online activity

Just days after finalizing its search and advertising agreement with Microsoft, Yahoo on Monday rolled out a beta version of a new consumer tool it hopes will appease growing concerns from privacy advocates. Dubbed Ad Interest Manager, Yahoo said the tool takes online advertising transparency to a new level to build user trust.

Essentially, Ad Interest Manager is a hub where Yahoo visitors can view a summary of their online activity at Yahoo and decide how much exposure they want to online advertising served via the Yahoo Ad Network.

Afghans turned to the Twitterverse to share news of Taliban intimidation at the polls and voter turnout in the presidential election, even as the country was just trying to keep electricity running and attacks at bay.

The memory of neighboring Iran's media crackdown during that country's vote is still fresh here, and orders from the Afghan government on the eve of the election to censor reports of violence during Thursday's voting suggested news on the ground could be thin.

Facing a barrage of international criticism, the Chinese government is apparently backing down from its earlier announcement that all PCs sold in the country must have censoring software installed.

According to an anonymous official in the government's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), it's "misleading" to say that China is requiring PC owners to use the software.

Use of online classified ads is surging, thanks mainly to Craigslist. Almost half of all adults who use the Internet in the U.S. now rely on classified sites, according to a study released May 22 by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. That number has more than doubled since 2005, when only 22 percent used online classifieds, and has increased faster than almost every other online activity covered by the researcher, including online banking, travel booking, and shopping on e-commerce sites like Amazon.com.

Nielsen reports that social networking in online communities and blogs has become a more popular Internet activity than e-mail. It is growing three times faster than the overall Internet and twice the rate of other top Web categories such as search, portals and PC software.

You might wonder what types of conversational and social media to engage in online. The answer is probably more than just one type. In traditional media, it’s been shown that marketing messages delivered across multiple overlapping media (for example, television and print) are often more effective than those delivered through one channel - even if the reach and frequency in that one channel is optimized.
Consider extending this offline marketing campaign notion to the online space by creating “distributed branding”.

When Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer dropped his bid to buy Yahoo, he took pains to point out that Yahoo's search-sharing arrangements with Google were likely to bring intense antitrust scrutiny for any company acquiring Yahoo. Given Microsoft's lengthy history with antitrust enforcement, Ballmer found that particularly unappealing.