Many search industry observers see click fraud as the number one threat to the growth of the Internet economy. An even greater threat has emerged one that not only places the entire infrastructure of the Internet at risk, it also threatens non-Net users. Read more…

Jack Kilby, the man whose invention of the integrated circuit in 1958 led to the power of today’s microchip, died Monday at age 81. Shortly after being hired at Texas Instruments, Kilby designed a wafer thin crystal platform (the chip), which served to connect components such as transistors, capacitors, and resistors that were previously connected by wire into a single processing unit. This allowed for greater processing speeds and, most importantly, mass production of microchips. Read more…

This week, Google leaked information about another very smart thing they’ve done. Google is about to introduce an online payment system to help facilitate e-commerce. While search engine observers speculated that Google was going head to head with Pay Pal, CEO Eric Schmitt was quick to dispel rumours that they were gunning for Pay Pal. In an interview with Reuters, Schmitt said that Google was not going to offer a “person-to-person stored-value payments system” like PayPal’s, where money is briefly stored in trust during the transfer. Read more…

Pioneering Internet marketer, Corey Rudl, aged 34, died in an auto racing accident yesterday morning. As the founder and CEO of the Internet Marketing Center, Corey was credited with creating enormous wealth through lengthy action-orientated website marketing pitches. His writing style has been studied, copied and used by literally millions of other webmasters over the years. The Internet Marketing Center generated over $7.5M in revenues last year and Corey often claimed to have made over $40M worth of Internet sales in the course of his decade long career. Read more…

Twenty years ago, the lead singer of the Irish punk band The Boomtown Rats, Bob Geldof organized two concurrent concerts, one at Wembley Stadium, London, the other at JFK Stadium in Philadelphia, to send money and food to famine stricken Ethiopia. Known as Live Aid, the concerts were a follow-up to a global effort on the part of recording artists through the UK , US and Canadian Band-Aid recordings. On July 2nd of this year, musicians around the world will band together to do it again with five simultaneous concerts planned for London, Berlin, Rome, Paris and Philadelphia. Read more…

Bill Gates is blowing smoke at Google again. Twice this week Gates has said nasty things about Google. Yesterday he was sounding sort of high-school churlish with his statement, “Google is still perfect; the bubble is floating, and they can do everything. You should buy their stock at any price. We had a 10-year period just like that.” Read more…

They say that everything old becomes new again. This adage is proving true in the search engine world as well with Google adopting a personalization plan that makes it look a lot like Yahoo and other search portals. Designed to allow Google users access to its various search tools, the portal displays Gmail, Google News, and Google Maps (labeled Driving Directions). It also calls US Movie Listings (by zip code), stock tickers, weather information, Wired News headlines, a quote of the day (from The Quotes Page), word of the day (from Dictionary.Com), and headlines from the NYTimes, Slashdot and the BBC. There are currently no selections following subscribed Google Groups or Google News Alerts. Read more…

Search Engine Marketing is a sensible vocation. Driven by many of the same basic tenets that inform the traditional marketing sector, the goal is to be sure one’s clients’ products are among the first people think of when looking for that certain something those clients create. In the olden days it was all about placement, positioning and repetition. Elaborate campaigns involving radio, television and print would be conceived and executed with the goal of establishing a foothold for new products in the households of the nation or solidifying the stability of a pre-existing brand. Those olden days may be, like so ’80′s, in relation to the crazed new world that search brings however, humans being humans, the ideas of an older generation often remain the ones that play best on the Internet today. Read more…

Toronto is the largest city in Canada and the fifth largest in North America . There are more people in this city than there are in the entire province of British Columbia. It is also my home town so I was more than pleased to be asked to speak at the Toronto Search Engine Strategies Conference again this year. Read more…

Adobe Systems Inc. has announced an agreement to purchase Macromedia for approximately $3.4Billion in stocks.

Adobe and Macromedia both make software for the creation of web documents. Adobe’s most famous product is the document security software Acrobat. It also makes the popular website editing software GoLive, and image editors Photoshop and Illustrator. Read more…