eBay just made it easier to give to charity--and more effective, too. Since 2000, the online auctioneer has helped raise more than $81 million for charity, which includes vendors donating part of their sales to nonprofits, and charities that sell items directly on eBay. A new program, effective Oct., gives sellers an incentive to be charitable--waiving the same percentage of the profit that was donated from their seller's fee. If you give 30 percent of your profit to charity, eBay will waive 30 percent of your fee. For charities that sell items on eBay's Giving Works program, there is no …

More and more magazines are extending their brands to the Internet, offering new or re-purposed content online. Country Living magazine just took the leap, opening a new site called "Country Living On Demand," which offers video segments on the same subjects it covers in its magazine. "Country Living on Demand" will compete with a variety of other Web rivals, including E.W. Scripps' HGTV, a cable channel that offers some of its content on the Web. Magazine publishers are hoping online video ad revenue will help offset flagging revenues from print ads. Country Living, for example, has seen its print revenues …

What have we learned from the appointment of Google CEO Eric Schmidt to Apple Computer's board of directors? "The old social networks in Silicon Valley run very deep," says AnnaLee Saxenian, a Silicon Valley scholar and dean of the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley. "Silicon Valley has a common enemy to the north." Microsoft, beware: the media and technology sectors are uniting against you with Google at the helm and the Internet as their weapon. Microsoft's Windows could be their next target. Last week, Google announced it was bringing together services that could be a Web-based …

Following Paris Hilton's lead, marketers now know they can buy visibility on YouTube. It's more like a content-distribution partnership, in which marketers pay YouTube for the right to upload content and promotional materials to an interactive channel. They get all the measurement trappings of their very own hosted Web site. It also lets consumers interact with brands, by letting them leave feedback, send content to friends and bask in total brand immersion. But it's not for everyone. How could a consumer packaged-goods marketer, for example, leverage this? Also, there are questions of control: Anyone can say anything they want about …

Net Neutrality advocates from 25 cities gathered across the nation to rally the "Save the Internet" coalition. From Seattle to Montpelier, VT, demonstrators hoisted bright orange signs touting their cause, presenting senators' offices with petitions signed by the thousands. They, of course, support net neutrality--the concept that network broadband usage should be an equal opportunity for all Web publishers. Telecom and cable broadband providers would like to create a tiered service that provides one data transmission speed for all Web publishers and a faster "lane" for those willing to pay more for faster delivery. The rallies were designed to ramp …

What do marketers think about the spate of new Google partnerships and ad initiatives? Do the additions of AOL, Fox Interactive and eBay make any difference? Not according to those who spoke with ClickZ. Of course not, since Google's distribution deals mean a lot to Google and its partners: more search queries and more money for each of them. Marketers just want to buy ads that put them in front of the right audience, whether it's at MySpace or eBay or Google. Insofar as Google technology does a better job of putting advertisers in front of the right people, they're …

People around the world have spent 9,305 years on YouTube since the site's inception, according to The Wall Street Journal writer Lee Gomes. Because YouTube tells us almost nothing about its users, he did a "scrape" of the site, which means he used a computer to methodically gather bits of public information scattered around a Web site in order to describe its usage in depth. This is legal, by the way. So, what else did he find? About a month ago, there were 5.1 million videos on YouTube; by the weekend that number had grown 20 percent, to 6.1 million. …