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.