Here we go again. (via SF Chron)

Wow! If only I trusted Nielsen’s numbers, this would be a big story…

Google garnered a 56.3% share of the U.S. search market in December, compared with a 57.7% share in the previous month, according to Nielsen. Yahoo Inc., meanwhile, saw its share in December fall slightly to 17.7%, compared with 17.9% in November…Microsoft Corp. was the only company among the three largest search providers to see an increase in December, as its share rose to 13.8% of the U.S. market from 12% the previous month, according to Nielsen.

BB Gadget’s Joel Johnson talks about AT&T’s plans w/r/t internet filtering on an AT&T show. The other shoe has not dropped on this one yet, but I salute Joel for bringing up a very important issue.

I was going to wait to post this till the start of a mobile posting campaign that Microsoft is very kindly launching, but I just can’t let it wait (for those who might care, Microsoft is going to underwrite a bunch of FM authors, including me, posting mobile stuff like photos and maps and voice posts). Anyway, I was in JFK airport and I saw an arresting image in a Pitney Bowes ad.

Now, what does Pitney Bowes do? Well, turns out I have some knowledge in this area, as my father, ever the itinerant entrepreneur, tried to compete with Pitney in the 80s by creating a better postage meter. He didn’t get very far. Pitney is the Microsoft of postage meter companies. They own the market.

So they are doing a corporate campaign, apparently, and somehow, they came to the conclusion that slapping postage on a newborn baby – wait, let me say it – a not very pretty newborn baby – is somehow a powerful statement of corporate purpose. (That bracelet is actually a postage label).

Now, am I off here, or does this simply offend at too many levels to really go into? Do they really want to be seen as “putting a stamp” on newborn babies? Are they out of their minds? Anyway, a funny ad, a funny photo, taken as I was, perhaps, a bit funny myself, given I was two beers in waiting for my delayed flight…

Andy Berndt, a former Ogilvy star recently hired by Google, says Google’s “Creative Lab” is an “internal creative and marketing resource at Google to manage the brand and our only client is Google.” More in this Ad Age piece.

Name the year this was written:

Yahoo offered details of its long-awaited turnaround strategy… hinging its future on advertising, exclusive paid content and revenue-sharing deals with Internet access providers…..Yahoo executives gave some specifics regarding a long-expected corporate restructuring, saying that they will whittle down Yahoo’s 44 business units to six: listings, commerce, communications, media, access and enterprise. In addition, the company will lay off 400 employees, or 13 percent of its work force.



That is from a November 2001 article in Cnet, and yes, it sounds awfully familiar, doesn’t it?

Techcrunch has shots of some tests…

Yahoo’s Ripe for Shake-Up from the WSJ’s “Breaking Views” column is quite a read. It argues that the sums of Yahoo’s parts, in particular its holdings in Yahoo Japan and Alibaba, which combine for more than a third of Yahoo’s overall market cap, should be spun off, as should its search business (I’ve argued that for some time now.) Interesting.

I’m digging into the domain space for this talk next week. It’s a fascinating, frustrating industry. I posted a general query last week, and got a ton of wonderful advice. But I did not get an answer to the question above.

Does anyone know?

$100K as the prize for building a new search engine? Sorry, that’s not gonna get it done…