02/28/2005
Copyright protection for a web site is just as enforceable as it is for traditional media. U.S. copyright law states that electronic files—including web files—are copyrighted the moment they're put into a tangible form, even if they're not on display to the general public. Protected web files may include the site's content, code, scripting, graphic images, sound and video files.

"One way to determine if your site's content has been stolen is to use the search engines," said Matt Naeger, Vice President and General Counsel at IMPAQT. "The primary way is to see your copy in the search results. Copy-paste an extended piece of text from your web site and see what other web sites show up for that same text. Typically two sites shouldn't legitimately show up for the exact same web copy. I would say I have seen higher rates of recidivism, if you can show publication through the search engine."

Complete Article - Legalities on the Web

02/16/2005
Publishers and webmasters provide content and news in an RSS feed. Users view the content of interest in an RSS reader or news aggregator. The aggregator or reader contains the collection of feeds that are of interest to the user. As the RSS feed is updated the content in the reader or aggregator updates with the new information. At any point, users can remove a feed from their aggregator or reader and no longer receive information from that source. Ultimately, the user is choosing the news and content they wish to view.

As RSS has increased in popularity more and more webmasters and publishers have adopted RSS as an alternative communication stream. Webmasters use an RSS graphic to indicate the content is available via RSS.

Complete Article - RSS News You Choose

02/22/2005
Internet fraudsters, motivated by money and armed with sophisticated technology, pose an increased economic threat as they steal private data from companies and individuals, the director of the U.S. Secret Service said Thursday.
"There is no longer any doubt about that threat ... With just a few key strokes, (online fraudsters) can disrupt our nation's economy," said Ralph Basham at the RSA Security Conference in San Francisco.

In addition to protecting the U.S. president, the Secret Service also helps to protect U.S. financial institutions.

Security analysts have warned that Internet hackers, once motivated by the thrill of shutting down computer systems, are joining forces with organized crime groups as they seek to profit from hacking into databases and stealing personal data through a variety of tactics, like phishing.

Complete Article

02/21/2005
Owners of smaller companies are less worried about the economy than they were a year ago, a new survey finds. Right now, about 31% of business owners say the economy is their biggest concern, according to a study commissioned by small-business software maker Intuit Inc. That's down from 36% last year.
Intuit hired independent market-research firm Decipher to gauge the optimism of that sector of the economy and to find out how companies will fuel their growth.

A bit more than one-third of business owners surveyed say they are, indeed, fixing to expand their company. And more say they'll do it through productivity-boosting business technology than by hiring more people.

Fully 39% say they'll grow by buying new software and hardware, 27% are depending on marketing initiatives, and only 11% will expand their payroll.

The base of respondents comprised 755 owners of companies with fewer than 250 workers that had been open at least two years.

Article courtesy of InformationWeek

02/18/2005
The bidding is over and the winner has been named. Word this afternoon that The NY Times will become the new owner of About.com.

The Times will pay Primedia $410 million in cash. About.com was purchased by Primedia in 2000 for $610 million in stock.

02/15/2005
Latent semantic indexing helps search engines to find out what a web page is all about. It basically means to you that you shouldn't focus on a single keyword when optimizing your web pages and when getting links.

The web pages on your web site should be related and focus mainly on a special topic while using different words that describe the topic. Use variations of your keyword and synonyms. That makes it easier for search engines to determine the topic of your site.

Complete Article

02/10/2005
Considering the ever-increasing support for RSS in online communities, we have compiled a list of resources and products that will benefit webmasters, web surfers and publishers in their quest to understand the power of RSS. RSS has rapidly become an alternative communication venue. In order to understand the full benefits, consider utilizing some of the following tools and resources.

Complete Article - RSS Tools

02/09/2005
The New York Times article: About.com, Primedia's Web Venture, Is for Sale, alerts us to the fact that the About.com property is for sale but also that both Yahoo!, Google, AOL, and The New York Times are bidding to purchase the site.

Final bids must be received by today. According to The Times, the asking price is $350 million to $500 million.

02/08/2005
A French court on Friday ruled against Google in a trademark infringement case brought by Louis Vuitton Malletier, in the latest legal setback to the search giant overseas.

The Paris District Court has sanctioned Google and its French subsidiary from selling search-related advertisements against trademarks owned by the luxury fashion designer, which sued the search giant in early 2004. The court charged Google with trademark counterfeiting, unfair competition and misleading advertising. Google was ordered to pay $257,430

Complete Article

02/07/2005
Microsoft has finally launched their new search engine. The new MSN has accepted the task of challenging Google as the market leader. After submitting sites and analyzing rankings here are factors we believe are helpful to obtain strong ranking in MSN.

Hyphenated Domains - domain names with hyphenated keywords appear to perform well.
Sites Age - older sites tend to rank better
Sites Size - bigger is better
Title - no big surprise it appears the title meta tag is heavily factored into their results
Description - the description appears to influence some results
Incoming Links - while not as obvious as many of those above it appears that incoming links may play a factor in ranking

02/03/2005
There was no champagne on New Year's Eve at the Jericho, New York, offices of Integrated Direct Marketing, but there was a good deal of celebrating. Three of the marketing firm's 12 employees were working late on an e-mail campaign for a longtime client, a men's Catholic missionary group, the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, which claims thousands of members in 71 countries. What made the client, and its mission, so relevant on this particular holiday is that the Oblates happened to have more than 400 volunteers already set up in offices in Sri Lanka, India, and Indonesia, which had just days before been devastated by a deadly tsunami that, to date, has killed more than 150,000 people in coastal Asia.

In the days after the event, Integrated Direct's employees, led by account executive Anthony DeBetta, worked furiously to pull together an online fundraising drive for the Oblates, who were even better suited than volunteer groups like the Red Cross to help out. And though it was late on New Year's Eve, and DeBetta and his team had planned to leave the office hours before, their persistence paid off. The fundraising campaign--directed at 26,000 people who had already donated to the Oblates' cause--began raising more than $1,000 an hour for tsunami victims. By New Year's Day, says DeBetta, the company had helped the missionary group raise $15,000, and the effort is ongoing. DeBetta says the goal is to help raise $250,000 by the end of January.

Complete Article

02/02/2005
Arabic media channel Al Jazeera has been voted the world's fifth most influential brand in a poll of branding professionals that gave the top slot to U.S. iPod and computer icon Apple.

In the survey of almost 2,000 ad executives, brand managers and academics by online magazine Brandchannel, Apple ousted search engine Google from last year's top spot, but the surprise to many will be Al Jazeera's entry into the top five.

Complete Article

02/01/2005
Determining keywords is a critical step in web design. If your website and meta tags do not contain related keywords, web surfers will be unable to find your website when they conduct searches.

The formula is a little tricky - you will need to locate terms that are popular and relevant to your site. These terms may or may not be terms that *you* feel are relevant terms. The optimal terms in a site should be terms that a potential customer would use when searching for a website with your content. In order to achieve success your website should be optimized with terms and phrases that are descriptive, related to your content, and which receive a significant amount of searches. The caveat, of course, is that you want to find terms and phrases where there is little competition, so you quickly achieve high ranking in the important search engines.

Complete Article - Determining Keywords