August 04, 2005
Quick Hit
Recent news and notes...
AOL Subsidary Forced To Change Tactics By FTC
c|net brings us this story. Here's the beginning:
An America Online subsidiary will no longer bundle its anti-spyware program with software that tracks consumers' online habits and force-feeds them pop-up ads, the Federal Trade Commission said on Wednesday
The full story can be read here.
Good news there. It's nice to see that the Gov't is finally holding their feet to the fire.
Mozilla Goes Commercial
Another c|net story
The [non-profit] Mozilla Foundation announced on Wednesday that it's creating a commercial subsidiary [that will be] responsible for the development, testing and distribution of the organizations open-source products.
The full story is located at c|net News
No earth-shattering news here at this point, just a legalistic change because non-profit status causes issues if you decide to earn an income from something. It's got to make a person wonder those if Mozilla browers are eventually going to be something you have to pay for.
Lastly, and this one will likely be pretty huge, the much rumored Yahoo! competitor to Google's Adsense look like it's going to come to fruition. From ZDnet:
Yahoo unveils beta of blog ad network
Yahoo on Wednesday debuted the beta version of an advertising network tailored for small and medium-size Web publishers.
Full story can be found here
The beta is only open by invitation, and I'd sure like to know how to get one of those! I'm going to have to fire off some emails to see what I can find.
This subject is one that I really need to bone up on and blog about a lot more. The recent advances that Yahoo! has made are pretty amazing when one thinks about it. And something that one should pay a lot more attention to.
They've got Y!Q (contextual search) in beta, they've got ads that can be placed in RSS feeds (huge potential there that everybody seems to be missing so far, myself included), and they've got their API applications that can also be used to retrieve very details Yahoo! Store data. Now comes the first somewhat open beta test of something that allows the average webaster to become part of what looks to be a pretty substantial ad network.
I can invision a way to roll all of that together to create a pretty significant force in online advertising. But I really need to find some time to sit down and work out the specifics in my head and in the coding of it all.
One way or another, Y! is definitely done a lot of good work to give Google a run for their money on the advertising side of things.
It was a busy news day Wedsnesday, hunh?
Update and slight correction:
Yes it's sort of By Invitation Only. But lo and behold 2 hours after my question of how to get invovled I got an email. LOL Gotta love the Web...
Anyway, you can apply to become one of the beta testers and perhaps help to shape this new product at the Yahoo! Publisher Network page. There's a link along the right side that takes you to the application.
Of course there's no way to guarantee that you'll be selected, but I'm putting in for it to see. Hope they let me!
Last add... One interesting thing I noted was that the application has "Adult" as one of the types of content your site contains in the application. Does that mean that they're going to be accepting adult content sites for ad placement? Or is that there to automatically kick anybody who chooses it so that they don't have to sort out that "Other" may mean adult content?
It's an interesting question anyway. Even though I don't have a clue what the answer is.