AOL Hopes to Integrate Blogging With Financial Journalism

AOL is trying to increase its presence in the world of online financial reporting, with a series of blogs about the stock performance of high profile companies.

The seven companies initially covered include Time Warner, Wal-Mart, Microsoft, Google, Apple, eBay, and GE. This lineup will almost certainly expand if the new website, BloggingStocks.com, proves to be popular.

The site is managed by a team of professional bloggers and analysts, who provide daily reports and commentary on each of the companies. And like any blog, readers may post their thoughts and responses.

BloggingStocks.com will be integrated with AOL’s Money & Finance portal, as well as with the WeblogsInc blog network, which the internet giant purchased for $25 million last year. This integration strategy is obviously intended to combine the casual and entertaining nature of blogs with the seriousness of good financial journalism.

Ultimately the new site’s degree of success or failure will depend on the writers. With a good selection of current and former journalists and analysts, AOL seems to have picked a winning team. Hopefully this team will do a good job at integrating the two types of journalism, so as to achieve the same popular status as Engadget, Joystiq, and apply it to the world of finance.

Internet Domain Industry Off to a Good Start this Year

The internet domain industry is still going strong, with at least 15 web addresses having already sold for over $100,000 this year.

Some of the most notable sales to date in 2006 include On.com ($635,000), Macau.com ($550,000), and Blue.com ($500,000). An all time industry record was also set when Sex.com sold for an estimated $12 million in cash and stock, as part of a private deal in January.

“The domain name is 21st century real estate,” commented Warren Adelman, who is president of the world’s biggest domain registrar, GoDaddy.com. “The economy is being increasingly driven by the Internet sector.”

This explosion in “internet real estate” has created opportunities for an estimated 1,000 to 2,000 people to make a full-time income from simply buying and selling domains. This is a difficult area to get in to, as there is a lot of competition, and only the best can truly prevail.

Those willing to do a bit of writing and link building, however, can make quite a decent living by developing “mini sites,” which can be used to generate Adsense revenue, and generally sell for as much as high $xxx on the open market. (I have done this myself many times.)

Expansion into light web development and content production can vastly improve a domain prospector’s chance of succeeding in this highly competitive and often cutthroat industry.

Google Launches Online Calendar Service

Leading internet search engine, Google Inc., has unveiled a new scheduling service to help users store a record of their schedules and appointments online, and receive reminders on their computers.

The new service is available at www.google.com/calendar, has a GMail-like interface, and intuitively understands time and place commands typed into a single text box, eliminating the need to fill in long forms. There is also a tool to make your calendar public, and share your schedule of appointments with a select group of friends or co-workers.

Launching an online calendar service is obviously Google’s latest attempt at moving user data off personal hard drives, and on to the internet, making it accessible from anywhere. It looks like it will be a handy tool for business and personal purposes alike, and seems designed to compete with Upcoming.org, which was acquired by Yahoo last fall.

U.S. States Attempt to Force Sales Tax on Internet Shoppers

For years, many people who buy online have treated the internet as a tax-free shopping loophole. American state authorities are now trying to crack down on this, however, by finding new ways to extort extra sales tax from consumers.

Online retailers like eBay and Amazon aren’t obliged to charge sales tax to buyers in a state where they have no major physical operations. For example, Seattle-based Amazon.com doesn’t force its California users to pay tax on purchases.

But the state of California, among others, is stepping up efforts to make its citizens pay taxes at California rates, on purchases made from out-of-state customers, including those made online. The state government has taken out banner ads on numerous websites reminding web surfers that they “owe use tax” (often misread as “owe us tax”).

New York, meanwhile is trying to force taxpayers to keep track of their online purchases, and declare them on end-of-year tax returns. Officials in that state will audit those who seem to be “creatively underestimating” their purchase habits, and inflict stiff penalties.

State governments believe that they are justified in doing this, claiming huge revenue losses in recent years as a result of people not declaring online purchases. California claims to have suffered $1 billion in lost revenue, last year alone, while Washington, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut have reportedly lost $600 million, $500 million, and $230 million, respectively.

These are gross overestimates, however, according to Steve DelBianco of the NetChoice Coalition. With a total of $86.3 billion in e-commerce sales last year in the U.S., the maximum amount of use tax due in the entire country couldn’t come to more than about $3.6 billion, and the vast majority of online buying is classified as business-to-business, where use tax is almost paid.

In short, state governments are going to extreme lengths to reach their hands just a tiny bit deeper into the pockets of consumers. Even if they manage to scrape every penny of use tax, they’ll probably turn a huge loss by conducting such a huge number of audits. Are they simply trying to prove a point?

All in all, the whole exercise seems to be a ridiculous waste of taxpayers dollars, just so that government busybodies can assert their dominance online as well as off.

Social Networking Sites Offer Highly Targeted Advertising Opportunities

In the past couple of years, the increasing popularity of online social networking sites (i.e. MySpace.com) has presented a unique set of targeting conditions for advertisers.

By providing demographic information about its subscribers, a social networking company can ensure that its sponsors ad dollars are spent in the most productive possible way. This boosts targeting and thus potential conversion rates to much higher levels than television, radio, or run-of-network online advertising.

This fact, combined with the generally rising cost of online advertising is greatly boosting the incentive for social networking communities to load their services with demographically targeted advertising.

In itself, there’s nothing wrong with using these demographics in marketing, so long as identifiable user information is kept secure, and never given out to the advertisers themselves. The quantity of ads, however, will likely upset some users if the community websites get too greedy.

The companies should do their best to effectively utilize a small amount of ad space, they shouldn’t let commercial content dominate the services. In the long term, conservative placement of highly targeted ads is a much more effective strategy to capture the minds of users.

Internet Citizens Must Fight to Maintain Net Neutrality

As internet service providers throughout the developed world work to expand their networks and develop exciting new services and technologies, they are in danger of sacrificing one of the key concepts that make the web what it is today: net neutrality.

Net neutrality is a principle stating that all internet data traffic should be able to travel freely through cyberspace, routed over an ISPs core network at the same speed. Without this essential cornerstone principle, the big internet service providers could essentially control the comings and goings of all internet traffic, and use this control for their own competitive purposes, ultimately leading to the demise of free enterprise on the internet as we know it.

A big telecom carrier could drive a smaller, cheaper, and more innovative competitor like Skype or Vonage out of business, by charging them exorbitant network access fees for their data usage. High traffic websites could also be subject to extra fees from their ISP, due to high data usage.

Preserving the essence net neutrality seems to be one thing that is supported, at least in theory, by virtually everyone who uses the web, from big internet giants like Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, to small-time webmasters, and internet users. It is easy to recognize that throwing every bit of internet activity on the mercy of a few companies will create an unfair and non-competitive network hierarchy. This could only serve to damage innovative spirit, as well as the internet’s integrity as a free enterprise environment.

It is not, however, up to governments to legislate on this issue, as some have suggested. In the years to come it will be up to web users and content businesses themselves to stand up for what is right in the long term on this issue, and help service providers realize that the internet’s integrity and independence is too important to be sacrificed for the sake of short-term profits gouging.

A Very Unusual Pagerank Update

Last week, many webmasters noticed that Google’s public pagerank system (a rough measure of each site’s importance in the search engine) was displaying higher than expected rankings for some sites.

Full coverage is available at SEOMix.com.

Google Debuts User-Generated Online Real Estate Listings

Web search leader, Google, has taken a step into the realm of online real estate listings, with a integrated search service for locally targeted homes and apartments.

Anyone who types a phrase like homes for rent, homes for sale, apartments for rent, or even just real estate into Google will be prompted to enter their ZIP code, after which they will see a page of local real estate listings.

This kind of innovative feature could definitely be useful, but it will likely be seen as an encroachment on the many websites that already offer this service. Google is essentially competing with its own organic results by sticking another search box right on top of them, and there’s nothing to stop them from extending this beyond just real estate listings.

What I’m curious to see is how comprehensive and well organized Google can keep its database of listings. The content will be user-generated (via Google Base), so the search giant will need to put a lot of energy into weeding out duplicate content and keeping the database in good order.

Personally, I don’t think that Google will be able to do this with the same level of precision that individual webmasters can, but I suppose there’s nothing to stop them from trying.

Ultimately, however, I don’t think Google’s user-generated content services will ever be able to eclipse the value of well-constructed niche-specific websites.

New Survey Illustrates Consumer Doubt about Podcasting

Despite the growing profile of podcasting on the internet, a recent poll from Forrester Research suggests that just 2% of the population have sampled this form of internet audio, and a mere 1% listen regularly.

“It doesn’t diminish how powerful or interesting it is, but people need to be realistic about how many people are listening,” said Forrester analyst Charlene Li.

There has been a lot of interest and hype surrounding podcasting in the past couple of years, but podcasts have failed to become as popular as text-based blogs. This is likely due to the vast digital divide causing the majority of internet users to see things like internet audio as being beyond their ability and grasp.

The survey by Forrester showed that a full 25% of internet users expressed interest in podcasting, and the ability to listen to both amateur programming on their own schedules.

The challenge faced by podcasters, and indeed webmasters in general, is to break down barriers like age and technical experience and show users that various forms of “advanced” web media are indeed as easy to use as the internet itself.

Federal Election Commission to Leave Political Blogs Unregulated

The US Federal Election Commission unanimously voted to leave internet political activity largely unregulated yesterday, allowing bloggers to endorse and criticize candidates without government interference or censorship.

The only regulations that will be imposed on internet political activity pertain to paid political advertising, where spending must be limited in the same way as offline ads for candidates.

According to FEC chairman, Michael E. Toner, the new rules will “totally exempt individuals who engage in political activity on the Internet from the restrictions of the campaign finance laws. The exemption for individual Internet activity in the final rules is categorical and unqualified.”

The decision is designed to “protect Internet activities by individuals in all forms, including e-mailing, linking, blogging, or hosting a Web site,” Toner says.

This is a major victory for the cause of free speech on the internet, and lays to rest concerns that internet political activism could be restricted or silenced.

A group of three citizens rights groups (Democracy 21, Campaign Legal Center, and the Center for Responsive Politics) released a joint statement that “the new FEC regulation strikes the correct balance in preserving the Internet as an unregulated forum for robust political activity by individuals, while ensuring that the Internet does not become a loophole for unregulated soft money.”