Interesting to see Kanoodle making a jump into the RSS advertising business.  It doesn't appear that they offer the tools to publishers yet but rather via a Moreover proxy feed.  If you already have RSS feeds of your own, your options are still mostly limited to custom ad serving.

Story at CNet.

Jon Udell has recently been refining a new web-based storytelling format, the Screencast.  His most recent entry is his second demonstration of deconstructing Google Maps, in this case using it to create an interactive tour of a city.  I think this is amazing not only for the creative use of Google Maps but for the method of telling us about what Jon has discovered in an entertaining way, if not a little bit tedious.

From NYTimes:

Using a news article's words as ads poses new questions for reporters and their publishers, said Aly Colón, who teaches ethics at the Poynter Institute, a journalism education organization. The biggest risk, he said, may be turning off readers. "If we want to be taken seriously for the work that we do as journalists, we should try to devise a way of presenting our material so the users, the readers, know that we are first and foremost about the news," he said.

Articles scattered with paid advertiser links could create the impression that advertising shaped the reporting, Mr. Colón said. That, in turn, could undermine the value of advertising in those articles in the first place, he said, adding, "advertising wants to be associated with a news product that has integrity."

From Eyetools Research Blog:

Last week, the Washington Post announced a new homepage — here's an Eyetools Heatmap of a group of 19 new visitors viewing the new page and what we can learn from its design. Fast summary:
* Top half of page — good readable design.
* Bottom half of page — bad example of line-spacing and white-space discourages reading.

From BtoBonline via Colin Crawford's Blog:

"Over the past year or so, most of our b-to-b properties have gone from investment to profitability" on the Internet, said Colin Crawford, VP-new business development and operations for technology media giant International Data Group. Computerworld.com, InfoWorld.com, Network World.com and CXO Media as a group all fall into the profitable column, he added. Further, Crawford expects IDG will be getting more of its revenue from online products than from print products by 2007, only two years from now, "if our current trajectories hold."

From MediaWeek:

Interactive advertising recorded its highest quarter ever, with fourth-quarter spending up 24 percent to $2.7 billion over the previous year, according to figures released Tuesday by the Interactive Advertising Bureau in conjunction with PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Overall, 2004 turned out to be a monster growth year, as spending soared 32 percent to $9.6 billion versus 2003, according to IAB estimates. The IAB did,however, bring down its recent estimate for third quarter 2004 from $2.4 billion to $2.3 billion.

Hilarious clip from Jon Stewart's Daily Show.  Favorite quote:

The first rule of journalism is "Don't report on journalism".

From SFGate:

Google Inc.'s new browser toolbar is raising eyebrows over a feature that adds hyperlinks in Web pages where none had existed before, giving the world's most widely used Internet search provider a powerful tool to funnel traffic to destinations of its choice.

MediaPost sumarizes the rumors about Google pushing out a new ranking algorithm. Something to watch out for ...

According to Hershberg, the update appears to be focused on distinguishing between the quality of different links, which the algorithm generally tabulates to determine order in the organic rankings. "It would appear as though Google is making distinction of quality of links. All links are not equal, and they're giving some links more credence than others," he said. "Lots of attention is being given to site content and anchor text." Anchor text refers to the hyperlinked text that directs a user to the linked URL.
He said that the new formula appears to give more weight to sites that have content, not just sponsored links and a navigation bar. And Google apparently now evaluates the anchor text to determine if it's related to the site content, or is just the same word over and over again--in which case the site's rank would fall.

From John Battelle:

Will online replace the Yellow Pages? Ask anyone under 35 that question - to most of them, the Yellow Pages represent an unwieldy doorstop, an irritating drag on the recycling bin. Most of the growth is online, and the Yellow Pages industry certainly knows that.

From TidBITS:

Few buzzwords surrounding Internet technologies have moved into the mainstream more quickly than "podcasting," but because of this speed and an only tangentially related name, few consumer-level technologies have engendered more confusion. So what is podcasting?

From Doc Searls:

I think news-org aggregators will succeed if they're run by editorial people, not by advertising people. Readers come to papers for editorial, not advertising. And the editorial folks could add enormous, and unique, value to the news stream that flows in from the blogosphere. On the other hand, if these aggregators are more about capturing eyeballs than about informing readers, they'll fail, just like all those doomed projects Josh remembers from back in the '90s.

From Jay Rosen's PressThink:

Think of all the millions of words written by news organizations around the world about Abu Ghraib during 2004. Now go to Google and search (as suggested in the Wired article above) for Abu Ghraib, and you will find only a handful of traditional media outlets mentioned in the first few pages (fortunately, the Guardian is one). This isn't just a quirk in Google's search algorithm; this is about traditional media ceding responsibility for providing the definitive, permanent record of major events.

All that reporting effort, all that insight and expertise, all those contacts: now completely invisible to the millions who decide to use Google as their first and final tool for researching.

Chris Anderson's influential essay, The Long Tail (now a blog and forthcoming book) explains how in a world without the traditional physical restrictions of high street space, online retailers can offer vast and diverse repertoires, brought to life through recommendation systems and other links. They still need their best sellers, but the future success of their businesses really depends on the long tail.

The same is true for news sites. Freed from the physical restrictions of print, now is the time to see our Web operations not simply as the place for today's news: but as the repository for everything we have ever done. Yes, we need big breaking news, but it's the long tail of your content accumulated over time that makes you distinctive and lets you stand out.

From BusinessWeek:

...All that competition is keeping a lid on profits by forcing Amazon to spend more aggressively on everything from hiring to research and development to marketing. Chief Executive Jeffrey P. Bezos said his company is hiring more computer scientists and programmers, who are helping it launch a stream of new features. The latest: its first membership program, in which frequent buyers can pay $79 a year to get free two-day shipping on more than 1 million items.

The biggest surprise came in marketing costs, which rose 44% -- far more than the 26% sales growth after stripping out the weak dollar's foreign-exchange benefit. Capital spending is also rising, from $89 million last year to $175 million this year, by Amazon's estimates.