The appeal of local search to people wanting to buy comes from a basic need to control their environment.

Viacom owned MTV Networks has partnered with five online video services in an effort to expand its online presence.

The word that was made famous a few years ago, now seems to be a necessary tactic for marketing.

“In today’s world, just about anybody can record their message, whether it’s educational, entertaining, or whatever, and get it disseminated to millions and millions of people at almost no cost,” said KFC Blanchette of Podchick.com and Skydivergirls.com.

At this point, filling a fallout shelter with food and cash may be the safest approach to 2008′s financial markets.  Failing that, though, Piper Jaffray thinks some of the stronger Internet corporations should provide a safe haven.

If a company’s big enough, a site outage lasting only five minutes is an embarrassing issue.  "Over 12 hours" is pretty terrible, then, and this is the amount of time for which Blockbuster Online ceased to work.

Online sales for pizza chain Domino’s rose 17.6 percent over the holiday period.

The makers of the Firefox browser have a subtle shift at the top of the organization, with former CEO Mitchell Baker asking Lilly to take the CEO title.

Microsoft has made an offer to acquire Fast Search & Transfer of Oslo that values the company at $1.2 billion.

CEO Jerry Yang told the CES 2008 crowds about Yahoo’s plans to make its Mail client a social tool with all the widgets one could want.

Fake Businesses

Today I came across an AdWords ad for an automated ebook business model website. Their screenshot highlighting their Paypal account was:

• hosted on another site
• named powersell_paypal2.jpg
• did not show payments but showed withdrawals

Fake Business Statistics

A lot of (mis)marketing techniques are more covert though, through the use of

The mobile web is not just the playground for big Internet firms like Yahoo and Google. The federal government has access to its resources available to mobile browsers too.

One of the more entertaining aspects of the entire paid links debate is Google is pretty quick to dole out the punishment, even though in many cases they haven’t taken the time to get their own house in order.

Internet visitors to Presidential candidate websites from New Hampshire have made Mike Huckabee and Barack Obama their favorite Republican and Democratic destinations.

Remember Barabbas? That’s why we don’t let the mob make judicial decisions anymore. Awful things tend to happen. These days, rather than a formal public gathering, a social network is all that’s really needed to stir up the masses.

Hackers turn the tables on the talk show host “Top Gear” who made an outrageous claim that no one could do anything evil if their banking information was stolen.

The humor part comes in that when he checked his bank account, someone had done a 500 pound (1000 dollar) donation to diabetes UK.

Just by looking at their names, you’ll be able to guess one thing that Hispanic PR Wire, LatinClips, and Hispanic Digital Network have in common.  By looking at the title of this article, you learned another, but we’ll repeat it here: all three companies have been acquired by PR Newswire.

By 2010, 35 percent of online banking households will be using mobile banking, up from less than 1 percent today according research firm Celent.

Mobile banking will be appealing to 18- to 25-year-olds, or Generation Y. They will be early adopters of mobile banking with 40 percent indicating that mobile services will be a factor in their choice of bank.

I’ll admit: from a design standpoint, it looks decent.  Also, in terms of text, all the right words are evident: "Blog," "Podcasts," "Videos," "Our Thoughts/Your Thoughts."  Still, there are reasons to be suspicious about GM’s new community site, GMnext.

Be prepared for a spike in keyword prices, if Didit’s Mark Simon is right. The reason: insider data trading among "the Big Three" Google, Yahoo and Microsoft due to recent acquisitions.

TiVo has announced that its users will be able to select video from the Internet for playback on televisions through its digital video recording service.

The new feature, unveiled at the International Consumer Electronics Show, will allow subscribers to use "Season Pass" to record video content available on Real Simple Syndication, or RSS feeds. The online videos could range from broadcast nightly newscast to more specialty videos pulled from blogs or independent Internet sites.

I created a new site on Friday, and by Saturday exactly 24 hours later it was in Google’s Index. I posted about this just over a month ago in my post, 7 Steps to Get Your New Site Indexed in 24 Hours.

I had a lot of comments about whether or not Adwords was necessary, so I thought I’d try it again without running Adwords this time. Here’s how it all played out:

Things are looking up for Pluck.  Things are looking so good, in fact, that the social media company has reportedly decided to sell itself, and has set $75 million as a target price.