Once thought to be a experts in a particular field, new research indicates influencers are individuals who gain self-worth by giving good advice. That’s according to findings from the CNET Networks study “Understanding Influence, and Making it Work for You.”
Influencers build large social networks and interact with 100 or more people each month. Moderately-connected individuals [...]

E-mail authentication is expected to see wider adoption this year as senders and ISPs implement standards like Sender ID (define) and DKIM (define). Marketers benefit by having forged and deceptive messages filtered by the ISP or carrier.
At the third annual Authentication and Online Trust Summit this week, Microsoft released findings from a two-year-long study [...]

DoubleClick to Set Up an Exchange for Buying and Selling Digital Ads
By LOUISE STORY
DOUBLECLICK, which delivers marketing messages to Web sites and monitors how many clicks they get, plans to announce today that it is setting up a Nasdaq-like exchange for the buying and selling of digital advertisements.
The service may make DoubleClick a more attractive [...]

Taking a tip from MySpace and Amazon, e-commerce sites are letting customers post comments, reviews and photos - and in the process finding out a lot about their customers, reports Business Week.
Macys.com opened its sites to customer reviews six months ago and now gets 350 reviews a day: The site has become a social network in its [...]

On February 7, 2007 Wines.mobi unveiled a free wine internet service. It can be accessed practically on any gadget connected to the web: cell phones, PDAs, laptops, Blackberries, etc. Wines.mobi is currently providing data on more than 300,000 bottles of wine from all over the world. Wine database contains data on wines from 1860s to [...]

SACRAMENTO, Calif.-(Business Wire)-February 7, 2007 - Specialty Wine Retailers Association announced today a partnership with IDology, a leading provider of age and identity verification services. The partnership gives SWRA members access to IDology’s robust tools that help assure online and phone transactions are between a retailer and an adult….
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ClassicWines.com Now Serves the Internet’s Largest Wine Directory

Thursday February 1, 8:57 am ET
Pennsylvania Firm to Celebrate New Site Launch With a Wine Tasting Event February 9
CHESTER, Pa., Feb. 1, 2007 (PRIME NEWSWIRE) — ClassicWines.com, the online guide to classic wine will celebrate the launch of its vastly expanded web portal with a celebration at its [...]

Fourth-quarter click-fraud data from Click Forensics showed that click fraud increased to the highest levels for the year, reaching 14.2 percent (industry average), compared with 13.8 percent for Q3, 14.1 percent for Q2 and 13.7 percent for Q1 (via Search Engine Land)…
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The recently released 2007 AffStat Affiliate Marketing Benchmark report provides a rare glimpse into how online marketers` affiliate programs stack up against each other. “Most affiliate programs exist in a bubble, judged to be either a good ROI or not in comparison to other programs within a company,” says author Shawn [...]

Call it human nature. Lots of advertisers explore the Help Center extensively when they first start with AdWords, just to get a handle on the basics, but rarely make a return visit after that. But what about the helpful information that has added since that last visit, say, oh, six months ago?
Here’s a good example: [...]

How does a Web start-up with fewer than 20 staffers get its hands on a sea of searchable inventory data for local stores across the U.S. — data Froogle, Yahoo Shopping and eBay’s Shopping.com drool over, yet can’t touch?
By making it all about the foot traffic, that’s how…
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IntelliScanner today unveiled the Wine Collector 200, a portable barcode scanner and companion software package for wine collection management. By scanning the retail barcode with the included portable USB or Bluetooth wireless barcode scanner, users can automatically identify detailed product information using an Internet-enabled AutoFill wine database. After scanning, collectors use the companion wine management [...]

In an encouraging act of collaboration, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft announced tonight that they will all begin using the same Sitemaps protocol to index sites around the web. Now based at Sitemaps.org, the system instructs web masters on how to install an XML file on their servers that all three engines can use to track [...]