Kenneth Corbin

NEW YORK — It seems a safe bet to say that traditional publishers and advertisers are still learning the ropes of new media. The process of transitioning from a top-down, one-way communications model to the pluralistic Internet world where everyone can create or comment on anything, and no one wants to pay for anything, has […]

You’ve always got to be a little skeptical about self-promoting research. We see a lot of it, and the latest comes from Massive, a Microsoft subsidiary whose specialty is placing branded ads within video games. Massive teamed with the research firm Interpret to test the effectiveness of the medium and, turns out, they work! The […]

Wikia Search, the open source search engine Wikia Inc. rolled out in January, is set for a significant upgrade today, adding a lengthy feature set aimed at bringing the project closer to its goal of creating a human-powered alternative to the algorithm-driven search engines currently dominating the market. Wikia Inc. is the for-profit venture chaired […]

NEW YORK — One of the great questions facing today’s advertisers is how to reach consumers in a media environment where control of the content is not in the hands of a consolidated publisher, but distributed among the millions of individuals who collectively make up powerful online communities. How do brands insert their messages into […]

Could it be? Will advertisers finally sour on the ad format that no one clicks on but everyone thinks is necessary? The analyst firm Research and Markets is predicting that spending on display ads will peak this year at $12.6 billion, and then enter a steep decline. Within four years, the firm estimates that that […]

A tech policy group of the University of Ottawa’s law school is petitioning the Privacy Commissioner of Canada to investigate Facebook for violating Canada’s privacy laws. The complaint filed by the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) charges Facebook with 22 distinct privacy violations, including the claim that the social network shares more […]

Now that it’s jumped into the social networking space, AOL’s going to have a whole new crop of third-party applications to manage. The online media giant has thrown its official weight behind OpenSocial, the developer standard for social network applications created by Google. Bebo, the social network AOL acquired in March, already supported OpenSocial, so […]

Online metrics firm comScore (NASDAQ: SCOR) has acquired privately held M:Metrics, a Seattle-based company that provides data on mobile usage. comScore will pay $44.3 million in cash for the metrics company and issue roughly 50,000 stock options to M:Metrics investors. With the snowballing introduction of Internet-enabled mobile devices and 3G phones, comScore had been planning […]

The United States and European Union traded shots Wednesday in a dispute over imports of certain technology goods that the U.S. claims are tax-free under World Trade Organization law. U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab charged that the EU is defying its responsibilities under the 1996 Information Technology Agreement, or ITA, which holds that certain tech […]

NEW YORK — Working in the mobile marketing industry has got to be a little like being a baseball fan in Brooklyn in the 1950s. Prospects to win abound, but somehow, come October, the faithful are always left with the consolation, “Wait ’til next year.” Well, just when 1955 (the Dodgers, triumphant at last!) will […]

Facebook today confirmed that it is preparing to further open its platform so that third-party developers will be able to create applications using its source code that will run on other environments. Facebook’s move toward open source follows a flurry of announcements from Web companies — itself included — talking up openness initiatives that would […]