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AOL Renews Casual Gaming Focus - Results of an Associated Press-Ipsos poll conducted for AOL drove both the redesign of and offerings by Games.com, which will include 20 new games, bringing the total to about 400. The poll of more than 2,000 adults surveyed in mid-October found 44% of all online adults who play games said they play versions of them online.           

EC Extends Review of Google Merger - The decision to extend the review shows the Commission has serious doubts about whether the merger meets antitrust standards The European authorities appear especially concerned with Google’s AdSense network, which serves contextual ads on other publishers’ sites.                  

Newspapers Form Alliance with Zillow.com - In their latest bid to counter shrinking print revenues, a group of major U.S. newspaper companies has formed an alliance with Zillow.com to extend their classified ads to the popular real estate site. The Zillow partnership comes a year after many of the same publishers forged an alliance with Yahoo, focused on giving newspapers the ability to place local help wanted ads on the Internet portal’s HotJobs career site.                        

Recorded Music Sales Hit a Downbeat - The global recording industry is struggling in a rapidly changing marketplace. “Digital formats such as online downloads, ringtones, mastertones, full tracks delivered to mobile handsets and Internet and mobile subscription services are providing new and growing revenue streams,” says Paul Verna, eMarketer senior analyst and author of the new report Recorded Music: Digital Falls Short. “But these new revenue streams are simply not enough to pick up the slack from free-falling CD sales,” he adds.                          

Ask Gains Search Traction - By now, you must have seen at least one of IAC/InterActiveCorp’s commercials for Ask.com, asking “Can your search engine do this?” and then proceeding to show off the virtues of Ask 3D in all its video-playing, image-thumbnailing, related-searching glory. It would be interesting to see how much IAC has spent on this Ask ad campaign, but according to Compete’s October search data, the company is already getting a solid ROI in traffic. Search queries increased 14% from September and while Ask’s overall market share of 3.9% is still down from last year’s 4.3%, this is the second straight month of gains. And as Jeremy Crane notes, Ask could well usurp that number next month if the growth trend continues.                                             

Google And Go Daddy Get Hitched - Well, it’s not an acquisition (yet), but Google and domain-hosting service Go Daddy have inked a new deal that will automatically give Go Daddy customers access to Google’s suite of Webmaster tools. Go Daddy will also ensure that its customers’ sitemaps get submitted to Google without any extra effort on their part.

OpenSocial And Facebook And Bebo, Oh My! - With the explosion of social networking “platforms” in the past few weeks, and the increased convergence of search, social media and overall Web site optimization, figuring out which platform works best for which audience, advertiser and ultimately for your search marketing efforts will be an ongoing task. Marshall Kirkpatrick serves up an at-a-glance view of the top five social networking platforms, including Google’s new Android and the content storage model of Box.net, and also provides a brief description of each one and how they benefit developers.                            

Bebo Strikes Revolutionary Content Deals - Bebo on Tuesday became the first social network to invite major media companies to make their content available to its 20 million-strong user base. The site’s users can now legally post music and video files to their profile pages. The initiative, called Open, has an impressive list of launch partners, too: Viacom’s MTV, CBS Corp., Walt Disney Co.’s ESPN, Yahoo Inc., Sony Pictures Entertainment Co.’s Crackle and JibJab Media Inc.                               

Google, Yahoo Plan Social Home Pages - Both Google and Yahoo aim to turn their email services into social networks. Both plan to introduce social features that keep people using their applications for longer. The idea is to turn iGoogle and MyYahoo into a more central hub that serves the triple purpose of being a personalized home page, an email inbox and a social networking profile.        

Google’s Road to Ubiquity - Google’s recent moves-OpenSocial, Android and the Open Handset Alliance, and enhancements to Google Maps and its Gmail email service-indicate the Web giant is on the path to ubiquity. The company wants all Internet users to do everything online, and store everything they do online, from sharing digital pictures to creating spreadsheets.. The company calls it “cloud computing,” which refers to the ready accessibility of Google’s vast database of information from any device, anywhere across the globe.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 14th, 2007 at 5:35 am and is filed under Internet, Digital Media & Software, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.