More information isn't necessarily leading to a clearer picture for marketers and agencies, which have "never been more confused." The growing importance of ROI via Web-based marketing has led to an explosion of market research by competing services using different methodologies that produce different results. Even more frustrating for marketers, is the fact that some new media forms, like social networks, live behind walled gardens that make it impossible for third party researchers to gain access to their data. More data is more confusing, but it's necessary in a ROI-focused world. Reliable data is also in increasingly high demand …

"The entire economic rationale for brands is gone," said Umair Haque, Havas Media Lab director and a Harvard Business Online contributor. "Interaction is too easy now for brands to have power." Indeed, Haque and others agree that brand equity in the Digital Age is about how brands manage their relationship with consumers. For example, Google and Craigslist, two of the Internet's brand icons, have maintained such a strong brand image by keeping their bare-bones sites unadorned with advertising to help consumers find what they seek quickly. This develops a modicum of respect between brand and consumer that grows …

Is Yahoo--whose stubborn insistence that Microsoft pay a "fair" (read: higher) price caused the tech giant to walk away from a $47 billion bid for the company earlier this month--a "buy" at just under $26 per share? The stock is trading down 26% from its 52-week high of $34.08 on Oct. 29, 2007, but BusinessWeek said the stock is apt to fall even further, as it becomes less and less likely that Microsoft will return with another offer. Once Microsoft is perceived to be totally out of the picture, the stock could fall back as far as $19 per share, …

First MySpace, then Facebook, and now Google this morning is expected to announce a new product called "Friend Connect." Friend Connect will be a set of APIs for Open Social participants to pull profile information from social networks into third party Web sites. The Google announcement trails MySpace's Data Availability, launched last Thursday, and Facebook's Facebook Connect, also launched late last week, which are similar products. So, like Data Availability and Facebook Connect, Google's Friend Connect will be a way for users to securely send personal profile data to third party applications. This allows users to centralize their social …

This is cool: A new Google challenger on Sunday unveiled tools for searching Wikipedia, the online community encyclopedia, using conversational phrases instead of keywords. Powerset's technology breaks down the meaning of words and phrases into concepts, the idea being to free users from the burden of typing exact words to find material. It also helps them find more detailed answers to questions rather than returning isolated links. Will "concept search" replace "keyword search"? Not anytime soon, but if the technology takes off (it is only being used on Wikipedia thus far), Powerset could become an attractive acquisition target for …