Where's Your Social Responsibility Google?

By Kalena Jordan (c) 2007

Unless you've been living on a desert island with no Internet access, you've probably seen the recent blog fallout from Google's latest crack down on alleged link brokers.

This week it seems that Google made some type of manual Toolbar PageRank reduction on a handful of major blogs and portal sites like the Washington Post, ProBlogger, CopyBlogger and Forbes.com. Some of these sites had PageRank scores of 7 which have now dropped to 5, scores of 6 which have now dropped to 4 and so on. The blog buzz is that the sites have been singled out by Google as using their high PageRank scores to sell links and have been punished by the world's most popular search engine as a result. There is currently no proof of this and no public statement by Google acknowledging or denying the situation.

A lot of bloggers have weighed in with commentary, observations and opinions. Every time I read a new post about the so called smack-down I imagine some Googlers at Mountain View laughing hysterically and high-fiving each other for turning the tables on the SEO industry yet again.

The situation has even got the SEOs turning on each other. One of the world's best known SEOs, Jill Whalen, made a post in response to the situation that included a comment about one of the affected sites, Search Engine Guide. Jill's post has been interpreted in some circles as a type of attack. Here's the comment Jill made in her post:

"Even my very good friends at Search Engine Guide were smacked down. I hadn't been to their home page in ages since I usually visit through direct article links, but when I looked at their home page today and scrolled down to the bottom, I was taken aback to see what looks more like a link farm than anything else!"

I've known Jill a long time and I read her remark about Search Engine Guide as a quick off the cuff comment, not a deliberate attack. Without putting words in her mouth, I think it sounded more shocking than she meant it, probably because she was typing as a response to first impressions of Search Engine Guide after not seeing it for so long and because (being ridiculously busy) she was probably in a hurry. So the comment itself didn't raise an eyebrow for me. But I WAS concerned about how the general webmaster community would interpret the comment.

Yes, she has every right to her opinion. But being who she is and the industry reputation she's built up, Jill has incredible influence over a large number of webmasters and SEOs who absorb her material. Persons reading her article that are unfamiliar with Search Engine Guide may permanently associate the site with the term "link farm" and all the negative connotations that brings. No matter her intent, her remark definitely has the power to hurt Search Engine Guide and their reputation. The site's publisher Robert Clough obviously thought so, as he was prompted to make an uncharacteristic post in response.

Personally, I think Jill should have considered the possible backlash from her casual comment and worded her post much more carefully. After all, with industry influence comes responsibility. Which brings me to the main point of this article. Google now has extreme influence and power over the Internet. When they make changes to their algorithm or the way they cache and filter web sites, it has a dramatic impact on not just web site owners, but business and life in general. Millions of people rely on Google to survive, literally. In that respect, this attempt at link bait humor is a little too close to reality to be funny.

With such powerful social influence, I think it's about time Google started taking more responsibility by being more transparent with their activities. If too many webmasters are doing the wrong thing with regard to linking, or an algorithm change has occurred, why not launch a media release to set the facts straight? Not everyone knows about Google's Webmaster Guidelines, or has a Webmaster Tools account. But a lot of people read the newspaper. If they want webmasters to co-operate, Google has to recognize it's a two way street.

By slapping on this latest penalty, (if it is indeed a penalty), Google seems to be claiming to *know* the intent of these sites. But what if they're wrong? What if, as Jennifer Laycock claims, they are merely selling advertising space without Google being a consideration? There's nothing in Search Engine Guide's advertising material relating to PageRank OR Google. To assume they are trying to use their site's high PageRank as a selling point is pretty arrogant and irresponsible of Google, in my opinion.

Without some type of public acknowledgement from them, we can only assume Google's latest move is an attempt to control how webmasters use their own web site space. That's a huge line in the sand they've crossed and I don't know about you, but it makes me nervous.

Source: Site Pro News

Microsoft Bets on Facebook Stake

By ROBERT A. GUTH, VAUHINI VARA and KEVIN J. DELANEY
October 25, 2007

Microsoft Corp.'s $240 million investment in Facebook Inc. -- a three-year-old company with more promise than profit -- represents a huge bet that the online advertising boom will continue and the popular social networking site will be among the biggest beneficiaries.

The software giant said yesterday that it will buy a 1.6% stake in Facebook, beating out Google Inc. after intense lobbying. The deal places a $15 billion valuation on the closely held Palo Alto, Calif., start-up. Facebook, which runs a site where people set up personal Web pages, expects to break even this year, on a cash-flow basis, with revenue of $150 million, according to people familiar with the company.

The high valuation for Facebook is the latest sign of a renewed exuberance in Silicon Valley over Internet companies with lots of users -- even if those users haven't yet translated into much revenue -- and is reminiscent of the Internet bubble that ended in 2000. Microsoft and Facebook say the valuation is justified and that Facebook is starting to find ways to monetize its rapidly growing user base.

"We're pleased with the economics of this deal," said Kevin Johnson, president of platform and services at Microsoft, adding that Microsoft and Facebook have "both learned a lot" from their experience with Facebook ads.

The deal is rooted in an online-advertising boom that has turned Facebook into the newest Internet darling. In recent years, advertisers large and small that once focused their spending on television, newspapers and other traditional media have started shifting their spending to a host of Web sites. Google has built its fortunes on that shift and others including Microsoft are rushing in.

Facebook presents a big opportunity for online advertising, in part because it collects detailed information about its users -- such as their hobbies, favorite music, location, age, and gender -- that can be used to place highly targeted ads.

Behind the deal are also concerns at Microsoft that social-networking sites like Facebook might one day become the central window consumers use to access the Web.

Facebook was started by Mark Zuckerberg when he was a student at Harvard University; he is now CEO. Like other social networking services including News Corp.'s MySpace, Facebook began by offering simple Web pages used mostly by young people to list information about themselves and send messages to their friends. But the services are gaining broader popularity, with some people using them as replacements for online services like email. The sites are also adding other Internet services that have historically existed independently; Microsoft, for instance, has its own instant-messaging and online music services. The deal gives Microsoft a window into Facebook as it expands such services.

Facebook sells ads on its own and also struck a deal last year that allows Microsoft to broker display ads on Facebook's U.S. site until 2011. In addition, Facebook and MySpace are opening non-English-language versions of their sites. Facebook is planning to do so in the coming months, probably starting in Europe.

But the online-advertising market is less mature and more fragmented abroad than it is in the U.S. In 2007, advertisers are expected to spend $900 million advertising on social-networking sites in the U.S., compared with $335 million on such sites abroad, according to research firm eMarketer Inc. In planning its global expansion, Facebook initially worried about how it would make money outside of the U.S., say people familiar with the matter.

As part of yesterday's agreement, which lasts through 2011, Microsoft will sell advertisements on international versions of the Facebook service. Microsoft in recent years has built up a large online advertising sales force and has invested in technologies to broker advertising over the Web.

The cash injection from Microsoft will also give Facebook funds to invest in new services, buy equipment, make acquisitions and hire engineers. Facebook in coming weeks plans to unveil a new advertising system of its own that will let advertisers visit an automated Web site to place targeted ads on Facebook and elsewhere on the Web, say people familiar with the matter. Meanwhile, Facebook's Mr. Zuckerberg has said he plans to expand from more than 300 employees today to about 700 employees a year from now.

Winning Facebook's hand could help lift morale at Microsoft's struggling online business. Over the past four years the software giant has invested heavily into building its own Internet search and online advertising services but has failed to keep pace with the growing online ad market and its leader Google.

Microsoft fought hard and lost to Google a string of deals with companies including Time Warner Inc.'s AOL unit and DoubleClick Inc., which Google earlier this year agreed to buy for $3.1 billion. Those losses and the steady growth of Google's share of online advertising have irked Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer, say people familiar with the company.

As a result, Microsoft scrambled to keep Facebook from falling into Google's hands. In recent weeks Mr. Ballmer personally courted Facebook's Mr. Zuckerberg, meeting in Silicon Valley to press Microsoft's interest in the young company.

On his visits to Facebook, Mr. Ballmer tried to be discreet: last Wednesday he negotiated with Mr. Zuckerberg in a private dinner at the home of Owen Van Natta, Facebook's chief revenue officer, said someone familiar with the situation. However, after the meal, at a nearby Starbucks, a customer noticed Mr. Ballmer, called out his name and snapped a picture of himself with the Microsoft head, said the person familiar with the exchange. Mr. Ballmer was worried that the photo could be used to show he was in Silicon Valley negotiating with Facebook.

Microsoft's discussions continued Thursday night in San Francisco. Still Google as recently as Friday seemed to be close to winning Facebook, say people familiar with the matter. Over the past few days and in a meeting that ran late last night, Microsoft clinched the deal.

Yesterday Google Vice President Tim Armstrong declined to comment on any Google discussions with Facebook. "We have tremendous respect for them as a company," he said during Google's analyst day at the company's Mountain View, Calif., headquarters.

Source: Wall Steet Journal

A New Kind of Spam

October 2007
By Brad Stone

“Hello, this is an investor alert. Exit Only Incorporated has announced it is ready to announce its new, Text4Cars dot.com Web site. Already a huge success in Canada! We are expecting amazing results in the U.S.A.!”

So says a computer-synthesized, British, female voice in what anti-spam researchers say is the first of a new wave of junk e-mail sure to cause headaches and earaches — MP3 spam.

Listen to the Spam MP3 Recordings (mp3)The e-mail security firm Proofpoint of Sunnyvale, Calif., and others caught these audio messages earlier this week in the dummy e-mail in-boxes, called honeypots, they use to trap new kinds of spam. The messages were blank but contained MP3 attachments of around 95 kilobytes — around the size of a cellphone ring tone. The attachments were audio files all pumping up the same penny stock.

This could be a virulent new form of unsolicited e-mail. Anti-spam companies like Proofpoint are not equipped to analyze the underlying audio and convert it back into text. But their filters can key off other indicators in the e-mail headers, e-mail structure and file size.

Even so, audio spam does not seem like it will do much for the spammers’ cause. That scary, disembodied voice isn’t exactly sending me scurrying for my eTrade account.

Still, it might represent something of spam’s future. Massive botnets have the computing resources to generate personalized audio files and even assign each a different, sneaky name to make spam filters think the audio files are legitimate ring tones — names like justintimberlake.mp3, for example.

Rami Habal, director of product marketing for Proofpoint, wonders if MP3 spam might ultimately portend something even more sophisticated: video spam. “It’s the Max Headroom effect. We’ll see images of spammers blurred faces showing fake Rolexes. I think they are going to have a lot of fun with it.”

Source: NY Times

Details of Hijacked Ad Server Emerge

October 21, 2007

Hackers have hijacked a server operated by Internet advertising company 24/7 Real Media Inc. and are using it to seed legitimate Web sites with ads carrying attack code, Symantec Corp. said Friday.

Windows users who visited sites with the attacking ads were infected if they browsed with Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer and had RealNetworks Inc.'s popular RealPlayer media player program installed on their PCs, Symantec said in an analysis written by three company researchers. This is the first time that malware has piggybacked on Internet ads served from a major advertising firm.

The attack should be a warning to the Web, said Andrew Storms, director of security operations at nCircle Network Security Inc. "So much of the content we consume today comes from many syndication services," Storms said in an e-mail interview. "We trust that the content provided to us by Internet 'blue chips' is safe from malware.

"This should be a wakeup call for sites which offer syndicated content," Storms said. "They need to take a more active role in ensuring the security of [that] content."

Working off reports last week that RealPlayer and Internet Explorer could be exploited to infect Windows computers, Symantec researchers Aaron Adams, Raymond Ball and Anthony Roe used a compromised company honeypot to trace an attack back to 24/7 Real Media's server. Although Symantec didn't speculate on how the server was compromised, it did lay out the attack's progression.

How the hack worked

After they'd gotten access to the server, the attackers added code that embedded an IFrame in every advertisement. The invisible IFrame contained instructions to redirect any browser that rendered the ad to another, unauthorized IP address. In other words, users who surfed to a theoretically trustworthy site that contained ads inserted by New York-based 24/7 were, in fact, secretly shunted to the second, malicious site.

Script hosted on that second site sniffed users' machines to determine if they were vulnerable to the unpatched RealPlayer vulnerability before actually launching an attack, according to Symantec. "The script first tests the user-agent supplied by the browser ensuring that it is Internet 6 or 7 and the system is identified as NT 5.1 [Windows XP] or NT 5.0 [Windows 2000]," Adams, Ball and Roe said in a report. Other sniff tests included one to identify the version of RealPlayer on the vulnerable PC.

If the computer met the attack criteria, a second exploit script was executed, which in turn downloaded and installed a Trojan horse to the PC. The Trojan horse was a variation of "Zonebac," malware first detected last year that disables a slew of security software and lowers Internet Explorer's security settings, said the analysts. On Friday, Symantec called the original Zonebac "fairly unsophisticated" but added that the variant in the RealPlayer attack "retrieves information from numerous Web sites."

Symantec was not available over the weekend to answer questions about the nature of that information or to provide any other details of the attack.

"What's most interesting about the exploit is where it is hosted," the three researchers said. "The compromise of an ad server can greatly increase the effectiveness of the attack. It is so effective because it allows an attacker to target victims that are browsing trusted or well-known Web sites."

In the specific attack that Symantec monitored, the advertisement -- which was for job-hunting site Monster.com -- had been placed on a site hosted by Tripod.com, a Web hosting service owned by Lycos Inc. that offers both free and for-a-fee plans. "The Tripod.com Web site that triggered the breach on the DeepSight honeypot was 'xxxxxxxxx.tripod.com,' containing [an] embedded script ... which loaded the compromised advertisement and then in turn loaded the exploit," said the Adams, Ball and Roe report. "To emphasize the severity of this attack, [the ad script] is embedded and called in every Tripod.com user Web page (URLs formatted like 'name.tripod.com') at least," they added.

Ground control to major mess

Tripod places ads on sites hosted under its free plan; customers who pay hosting fees, however, do not have ads stuck on their sites' pages.

It's not known if the only sites served with ads containing the IFrame were Tripod's. There were hints, however, that Tripod might not be the only tainted domain. Last Wednesday, for example, NASA issued a warning to workers of a surge in attacks on Windows PCs running Internet Explorer and RealPlayer. According to the space agency's bulletin, the attacks had come from "well-known news sites which may be hosting advertisements from ad servers that redirect the users to malware hosting sites." Friday, NASA spokesman Mike Mewhinney declined to name the news sites the agency suspected of displaying rogue ads.

Because 24/7 Real Media's ad research is significant, the IFrame-infected ads may have been placed on a large number of Web sites. According to the most recent data from Internet audience measurement firm comScore Inc., 24/7's ads reached 50% of all Americans online last month. The company's reach placed it at No. 15 on comScore's September Top 50.

24/7 Real Media did not respond to e-mails sent Friday and Sunday.

Symantec couldn't pin down the start date of the attack, but it did note that the malicious site had hosted exploit code since at least Oct. 8. "There is a possibility that this IP [has been] controlled by the same attackers for quite some time and that they are using it to launch numerous low-key attacks," said Adams, Ball and Roe.

Late Friday, RealNetworks issued a patch for RealPlayer 10.5 and the RealPlayer 11 beta. It also urged users of earlier versions to first upgrade to 10.5 or 11, then apply the patch. Only Windows versions of RealPlayer are vulnerable, RealNetworks said in its advisory; Mac and Linux versions are not at risk.

Source: ComputerWorld

Semantic Web Technology, Twine

By John Markoff

One great way to start a fight in a crowded Silicon Valley cocktail party (and there are a lot of them these days) is to mention Web 3.0.

There is no easy consensus about how to define what is meant by Web 3.0, but it is generally seen as a reference to the semantic Web. While it is not that much more precise a phrase, the semantic Web refers to technology to make using the Internet better by understanding the meaning of what people are doing, not just the way pages link to each other.

Amid the new Silicon Valley gold rush under way, a lot of entrepreneurs seem to believe that to define something is to own it. And Web 3.0 seems like a great thing to own.
So companies are bubbling up all over the place that claim to be building part of the semantic Web. Some are building voice recognition systems to use while browsing the Internet on a cell phone. Some want to challenge Google head on with a better search engine.

The leading players include Danny Hillis, the founder of Metaweb, Barney Pell of PowerSet, and Nova Spivack, the co founder of Radar Networks.

At the Web 2.0 conference on Friday Radar Networks will show off Twine, a service that uses semantic Web technology to improve sharing information with friends and coworkers.

Mr. Spivack, who previously founded Earthweb, an early Internet development firm, is the grandson of management theorist Peter F. Drucker. It was funded in part by Paul Allen, the co founder of Microsoft who appears to be creating a small keiretsu of semantic Web start-ups.

Twine will be available in a limited test version on Oct. 29 and open to the public next spring. The idea is to create a web, not of your friends as on a social network, but instead of all of your information. Twine is intended to let you suck in email, bookmarks, RSS news feeds, websites, photos, videos, database and any other digital information. Then it tries to make sense of it.
The company is positioning itself like a Facebook for sharing information, rather than entertainment, with friends and associates.

In a demonstration I saw earlier this week Twine appeared to do a good job of what artificial intelligence researchers refer to as “entity extraction,” that is categorizing things like people and places automatically. So you will be able to find your stuff by typing in a category–job applications, Cape Cod beaches, and so on.
The service will succeed to the degree that it accomplishes its goal of exposing the meaning of the information and automatically revealing relationships to enrich information by discovering patterns that users might not otherwise identify.
In the past such “knowledge management” services have been restricted to large corporations and to world of government intelligence organizations. Now the falling cost of computing and networking will make it available to everyday consumers and in theory support it with advertising.
The program will organize data in a popular format used defined by the World Wide Web Consortium known as Resource Description Format, or RDF, in principle making it as easy to export to new kinds of services as to import it.

To be sure, there is one easy way to separate this sort of heavy duty computer problem, from the Web 2.0 chat programs and such, Mr. Spivack explained in an interview at the company’s headquarters which are located a South-of-Market neighborhood in San Francisco.

“If you’re looking to make a quick buck you wouldn’t do this,” he (Spivack) said.

Source: NY Times

Google's Plan For Social Networking

By Miguel Helft

Just days ago, Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, was warning that social networking may be a fad.
Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, is far less dismissive.

People don’t appreciate how many page views on the Internet are in social networks,” Mr. Schmidt told a group of reporters at the end of its Zeitgeist conference, a two-day gathering of an eclectic mix of Google partners, competitors, social activists and politicians.
Social networks, he said, account for an “enormous proportion” of Internet usage, he added. “It is very real. It’s a very real phenomenon.”

In a conversation that also included the company’s co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Mr. Schmidt did little to answer what was in the mind of several reporters: What is Google going to do to remedy its lack of success in social networking?

Mr. Schmidt did say that over the next year, Google is planning to use information it has about the connections between its users, something techies call the “social graph,” to improve searches and other Google services. He said the company would like to sell advertising for Facebook, a position currently enjoyed by Microsoft. And he highlighted Google’s existing social network service, Orkut, and its deal to sell ads on behalf of MySpace, the largest social networking site.

Mr. Schmidt’s comments came amid intense debate in the tech world about the value of Facebook, which has reportedly discussed taking an investment from Yahoo, Google and, despite Mr. Ballmer’s qualms, Microsoft. There have also been reports that Google will not only use its social graph information for its own services but will also create a system for other companies to use the same data — in other words, to “out-open Facebook.” Mr. Schmidt was closemouthed about that.

Source: New York Times

Good News for Yahoo!

When Yahoo! makes news these days, it's usually not good news. But today there's a bright spot for the portal, which has managed to capture the No. 1 spot for internet news, ahead of rival Google.

According to comScore, Yahoo reaches 50 million people per month between its news, finance and sports channels. Although TV still has a greater daily reach, portals like MSN, AOL and Yahoo are quickly becoming news heavyweights.

Scott Moore, vice president of news and information, told Forbes.com that Yahoo has built its news empire by cutting deals with an array of news providers.

"Our news product is very leanly staffed," Moore said. "The MSNBC news room has 150 to 200 people. Yahoo News is a fraction of that. We have lower costs and that makes us more profitable."

Despite the popularity of the news division, Yahoo executives continue to look for a solution to the company's struggles.

Last week, Yahoo unveiled its next-generation search, which it hopes will rival Google's universal search. In the meantime, Yahoo engineers continue to test Mash, a social network built to replace Yahoo 360. The company hopes Mash could find itself wedged between MySpace and Facebook for a share of the growing social networking market.

Source: iMedia Connection

Avoid Seasonal Search Ranking Wreckage

By Aaron Shear , October 9, 2007

Despite the infancy of the Internet, businesses routinely predict next year's Web traffic based on last year's growth. For example, if traffic grew at a similar rate in 2005 and 2006, you can assume the same trend will continue in 2007, right?

Stop-and-Go Search Traffic

Maybe not, especially if you're depending on a source of traffic that's beyond your control. We all know you can't control search engine traffic. That means traffic data for both organic and paid search listings could show volatility.

Organic search and paid search are common sources of traffic growth, but what happens when there's a change in an algorithm that may drop you out of favor with the engines? You could suddenly lose all your traffic. Alternatively, if the quality scores given to your paid search campaigns change dramatically, can you adjust your site quickly enough to deal with the changes and get back up to speed?

One can argue that paid search is an easy to regulate standard, and for the most part, that's absolutely true. However, with the rise in attacks against arbitrage and affiliate sites, the battle is no longer simple. These attacks are not just limited to paid search; they can be targeted toward natural search traffic as well.

X-Factor Bake-In

How can you determine the best way to predict the traffic and revenue implications of the algorithm x-factor? This x-factor is the unstable nature of Internet search engines and represents what's beyond your control. Can you use a sliding scale to determine what your possible projections might be? In the business world, this isn't a normal strategy and will yield nothing but trouble. However, it's important to bake into your projections all traffic trends experienced throughout the year, including losses. Without taking the down side into account, you could wind up in deep water. Don't be afraid to report lower estimates than previously predicted.

It's also important to build any traffic trends experienced by your affiliate channel into your model, if you have affiliates. A loss in traffic to your primary site may not be isolated to your site alone. Diminished traffic could result in significant changes to many other sites that might be pushing your products as well -- especially with the way good duplicate-content pattern matching works these days. This loss could also be amplified for affiliates, depending on the extent of their reach and what they may be doing to trick or manipulate the engines. It's not a well-kept secret that a small percentage of affiliate sites don't play fair.

A few warning signs to look for: inexplicable lapses in traffic that occur for a few hours or even shorter periods of time. Traffic anomalies can be the best indicators of what might happen down the line. Search engines run tests to ensure their new algorithms are working properly on both their paid and natural systems.

Beware Holiday Updates

Some of the engines have even made huge changes right before the holidays, which is usually the time of year when change can be unwelcome -- at least, not in the negative direction. Recently I've seen organic search changes affecting ecommerce sites across-the-board that will dig into their projected Q4 profits. CFO's: sharpen your pencils and adjust for seasonality and search engine updates. We know you want to stop the red ink from flowing. Keep in mind, though, the more pressure you apply to recapture lost traffic, the less likely you'll stop the hemorrhaging. Plus, you'll not only lose traffic during the holidays by pressuring your staff. Before you ring in the New Year, they may already be celebrating -- at another company.

Source: SearchEngineWatch.com

Online Ad Sales Rise to $10 Billion

From Reuters
October 5, 2007

U.S. online advertising revenue surged to a new high of nearly $10 billion in the first half of the year, rising 27% from a year before, according to data released Thursday.

The figures from the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers underscore how quickly spending by marketers is shifting to the Internet, often at the expense of traditional media such as newspapers or radio.

"The torrid growth of interactive advertising revenue persists," bureau Chief Executive Randall Rothenberg said.

Second-quarter revenue rose 25% from a year earlier, the data showed, to a quarterly record of $5.1 billion.

One outgrowth of the boom is that media and technology companies are building up their online advertising businesses, partly through acquisitions.

Among recent deals, Google Inc. agreed to pay $3.1 billion for ad serving and tracking company DoubleClick and Microsoft Corp. bought online marketer AQuantive Inc. for $6 billion.

Jean-Philippe Courtois, head of Microsoft International, said this week that the online advertising market was growing 15% to 20% a year worldwide while the global advertising market was gaining only 2% to 3%.

At the same time, competition for those advertising dollars is growing, as firms including telephone companies and cable operators try to court marketers in an industry long dominated by television networks, newspapers and radio broadcasters.

For now, the majority of Internet spending is highly concentrated on the most popular sites.

The top 50 sites accounted for more than 90% of the revenue from online advertising spending in the first half of the year, and the top 10 sites accounted for 70%, according to the study.

Search ads, led by Google, remained the most popular form of online marketing and at $4.1 billion were 41% of the money spent in the first half of 2007.

Source: La Times

Class Action Against Target Website

A federal judge in California certified a class action lawsuit against Target Corp brought by plaintiffs claiming the discount retailer's Web site is inaccessible to the blind, according to court documents.

Judge Marilyn Patel of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California also rejected Target's motion for summary judgment in the case, according to the ruling filed October 2.

According to the ruling, plaintiffs -- including the National Federation of the Blind -- claim Target.com violates federal and state laws prohibiting discrimination against the disabled.

"This is a tremendous step forward for blind people throughout the country who for too long have been denied equal access to the Internet economy," Marc Maurer, president of the National Federation for the Blind, said in a statement.

"All e-commerce businesses should take note of this decision and immediately take steps to open their doors to the blind," Maurer said.

"Target is committed to serving all of our guests and we believe that our Web site is fully accessible and complies with all applicable laws," Bloomberg quoted Target spokeswoman Carolyn Brookter as saying in an e-mailed statement.

Target was not immediately available for comment to Reuters.

Source: Yahoo News

Plaintiffs’ Counsel

Disability Rights Advocates – A non-profit law firm dedicated to protecting and advancing the civil rights of people with disabilities located in Berkeley, California. DRA advocates for disability rights through high-impact litigation, as well as research and education. DRA's national advocacy work includes high-impact class action litigation on behalf of people with all types of disabilities, including mobility, hearing, vision, learning and psychological disabilities. Through negotiation and litigation,
DRA has made thousands of facilities throughout the country accessible and has enforced access rights for millions of people with disabilities in many key areas of life, including education, employment, health care and public accommodations.

Schneider & Wallace, LLP, located in San Francisco, is a dedicated group of California trial lawyers committed to continuing the work of the civil rights movement through individual and class action litigation. The practice has litigated extensively and with unparalleled success against prominent corporate and government entities since 1993.

Brown, Goldstein & Levy, LLP is a Baltimore-based law firm and is Maryland’s leading civil rights firm. It has represented the National Federation of the Blind in cases throughout the United States, including against AOL.

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