Spam concerns continue to slow adoption of e-mail marketing, Digital Impact said yesterday. Reporting its fiscal second-quarter results, the San Mateo, CA, e-mail service provider said its business shrunk in the three months ending Sept. 30. Quarterly revenue totaled $10.2 million, down 7 percent from the year-ago period. Digital Impact had a $2 million net loss in the quarter compared with a $108,000 profit a year earlier.

Yahoo! has acquired privately held Stata Labs, developer of the searchable e-mail client/RSS reader Bloomba and the SAproxy Pro spam filter. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Yahoo's Overture Services said yesterday that it has opened its third-party reseller program to ad agencies, which have been slow to embrace search marketing.

Though European direct marketers expect the effectiveness of Web, e-mail and mobile marketing to improve drastically in the next few years, they plan no large spending increase in these areas. This was the conclusion in a recent Forrester Research study published in cooperation with the Federation of European Direct & Interactive Marketing.

Financial analysts are predicting strong third-quarter earnings for Google on growth of search-related advertising, but some caution that its stock is still overvalued.

An Elvis Presley lookalike from Blackpool is the star of the new campaign for AOL, created by Grey London, as the ISP taps into the craze for music downloads. The campaign, called "Chinese Elvis", shows how AOL members can feed their obsessions and access unique music content via the keyword search feature. It is the latest campaign from Grey for AOL 9.0 to use a central character to highlight the benefits of being an AOL member.

Gawker Media publisher defines blogging and custom publishing for an iMedia Brand Summit audience (first of three parts). At September's iMedia Brand Summit in Deer Valley, Utah, Denton spoke about the marketing potential for social networking and blogging.

An Australian journalist kidnapped in Iraq was freed after his captors checked the popular internet search engine Google to confirm his identity.

When comedian Jon Stewart blasted the hosts of CNN's "Crossfire" on the cable TV program, he ignited a frenzy of online activity.

Yahoo!'s Overture is expanding its Ambassador reseller program to help the company go beyond its base in the search engine marketing community to reach out to traditional and interactive agencies. Competitor Google is engaged in outreach as well.