the very best Walkman allowed Apple to walk in and just start selling iPods from under their noses. We know now of course that Steve Jobs - yep - I have met him - had all the contacts via pixar/disney, but hey didn't Sony. Sony - there is still time! Bring it on

blinkx unveils TV search engine

Search company blinkx has launched the first search engine that enables personal computer users to search TV across news.
This is an interesting one, I love their smart folders, not that this is a particularly new idea, but it is great to see intelligent agents at work within software, as part of the overall package and the package itself leaving it up to us to work out just what it is that you do with it, like so many other software - I'll come back with an example on this when I next stumble across - limited intelligence. By the way, I hope I can't find an example and that will be a sign that we have moved on. I guess I can always produce a retro intelligent agent....

Search firms team up to tackle blog spam

Search giants Yahoo!, Google and MSN have joined forces in order to fight weblog comment spam.
I know I am criticising my own news here, but heck you don't think I write the news do you? Anyone, does anyone know what this story is about...

Advertising boom boosts Yahoo! profits

Internet firm Yahoo! has announced that its fourth-quarter profits more than doubled at the end of last year.
When I have looked really closely at Yahoo profits in the past I have found that their profits are boosted by what appears to be sales of banner ads... this er, press release says that too. Conventional wisdom my side of the pond tends to suggest that banner ads don't work. Sales houses have shrunk, double click has well, clicked and when I look through the site I don't see many banner ads - is it my IP address, am I blind or has my BS detector come on, and there is something else I should be looking at... Where are they getting that kind of revenue from really? I would understand more and find it a lot more palatable if they said that it was following the acquisition of Overture and all that pay per click revenue was pulling in the dollars, that would be great for them to say that. Is that the case and they are shying away? go figure.