American Airlines Faces Uphill Battle In Trademark Suit Over Google Keyword Ads

From Online Media Daily - DESPITE ITS STRONG BRAND AWARENESS and deep pockets to pursue the litigation, American Airlines faces an uphill battle in its suit seeking damages from Google for allowing rivals to buy keyword ads triggered by its own trademarks.

The suit, which was filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in Fort Worth, seeks unspecified damages from Google for allowing visitors who enter trademarked phrases such as its frequent-flyer program name "Aadvantage" or "AA.com" to see rival "sponsored links." | Read full article

User-Generated Content: Is Anyone Watching?

From Online Media Daily - YOU KNOW THAT OLD PHILOSOPHICAL question--if a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? Well, I started thinking about that as it applies to the explosion of Web and cell phone-based user-generated content (UGC). Who will watch the billions of videos being posted?

When you take out the extraordinary amount of content on the "user-generated" sites that is really stuff caught on TiVo, will anyone really care to watch the stuff that "users" actually make? | Read full article

Top Video and Movie Sites, Viewers and Advertisers

From Research Brief - A deeper look at most popular video and movie sites, exploring viewer demographics as well as advertisers and types of ads. | Read full article

Gaming Surpasses Video, Social Nets In Online Popularity: Study

From Online Media Daily - OVER A THIRD (34%) OF U.S. adult Internet users play online games weekly, according to Parks Associates, with games trumping social networking and online video as the most popular Web-based entertainment activity.

Online video came in as the second most popular activity, with some 29% of users watching short clips weekly, while social networking rounded out the top three at 19%. The market research company, compiling data from two studies for its new Casual Gaming Market Update, surveyed nearly 2,000 Web users over age 18.

"Despite the growing popularity of YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook, gaming remains the king of online entertainment, driven largely by casual gaming activities," said James Kuai, research analyst, Parks Associates.

Casual games--loosely defined as easy-to-play online games targeted at a mass audience--typically have low production and distribution costs. Parks forecasts that the industry will rake in $400-$500 million this year, with a significant portion of the revenue coming from advertising. | Read full story

MTVN Makes 2-Year $500 Million Gaming Commitment

From Online Media Daily - MTV NETWORKS ON THURSDAY PLEDGED to spend more than $500 million on gaming properties worldwide over the next two years. That includes the $100 million Nickelodeon committed last month to the development, distribution and creation of casual gaming titles, sites and platforms.

The Viacom company's attention to gaming is broad. "Whether hardcore or casual, online or console-based, we know that games are a dominant activity across all our audiences," said Mika Salmi, president, MTVN Global Digital Media. | Read full article

Chicago Tribune's Triblocal.com Spawns New Print Papers

From Online Media Daily - IN A REVERSAL OF THE hyper-local formula, which last month saw Washington Post Newsweek Interactive (WPNI) start rolling out narrowly targeted news sites in communities already served by regional print editions of the daily WP, the Chicago Tribune on Thursday launched two weekly print editions spawned by its four-month-old venture in hyper-local citizen journalism, triblocal.com.

The new papers, covering Chicago's West and Southwest suburbs, include photos, stories and other contents posted by readers on the Web site, as well as content from Triblocal's own editorial staff. Published by the Tribune's Chicagoland Publishing Company subsidiary, the papers will be distributed with more than 23,000 copies of each Thursday's Tribune in the communities of Batavia, Geneva, St. Charles, Elburn, Maple Park, Orland Park, Orland Hills, Tinley Park and Homer Glen in the Southwest suburbs. | Read full article

Hearst-Argyle Joins Online High School Sports Players

Editor's Note: This is reminiscent of the LJWorld.com amateur sport efforts of several years ago...

From Online Media Daily - AMERICA SEEMS TO LOVE HIGH school sports, and high school students certainly love the Internet--so it's no wonder that high school sports Web sites and social networks are a hot item in these back-to-school days.

The latest entrant in the category, High School Playbook, comes courtesy of Hearst-Argyle Television, which has launched the site in seven of its 26 television station markets. The seven stations are accessible through the main Web site at www.highschoolplayback.com, and are also providing High School Playbook features through dedicated YouTube channels. | Read full story

The Decline of Local News on the Net?

From The New York Times - A week after Google made headlines by opening up Google News to commentary, the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University is weighing in with an interesting study: Creative Destruction: An Exploratory Look at News on the Internet.

The center looked at traffic to 160 news Web sites over the last year and found overall traffic leveling off. But there were some telling distinctions. Newspapers with national brands, like the New York Times, Washington Post and USA Today, saw their audiences grow, on average, 10 percent over the year. Most other newspapers lost visitors. | Read full article

Error in Skype’s Software Shuts Down Phone Service

Editor's note - Yikes! This is not good for those of us who use and depend on Skype.

From The New York Times - The online telephone service Skype was not working for much of the day on Thursday, leaving its 220 million users, some of them small businesses that had given up their landlines, without a way to call colleagues, customers and friends.

Executives at Skype, a division of eBay that is based in Luxembourg, said its engineers worked throughout the day to bring the service back online. But they said that while they had pinpointed the source of the problem, they still did not know why it had resulted in a network failure, and they could not ensure that the service would be running smoothly again by Friday. | Read full article

As Billboards, Public Phones Always Work

Editor's Note - This may be about older technology, but it's a fun read nonetheless.

From The New York Times - They stand on corners from Brighton Beach to the Bronx, all but mocking New Yorkers: Pay phones that may or may not work, which you can’t even check for a dial tone without worrying about germs.

But they remain rooted in the pavement of New York, blocking pedestrian traffic, looking a bit like museum pieces in an age of cellphones, BlackBerrys and Bluetooth headsets.

There is a reason for their survival: Public telephones are one of the stranger cash cows in city finance. Not because of the coins that are fed into them, but rather because of the millions upon millions that companies are willing to pay to put ads on them.

The phone kiosks generate $62 million in advertising revenue annually — and last year the city got $13.7 million of the take. Last year its income from ads was triple what it pulled in from calls. | Read full article