Even though the pickings have been slimmer than Kate Moss, one in ten online consumers is watching TV online. According to the Conference Board’s Consumer Internet Barometer (per Multichannel News), people are watching just as much TV as before but watching sports, missed episodes and news online.

Just think how high that number would go if video content were aggregated and easy to find. Just as Napster et al forced the music publishers to license their music online, YouTube has done the same thing with TV video. If only they had been paddling together earlier!

News was the big winner in the survey, with 62 percent of respondents saying they caught up on the world's happenings online.

This reaffirms my belief that there is an untapped market for a video news site that takes the best from the news channels and puts it all on one customizable page, much like Yahoo or Google News.

You pick the news stories you want to see, and the service creates a virtual newscast that includes the latest footage on hurricanes, wars, fire, congressional scandal, Brangelina, sighting.. you know, all the important stuff from all the networks, plus throw in some Vloggers as well. Throw in a few commercials (every third video a 20 second spot), and boom, it's a business model.

Blinkx would be the best candidate to do it, but GooTube or YahooTV could also make it work. Let's get cracking.

A new report suggests that click-to-call technology may never get off the ground, but I'm a bit more optimistic. Analysts Pike and Fischer say that consumers won't warm to having sales folks call them on the phone based on Internet requests because of privacy concerns.

Privacy is a legitimate concern, but the point of being able to hit a button and have someone call you is because you are serious about a purchase and need to speak with someone live to answer a question. Telemarketers have already taken away most of our privacy anyway, so as long as companies promise not to sell your phone number or call you back unsolicited, that shouldn't be much of a concern.

The report acknowledges the upside:

There are immediately observable advantages to a click-to-talk offering — namely enhanced communication, the opportunity for improved customer service, an expedited sales cycle, and the opportunity for impulse shopping. Furthermore, click-to-talk technology could open up whole new areas of interactive broadband marketing by integrating popular forms of rich media advertising with a voice communications feature.

As more users get microphones and broadband access, privacy concerns could be avoided since you could start a VOIP connection directly. Also, companies could reduce their cost by having customer service or sales reps handle multiple customers through IM sessions. It's anonymous, easy to do, and people could provide instant feedback to several people at a time.

Searching for products online can be much faster than walking the aisles of, say, Home Depot or WalMart, and having a body on standby provides the real world advantage of being able to answer a question and close a sale. While click-to-call will be a niche service, the cost benefits to marketers means it won't go away soon.

Yes, I know, it was launched on the 10th of October and I'm just now getting around to writing something about it... Let's just say I don't jump on the bandwagon of every new press release. However, after prompting for some thoughts from a friend I decided to give Ask Mobile Search a try. The thing I like most about Ask's Mobile search feature isn't that it's available on my phone (all mobile search apps are), no it's something much simpler. It's the fact that I can actually test it out within my normal web browser from my computer before I ever try it out on my phone.

Now I know that may sound off the wall but hear me out. If you go to http://mobile.ask.com/ you can try out the service from your pc without getting your thumbs bruised or wanting to throw your phone against the wall. Google doesn't let you do that. You see Google took a different approach. They detect your browser with a fancy little javascript app (probably took an engineer a week to make it work with all browsers) and see if you're on a mobile phone browser... If you're not then you get kicked out to the Google Mobile Search "Marketing" page asking you to give them your mobile number so they can text/sms you the link to your phone. Of course they just want your phone number for marketing demographic stats purposes and put it under the pretense of making it easier for you to navigate to their mobile search from your phone.

Ask doesn't do that, they don't play games. If you want to see the size images that will be returned to your phone when you use their search results then you just go to their mobile search page and enter your query, that's it! It's that simplicity that allowed me to play with their mobile search platform before I ever opened up my phone.

Didn't Google build it's business model around simplicity?

ZotSpot is a new search engine that offers to pay users a nominal sum (or let them give the money to charity) for using the search engine -- and more importantly -- for getting their friends to use it.

I spoke with CEO Mark Davis, and he said that search engines can't compete on the quality of search results anymore, so they are competing on price by bettering the "free" search market with a payment plan. I'm not sure that I agree with that assessment -- engines that get clearly better results will gain an audience, although there is plenty of inertia that keeps people using Google and Yahoo instead of trying something else.

Davis says that if you refer 10 friends who each refer 10, who each refer another 10, you could make a few hundred bucks per year. I thought this could lead to people conducting bogus searches just to increase their commissions, but he said the payment algorithm focuses more on the number of referred people searching than the number of searches per person.

"It's a pyramid without the scheme," according to Davis.

Zotspot doesn't increase the payouts based on click-throughs either, so there is no incentive to disingenuously click on the ample amount of ads that populate the search results page.

I'm not sure how ZotSpot can compete financially with the big search engines considering they have to share some of the revenue generated by searches with the users. ZotSpot doesn't have it's own ad network either, so the company has to further share its proceeds.Davis is hopeful that world of mouth will help the company to grow.

Sometimes I hear about a new company and the light clicks on that their ideas make absolute sense and have a real chance at success in the market, like when I first saw a TiVo. This isn't the case with ZotSpot.

According to the Wall Street Journal (via MediaPost), MySpace and Facebook had fewer unique users than the month before, a bad sign for the social networking industry.

The slowdown has begun, and I expect both of these sites to start shedding users like a dog's summer fur. Concerns about privacy, spamming, and the fickleness of youth will cause people to move on to something else.

Social networking is a useful tool, but as I've said before, it will be incorporated into niches rather than be used as a destination itself. Publishers will create sites such as Edmunds.com's CarSpace that give their current audience a new way to communicate.

Instead of advertising on MySpace, Apple should create its own social network. Imagine the possibilities as the "they do no wrong" crowd pat each other on the backs about their wisdom and offer video editing tips or their latest iPod hacks.

MySpace will become like the mall to a teenager on Friday nights. "It's too crowded so nobody goes there anymore.

I guess I'm one of those guys that's too scared to move away from Microsoft Office and try something new (well, new to me at least) because I get scared when I think about the learning curve required to retrain my brain on a new office suite. However, I recently downloaded the beta of MS Office and just the retraining of my brain within it has been a chore. They've completely changed the UI on every application so I'm thinking now is as good a time as any to try something new.

Enter Open Office, of course it's not new but it's now 6 years old and has some pretty cool stuff going on. One such project is actually a contest. World Label is sponsoring a template and clip art design contest and has ponied up $5,000 USD in prize money. From the OpenOffice homepage...

"The Documentation Project is holding a competition for templates and clipart, and there is prize money! Worldlabel.com has set aside USD 5,000 for prizes. Everyone is eligible and everyone is encouraged to participate; visit the Documentation Project for more information. The contest end date is 31 October 2006; winners will be announced on 1 December 2006."

When I saw this I thought to myself that I just had to add some commentary, especially in light of some recent events surrounding business productivity. I mean think about it, Google now has Google Docs Spreadsheets (akin to Excel and Word), Basecamp is taking over the project management world (think MS Project with less fluff), Google pages & blogger pretty much own the old FrontPage market, Adobe Flash Paper is an easy replacement for PowerPoint and Microsoft has completely changed their interface for their Office Suite to make it look more user friendly (it just looks like confusion to me).

Due to those events and the fact that a long time ago I wrote an application (circa 2000 AD) for my first web development client that allowed her to store and manage her client contact information online and also allowed her to print mailing labels for each of them directly from her web browser by creating a pdf label template based on Avery labels. So the thing that really stuck out in my mind with this contest is that World Label has created a host of label templates for Open Office versions 1.1x and 2.0 Writer and is giving them away free of charge. I remember what a pain it was making all of the labels print in exactly the right position within the pdf template so I can appreciate the effort the WorldLabel guys put into this project... Not to mention they're really putting their money where their mouth is by also giving away $5 grand.

From WorldLabel's Open Office template page...

Download for free Blank label templates in .stw or .ott file format for Openoffice.org 1.1x and 2.0 version for Writer. Templates include CD and DVD. Avery® cross reference, a large selection of both square cornered and round cornernered labels for mailing, shipping and many other labeling uses. Oval and round labels templates. VHS, Diskette Templates and more. Ooo Writer labels templates will work on Openoffice.org program installed on Linux and other OS including Windows. These documents are XML Open Document Format (ODF).

Congrats to both Open Office and World Label for helping small businesses save money on software licensing and making them more productive all in one fell swoop.

Google's new custom search feature is a somewhat useful way for people to create search engines for their own sites or sets of favorite sites, but there are some holes to the product.

Do the AdWords advertisers really want their ads running on what could often be an internal-use sight? For small publishers, Co-op is an easy way to track the content you've created, but not exactly a way for the advertising companies to make cash.

The customization allows blocking of sites and clustering search across multiple sites which is fine if you are looking for reference material. But a big opportunity is being missed by not offering an advanced search feature for timely content -- namely news and blogs.

You can add news sites or blog to your search destinations, but the results are not in date order, so tracking what is happening now with your company or a competitor is difficult since you'd have to manually search for the most recent links. Hopefully Google will release another version optimized at news/blog search that will allow search timely information. I'd be an instant fan if they did.

I just got off the phone with Reena Jadhav, Conduit's CMO. The topic of the hour was of course her company and how they're actually growing quite rapidlly in the free, customizable toolbar space.

I must admit that the only reason I decided to schedule something with them was because their PR firm used TechCrunch as an example of an influential blog that was actually using their toolbar to promote the TechCrunch conference. However, I must look into this a bit further since Arrington isn't promoting the CrunchBar anywhere that I can see and the only reference to it and conduit that I could find was from a Google search. Here's the snippet Google had...

Our sponsor Conduit will be providing a custom toolbar for everyone attending and connecting virtually to the party. It is called CRUNCHbar, ...

Ah, mystery solved, Conduit is a product level sponsor of the TechCrunch New York event. I guess that means product placements can actually be used as endorsements, more on that later.

After getting a fairly thorough walk through of the product I can see why they have over (woops - numbers will be released November 6th) active users, most of which are actively using the toolbars. I'm still not completely sold on the idea of using a toolbar to build community but I can definitely see the value this brings to the table. My issue with it is that it's another thing to download, kind of like a plug in for Firefox. On the plus side, they're taking some big steps to deal with privacy and not report on any individual user level stats for the custom toolbar creators.

I'm not the foremost authority on the toolbar market (I've never tried to build one on my own and never will) but I can appreciate the simplicity with which Conduit has made creating a custom toolbar to engage your community uber easy. Conduit is to toolbars what blogger is to content management systems. It's that easy and you get stats to boot.

I think we should definitely keep an eye on them in the next 6 months to see if they can line up some key partnerships in the streaming and online video
space as well as other content partnerships cause that's what will take then to the next level, IMHO.

According to TechCrunch Digg has been talking to News Corp. and others about being acquired but hasn't found anyone willing to pay their asking price of $150 million.

It seems strange that today $150 million may seem like chump change when compared to MySpace or YouTube, but those sites had many more users and the potential for a business model beyond ad dollars.

What is Digg's value? Well, they have lots of eyeballs of assumingly educated users, and proprietary technology for rating articles posted on other websites. The site is a content aggregator, but the general idea could be cloned fairly easily, and I don't feel the "stickiness" that advertisers love.

So is a portal website with flat traffic and no unique content worth a Powerball-sized payout? Digg's audience likes the user-determined filtering, and anyone who gets Dugg certainly appreciates the traffic. But if a Yahoo or News Corp. were to buy them, would their be internal pressure to link to in-house websites more?

If Digg does find a taker, it could open the door to more aggregation/content sites being acquired, and indicate that the Web 2.0 craze will continue unabated. Should they remain independent and not grow much bigger, Digg could be an indication that some of the bloom is off the Rose, so to speak.

WalMart.com has rolled out a new, more user-friendly site design. While, I am not a big fan of Walmart I am a fan of their new design. This new layout is leaps and bounds better then their old one which you can see here . For starters, it doesn't feel as 'Walmarty' as the old site. By Walmarty I mean cheap and obnoxious, two qualities that are very prevalent among Walmart regulars. I could go on and on about new upgrades but I'll leave that to the more design knowledgeable folks and let you know what they left out.

I know almost anyone has seen that commercial where the advertising agencies all say "what would so and so do?" as the camera moves to the next larger advertising agency and when they get to the big global agency they look down and say "what would those guys at Hornstien do?" Well, Walmart should have taken a lesson from that commercial and asked the same question. Look at some of the smaller more succesful retail sites on the web and get inspiration. For example, every geek knows NewEgg.com as the best place on the web for computer related equipment, but one of the best features they have that Walmart forgot is product reviews. People want to know what other people think about products its one of the features that has made Newegg, Amazon.com, and CircuityCity.com so successful in their online adventures. They also need to remove their flash main content widget or at least cookie me so I don't have to see the "Take the Tour" every time I visit, which will be never again after this post.

Does anyone think this is an attempt at Walmart to change its' image to more of a say, Target? They can paint the entire building pink but Walmart will always be Walmart to me!

*Update*
Cingular.com just updated their page as well, its definitely a more web 2.0ish feel and if you've ever visited the site before hand, you'll be pleasantly surprised with the navigational changes which make worlds of difference.

For Courtney Love, 2005 was marketing Nirvana. The royalty checks going to her dearly departed husband's estate totaled $50 million last year, for the first time passing Elvis as the king of all dead earners, according to Forbes.

It is amazing that Cobain's heirs brought in more bucks than the Elvii clan, or perhaps his estate was just more aggressive in licensing his image to feed Courtney's bad habits. It is a sad passage of time that the grunge era has surpassed early rock and roll as the sentimental favorite of t-shirt and coffee mug vendors.

Rounding out the top ten corps(es) in this stiff competition were Charles Shulz, John Lennon, Albert Einstein, Andy Warhol, Dr. Seuss, Marilyn, and Johnny Cash (my pick to move up the list next year).

When it comes to raking in the royalties, you are better off dead.

Hollywood can't keep up with those crafty Bit Torrent users, so if you can't beat 'em, you may as well join 'em.

Bit Torrent users download more than 1 million movies per day, and the "service" has prompted InfoFilter to start charting the songs and videos that are the most downloaded.

And soon downloads will be even faster as networking companies are loading a Bit Torrent client directly into their routers.

Bit Torrent's execs say they want to offer a legit service and have been speaking to the movie studios about getting content deals. Although Time Warner may not be loaded with cash right now, it would be a good time to invest in the company and control the piracy and use the platform as a distribution for its Warner Bros. movies and AOL's Red video service which on Halloween will unleash the latest Tara Reid (a poor man's Kari Wuhrer) horror vehicle.

Piracy ain't right, but the demand will always be there, so Hollywood would probably make more money by having paid content available through Bit Torrent than trying to fight with lawsuits. Also, Bit Torrent should take the first decent deal to come along to prevent become the next Napster.

This paragraph in the terms of service (tos) for the new Google custom search application just cracks me up.

"GOOGLE MAKES NO EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, WARRANTIES OF TITLE OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, WITH RESPECT TO THE SERVICE AND BRAND FEATURES. THE SERVICE AND BRAND FEATURES ARE DISTRIBUTED AND PROVIDED ON AN "AS IS, AS AVAILABLE" BASIS. GOOGLE DOES NOT WARRANT THAT THE GOOGLE SERVICE AND BRAND FEATURES WILL MEET YOUR REQUIREMENTS OR THAT PERFORMANCE OF THE SERVICE WILL BE UNINTERRUPTED OR ERROR-FREE INCLUDING ANY ERRORS OR OMISSIONS IN THE SEARCH RESULTS OBTAINED THROUGH USE OF THE SERVICE. GOOGLE MAKES NO WARRANTY THAT CUSTOM SEARCH ENGINE WILL INCLUDE ALL DOMAINS SPECIFIED BY YOU..."

And then, just for good measure, they tell you what the max amount they'll compensate you is in the event the custom search engine craps out on you.

"...UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES SHALL GOOGLE BE LIABLE TO YOU FOR ANY AMOUNT EXCEEDING ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS ($1000.00)."

If you're Google, how do you generate a billion more pageviews a day as inventory for your biggest advertising revenue stream. Oh that's easy, you launch a customizable search engine for user web sites and start displaying your ads on it silly.

Niche publishers hope that they can have similar, albeit on a much smaller scale, success to YouTube by creating video sites aimed at vertical markets.

For example, companies are pursuing travel videos as a way to give a first hand look at vacation spots. A new site called Travelistic (via MediaPost) combines user-generated, company created and tourism board videos.

Similarly, Travelzoo is adding videos to its travel package website. Seeing some video from Joe Tourist of destinations could make all the difference in deciding where to go.

Travel is a perfect match for online video. For example, a quick video that shows that a discount hotel is actually in a seedy area could dissuade some travelers, while the view from a window overlooking the ocean could make the sale.

These companies should compensate travelers for submitting videos in the form of discounts on future travel. For example, I gambled on staying at the Hotel Del Sol in San Francisco recently, and it turned out to be a great place with modern rooms that were surprisingly quiet for the neighborhood. An unbiased video would have given me much more information than the user ratings I read.

Other likely areas for online video niches include life on campus, sports bloopers, and product review videos. What am I forgetting?

Many of you know who Jaffe is and read his JaffeJuice blog on a daily basis. He's been one of the bloggers on the forefront of monitoring, adding commentary and taking action on many of the issues affecting marketers and advertisers online today. With his keen sense of how the blogosphere has evolved and with a little help from some of his friends, he's launching a new kind of marketing company... Crayon. The official launch will be this Thursday but I'll post more in the coming days after I get him on the horn to answer a few questions on what he's really got up his sleeve.

If anyone has questions they'd like to ask Joseph Jaffe then just post them here as comments and I'll include them when I speak with him later.

Good luck to Jaffe and gang on the new venture, my eyes are pealed.

Canada's conservative government has joined the United States in seeking to ban online gambling, putting a further damper on advertising sales.

Last week legislation was introduced in Canada that would ban advertising online gaming in the country, which like the U.S. prohibits betting online, except for government-sanctioned horse racing, lotteries and casinos.

So while advertising in North America could lead to criminal prosecution, it isn't stopping people from advertising their toll free numbers for online gambling here, or from spamming.

But in reality, these ads will continue to appear online and in our inboxes as tracking down these ads and emails is too big a job for law enforcement, especially when most of the companies that are doing so are located offshore. Just consider how many emails an ads are still around for buying illegal prescription drugs online.

While the shift is definitely towards less advertising of online gaming today, as I said before, it may change over time.