Henry Blodgett, the dot-com-era analyst famous for publicly saying one thing but privately meaning the opposite, trashed AOL in a recent post on his blog Internet Outsider. Specifically, he said AIM Pages is a good five years too late, and even if the product is ten times better than MySpace, it's still "going to bomb." Why? Simply because MySpace got there first, and 70 million people don't want to do it all over again. AOL should know, he says: AOL Instant Messenger dominates its space for exactly the same reason. I'm gonna play devil's advocate for a minute and point …

Google should be wary of MySpace, says Motley Fool columnist Stephen Ellis. Since the next generation of pay-per click-advertising is going to come from content (as Google knows with AdSense) the search giant should consider that News Corp. "has both the content and the online properties to build an online powerhouse." This makes the "stodgy company" one to watch, he says. To be sure, MySpace is still a tiny part of News Corp, though it represents most of the company's opportunity for growth: it's already generated $2 billion in cash this financial year, about four times what News Corp paid …

Viewers watched ABC's television shows about 3 million times over the last two weeks since the Walt Disney Co. made some of its TV content available on the Web for free. In the Reuters.com report, Disney makes no indication that it was either pleased or displeased with the result. While certainly not a nominal figure, 3 million streams of four programs after two weeks doesn't come close to the 7-12 rating a new episode of "Lost" or "Desperate Housewives" can pick up in a single night. This just goes to show that Web-based episodes won't be replacing television--yet. That said, …

By year's end, telecom giant AT&T expects to be offering Web TV service in 15-20 US markets, but the decision to aggressively move into TV leaves skeptics wondering whether the Internet technology AT&T will use can work on a massive scale. By deploying Web-based technology, the company formerly known as SBC is trying to bypass the enormous expense of wiring fiber-optic cables to homes so it can compete with cable operators providing TV, phone and high-speed Internet service. AT&T is spending $4.6 billion to make TV available to 19 million homes in 41 markets by 2008, but analysts say the …

The Online Retailing Alliance yesterday applauded the efforts of House Judiciary Committee H.R. 5417 for devising a new Net Neutrality bill that would prevent telecom companies from creating a tiered system for distributing bandwidth over their networks. The Alliance, which includes the likes of Amazon, eBay, and IAC/InterActive Corp., said the committee's bill "wisely" recognizes that recent court decisions and FCC actions show that a handful of Internet network operators now have control over the fate of the Internet, allowing them to engage in discriminatory behavior without consequence. The group added that the new bill is "particularly timely" because another …

As we know, Yahoo's overhauling its search advertising system, but CFO Sue Decker, speaking yesterday at the company's annual analyst meeting in San Francisco, doesn't expect the changes to make a positive financial contribution until 2007. Yahoo's overall revenue should grow 24 to 31 percent this year, settling into a compounded growth rate of 25-26 percent for the next few years after that, she said. This would be slightly faster than the 22-24 percent growth projected for Web advertising overall. Yahoo's new SEM software won't be available to ad buyers until the third quarter in the States and the first …

Not to be outdone by Google and Microsoft, Yahoo did some analyst day grandstanding of its own in San Francisco yesterday. Search execs in particular trumpeted the targeting capabilities of its new advertising system; Tim Cadogan, the company's vice president of search, boasted that Yahoo now collects "more data about the quality of advertisers' listings than any other competitor." The new system measures an ad's performance on a five-point scale and is able to determine specific criteria like queries that indicate a specific versus an implied intent to shop. I'm not sure how familiar Yahoo is with Microsoft's AdCenter, but …

Major corporations continue to pick sides in the Net Neutrality debate. Yesterday, 3M, Cisco, Corning, Qualcomm and 30 other technology heavyweights sent a letter to Congress firmly opposing new legislation that would prohibit providers of broadband Internet service from favoring some Web sites over others. This view, of course, is backed by major telecom companies like Verizon and AT&T and cable providers like Comcast. Internet firms like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Yahoo, which would have to pay fees for access to more bandwidth over their respective networks, support stringent Net Neutrality legislation. The Web firms are hoping to gain public …

It's not quite ad-related, but evidence abounds that virtual worlds are coming into their own as alternative real-world business opportunities. This time, a property dispute involving a gamer versus Linden Lab, purveyor of Second Life, a massively multiplayer online game, is headed to real-world court. Gamer Marc Bragg, who's also a lawyer, is suing Linden Lab for freezing his user account after a land deal went bad, and then shutting him down completely. Bragg is demanding $8,000 in restitution. Second Life is one of the only virtual worlds in which members actually own the content they create. Bragg, who owns …

Google's Tower of Babel-like goal to capture all the world's information in a searchable database conjures up images of Borges' "Library of Babel" from his masterpiece The Fictions, which contained not only all of the books that have been written in every language, but also those that had yet to be completed. With more than half of its projects yet to be completed, that sounds something like Google, all right. But what will it take for Google (or Yahoo, Microsoft and the Open Content Alliance) to truly assemble a modern-day "Library of Babel?" According to a recent New York Times …