When David Morison awoke at 6:30 a.m. Friday in the United Kingdom and learned about the power blackout that had been crippling the northeastern U.S. and Canada, he knew immediately what he should do: buy paid-search advertisements for his one-man Web company.

Top U.S. consumer electronics chain Best Buy Co. Inc. said on Monday it has begun selling subscriptions to RealNetworks Inc.'s Rhapsody digital music service as music labels and retailers rush to cash in on the growing allure of Internet downloading.

This week, Viacom launched Spike TV, the first cable channel exclusively targeting the fragmented, male. In some ways, one might say the strategy borrows from the playbook of the Web, which has proven to be a home run with guys.

Online search and printed local directories: an either/or proposition?

Talk about testing a marketing strategy. Joel Skretvedt, director of Internet marketing and operations for Techno Brands Inc.'s TechnoScout.com, wondered how effective his online advertising was. There's only one way to find out, he reasoned. And so from mid April to mid July, he halted all online advertising.

AOL Time Warner is considering dropping the AOL name from its corporate masthead.

At the end of 2002, U.S. cable companies had slightly more than 10.5 million broadband subscribers in total, whereas DSL providers had only 5 million, Yankee Group analyst Mike Goodman said. He predicted this proportional gap will stay roughly the same.

Beginning on Friday, all Merrill Lynch & Co. staffers will be blocked from viewing e-mail from AOL, MSN, Yahoo, chat rooms and the like.

The women's site signs on for paid search and contextual advertising, while Google offers AdSense customers more tools.

Rankings for the top 15 programs on basic cable networks as compiled by Nielsen Media Research for the week of July 28-Aug. 3.