Marketing Pilgrim

You may already be aware that The Associated Press (AP) has gone down a ludicrous path of insisting you owe them money, if you quote one of their stories.

Now it appears the news organization has been caught indulging in some double-standards, by quoting from Woot’s announcement that it had been acquired by Amazon.com. In light of this, the good-humored folks over at Woot have decided to point out the hypocrisy to AP.

So, The AP, here we are. Just to be fair about this, we’ve used your very own pricing scheme to calculate how much you owe us. By looking through the link above, and comparing your post with our original letter, we’ve figured you owe us roughly $17.50 for the content you borrowed from our blog post, which, by the way, we worked very very hard to create.

MySpace needs to find another company willing to pay them for the opportunity to advertise to their decreasing number of users. They need to do this at a time when their executive suite has installed a revolving door to more easily handle the traffic in and out of the offices. It also comes at a time when the best company MySpace can find itself in is in the major Internet property rehab wing with Yahoo! and Aol.

So this is not the best situation to be in especially when you had cut a deal in 2006 with Google that should have brought $900 million to MySpace during the period where Google had the advertising exclusive with them. The Wall Street Journal reports

Sometimes in search you are alerted to something that is a bit dramatic in its presentation. Google has been experimenting with their positioning of the most critical elements of a local search SERP and it makes for some interesting “What if?” questions.

This new look SERP was brought to my attention from Mike Blumenthal’s blog. If you want to be on top of local search information Mike will certainly help you do that (or one of his readers in this case). I was able to replicate the result so here it is

Assuming we are granted seeing the next 10 years unfold, how will the Internet impact your life and in particular your social interactions?

According to ‘experts’ (overused and often undeserved title alert!) a study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, life is gonna be good because of the social web. Honestly, since most of these folks probably depend on the Internet to make a living are they going to say anything else?

The study revealed

The social benefits of internet use will far outweigh the negatives over the next decade, according to experts. They say this is because email, social networks, and other online tools offer “low friction” opportunities to create, enhance, and rediscover social ties that make a difference in people’s lives. The internet lowers traditional communications constraints of cost, geography, and time; and it supports the type of open information sharing that brings people together.

This is not shocking. From AT&T’s data plans to just about every other aspect, having an iPhone just costs more money. This is not an indictment it’s just something that appears to be a fact for most.

In fact, an app store analytics provider, Distimo, reports on apps for the iPhone leading the way for average costs. (OK, so the BlackBerry Apps are higher on average but the lowest they can be priced is $2.99 and who buys them anyway? Ditto for Microsoft. Honestly, why these two are even considered in app discussions is beyond me. It’s either Apple or Android moving forward, correct?)

When it comes to free apps Android’s market leads the way

TechCrunch points out that the Android market has its own issues.