Chief Executive Steve Ballmer on Thursday defended Microsoft Corp’s need to make heavy investments in its Internet businesses but said the company was “done,” for now, with pursuing Yahoo Inc . “There’s nothing under discussion between the two of us,” Ballmer told investors of how six months of various talks had reached an impasse earlier in July.

“We had a set of principles, we talked about them, it didn’t work out,” he said. “Fine, we’re done. We can move on.”

The message for Microsoft’s annual meeting with Wall Street analysts, an all-day affair at its headquarters in Redmond, Washington, was that it had a post-Yahoo plan to turn around its online services division and a strategy to take advantage of future opportunities, even as its Internet chief departs.

“There is this huge, huge, huge new opportunity around the Internet and online and we have to embrace that opportunity and invest in that opportunity,” Ballmer said.

Shares of Microsoft have fallen 8 percent over the last week since the company forecast an outlook below Wall Street estimates and revealed an additional $500 million investment into its online unit, even as it chalked up further losses.

Charles Di Bona, a software research analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein, said Ballmer’s comments did not give enough details about how that additional investment will be spent and how the company arrived at that decision.

“It’s spending $500 million dollars and then it says we’ll tell you later how we’ll spend it,” said Di Bona, who has an “outperform” rating on Microsoft. “The market’s concern is not about how it is running its core business. It’s about decisions about larger chunks of money that people can’t track.”

Ballmer said Microsoft is willing to endure online division operating losses that amount to between 5 percent to 10 percent of the company’s total operating income, which reached $22.5 billion in fiscal year 2008, until the search and advertising business reaches “scale.

Seven months after Google began testing a service called Knol, a Wikipedia competitor, the company on Wednesday finally rolled it out. Knol is described as “Like Wikipedia, With Moderation.” Articles on various topics are penned by individuals, and in many cases, experts — not collectively by the anonymous masses. Knol authors can choose to benefit from the “wisdom of the crowds” by letting others edit or supplement their articles. But those changes make it into Knol entries only with the author’s permission.

Knol, which, by the way, is short for knowledge, is making some people uneasy because it further transforms Google from a search engine that helps people find content into a site that helps people create and publish content.

Even though it will make money on many Knol pages with its AdSense program, Google promises that the objectivity of its search engine will not be compromised.

“We will treat Knol pages as we treat other Web pages,” said Cedric Dupont, a Google product manager. “If there is a Knol that is the first place in search results, it deserves that place.”

Of course, on many searches, it is Wikipedia’s ad-free pages that show up at the top of search results.

Mr. Dupont dismissed speculation that Knol was designed as a Wikipedia killer: “Google is very happy with Wikipedia being so successful. Anyone who tries to kill them would hurt us.”

There is a striking similarity between one aspect of the two sites. The text of Knol articles uses the same font as Wikipedia. Mr. Dupont said that is simply coincidence, as it is a commonly used font.

For now, Knol has only a few hundred articles, compared to the nearly 2.5 million in Wikipedia’s English language version. And for now, the best place to follow the debate on whether or not Knol is a Wikipedia killer is on the Knol entry on, where else, Wikipedia.

Source: NYTimes

A new targeting tool is set for release from ValueClick. The tool is a predictive behavioral targeting tool which provides marketers with anonymous consumer behavior and then predicts future behaviors based on the past information. The Precision BT suite combines Precision Retargeting and Precision Profiles, giving marketers unique insight into consumer behavior.

“What makes Precision Profiles unique is our access to a critical mass of anonymous consumer online experiences and the way our technology dynamically categorizes and transforms them into hundreds of interest segments,” said Matthew Boyd, senior vice president, ValueClick Media. “Combined with the ability for our optimization technology to identify the best possible context in which to serve an ad, we have assembled the most scalable, data-driven audience targeting platform for marketers to achieve their brand and direct response objectives.”

By using predictive algorithms, marketers are given insight into the segments and times that consumers’ visit certain websites, publishers or content sites. This is very valuable information because by knowing when and where consumers will “stop by” they can determine where and how they will advertise, thereby increasing campaign ROI.

The anonymous information provided to marketers includes web browsing, interaction with ads and search and shopping behaviors.

Google says, search marketing does increase brand awareness no matter where it appears on a results page, and they have released the results of a recent study to bolster their case.In a recent study called “Brand Value of Search”, Google attempts to answer the age-old question of whether search marketing increases brand awareness, reports MediaPost.

Over 2,400 people took a brand survey using consumer-packaged goods brands and Google concluded that, when a brand did not appear in search results, awareness was decreased. This, says the search firm, shows the importance of search marketing in ensuring the brand is represented within search results.

While building a brand with search marketing would be hard, bringing brands to front of mind at a time when a consumer is intending to make a purchase could only be beneficial. Several previous studies have shown that search marketing goes along way towards generating brand awareness. iProspect’s 2006 survey found that “36% of search engine users believe that the companies whose websites are returned at the top of the search results are the top brands in their field”.

However, with social networking, blogs and review/comparison sites becoming increasingly popular decision-making destinations, it’s often the power of the crowd that dictates unaided search results, and it’s increasingly hard for marketers to ensure that search results reflect a positive brand image when two opposing representations might appear on the same search results page.

“.anything” domains are - literally - any domain extension that isn’t already taken and that has at least three characters. This would allow companies to own and host their websites at their own root level domain. For example, Google could rename their root level domain “.google” and could rename their other extensions accordingly, for example search.google or blog.google, leaving off the “.com”, “.net” or other three-character extensions that have been used for years.

This also means specific brands, for example Ziploc, could host a top level as “info.Ziploc”. Big corporations - like the BBC, the New York Yankees and even IMAX Theaters would likely not have any problem adding a vanity domain because consumers are already familiar with their brands. For some advertisers, this is a great chance to increase their web presence, but be careful, without very strong brand recognition, marketers could also lose some consumers. Those who aren’t familiar with a specific brand may miss the boat because they wouldn’t know to log on to a “.myproduct” domain.

According to ICANN, it will be upwards of two years before these vanity top level domains are released for general use.

The platformization of social networks is continuing throughout the world as Rediff, one of the most popular portals in India (and publicly traded on the NASDAQ), is launching a Developer Platform, according to Medianama. Rediff is using a REST API, a markup language based off Facebook’s FBML, and a query language called RQL. The Rediff Developer Platform page has more information.

The Rediff Platform marks the best opportunity yet for social network application developers to reach the Indian market. Like Facebook’s fbFund, Rediff is offering “several grants of Rs 250,000 [about $5,850] for your innovative app ideas.”

Rediff also operates one of the largest webmail services in India, with over 65 million registered users, a popular IM service, and many other vertical services like travel, job, and marriage search.

Across the globe Google remains the dominant search engine. In two countries, the U.K. and Australia, Google’s market share is huge at almost 90%, found Hitwise. In the U.K. the search engine has increased market share by 10% year on year. Meanwhile, in the U.S., Google’s market share showed a less dramatic rise from June 2007’s 64% creeping up to 69% this year. Other big search engines lost overall market share. Yahoo dropped to 4% from 7.7% a year ago and MSN dropped from 5.7% to 3.7% in the same period. The remaining 42 search engines cited could only muster up a 1.5% market share between them.

Google has experimented with search features that let users vote on search results, and/or recommend other results than those given, since late 2007. They generally bucket test these features (meaning some small percentage of users, randomly chosen, see them), and if testing goes ok, they move them into the optional experimental area where any user can add them.

Advertisers just got another valuable tool in the ever-growing AdWords arsenal. Google is now providing search volume data with the existing Keyword Tool.Using Adwords’ Keyword Tool, advertisers are able to view data across a multitude of areas including competition, average CPCs and estimated keyword ad positions.

AdWords has now added more hard data to enable advertisers to fine tune their ad campaigns - the ability to see approximately how many people are searching on specific keywords. An official announcement was recently posted on the AdWords blog.

Expect counts to differ from third-party tools as, on the whole, they have not been privy to the Google search database. Plus, with Google being the most-used search engine, it follows that their data should be more relevant.

Search engines are probably the single most effective way to generate traffic to your web page. Because of this, web owners will inevitably complete with each other in order to get a higher ranking. But how would then do this? Well, a lot of e-books, blogs, websites, podcasts, and other kinds of content are dedicated to this topic. But there will always be web masters who complain that they are not getting visitors from search engines. This can be due to different factors but some of the most common reasons I know of include:

New Website – when your site is new, you should expect that it will not perform that well with search engines. Take note that there are over 30 billion pages on the internet and a lot of these can be categorized as “spam”. Before search engines start to give your site a good ranking, they need to achieve a certain level of trust with you and this will grow over time as you build your content, traffic, and one way links.

Black Hat SEO Techniques – very few people want to be called a black hat marketer; or in layman’s term, a spammer. But no one can deny that being a black hat marketer does have its own appeal because of its immediate results. If you decide to take this route, you should realize that you can be hit by a penalty or in some cases, banned altogether.

Useless Content – even if you invest a lot in creating your website, it would not matter if you don’t have good content. Searchers are exactly that, they search for information that is relevant to their needs over the internet. In addition, good content will generate a lot of links which are “votes” for your website.

Duplicate Content – some people debate on the impact of using duplicate content on their websites. But as far as I’m concerned, search engines love fresh content and it will reward websites and blogs that frequently posts new and original articles.