Internet penetration is now at 73% of all American adults. Users are noticing major improvements in relation to online shopping, their pursuit of hobbies and personal interests while on the web.

In a recently released
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Beta products that have a more than minimal potential of crashing my system I usually shy away from, but I’ve been waiting so long for IE7, the anticipation was killing me. I had already resisted the IE 7 Beta 2 Preview - enough of the waiting already - on Beta 2 went :).

My intial thoughts?
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A bit of good news for marketers after previous years of jittery surfers deleting cookies on a regular basis. A new survey of over 1700 people shows that the majority of consumers prefer advertising based on their interests but not only that,
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Blog, podcast and RSS advertising spending grew by nearly 200% in 2005, and is projected to grow another 144.9% to $49.8 million in 2006 according to a custom media research firm.

The company also states that podcast advertising is expected to be a bigger market than blog advertising by 2010.
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eBay has just launched eBay Express, a new service tacked onto their marketplace that offers items at a fixed price. Although in “preview” release, which the company states will last for a few weeks, it is fully functional.

I took a trip out to eBay Express and was
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Microsoft announced the release Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 a few hours ago. The IE team states that this release is not a preview or an update to the preview, but the real Beta 2 of IE7 - gets confusing doesn’t it :).

It’s available for download from
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MySpace amazes me. It seems to be everywhere you turn these days. Sure, social networking sites are nothing new, but MySpace really hit on the secret sauce in my opinion - and more importantly, based on the fact they have 66 million members, with around 250,000 new signups each day.

Looking at some of the members pages, you may wonder why it’s so successful, but that’s the
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Behavioral targeting is nothing new, but when the related buzz was first flying around the Internet some years ago, it carried with it a lot of negative media coverage. In 2006, it appears that the reputation of this marketing strategy
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I was digging through some server logs today and came across a site that was selling shares in Taming the Beast.net at $150 a throw. The page also stated that there were 573 shares left. As you could imagine, I was a little curious as to what was happening and thinking that perhaps I should get in on the action; after all, at $150 per share, that’s a steal ;).
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I’ve often wondered why some online companies, when the management or employees respond to customer service related emails, have the habit of a) not addressing the client by name and b) using a signature without their own name; even just a first name.

Call most (good) companies, and the person answering the phone
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