It’s officially over folks. We are going back to slide rules and abacuses. Throw away your computers because there is a report that in the first 23 days of November online sales overall is off – gulp- 4%. That’s right 4%.

Since PC Magazine is for the tech crowd the announcement that the publication (can’t call it a magazine anymore I guess) would cease printing a hard copy and be a strictly online operation isn’t a surprise.

Want to know how to reach female shoppers online? Well a recent study might just give you a bit more of an insight into how.

A study by Microsoft with Ogilvy Chicago and Mindshare has given us some insight into the behavior of women online.

Beth Uyenco, Global Research Director of Microsoft’s Advertisers and Publisher Solutions explains more:

As the news continues to pour in and the news media works hard to sell their wares (meaning the more terrible the news the more people pay attention) there are more victims to be counted in the carnage. This time the targets are the ‘darlings’ of the new world advertising and marketing including web video, mobile phones, gaming and virtual worlds.

Incredible, I know, but for the third time in two days, MySpace does something newsworthy. Today, they topped them all, and they just might have revolutionized music online—little, if any, exaggeration.

Bookselling chain decides competing with Amazon.com on book sales will be a better prospect than the now-ended partnership with the online retailing giant.

The company’s Exchange and SharePoint products up the stakes in the competition for businesses and their employees, to serve their technology needs with hosted services.

Despite the absence of much good stuff, in at least one sense, 2007 wasn’t bad – on a year-to-year basis, total advertising spending for the first three quarters was almost flat, down only 0.1 percent from the previous period.  Furthermore, things continue to look positive for online segments, as Internet spending increased 15.9 percent.

In case you haven’t noticed, I’m a little obsessed with online reputation management.

Here are some numbers about blogging and social networking sites according to Nielsen Online. They just released November’s numbers on the top 10 social networking sites. The biggest gainers are Flixster (where you share movie reviews) and LinkedIn, a social network for professionals.

Looks like Google is having a contest to ask students across the world to help local business’ become more optimized in the Google SERPs: 

Register your class for the Google Online Marketing Challenge

Do we need to change our entire campaigns to capitalize on universal search? Find out what you can do to better dominate the universal SERPs and grab searchers’ attention.