battle

Newspapers that make the move to online-only risk losing 75 percent of their revenue and a decline in Web traffic, according to researchers from City University in London. Their study focused on the Finnish financial newspaper Taloussanomat, which stopped its print version and went online- only in December 2007. The move was made after the paper had suffered significant losses. By going online-only the papers costs were reduced by 50 percent but its online traffic decreased by 22 percent and revenues fell by more than 75 percent.

A Forrester report released yesterday kicked off once again the debate over paying bloggers to write about products and companies. Blogging purists, new media marketing experts, and Google’s Matt Cutts have all weighed in, indicating this is hardly a debate that will soon be put to rest.

There was a time, if your only source of information was the Internet, when it seemed Ron Paul was a shoe-in for the Republican nominee. Internet reality is not always true reality—then again, what’s reality matter in politics? What really matters is narrative, and in that sense, the Internet is a mirror of the brick-and-mortar world, and there are lessons in political campaigns for businesses about controlling your online story.

One might suppose it's due diligence to listen to the arguments of companies enormously invested in the outcome of regulatory decisions, so the onus of coming to a reasonable conclusion rests solely on Congress whether to believe Microsoft or Google in two hearings today in the Senate and the House.

A Scottish father has become entangled in a legal battle with the estate of author C.S. Lewis after purchasing a Narnia Internet domain name for his 10-year-old son as a birthday present.Richard and Gillian Saville-Smith, of Edinburgh, paid $140 to buy the domain name Narnia.mobi from the Internet registration company Fasthosts in 2006 so their son could use it as an email address.

Just when you thought it was over: May 19 was the deadline for the man who would be SEO trademark holder to respond to notices of opposition to his trademark application (which were filed by SEOmoz, Arteworks, Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning, SEO.com, Jonathan Hochman, and Rhea Drysdale). Sarah Bird, Esq., of SEOmoz filed for default judgment in the case on Tuesday.

For years I have been paying sales tax (VAT) on purchases I make online through services such as Clickbank. It is inconvenient but it is much easier for Clickbank to work this way then to have to monitor the location of a seller and buyer. The general rule in the US, as far as I can determine is that if you have a business presence in a state, you have to pay tax there. This applies if you own your own servers in the sate, or if you have employees.

In the nearly three years this writer has been diligently typing away, we witnessed cute and compelling blogs grow into the kind of pre-pubescent youth who rationalize violence as a way of dominating their little island.