NY Times Company plans to utilize new website acquisition - About.com - to diversify its current online advertising through “cost per click” ads and marketing their products to About.com users that are demographic variants to NY Times users.

Full article is below…

The Times Company Acquires About.com for $410 Million
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE

Published: February 18, 2005

he New York Times Company announced yesterday that it would acquire About Inc. and its Web site, About.com, from Primedia Inc. for $410 million.

Times Company officials said the acquisition would add a fast-growing, highly profitable Web site to the company’s portfolio and would increase the company’s revenue from the expanding online advertising business.

“This deal provides a very attractive return on our investment going forward, and I feel very comfortable standing up in front of shareholders and telling them that,” said Leonard P. Forman, chief financial officer of the Times Company.

By adding About’s 22 million monthly users to the Times Company’s 13 million monthly users - from The New York Times, The Boston Globe and more than 40 other Web sites - the company said it would have the 12th-largest presence on the Internet.

“This scale is important as content companies compete for market share in readership and advertising,” said Martin A. Nisenholtz, named by the Times Company yesterday as senior vice president for digital operations.

About.com uses a network of about 500 experts to write online about hundreds of specialty topics, from personal finance to quilting to fly-fishing. Primedia wanted About.com as a way to provide a link with its many print publications, Web sites, newsletters and video programs.

Kelly P. Conlin, Primedia’s president and chief executive, said that selling About.com would help Primedia reduce its debt and strengthen its own balance sheet.

The Times Company’s acquisition of About.com comes after it was among the losers in a bidding war in the fall for CBS MarketWatch, the financial news Web site. The site was acquired by Dow Jones & Company, publisher of The Wall Street Journal, for $519 million.

Times Company officials said About.com would help diversify its online advertising base by adding “cost per click” advertising, in which advertisers pay only when a reader clicks on an ad.

Cost-per-click ads are the fastest-growing segment of online advertising. The Times Company said it also expected to market its products to About.com users. “The appeal of About is that it gets the NYT Company into the fastest-growing component of the advertising market place, and therefore it makes strategic sense,” said Peter Appert, a media analyst for Goldman Sachs.

“The challenge is that About is very small versus the total scale of the NYT business,” he said, adding that About’s revenues last year were $40 million, a fraction of the Times Company’s revenues. “It represents barely over 1 percent of NYT revenue, so while it’s strategically appealing and it’s a step in the right direction, it’s financially too small to really change the growth story at the NYT,” Mr. Appert added.

Times Company officials said the demographics of About’s users were somewhat different from those of users of The Times’s Web site. The median age of About’s users is 37, which is five or six years younger than that of nytimes.com users. About 65 percent of About users are women, while The Times’s site attracts more men than women. The average income of About users is $61,000 a year, while that of The Times’s online readers is $80,000 a year. And there is little overlap between current About users and The Times’s users.

“It adds a huge new base to our mix,” Mr. Nisenholtz said.

Scarlet Pruitt, IDG News Service

Internet users are being threatened by yet another variant of the MyDoom mass mailing worm, which is spreading in part by using e-mail addresses found through popular search engines, security experts warn.

click here to read more !!!!!
(pulled from yahoo)

There is a story about a man who hired a plumber to fix his furnace. They went into the basement, and the plumber looked at the furnace, walked around it, studied it from different angles. Finally, he took a large hammer out of his toolbox, found just the right place on the furnace, and WHACK!

The furnace came to life, started chugging away, and heat started coming out of the vents. The plumber wrote out a bill and handed it to the man. It read:

Fix furnace, $100.00.

The customer said, “What, are you nuts? All you did was hit it with a hammer! I want an itemized invoice.”

The plumber wrote out another bill and handed it to the man. This one read:

1. Hit furnace with hammer: $10.00
2. Knowing where to hit: $90.00

You’re not paying for the 60 hours the graphic designer and programmer spent on your website. You’re paying for the years of experience that allowed them to be able to do that work in the first place. {;~)

Here are some statistics of browser usage, resolution, and javascript for to web browsers. I find it very interesting that Netscape is so small.

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

Way back in mid 2003 (eons in web terms), 40% of web visitors used 800×600 (SVGA) resolutions, 40% used 1024×768 (XGA) with the rest using other sizes.

LevelTen has always recommended designing sites to be viewed in 800 wide browsers. In the last few months our designers and a few clients have been asking if we should evolve to the now dominant XGA standard of 1024×768.

We just completed our first website, Gwinn & Roby, LLC that goes wider then 800. However, just to be sure, we put JavaScript width detection that changes the style sheet to fit SVGA monitors. (I know I was being an*al, but we have to look out for the small monitor guy.) Try it, it’s fun. Go to the about us page, change your browser window widths and hit refresh. Watch the magic moving trivial box, cool.

I was reviewing the lattest stats and now 52% are XGA, only 14% SVGA, and 14.5% UXGA (1280×1024). BTW someone in our LevelTen Hit Counter reports had a 3840×1024 monitor, what the heck is that? (once our designers find out such a thing exists I am sure they will find a “good” price for two on each desk).

I was viewing the Hit Counter reports on my XGA laptop with Pluck RSS reader open. For those who don’t know, Pluck creates a left hand column in IE, just like the left hand favorites view. I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of this before, but these left hand column tools were taking my XGA monitor to an SVGA usable width.

Actually, there are a lot of tools that want that precious left hand column space. Looks like it will be a bit longer before we recommend moving to 800+ wide sites.

P.S. When was the last time anyone used the term SVGA? I not only feel like a geek, but an old geek.

Taken from news.com

Google on Wednesday released a fresh version of its Web-searching toolbar with a trio of new utilities.

Available free in beta at Toolbar.google.com, the downloadable software lets people search the Web from a static box on the Internet Explorer Web browser and block annoying pop-up ads.

Version 3 of the software also lets people automatically check their spelling in Web forms; translate words in English into several languages; and add Web links to certain plain text. For example, an address could be enhanced with a hypertext link to its location on a map, with the click of a button on the toolbar.

“All these features add up to less cutting and pasting,” said Marissa Mayer, Google’s director of consumer Web products.

The software joins a fleet of new toolbars from mainstream and niche Internet companies alike. Many such companies are trying to ingratiate themselves on consumer desktops for marketing purposes. Google, for example, makes money from sponsored listings that appear after people perform a Web search, whether it’s from the desktop, the browser or its own site.

Last week, Yahoo introduced a version of its search toolbar for the Firefox Web browser, which has quickly become a contender to Microsoft’s dominant IE. Mayer would not comment on whether Google is developing a version for Apple Computer’s Safari or Firefox Web browsers, but the search giant in recent months has developed deeper ties with the Mozilla Foundation, the open-source group that created Firefox.

Google’s newest toolbar will be in beta for two months, Mayer said, and will then be released more widely. Mayer indicated that the application does not follow Google’s more limber policy on Web betas, which can last for several years.

Websites that allow searching for locations or outlets from a database often limit the search parameters to state or city. The last is problematic, since many USPS-compliant town designations are actually political subdivisions within a larger, more recognizable city (Flatbush in NYC, Addison in Dallas, etc.). A more flexible way to search is a radial zipcode search, in which the user is allowed to enter their own zipcode and a distance in miles, and the results return all matches within that distance. We do that by using a freely-available database of U.S. zipcodes with geographical coordinates, and a PHP script that passes the parameters to a module, which does the calculations, and passes back an object containing all matching results.

Hacking — what it is, and what it isn’t.

Hardly a week goes by that a client doesn’t tell me, in a panic, that they’ve been hacked *. Usually, all that happened was someone got their phone number or SSAN from another online resource.

Make no mistake, though; there are tens of thousands of people trying to learn how to get into your site, your database, or both. On TV, it looks easy: the computer geek on Law-and-Order sits down, tries the wife’s first name, the dog’s name, the child’s birthday, and presto! No one reading this is so phlegmatic as to use a name or a birthday as a password, are you? Let’s see a show of hands. Uh-oh!

In the real world, hacking into a website is much more difficult (sometimes completely impossible), often requiring considerably more code-level knowledge of an operating system than most would-be hackers have. There are several types of attacks:

• Dictionary attacks: the hacker uses a program to throw hundreds of thousands of dictionary words and proper names at a login page (also called a “brute force attack”). Still using your dog’s name? Yikes!
• Port sniffing: the hacker points a program at your URL to probe for ports left open, through which he can access a service, or inject a worm. Windows is especially susceptible to this.
• Network sniffing: if you are using an unencrypted wireless network at home, and connecting to your server by Telnet or Windows Terminal, you just gave your password to everybody on your block.
• DoS (Denial of Service): more often used to target large businesses. The hacker gains control of several servers, and causes all of them to send an endless stream of HTTP requests to one URL. That webserver is overloaded and shuts down, possibly exposing a security hole in the process.
• CSS (Cross-site scripting): actually the easiest. There are many free 3rd party programs available for webmasters to use on their sites, like guestbooks, bulletin boards, image- and music-managers, database frontends, etc. Some of them have security holes, meaning that they can be tricked into executing a command that was not intended by the programmer. As soon as someone discovers, by trial-and-error, that one of these is exploitable, it is posted on hacker websites around the world. Then the fun starts.
  Thousands of “script-kiddies” (amateur hackers) download any of dozens of free “rootkits” (programs that will create for the hacker a new user identity with root access, if he can get it on your server), run a Google search for sites using that exploitable program, and go to one of those sites. Insert some code into a query string, trick the program into uploading the rootkit, and the server is his. Want to send out 1,000,000 untraceable spam emails? That’s how they can do it.
• SQL-injection: too complex to discuss here, but similar to the above; tricking a database into dumping data for the hacker.
• Buffer overrun attacks: the hacker passes a very long, complex URL to your website, aimed at an executable program in the operating system with a known exploit. The lengthy parameters overwhelm the target program’s internal stack, causing it to respond in a way not intended by the programmer. Depend on your SysAdmin to keep your OS up to date.

As you can see, the hacker doesn’t really need your password to do damage.

Why do they do it? Sometimes it’s about money: credit card numbers, or sending out spam emails. Sometimes it’s just to prove they can do it. Programmers are that way. I once wrote a Trojan Horse in machine code. If it was on my employer’s computer, and if I was not there 3 months later to disable it, it would wipe the hard drive clean. Don’t fret, I didn’t do it, but I knew I could, and that was enough. That time. {;~0

* [To a programmer, a hacker is someone adept at modifying existing code to change or add functionality, while someone trying to get into your website or database is a cracker. By that definition, I am a hacker. Since my family came from the hills of Tennessee, I have also been called a cracker, but that’s another story. {;~) I will use the term hacker for its commonly accepted meaning: a criminal, sometimes an idiot, sometimes both.]

Things we know, but would be good information for clients.
Info taken from SEOchat.com | Written by: Tiberiu Bazavan

It’s true that no SEO can guarantee inclusion in the search engine indexes after performing an analysis. That is partly because the search engines themselves are not terribly specific about what practices will cause them to remove a website from their indexes. For example, what exactly is search engine spam? Google offers a short list of practices that fall under that heading, and therefore should be avoided:

Hidden text or hidden links.

Cloaking or sneaky redirects.

Automated queries to Google.

Pages loaded with irrelevant words.

Multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with
substantially duplicate content.

“Doorway” pages created just for search engines, or other
“cookie cutter” approaches such as affiliate programs with little
or no original content.
Here are some other rules to keep in mind, from Google’s site:

“Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you’d feel comfortable explaining what you’ve done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, ‘Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?’”

“Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or ‘bad neighborhoods’ on the web as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.”

“Google may respond negatively to other misleading practices not listed here, (e.g. tricking users by registering misspellings of well-known web sites). It’s not safe to assume that just because a specific deceptive technique isn’t included on this page, Google approves of it.”

For more information, check Google’s Webmaster Guidelines at
http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html.

Yahoo Search is even more restrictive in their definitions of spam and undesirables; however, concentration on detection and removal has not been receiving quite as much focus. It is important to be aware of and conform to Yahoo’s restrictions, since Yahoo has no reacceptance policy. Banishment has been, in every case I’ve heard of, permanent. http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/deletions/deletions-05.html

Need to recharge your creative batteries? Check out the most creative (and FOTF funny) site on the web, Homestar Runner.

Homestar is truly innovative. It’s cleaver, funny and wacky while being fun the whole family can enjoy.

Hint: Start with Strong Bad’s E-mail (the e-mail, the e-mail, uh uhh the e-mail).