Susan Kuchinskas

When eBay’s Secret Santa Gift Exchange launched today, the site’s front page offered a new surprise: one-click donations to Unicef, Toys for Tots and American’s Second Harvest. “It’s an exciting new platform for cause marketing and fund-raising,” said eBay director of consumer promotions Julie Haddon,” and the holiday season is its first big test.” Two […]

InterActiveCorp CEO Barry Diller told investors that his company’s CitySearch unit is being courted by Google, Yahoo! and MSN. Acknowledging that CitySearch “has not made a dime, and has lost many,” Diller said that the company has scaled down in the last six months to focus on pay-for-performance advertising. What CitySearch needs is more distribution, […]

Online marketplace eBay launched a Secret Santa Gift Exchange promotion for the holiday season, in an effort to get its customers, along with their friends, families and co-workers, thinking of the site as a gift shopping destination. San Jose, Calif.-based eBay partnered with the United States Postal Service, Infinity Broadcasting and social event planning site […]

Forget decoder rings or troll dolls. Marketers are reaching today’s kids with digital goods — and top of the list is music. Real Networks’ deal with Comcast, announced this week, will offer free unlimited use of the Rhapsody streaming music service to the cable company’s broadband subscribers who use the RealOne player for desktop computers. […]

InfoSpace’s Search & Directory business has agreed to use Vivisimo’s Clustering Engine on its Web metasearch properties, Dogpile, WebCrawler and MetaCrawler. Bellevue, Wash.-based InfoSpace has spent nearly a year upgrading its search properties. The five-year-old Vivisimo, based in Pittsburgh, Pa., offers technology that clusters search results on the fly into folders labeled by category. The […]

Disposable e-mail addresses (DEAs), the latest in anti-spam tactics, let people set up and discard e-mail identities as easily as yesterday’s soiled shirt. How will their adoption affect e-mail marketing? Marketers take the trend in stride, as long as they aren’t the ones being dumped. This new permutation on the e-mail address allows people to […]

The Google Deskbar, a free software download released today by Google Labs, places a branded search query window within the Windows taskbar, letting users perform Google searchers without having a browser window open, although users must have installed Internet Explorer 5.5 or higher. Deskbar functionality makes Google search seem almost like part of the operating […]

The Internet Committee of the National Association of Attorneys General say thanks, but no thanks, for the Can Spam Act, passed by the Senate in October. A letter sent to House leaders, including Billy Tauzin, head of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader, detailed their complaints. AGs from […]

After a report that showed men aged 18 to 34 had deserted network television, interactive marketers prayed that they’d show up online instead. Two new studies lend support to that idea. Earlier this week, comScore Media Metrix released a more general study of men in the elusive age group. The study from the Reston, Va.-based […]

It seems like everyone’s rolling out local search. Citysearch began offering paid listings in local search in March; Google began testing regional targeting of AdWords in October; and Overture plans to offer similar functionality in a few months. But who’s going to buy these placements? Will a national advertiser like Domino’s start hyping pepperoni pizzas […]

NetRatings and ACNielsen U.S. this week announced the launch of Homescan Online, a new service designed to improve the effectiveness of online marketing for consumer packaged goods (CPG) marketers and Web publishers. Homescan Online will track the habits of a 12,000-member panel, a subset of the ACNielsen Homescan consumer panel. Panelists already record their purchases […]

Web search technology provider Ask Jeeves, Inc. today announced the addition of Smart Search for Products, the latest in a rash of shopping-oriented search products released in time for this year’s holiday season. The tool from Emeryville, Calif.-based Ask Jeeves uses data from its research on online and offline shopping behavior, and delivers what its […]