Media

CARLSBAD, Calif.--Pay-per-click advertising has caused Google's ad revenue to explode, but it's also meant a mad rush for URLs, Stratton Sclavos, CEO of VeriSign, said at PC Forum, a conference taking place here.

A little while ago, there were only about 450,000 new requests a week. Now it's 7 million. A substantial portion of these URLs are essentially abandoned after five days or so, Sclavos said. The idea is that these URLs will crop up on searches and allow the owner to nab a portion of ad revenue.

Scott Matthews, CEO and sole employee of Bitty Browser, was having a pretty good afternoon Monday at PC Forum in Carlsbad, Calif. As he would demonstrate his software to a group of people, one or two of them would invariably say, "How come no one has thought of his before?"

Bitty Browser, the product, is essentially a browser within a browser. On a typical PC screen, its browser window is about three by three inches. When run on a news site, it can be used to play videos or conduct searches. The advantage is that people don't … Read more

If you're a movie-goer, you've likely watched one of the ominous pre-movie commercials from the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) that warn viewers against thieving films, whether by actively downloading an ill-gotten copy of "Star Wars" or by buying a DVD on the street.

If you've missed the ads, just know that the MPAA is on the warpath to catch film rogues with digital camcorders in theaters isles. (More than 90 percent of newly released films are stolen by someone making a digital copy with the use of handheld camcorder.)

The MPAA is now … Read more

Pornography isn't as big on the Internet as you might think, according to Don McLagan, CEO of Web analytics firm Compete, who's attending PC Forum in Carlsbad, Calif., this week. Pornography pages grew by 18 percent last year, but pages accessed on the Web overall grew by 36 percent. As a result, the overall share of porn in 2005 declined from 5.5 percent of all pages flipped online to 4.5 percent.

Can online avatars help you? Sometimes, asserted Philip Rosedale, creator of Second Life, a site where people create their own products a lead imagined lives.

In one experiment, a small island was set up for patients with Asperger's syndrome, he said at PC Forum taking place in Carlsbad, Calif. People with the disease are uncomfortable with social situations. The island created for them contained artificial, difficult social situations. Some patients said it helped them later in some aspect in real life, according to Rosedale.

There are roughly 150,000 participants on Second Life, he said.

Second Life is also … Read more

AUSTIN, TEXAS--These days, two of the hottest words in interactive Web circles are "folksonomy" and "tagging."

In general, the words are somewhat interchangeable and refer to the user-created keywords that bring context and meaning to online content. Examples are the tags that make the millions of photographs hosted by Flickr or the millions of bookmarked Web pages on Del.icio.us searchable and more usable.

But in a panel entitled "Beyond Folksonomies: Knitting tag clouds for grandma" at the South by Southwest conference here, a panel discussion with more than 200 in attendance was … Read more

YouTube is rethinking the way it decides whether material posted on the video-upload site violates its user agreement, according to reports.

Any video clip can be pulled if a certain number of people find the material objectionable. That's exactly what happened to a popular short film called "MySpace--The Movie," according to a story on AdAge.com, a trade publication.

The parody of the social networking site, MySpace, has drawn more than 4 million viewers since January and helped persuade MTV to sign the film's maker, David Lehre, to a development deal, Adage reported. Nonetheless, some people … Read more

Surfing the Web has topped watching TV in terms of Britons favorite pastime, according a Daily Mail story about a new Google survey.

The survey of more than 1,000 adults ages 16 to 64 found that on average, residents in the UK spend 164 minutes online every day compared to 148 minutes watching television, the story said.

Men are the biggest Net users, averaging 172 minutes a day compared to 156 minutes a day for women. Shopping is one of the most popular online activities. And Londoners spend the most time and the most money on the Web, the … Read more

Mark Pilgrim, author of "Greasemonkey Hacks: Tips & Tools for Remixing the Web with Firefox," gave a talk Tuesday afternoon at O'Reilly's ETech Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego to show off the promise (and peril) of the Firefox Web browser add-on, which is nearly at its one-year anniversary.

Greasemonkey is not a car mechanic, but a tool for manipulating and customizing the design of remote Web pages (without the knowledge of publishers) when sites are viewed through the popular open-source browser, Firefox. Pilgrim is an expert on the user JavaScript extension: He identified a major … Read more