AOL wants to dig for gold _ literally
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Dig this: AOL believes a renegade Internet spammer buried gold and platinum on his family's property in Massachusetts and wants to bring in bulldozers to search for the treasure and satisfy a $12.8 million judgment it won in federal court.
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John, TechWeb.com. The search wars rage on. It seems as if every large e-business company thinks that search is the key to building its business to the next level.
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A maverick prospector plans to scoop gold and silver from the bottom of the sea. Is it an environmental improvement or the beginning of a disaster? Plus: Nautilus Minerals' video calling card and a podcast with writer Joshua Davis from Wired magazine.
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It's a gold rush in the Amazon jungle, driven by the Internet.
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Aiming to put itself in the vanguard of the Internet travel business, America Online will invest an undisclosed amount in an upstart that threatens to lure customers away from Orbitz, Expedia, and Travelocity.
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America Online Inc., seeking to boost traffic to its free Web site and generate more advertising dollars as its paid subscriber base declines, said Thursday it is enhancing its search functions.
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By JAY FITZGERALD  The America Online gold-digging battle has reached a temporary stalemate, despite what appeared to be a tentative agreement last month to allow the Internet giant to search a Westwood property where a neo-Nazi scammer may have buried loot.
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If you search for Yahoo Microsoft, this page is the second hit. I like that of course. It's generating a fair amount of flow, since the combination of Yahoo and Microsoft is a pretty hot topic. Keeping the topic going, I think it's pretty amazing that Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo, but then again, which of all their web efforts has captured our imagination? At least Yahoo has Flickr, and when they try something new, we all try it with them (often with not the greatest results). The rambling continues... If Yahoo is into poison pills, try this one out.  Reserve 5 percent of Yahoo's common stock for blogger options. Put us to work to find new businesses for Yahoo, ones that are relevant to our world. When we find them, reward the bloggers with a significant upside stake in Yahoo's future, not the airy-fairy kind, but real stock that we can trade. Handled properly, it could raise shareholder value by much more than 5 percent. Just the kind of deal they pay you to do, oh Yahoo gods and board members.  Of course it'll never happen. It's an idea like the one I keep proposing for newspapers -- that they hire their public editors from the public, independent bloggers with no journalism experience, with no undue reverence for the institutions so revered by journos. They're going away, just like Yahoo is (sad but true). Now what will rise in their place? Imho, something that's home grown, with the integrity of the people, in our interest. The more they invite the public in, the more clued in they will be when we figure out where we want to go with news on the web. It's why I'm excited about the Obama campaign and why I keep giving to it (I'm up to $400 now). I'm excited because so many other people are excited.  I like his idea about tuition for public service for college students. It's so simple. People want to be involved, they want to use their energy and creativity to solve problems. In the 20th century we were couch potatoes. In the 21st we do it for ourselves.  The first tech company that fully embraces this, not just in the form of User Generated Content (what an insult) but by giving us power (that comes from stock) will rule the world. If Y! had the guts, it won't be long before they're making tender offers to buy out Ballmer.  BTW, I think I understand why Ballmer wants Yahoo! When Yahoo engineers wake up they program stuff like Yahoo Live, which is pretty cool and runs on the web, and while it steals ideas from smaller companies, it adds some pretty cool stuff of its own. When Microsoft engineers wake up they program stuff like Vista, a multi-year, multi-billion dollar waste of money, time and customer goodwill. They can't do another Vista without wrecking the franchise. Now the question is -- where do they go for growth? That's what Yahoo is for.
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America Online is preparing to offer free, Web-based e-mail to the general public in an effort to counter mounting competition from Yahoo, MSN and Google.
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AOL's decision to stop charging broadband Internet users for access to its services confirmed that the money-making model for online search engines is rooted in advertising, analysts say.
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In both a literal and symbolic move, AOL announces a move to New York and a new focus on the online-advertising market. But is it too little too late?
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(InfoWorld) - AOL needs all the Internet traffic it can get, but it is struggling with the fading popularity of Netscape.com, for many years one of the Web's most popular destinations. AOL doesn't break out how much Netscape.com contributes to its revenue but calls the property a valuable one. "Netscape has a loyal community of users and is an important part of the AOL Network," an AOL spokeswoman said. Soon, AOL will restore Netscape.com to a traditional Web portal format, 15 months afterÂ turning it into a social news site, a change that, instead of boosting the site's popularity, hurt it. Still, one can't blame AOL for the attempt to give Netscape.com a new lease on life as a Web 2.0 site. Traffic to the site had been on a years-long slide. This raises the question: Will switching Netscape.com back into a portal turn the tide? With AOL fighting tooth and nail for every online ad dollar, the performance of the once mighty Netscape.com matters. "If you have a brand that has some cachet or currency and carries recognition, it's logical to use it," said James Goss, a financial analyst with Barrington Research. Still, Netscape.com's past glories will not magically draw people back to it. "It's probably not worthwhile to invest heavily on the site unless they have a coherent strategic plan for it," said industry analyst Greg Sterling of Sterling Market Intelligence. AOL has bet the farm on online advertising as it sheds its old subscription-fee business model. It's a years-long process that continues full-speed ahead withÂ this week's announcement of AOL's plan to move its headquarters to Manhattan and the integration of its ad networks into a single platform. But with its online ad revenue growth a disappointing 16 percent in the second quarter, AOL could sure use the traffic that Netscape.com used to draw even several years ago. An examination of Netscape.com's traffic patterns since AOL acquired Netscape Communications in March 1999 for $4.2 billion tells a story of consistent decline. As critics have pointed out over the years, this is true not only for the Netscape.com portal but also for the company's other products, in particular its browser. "AOL has never known what to do with Netscape. They squandered that asset," Sterling said. "Eventually, the bottom dropped out." In November 1999, Netscape.com had 20.8 million unique visitors in the U.S., reaching close to a third of the country's Internet users, according to comScore. By December 2003, Netscape.com's unique visitors had dropped to 18.8 million, and its reach had plummeted to 12.4 percent of the U.S.'s Internet users, according to comScore. Things kept deteriorating, and by January 2005, Netscape.com had little over 17.5 million unique visitors and a reach of 11 percent. In the next nine months, Netscape.com suffered a massive drop in unique visitors. In October 2005, the portal had 12.9 million unique visitors, and its reach among all Internet users in the U.S. -- 169 million at that point -- had fallen to 8 percent. This page-view graph, based on data compiled by Alexa Internet, shows the erosion in Netscape.com's traffic between early 2002 and today. "It's an interesting illustration of the waning of a very strong Internet brand," Sterling said. As tragic as 2005's traffic numbers look compared with what Netscape.com had been, they would probably elicit tears of joy from AOL officials today. In August 2007, Netscape.com drew 6.1 million unique visitors, down from 10 million in August 2006, according to comScore. The AOL spokeswoman said part of the traffic erosion of the past year is due to the fact that starting in the third quarter of 2006, Netscape Mail was migrated to AIM Mail so Netscape.com lost those visits. Also, in October 2006, the site lost the traffic from the Netscape Connect dial-up access service, which was broken out into its own property. She couldn't quantify how many unique visits the loss of those two components cost Netscape.com, but it's probably fair to say that AOL had much higher expectations for the site's traffic after its social news transformation. Netscape.com drew 61 percent fewer visits in August of this year than in August of last year, a period when visits to social news rival Digg.com increased 142 percent, according to Hitwise Pty. Ltd. In other words, the problem hasn't been the social news format, which lets readers submit and share links to stories as well as vote on, comment on, and rank those articles. Netscape.com simply didn't gain the expected traction with people who frequent these sites. AOL acknowledged this when it announced the plan to turn Netscape.com into a portal again. AOL isn't giving up on the social news site now housed at Netscape.com. Last week, AOL announced that the social news site will be rebaptized Propeller and moved to Propeller.com. However, Propeller could face an uphill branding battle, considering the history of its Web address. According to cached pages found at the Internet Archive, Propeller.com belonged to PropHead Development, which specialized in digital set-top boxes. PropHead was acquired by AOL Time Warner -- now known as Time Warner Inc., parent company of AOL -- in 2000. Archive.org's last cached snapshot for the Propeller.com address dates from January 2002. At press time, Propeller.com is empty of content. As a portal, Netscape.com will feature news articles handpicked by its editors instead of visitors, along with a search engine and links to AOL and Netscape services and content. Netscape.com's forthcoming format is at an alternate address. Basically, it looks a lot like it did before its social news transformation. One change: AOL plans to establish links between Netscape.com and Propeller.com. It remains to be seen if the latest plan to revitalize the once mighty Netscape.com will propel it to new heights or see it sputter into oblivion. What's clear is that AOL once had a portal jewel in its hands. "AOL really wasted an opportunity when they bought Netscape. They didn't do enough to leverage the site's traffic and brand. They basically sat on it. It was a strategic blunder," Sterling said.
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The search engine company gets ready to unveil a program to do just that. Also: Make CDs while you order at Starbucks & hellip;. Nokia takes a Wall Street hit & hellip;. and more.
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Buys Buy.at America Online (AOL) moved to prop up its web ad operation yesterday with the purchase of online affiliate marketing network Buy.at.â¦
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An AOL user who logged on to check his online financial portfolio was given access to someone else's data and is calling on AOL to correct what he sees as a security breach. AOL acknowledged an "issue," but said corrective action has been taken.
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Q: One thing we want to do next year is more online advertising, but I don't know much really about how that works. Could you explain?
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AOL's move to New York City is based largely on the hope that by getting closer to advertisers, it will secure a bigger share of an online advertising market that's dominated by its rivals.