The Justice Department on Thursday said Internet service providers should be allowed to charge a fee for priority Web traffic.

The agency told the Federal Communications Commission, which is reviewing high-speed Internet practices, that it is opposed to "Net neutrality," the principle that all Internet sites should be equally accessible to any Web user. Several phone and cable companies, such as AT&T Inc., Verizon Communications Inc. and Comcast Corp., have previously said they want the option to charge some users more money for loading certain content or Web sites faster than others.

The Justice Department said imposing a Net neutrality regulation could hamper development of the Internet and prevent service providers from upgrading or expanding their networks. It could also shift the "entire burden of implementing costly network expansions and improvements onto consumers," the agency said in its filing.

Such a result could diminish or delay network expansion and improvement, it added. The agency said providing different levels of service is common, efficient and could satisfy consumers. As an example, it cited that the U.S. Postal Service charges customers different guarantees and speeds for package delivery, ranging from bulk mail to overnight delivery.

"Whether or not the same type of differentiated products and services will develop on the Internet should be determined by market forces, not regulatory intervention," the agency said in its filing. The agency's stance comes more than two months after Federal Trade Commission Chairwoman Deborah Platt Majoras cautioned policy makers to enact Net neutrality regulation.

Such a regulation could prevent rather than promote Internet investment and innovation and have "significant negative effects for the economy and consumers," the Justice Department said in the filing. Supporters of Internet regulation have said that phone and cable companies could discriminate against certain Web site and services.

However, the agency said it will continue to monitor and enforce any anticompetitive conduct to ensure a competitive broadband marketplace.

Source: washingtonpost.com

Baidu, known as China's Google, still intends to seek a domestic listing but is focusing for now on ramping up a fledgling Japanese service with plans to hire dozens of people in the second half.

Baidu, the undisputed leader with more than half the search market in the world's second-largest Internet arena, is investing $15 million in Asia's largest economy to extend its presence beyond its home country and take on the likes of Google (GOOG.O: Quote, Profile, Research) and Yahoo (YHOO.O: Quote, Profile, Research).

Chief Financial Officer Shawn Wang said on Friday that the firm's domestic Chinese listing plan would have to take a backseat to its global expansion for now, which began with a soft launch in Japan under the domain name www.baidu.jp.

"We're not expecting any near-term revenue, but it's a market of huge potential," Wang told Reuters in an interview. "Search is a big arena." Industry sources say the ambitious firm -- which got its name from a line in a Song dynasty poem about finding the one right woman in a million -- is setting its sights beyond Japan.

Some say South Korea could be Baidu's next destination, but Wang would not address that speculation on Friday. But Wang kept mum as to the firm's future plans, except to say it fully intended to list in Shanghai or Shenzhen, once regulations allowed.

Overseas-registered firms are now barred from floating shares on mainland China's massive domestic markets. "We don't necessarily want to be the first one. If someone hasn't done it before, and you want to try it in China, you have got to be prepared," Wang said.

"It's one of our wishes, but we haven't been pursuing that actively," said the former partner at PriceWaterhouseCooper's capital markets division.

MARCHING ON

Analysts believe Baidu plans to also eventually widen its net beyond search engines and delve deeper into messaging and advertising, encroaching on areas dominated by portals such as SINA and Tencent. China's top Web search provider swept past expectations by more than doubling second-quarter profit to 141.9 million yuan ($18.8 million).

With over 162 million Web users, China is the world's largest Internet market after the United States. Baidu dominated the domestic search market in the second quarter with a 58.1 percent share, followed by Google's 22.8 percent and Yahoo's 11.6 percent, according to research firm Analysys International.

It's been gobbling up market share mainly from smaller rivals and Yahoo. It also overtook major portal SINA early this year as the largest Web advertising supplier in China, according to a recent report by broker research firm CLSA. "The search business is not just a search box. There's accelerating functions and services relating to search and we're doing all that," Wang said.

Source: reuters.com

A newly released eyetracking study by usability guru Jakob Nielsen shows that online banner blindness is worsening. Nielsen says that banner ads (indicated by green outlines in his heat maps below) didn’t even receive light focus from skimmers, scanners and readers—and neither did non-ad content in the same areas.

Nielsen concludes, much to his own dismay, that the best way to get people to look at your ads is to make them look like actual content—much like advertising in magazines and newspapers masquerades as editorial content (gotta look for that tiny little ‘advertisement’ notice at the top). That doesn’t mean, however, a 300×300 AdSense block as the first thing in your blog’s text will trick people into think that it’s content and clicking on it. That’s just annoying.

Another study that was released recently cautions against making advertisements annoying, obnoxious or offensive. As obvious as this sounds, remember that a lot of companies (*cough* ASK *cough*) need this reminder. And a vivid reminder it is. In the study, commissioned by Streetblimps and conducted by Opinion Research Corp.

So yes, Ask’s ads may have had us all talking—but according to this survey, they also would have prevented 90% of American adults from purchasing a product associated with them. Even if you didn’t find the Ask commercials offensive, you have to admit that they’re annoying. And 70% would remember the commercial—and the bad taste it left in their mouths. A novel commercial isn’t enough to succeed.

The bottom line: don’t go for the flashy and annoying ads—make them look like content. For your biggest ad purchases, work with webmasters to integrate your ads into their design—use their site’s colors and fonts, tinker with placement, etc. It just might pay off.

Source: marketingpilgrim.com

Posted by Stephan Spencer

My company recently added a client for whom Like.com is a direct competitor.

The Web site was much-hyped and reviewed 10 months ago, when it fired up, including being dubbed the "First True Visual Image Search," but little has been made of it since.

If you believe the traffic trend data from Alexa, traffic to Like.com has mirrored interest by the media and blogosphere, having a spike at launch, followed by a marked decline.

Like.com employs the technology of Riya, an image search company that focused primarily--until Like.com became a factor--on facial recognition. Now that same recognition software is used to characterize fashion design and trends for the purpose of online shopping.

See a pair of pants or dress you like? Use Like.com's selection box to highlight the area of the apparel that catches your eye, and the engine will go out to find other pieces of clothing with similar features (at one point, this included photos of celebrities upon which to focus, but those, evidently, are no longer part of the site).

The question is, does this functionality have any real use, or is it just a neat Web application? Does it increase the likelihood of shoppers being paired with what they will buy, or is it simply another Web 2.0 exercise that will fall to the wayside with the other cool-but-useless applications out there?

Shopping for clothes is not a main focus in my life, but regardless, I decided to take two test runs on Like.com in an attempt to find something that I might at least consider buying.

First, I tried to find an item I'm familiar with by using the interface to guide me from the home page to the particular item. Second, I used Like.com in an attempt to match me with something I had no need for or knowledge of previous to the search engagement. The results were interesting.

In the first experiment, I tried to find a popular brand of pants I had tried on (and not purchased) in a store last weekend: a pair of Levi's Low Boot Cut 527 Jeans. Like.com has a photo of a pair of men's jeans on its home page, so I began there, highlighting the upper part of the photograph that most matched the Levi's. The "Likeness" menu popped up, giving me one of three choices to apply to this visual search: Color, Shape, or Both. I chose Both.

The results were wide-ranging, to say the least. With approximately 1,800 results returned to me, I was no closer to my particular Levi's, much less any Levi's. After scrolling through several pages of results (already outside of the image search boundaries), I finally came upon a pair of Levi's. I selected that pair of jeans, hoping to narrow my search.

At that point, however, I was no longer offered the visual search interface. Instead, I was taken to a purchase page at Amazon.com for that particular pair of jeans. Search over. Not even close. I found no way of using the visual-search interface to narrow my results.

The second time around, I looked for a pair of running shoes. I'm not sure what I want, in that regard, so I clicked on the Men's Shoes category and found a running shoe that looked good to me. It was a tennis shoe style, and I selected the toe of the shoe with the visual search interface. Lo and behold, I got a page full of tennis shoes to choose from. I clicked on a pair of Converse that caught my eye and, like last time, was taken outside of the Like.com Web site (to Zappos.com purchase page this time). I didn't buy the sneakers, but they did fulfill the general requirements of what I was looking for--I liked them!

With these experiences in mind, I have to say that as a pure form of search, this type of visual search is extremely limited. Like.com could certainly make improvements to its ability to narrow a search using the tools, but even then, I suspect that sooner rather than later, a wall would be found.

While visual search is useful in some shopping searches--browsing searches as opposed to specific searches--it is only in tandem with traditional textual search that the tool has any real use. Still, it's an interface that could grow beyond a "cool app," especially if it is branded as just one search tool among many, rather than as a destination in its own right.

It could make for a nice complement to Google's search tool set; perhaps Google should acquire it?

Source: news.com.com

While many search marketers understand that there is a connection between online and offline marketing, some may not understand its full extent. According to a new study by Jupiter Research and search marketing agency iProspect, a surprising two-thirds of searchers are led to search on a given keyword as a result of offline marketing.

Specifically, 37 percent of respondents said that in the last six months, a television ad prompted them to conduct a search on a particular company, service or slogan, while 20 percent said a magazine or newspaper ad led them online. Twenty percent said a company's store drove them online, and 17 percent were influenced to search by a radio ad. A smaller number were influenced by outdoor ads.

Only 33 percent of respondents said they had not been influenced to search by any offline media in the past six months. For daily searchers, the influence of offline media was even more apparent, with only 28 percent of searchers saying they had not been prompted to search by any offline media in the past six months.

"Today, it's incumbent upon marketers to integrate search with their offline efforts," said Robert Murray, iProspect's president. "Quite simply, their offline messaging needs to be memorable and facilitate search, and their search efforts need to echo that messaging and integrate those keywords. The bottom line is that integration is no longer optional."

The most common keywords searched were company names, or names of products or services mentioned in an offline ad. In 44 percent of cases, the keyword was the company name. To take advantage of this, marketers should prominently feature company and product/service names in their offline advertising, and make sure their sites are organically optimized for those keywords, and they are showing up in search ads on those keywords as well.

If an offline ad features a tagline or slogan, search marketers should also ensure they are showing up in either organic or paid results for that as well, Murray said. "Offline ads have a short window of time to get the message out to the audience. People often tune out ads, but remember snippets of them. That makes search even more important," Murray said.

Besides driving traffic, offline media tends to drive quality traffic, according to Murray. The study asked those users influenced by offline media if they had ultimately made a purchase at that site as a result, and found that 39 percent had done so.

That 39 percent conversion rate is generally higher than the rate achieved by either search or offline channels alone, Murray said. While the offline ad gets attention and creates demand, it's search that can harness that demand and drive the potential customer to the company's site and turn it into a sale, he said.

"Sure, offline channels can drive traffic, but at the end of the day, it's pretty much meaningless if a purchase isn't made," said Murray. "Marketers want to know the pay-off. And the data from this study suggests that search and offline produce extremely impressive results."

While many marketers are aware of the relationship between online and offline media, it can still be difficult in some organizations to coordinate online and offline campaigns, due to the siloing still present in many marketing departments, Murray said. Many offline marketers don't want to give up any control to their online counterparts, but Murray has found that laying out the situation clearly can help both sides adopt more of a team attitude.

"Search is no longer an add-on consideration for marketers," said Murray. "It is front and center. And while it is a powerful channel on its own, it's clear that its efficacy is multiplied when combined with offline channels."

Source: clickz.com