Google Inc. may have warned investors that it is does not intend to be a conventional company, but one convention it cannot avoid is being reviewed by stock research analysts.

I was extremely interested to hear about new study results from an outfit called NameProtect. This month, they analyzed the paid search ads that appeared on Yahoo! and Google against the trademark terms associated with America's top 100 brands.

Like a lot of journalists, ClickZ's editors have been pondering the role blogs are coming to play, both online and in society at large. We're wondering what the changes mean for more formally organized online publishers. Sometimes, the discussion gets passionate, sometimes it's subdued, but it's always extremely interesting.

Hearst Magazines yesterday announced the launch of a companion Web site to Shop Etc., its new fashion, home and beauty shopping title that hit newsstands this week.

Congratulations, Google! By the time you read this, Google will be a public company (not any old public company -- it'll have done it the Google way). Yahoo!'s stock will, of course, still be flying high on a steady stream of revenue generated by you, your competition, and all the other search marketers out there.

On the internet, competition is stronger than ever. There was a time where paying a few bucks to get in Yahoo was enough to generate substantial traffic but marketing websites on the internet got much more complex since.

Google, conceding that demand for its long-awaited public stock offering had fallen far short of the company's hopes, reduced the number of shares yesterday and concluded its unorthodox online auction by accepting a price well below its original target. The final price was $85, far off the target range of $108 to $135 a share that the company projected last month. The shares are expected to begin trading today on the Nasdaq market.

WebSideStory cut the anticipated price of shares in its initial public offering, according to a regulatory filing the company made yesterday. The Web analytics company now anticipates its shares will price in the $8-$9 range, down from $10-$12.

There's no Napster for books yet, but creators of text and images still have to deal with a lot of the same digital rights management issues perplexing the movie and music industries.

The London Internet Exchange (Linx), the UK's most influential ISP organisation, has agreed tough new antispam guidelines.