Datalust

Yahoo has added coupons to its online mix. Today, the company unveiled its new Yahoo Deals Web site, which offers shoppers coupons, information about promotions, sales and tips on saving money.

The site aims to fill a surging demand for cost-saving ideas. According to the company research, searches for the term “printable coupons” are up 50 percent this year compared to the same time in 2008 and up 135 percent compared to 2007. Yahoo’s research finds that the most popular searches for coupons included searches for coupons for major retailers and groceries as well as discounts at the local pizzeria.

via Yahoo Gets in the Coupon Game.

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Two of the National Advertising Review Council’s investigative units plan to announce Tuesday their first decisions involving blogs. Their recommendations call for clear disclosure when a company is sponsoring a site or paying for product reviews.

That’s nothing shocking, but it’s part of a sharper focus on the relationships between bloggers and advertisers. Attorneys general and the Federal Trade Commission, which is about to expand its endorsement guidelines to include blogs, are investigating the area, along with the self-regulatory groups.

via Advertising – Notice Those Ads on Blogs? Regulators Do, Too – NYTimes.com.

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Men are from Mars. Women are from Venus. And Dell is from the school of marketing hard knocks.

The computer maker recently took the wraps off a new Web site geared toward women called Della, which advertises Dell’s line of Inspiron Mini 10 netbooks.

The site originally featured tech “tips” that recommended calorie counting, finding recipes and watching cooking videos as ways for women to get the most from a laptop.

via What Do Women Want in a Laptop? – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com.

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Google Sites led the U.S. core search market in March with 63.7 percent of the searches conducted, followed by Yahoo! Sites (20.5 percent), Microsoft Sites (8.3 percent), Ask Network (3.8 percent) and AOL LLC (3.7 percent).

via comScore Releases March 2009 U.S. Search Engine Rankings.

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One year ago today, seven stroke patients shared their stories of illness and recovery in a unique audio feature posted on the Well blog.

They were the first Patient Voices, a regular series that offers first person accounts of the challenges patients face as they cope with various health issues. Since the original Patient Voices appeared, New York Times producer Karen Barrow has continued to give a voice to a wide range of patient stories, ranging from bipolar disorder and psoriasis to restless legs syndrome and spinal cord injury.

via One Year of Listening to Patients – Well Blog – NYTimes.com.

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TODAY is an important date in the history of the Internet: the 40th anniversary of what is known as the Request for Comments. Outside the technical community, not many people know about the R.F.C.’s, but these humble documents shape the Internet’s inner workings and have played a significant role in its success.

via Op-Ed Contributor – How the Internet Got Its Rules – NYTimes.com.

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The top 100 advertisers in the U.S., who represent 41 percent of total advertising spending, shifted about $1 billion last year from TV and newspapers to the Web. An analysis from Ad Age shows that overall media spending in “measured” categories (TV, print, radio, Web) by the top 100 advertisers was flat in 2007, with 0.3 percent growth to $61.3 billion. But spending on Web display ads rose 33 percent to $4.2 billion. The article notes:

via Top 100 Advertisers Shifted $1 Billion To the Web Last Year At The Expense Of TV And Newspapers.

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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has sent letters to a number of pharmaceutical manufacturers to alert them that they were in violation of acceptable marketing practices in relation to their paid search marketing campaigns.

The basic gist of the letter is that when these pharmaceutical companies advertise on Google they are a.) not providing the risks associated with the drugs and b.) not including their “established name.” Basically, the FDA is stating that pharmaceutical ads must provide adequate explanation of the risks associated with the drug and provide the full name of the drug. Think of the wonderful television ads that always list the full name of the drugs and provide a plethora of horrible sounding side effects. Or just watch this hilarious SNL spoof.

via FDA Cracks Down On Pharma Search Ads.

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Here’s the problem. Each and every piece of multi, multi-million dollar bloated piece of crap healthcare “electronic medical record” (sounds about as dated as electronic mail, doesn’t it?”), is simply a billing engine to communicate a medical diagnosis to insurance companies with the hopes of maximizing how much doctors are paid. Each diagnosis and procedure has these numerical codes. They are a ridiculously robust antiquated language, like the code written to power the Commodore 64. There are people who speak this language – the 100 or so medical billers who are holed up in the basement of every hospital. They are the people you never see when you visit the hospital, but they’re the ones speaking the language that maximizes how much your hospital gets from your insurance company.

via Google Health Just Perpetuating Antiquated Technology.

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WASHINGTON – When Dave deBronkart, a tech-savvy kidney cancer survivor, tried to transfer his medical records from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center to Google Health, a new free service that lets patients keep all their health records in one place and easily share them with new doctors, he was stunned at what he found.

Google said his cancer had spread to either his brain or spine – a frightening diagnosis deBronkart had never gotten from his doctors – and listed an array of other conditions that he never had, as far as he knew, like chronic lung disease and aortic aneurysm. A warning announced his blood pressure medication required “immediate attention.”

“I wondered, ‘What are they talking about?’ ” said deBronkart, who is 59 and lives in Nashua.

via Electronic health records raise doubt – The Boston Globe.

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CNN — Penny Ireland’s family is so scattered around the world that Facebook, the popular social networking site, has become the family’s No. 1 way to communicate.

The fastest-growing age group on Facebook is women older than 55, Inside Facebook says.

“We call it our living room,” the 56-year-old mother said by phone from her home in Houston, Texas. “Everybody can tell what everybody else is doing.”

“Everybody” includes Ireland’s five kids and her 83-year-old mother, who has a Facebook profile she accesses daily, Ireland said.

via All in the Facebook family: older generations join social networks – CNN.com.

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For the last five years, I have worked at PRWeek, where I most recently held the title editor-in-chief. My decision to leave the publication for a position at Attention reflects in part my belief that the public relations industry is fundamentally changing. People no longer solely consume top-down media, they create and share their own. This explosion in content, coupled with the finite amount of consumer attention, means brands must figure out new, creative ways to communicate. It is an exciting time for media and marketing, and I’d like be involved directly.

via Why the future of PR lies in Social Media | ATTENTION.

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Internet advertising rose in 2008, according to a report released Monday, but the growth is starting to flatten.

“The economy has had a significant impact on the short-term growth of the Internet advertising market,” David Silverman, a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers, which contributed to the report, said in a conference call.

Internet advertising in the United States grew to $23.4 billion in 2008, an increase of 10.6 percent from 2007, according to the Internet Advertising Revenue Report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau, a trade group representing online advertisers, as well as PricewaterhouseCoopers.

via Internet Ad Sales Rose in ’08, but at Slower Pace – NYTimes.com.

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NEW YORK AdAge.com — The FDA’s Division of Drug Marketing, Advertising and Communications has sent out letters to 14 leading drug companies requesting them to end what it’s calling certain “misleading” and “misbranded” advertising on search engines such as Google and Yahoo.

via FDA Demands Drug Cos. Stop ‘Misleading’ Ads on Google, Yahoo – Advertising Age – News.

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Taking aim at the way news is spread across the Internet, The Associated Press said on Monday that Web sites that used the work of news organizations must obtain permission and share revenue with them, and that it would take legal action against those that did not.

via Associated Press Seeks More Control of Content on Web – NYTimes.com.

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