"American Idol," the nation's most popular song contest on the Fox TV network, expanded its brand with the introduction of an instant messenger service targeting the estimated 25 million to 30 million weekly viewers of the show.

GoDaddy.com, the Web site registrar that gained national attention with a controversial commercial during the Super Bowl last month, said yesterday that it would not extend its contract with the agency that created the commercial, the Ad Store in New York, after the contract expires on Thursday.

After the explosive growth of the iPod and other digital music players, technology companies look to do the same thing with another medium: video.

Local advertising spend on online radio Web sites increased 94 percent from 2003 to 2004, but there's plenty of room for growth, preliminary results from a Borrell Associates study show. The figures indicate radio stations' sites grew ad revenue from $17 million to around $33 million. They bode well for new initiatives reportedly underway at Clear Channel Communications and Infinity Broadcasting.

Ken Fuhrman's Colorado-based start-up company is a television junkie's dream, making powerful home media servers to hold digitized versions of television shows, movies and music. But Fuhrman is worried. On Tuesday morning, the Supreme Court will hear arguments on whether file-swapping software companies Grokster and StreamCast Networks should be held responsible for the widespread copyright infringement on their networks, and he's afraid his company, Interact-TV, could be affected too.

Billionaire Mark Cuban has announced that he will finance Grokster's defense against MGM's peer-to-peer lawsuit, which is expected to be argued before the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday. Cuban, the entrepreneur who sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo for $5.7 billion and who's now president of HDNet, a provider of high-definition TV programming, wrote in a blog entry Saturday that he had agreed to fund the software company's defense after he was approached by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and others.

The price of search engine ads keeps rising, but analysts say advertisers will continue to prime the pump. Paid search has become the fuel that drives companies to advertise online. In the last year, prices for ads placed on search results pages have risen about 25%, say several research sources. While some companies balk at the prices and, in some cases, hire consultants to help them get better results with free, natural search, many companies will simply pay higher prices for search engine advertising.

Hawking baby and children's clothes - along with some garage sale and thrift store bargains - on eBay helps Sunni Wojnarowsky bring in some extra money so she can afford to stay home with her two young boys. The additional dollars are great, but does she really need to hassle with the paperwork and report her small profit to the Internal Revenue Service? Her question, posed to the online auction site's discussion board for sellers, generated much advice - and more confusion.

"Video Killed the Radio Star," or so goes The Buggles song that launched MTV in 1981 and a new era in music history. On Monday, radio conglomerate Clear Channel Communications Inc. plans to transform video into the next radio star.

What if the internet extended beyond computers and high-speed connections, with web pages expanding down city streets and onto the sides of buildings? This is the vision behind an interactive new media project called grafedia, which enables folks to make the world their canvas by publicly posting e-mail addresses or keywords that, when punched into certain mobile phones or an e-mail account, retrieve corresponding images.