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KABUL -- Afghan President Hamid Karzai was under growing pressure on Tuesday to intervene in the case of an editor jailed for two years for blasphemy after clerics accused him of questioning Islamic law. The world's top media rights groups joined Afghan journalists in urging Karzai to intercede after a court sentenced Ali Mohaqiq Nasab, editor of the monthly magazine Haqoq-e-Zan (Women's Rights)...

NEW YORK -(Dow Jones)- Google Inc. (GOOG) is testing an online-classifieds service similar to Craigslist.org that it will support with keyword-based advertising, according a person familiar with the matter. The service, called "Google Base," according to screenshots of in-development Web pages circulating on the Internet, will allow Web users to share information about events, housing and jobs and...

WHEN the city of Vail, Colorado, wanted the local cable company to provide better programming without raising its prices, Liberty Media chairman John Malone pulled the regular shows off air and replaced them with a screen that showed nothing but the names and phone numbers of the mayor and city manager. Vail backed off, according to L. J. Davis, author of The Billionaire Shell Game: How Cable...

A growing number of countries, including China, Brazil, India and Cuba -- as well as the European Union -- are questioning U.S. control over the Internet. The Internet is managed by a nonprofit private organization called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or Icann, set up by the U.S. Department of Commerce in 1998 and based in Marina del Rey, Calif. Icann has an...

Michael Marx loves Barq's root beer. He frequently wears a Barq's T-shirt. He brings Barq's root beer to parties. So it should come as no surprise that Mr. Marx, 34, of Gilbert, Ariz., keeps a blog dedicated to Barq's. "I've been drinking Barq's for 15 years. It's my beer," said Mr. Marx, who started his blog, thebarqsman.com, last year to collect news about Barq's, commercials he likes for the...

ONLINE ADVERTISING REMAINS A SPOT market, but some media buyers are starting to purchase inventory with a longer lead time, according to a recently released study by Deutsche Bank and MediaPost. For the report--the fourth in an ongoing series of quarterly studies of media professionals by MediaPost and Deutsche Bank--87 media executives were questioned earlier this month about their clients'...

It’s 1997 all over again out on the West Coast–or at least it seemed that way to me the other day at the Argent Hotel in San Francisco. At the Web 2.0 Conference, the new "It" shindig for the new generation of wannabe golden geeks, all the signs were in evidence of a bubble in the making. There’s the army of khaki-clad venture capitalists, chasing after postpubescent entrepreneurs, begging to...

Two of the largest alternative newspaper chains in the United States have decide to merge. New Times Media is buying Village Voice Media to create a company of 17 publications. The new company will have a combined weekly circulation of 1.8 million papers and 4.3 million weekly readers. The merger process is expected to be completed in early 2006. The new company will retain the Village Voice Media...

Jason McCabe Calacanis had an enviable problem. Advertisers eager to reach niche audiences were banging on his door. But the CEO of Weblogs Inc., a collection of 90 blogs, didn't have enough front-page space to sell them. Calacanis huddled with investors to devise a plan to scale up the business. Instead, on Oct. 6, he sold Weblogs to America Online Inc. (TWX ) for a reported $25 million. AOL is...

If there's one image to remember from early October's Association of National Advertisers conference, it features the bespectacled gentleman with an accountant's charisma who quietly posed simple queries. Thing is, the questions held enough tonnage to crush virtually all assumptions underpinning advertising and media. He might have been dismissible, were he not the chief executive of Google Inc....