Media - Internet

7 October 2005

Yahoo CEO pooh-poohs Google

Terry Semel, Yahoo Inc.'s chief executive, fired a few salvos at high-flying Google Inc. Thursday, saying the rival Internet company has a scattered strategy and an array of products whose popularity lags behind those of his own Web portal. "So far, they don't seem to have a plan, but maybe they do," Semel said of Google at the Web 2.0 Internet conference in San Francisco. "Maybe magic will happen...

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7 October 2005

Blog Acquisitions Signal Tipping Point for User-Generated Content

The blogosphere was abuzz with surprise and cautious optimism Thursday with the news that a major blog network and a blog update notification service were being acquired by large media companies. America Online Inc. announced its acquisition of Weblogs Inc., and Verisign Inc. announced their acquisition of Weblogs.com. America Online's purchase was valued at approximately $25 million, and is...

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6 October 2005

AOL to buy Weblogs Inc. Network

SAN FRANCISCO– America Online Inc. has agreed to buy Weblogs Inc., a network of Internet sites focused on niche topics ranging from food to gadgets, for around $25 million, a source familiar with the deal said on Wednesday. AOL , a unit of Time Warner Inc., could announce the acquisition of New York-based Weblogs Inc. as early as Thursday, the source said. A spokesman for America Online declined...

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6 October 2005

Yahoo's Semel talks new, new media

At a Web-related confab Thursday, Yahoo CEO Terry Semel shared his thoughts on everything from 21st century media companies to his company's struggle with Google to the ethics of doing business in a communist country. At the Web 2.0 Conference 2005, sponsored by Yahoo, Google, MSN Search and others, Semel said Yahoo is blazing a trail as a new kind of new-media company, rooted in technology and...

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6 October 2005

Breaking America's grip on the net

You would expect an announcement that would forever change the face of the internet to be a grand affair - a big stage, spotlights, media scrums and a charismatic frontman working the crowd. But unless you knew where he was sitting, all you got was David Hendon's slightly apprehensive voice through a beige plastic earbox. The words were calm, measured and unexciting, but their implications will be...

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6 October 2005

United States Strives to Maintain Internet Dynamism

Washington � U.S. officials are engaged in ongoing talks with other governments, private enterprise and nongovernmental organizations working to craft an agreement on the future of Internet governance for presentation at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) to be held in Tunis, Tunisia, November 16-18. Discussions continue after a preparatory conference ended in Geneva September 30...

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5 October 2005

Topix.net Gets Modular With Headlines

News aggregator Topix.net will soon begin distributing contextually-targeted headline "modules" to publisher partners, in a deal that involves sharing the resulting ad revenue. The product builds upon work Topix.net has been doing with 177 Gannett, Knight-Ridder and Tribune Company sites. (Together, the newspaper publishers own a three-quarter stake in Topix.net.) The company has developed...

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5 October 2005

RSS: What, Why & Where are the Ads?

It has been around longer than Google, but RSS is finally breaking out of the tech dungeon and into the mainstream -- so where's the advertising angle? Pop quiz hotshot, when was RSS invented? Here are a couple of hints: it's older than the iPod and older than Google. Give up? 1997, when RSS was released by Netscape. Since then, Netscape dropped RSS and it bobbled around between obscure software...

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5 October 2005

Yahoo Inc. Acquires Upcoming.org

SAN FRANCISCO - Yahoo Inc. has acquired Upcoming.org, an online event planning site that's expected to infuse the Internet powerhouse with more content about local communities. The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company confirmed the deal late Tuesday without disclosing financial terms of the acquisition. Los Angeles-based Upcoming acts as a social calendar that depends on its users to post free listings...

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4 October 2005

An Internet fix?

THE INTERNET hasn't made everyone happy. There's spam, pornography, shady businesses and political dissent. A 40-nation U.N. study group thinks it has found another sore point: the nonprofit agency that sets the domain-naming rules and numbered computer addresses used for e-mails and Web sites. The problem? This nearly-invisible agency -- the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers --...

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