Social networks and online communities have little impact on online retail sales according to a report from JupiterResearch, "Us Retail Consumer survey, 2007."

In olden times, the pope would often crown a new king.  These days, that duty sometimes falls to Facebook – iLike’s recent success has been attributed almost entirely to that one site.

Independent filmmakers got a leg up today as Amazon and Microsoft set off a joint venture called the 1,000 HD DVD Indies Project, designed to make it easier to produce and distribute movies in the HD DVD format.

The redesign to AOL Video integrated its Truveo video search technology with the updates delivered by the website.

Setting up an online campaign can be complicated, and it’s hard to know where to begin. Lately, social marketing and blog marketing have been the buzz words, but if you’re just getting started, just like in anything, really, you should start with the basics. And the basics of an online campaign involves a tightly targeted search campaign.

When planning and improving a website, it is important to know how people view websites. Knowing this will help you to design your site in such a way, that people will be able to find and do what they want on your website.

How to describe visitor behaviour?

Before changing the site layout, it is important to understand the nature of human behaviour on the website. It helps that certain known patterns apply to human behaviour, such as:

AOL has launched a new version of its sports site that will focus on user content and blogs.

The new sports site will be similar to the blog format used on celebrity gossip site TMZ, which is a joint partnership of AOL and Telepictures Productions. Along with the Web 2.0 features the sports site includes sports news, columnists, scoreboards and user-generated video.

Four major domainer firms are being sued for filling (otherwise unused) sites with ads.  One other corporation – Google – has also been named in the class action complaint; Google provided the ads.

Advertising that presents the most relevant ad to an individual viewing web content represents a way for Yahoo to improve its ad performance.

A Google blogger posted a pro-healthcare industry item that criticized filmmaker Michael Moore’s new film, while suggesting Google ads as a way to counter negative publicity.

When it comes to website analytics, bounce rate is as dead sexy as it gets when it comes to statistics.

Whatever happens with web radio from this point forward will depend on whatever concessions webcasters can wrest from SoundExchange and the record labels that back it.

Has the word "YouTube" become synonymous with phrases like "voice of the people" and "civil right"? The reason I ask is that though it’s not abundantly clear what, exactly, YouTube has to do with New York City film permits, the name was invoked as if it were an argument stopper.

I’m not a New Yorker, so the news that the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theater and Broadcasting is making regulations tougher is of no concern to me. I cover YouTube, and sites like it, so the keyword popped up.

I saw an old episode of “Cheers” the other night; in it, a woman repeatedly sang her phone number to Frasier, and (much to Lilith’s dismay) Norm, Cliff, and Woody took up the tune.  Believe it or not, this does (sort of) relate to eBusiness – a new study found that “Multiple Online Ad Placements Impress.”

Michael Eisner’s web series "Prom Queen" is now available as a full length download from Amazon Unbox.

"Prom Queen" launched in April on MySpace and is an 80 episode series that are 90 seconds long. The series can be purchased from Amazon for $9.99 to own and to rent for 30 days for $3.99.

Let’s hope the FCC is smarter than this. Wait, which FCC? Oh, crap. In a filing with the FCC, lobbyists for NBC Universal recently made this anti-piracy claim (paraphrased): Piracy hurts corn farmers and farm equipment manufacturers.

Google and Yahoo do good deeds on a weekly basis.  Microsoft and Ask also make the occasional selfless act.  And now Project Red Stripe, a team within The Economist Group, has unveiled Lughenjo.  Lughenjo is intended to be “[a] business that does good, and returns a profit.”

U.S. search activity surrounding the Apple iPhone reveals that Americans have performed an average of 274,000 iPhone searches per week since the start of the year according to comScore.

We’ll try to get through this with as few inappropriate cracks as possible. The porn star/blogger Barbie Cummings, the one who a little while back opted out of illegal drug charges will still have to pay her speeding ticket.

An anonymous Wikipedia user has admitted to editing the Wikipedia page of professional wrestler Chris Benoit, in which it said that Benoit’s wife had passed away

YouTube appears to be having a streak of good luck – first we learned that a ban in Thailand had been lifted, and now Google’s video-sharing site has won a court case in Brazil (this case had also, as it so happens, resulted in a block).

Powerset, a company that focuses on “natural language search,” recently discussed its to-be-released-in-September search engine, and there’s some very interesting stuff going on.  Very interesting, and very hard to understand.

Not enough people wanted to pay for CNN Pipeline, the news network’s video service. Instead of killing it off, Pipeline will be integrated into CNN.

Richard Whitt, Washington Telecom and Media Counsel Google has put together a three-part blog post outlining Google’s approach to Net Neutrality, what the company feels is okay for broadband providers to do, what’s not okay, and where they have misled the public.