Today I’ve seen two websites using drop shadowson the Adsense box. Against the TOS? I don’t know, I’m going to contact Google about it. It seems to me it could be argued either way. I certainly wouldn’t call it abusive. It draws attention to the ad, but it would be hard to argue that there are any “trick clicks” resulting from it. Another question, does a drop shadow statistically improve the clickthrough rate?

Judge for yourself — there is a thread over at Digitalpoint right now where a few people are discussing their results. Subigo documented his results, which ended up with 15 interviews, including 3 TV and 5 radio.

A press release isn’t a magic bullet. You still have to write about something the media is interested in & write it appropriately. As a general rule, the headline should sum up your main point, and it should read from most important information to least important details. Kind of like the opposite of a joke — the punchline comes first, or else its going to get passed over.

Here is another one from Paidcontent — Yahoo just bought social bookmarking site del.icio.us. No word on the price. But, judging by the fact that Yahoo had tried launching similar services themselves with minimal success, I’m going to guess they paid quite a bit.

On an interesting note — its pretty obvious they have an absolutely wierd domain name. The question is, did the domain name hurt, or help them?

This isn’t related to web publishing, but it is amusing. An employee at a Japanese bank made a typing error and accidently sold a few too many shares of stock in his company on the Tokyo Stock Exchange — $223 million too much.

Apparently this isn’t the first time something like this has happened — “A trader at UBS Warburg, the Swiss investment bank, lost £71 million in seconds while trying to sell 16 shares in Japanese advertising giant Dentsu at 600,000 yen each. He sold 610,000 shares at six yen each”

If you were a trader or a bank how much money would you spend on software to prevent this sort of thing happening? If I was a programmer in the financial industry right now, I’d be thinking of a solution and how I could make money from it. It is pretty scary that a single employee could do this much damage to a company simply on accident.

Makes me glad I’m in an industry where a typing mistake means edit->undo.

From Paidcontent.org — Daily Mail offers $83 million to buy the company that owns Primelocation.com. The market for online real estate sits has been on fire lately. I suspect that print publisher’s concerns over the drop off in classified advertising is playing a big motivating factor here.

In an interesting move, online publisher Weblogs Inc launched a new blog — WoW Insider to follow to rapidly growing online role playing game World of Warcraft. Weblogs Inc currently runs a very well known gaming blog, Joystiq.

I might be just giving this a wild guess, but perhaps this has something to do with the bidding rate for the keyword “World of Warcraft” which is higher than average games due to the game’s massive economy of trading real world money for in-game gold and items.

From Paidcontent - Friends Reunited was purchased for $300 million by British broadcaster ITV. The payment is partially dependant on future performance. They currently have 15 million registered users and 1 million paying users.

First the AFP sued Google over Google News, now book publishers are going after them over Google Print.

This isn’t exactly new either — anyone remember MP3.com’s RIAA fiasco?

In a statement, specifically aimed at Google News (and possible Google Print as well) the head of the European Publishers Council revealed that he believes people are going to pay for news content, as opposed to the domination of free ad-supported news today.

“It is fascinating to see how these companies ‘help themselves’ to copyright-protected material, build up their own business models around what they have collected, and parasitically, earn advertising revenue off the back of other people’s content”

Are these guys nuts for not only turning down free traffic, but spending millions on legal fees in the process?

I’ve been an internet user for over a decade (Jeez, I wish I had thought about making money online wayback then.)

One question I’ve asked myself over the years is how long do online communities last? There are communities which used to be huge which are either dead or are only small reflections of their past selves. There was a time when Geocities dominated the web. Who uses it today? Everyone uses Myspace or some other social networking blogging site.

The same question can be posed about MMORPG (massively multiplayer online roleplaying games.) Originally this “genre” was solely populated by the text based MUD. Then along came Ultima Online, then Everquest, now World of Warcraft. Interestingly Ultima Online is still alive and kicking — and its doing pretty damn well. Unlike Asheron’s Call, Ultima Online’s owners have cared for their game, provided updates and new content year after year.

When owners neglect their online communities users go elsewere. As pointed out over at Shoemoney, the once titan WebmasterWorld has been overtaken by Digitalpoint forums in terms of traffic. Could this have anything to do with the owner banning Google’s bots from the site and no providing a search function? Perhaps.

If you have built a big community online don’t grow complacent. If you want thatrevenue stream 10, 15, or even 20 years from now your community has to be nutured and cared for.

Fed up with Spread Firefox? Then try Spread Internet Explorer. (By the way, I’m a proud user of Firefox, and have been through several name changes way back when.)