making

Since Bing's launch, the search engine has garnered quite a bit of attention. This is no surprise since Microsoft invested so much money into marketing it. It may still be too early to tell, but it seems to be paying off so far. Bing's numbers have edged up since its launch.

The Associated Press (AP) is saying it hopes to negotiate more lucrative licensing deals with major web sites. Reporting for the AP itself, Michale Liedtke says that AP CEO Tom Curley discussed possible revenue initiatives to protect online content. Here are some key facts from the Liedtke's piece: 

There is no hotel on Santorini that doesn't look amazing in the photos on their website. They all show rooms with white washed walls and clear blue exteriors. Glasses of wine on tables overlooking amazing sunsets. Beauty products are the same online, promising supermodel style complexions with no wrinkles in sight. Flickr is full of photos that are "tweaked" in some way to slightly increase their beauty, and the tricks that used to be only in the realm of tabloid photo editors are now available to us all.

Sometimes one has to state the obvious: You’re in business to make money. You make money by convincing lots of people to give you some of their money. Success depends on making this process as painless as possible*. But many online businesses may be making it too difficult for customers to hand over the cash, which is a bad business practice by any account. Here’s what people (especially men) are used to:

Earlier this week, Google launched what I consider to be the company's next step in personalized search - "search options." Essentially, it is a link searchers can click, which brings up a left-side navigation menu that allows for different ways of searching. The following video shows how it works if you have not yet experimented with it for yourself:

 Direct band to fan sales is the new holy grail; not just for indie musicians, but for a growing number of major label artists as well.

I know it has everything to do with journalistic integrity and it is the right thing to do but when a newspaper the stature of the New York Times reports on the cuts it must make to its sections to ‘survive’ it’s still sad.

Update: Google now says: We initially reported that Urchin Software might require a patch to handle the new URL structure, but after some additional testing, it turns out no patch is needed. Urchin can handle both the current and new URLs. Original article: Google is changing referral URLs on results pages. What up until now has looked something like this: