Our visionary leader Jason predicted a year ago that RSS to e-mail solutions would be a growing trend, and all indications are that the trend will continue.

Blue Sky Factory acquired RSSFWD, a free service for forwarding any RSS feed to your e-mail account. RSS reader companies Attensa and NewsGator have developed add-ins for viewing RSS feeds directly in Outlook for people who prefer to use e-mail for browsing.

RSS readers are simple and convenient to use, but running another application is a turn off for many users, and as SearchMarketingStandard points out, many folks aren't comfortable with RSS readers, so offering an e-mail service is a great way to expand your audience.

Once again new technologies don't replace the old -- they merely enhance them.

One of Google's "big" ideas announced this week is "universal search" that integrates results from news, images and video. But dumping these results into a pile and calling that an innovation falls short of satisfying users.

For universal search to be a hit, Google should distinguish areas of the results page for each type of results and modify their presentation based on the nature of the search. Also, Google's customization features should allow you to control the quantity of each type of results that are featured.

If the keyword is a person, entity, or event that is current, then news results should get equal placement with the "reference" results such as the organizations home page or a fan site. Or, if keyword is someone/something that is dead and gone, such as Charles Darwin or the League of Nations, then news is probably of secondary interest, and the algorithm should know better. Instead of placing all results one after another, Google could split the results page into columns so that news and images are all at the top of the page.

Speaking of Darwin, results should be grouped together so that the results surrounding the person, the city in Australia, the awards and the software platform are all together.

Finally, users should be able to customize the results for each category. Newshounds care less about the Apple home page, while students might want to see more of the Wikipedia and other reference entries. Finally, Google needs to integrate video into its news search. You should be able to choose to read or see the latest news from the Gaza strip, and today video news is lumped into general video search.

I was scrolling through my RSS feed and stumbled upon Rebecca's post comparing the top image search engines but I think she left a couple out. Flickr and Photobucket. Like a lot of my other searches these days, I find the best results coming from sites not named Google, Yahoo or MSN. Image searching is no difference.

Flickr is my choice for image search for several reasons. Its quick, the images are fresher (almost like a blog search), an although there are not as many images as the major engines have in their image searches, the quality of the images is much higher. Another bonus is that I don't run across missing images or pages which happens fairly often with the other image search choices.

Photobucket is along the same lines except their interface is more traditional and not as convenient albeit they do have more images for a lot of younger generation searches i.e. Rebecca's American Idol example.

Rebecca used American Idol's Jordin Sparks as her image search example, now compare these results to the ones she posted:

Flickr results for Jordin Sparks
Photobucket results for Jordin Sparks

If someone wants to take my idea of creating an image search thats scours all the major image sites, we'd really have a quality image search, just give me some credit for the idea. ;)

ABI Research agrees with moi: Online video only gets content companies so far; the big money will come when your video clip can be seen on televisions.

The biggest challenge for online video providers and consumer platform companies today is bridging to the TV," says ABI Research director Michael Wolf. "Over the next few years new solutions from the likes of Apple, Netgear, and Sony will help cross this divide, making à la carte video download and viewing much easier. That doesn't mean this transition will be an easy one: factors such as video quality, pricing of content, and technical glitches will persist for some time."

ABI Research expects that of the contenders for watching Web video on the TV -- DVRs, media boxes such as AppleTV, or game consoles -- consoles will be the biggest generators of revenue. They may be right, but DVRs will be highly competitive. I just don't see why you'd want a third box like AppleTV if your DVR or console can accomplish the same thing.

Within a few years you won't be able to differentiate between the video that came from the TV network or the Internet publishing company, and most TV networks will have an Internet arm. Just as today it doesn't matter if we watch a show from USA Networks or Fox, in the future we'll be watching shows from Discovery Channel Online alongside of Disney and smaller publishers.

This is shift towards on demand programming stored locally will be the biggest thing to hit TVs since cable, and will be even bigger.

Say goodbye to lining up with all the tweens outside the megaplex on Saturday night. Comcast will offer blockbuster movies as video on demand during their opening weekends.

Theater owners are aghast at the prospect of losing their monopoly over theatrical releases, but they don't have a right. Here in the home of the free we should be able to choose the experience that best suits our tastes.

Comcast will charge a hefty fee ($30 or more) for people to watch a movie at home, but that seems a bargain when you compare it with the cost of buying some refreshments along with a couple of tickets.

Most people will continue to see movies where the "big screen" experience is important. However, some people (especially those with small kids or those annoyed by obnoxious fellow movie watchers) might prefer to gather the family or a few friends to watch together.

Theater operators don't have right to expect a share of the revenue from any Comcast VOD service. They don't make the movies.

With DVDs now available close to the theatrical release dates, the shift to simultaneous home delivery of movies is on, and there's no turning back.

Launching a business has been increasingly complicated by the Internet. You can't just think of a catchy name and see if it is also being used in your city or state; the domain name (or some close derivation) has to be available.

This is why so many companies are launching using made up words such as "blinkx" or "skype" or words from other languages such as "Nau."

Anthony Mitchell at Ecommerce Times has 10 helpful brand hints including several recommendations regarding domain names. He hates using dashes in the middle of a URL, and says that only "dot coms" and "dot nets," can be taken seriously.

Mitchell also warns against violating the rules of grammar or using "i" or "e" before a word. I agree, "i" and "e" seems trite these days since it is assumed that the Internet and ecommerce are part of any business. Replacing "s" with "z" to be hip is quickly entering this realm as well.

Companies should be expected to pay heavily for combinations of common words to get the domain name rights to new brands if they want to be taken seriously.