Far from being the dot-gone that we all thought it was after the crash of 2001, it looks like advertising spending by dot-coms is actually on the rise for the first time since the end of the boom.

If the latest retail spending reports hold, then it's going to be a big year for consumer electronics and toys/videogames.

As I write this column Friday morning a little bit north of New York City, we're under the gun of an early-season snow storm that threatens to dump a foot of snow on us between this afternoon and Sunday morning.

Through the end of the month, you can buy a new PC for $299. It's a pretty good deal for the price, with a 1.7GHz Celeron processor, 256MB of RAM, an Ethernet card, a 40GB hard drive, monitor, even a printer and a 56K modem.

One area where the fast-growing search-engine marketing is heading is local. Witness today's announcement by FindWhat.com that it signed a contract with Verizon Information Services, publisher of the Verizon SuperPages directories in print and SuperPages.com online.

With less than a month before figuring out compliance with the newly passed CAN-SPAM law, here's some help.

Don't look now but it looks like we might have a federal anti-spam law. It isn't soup yet, but the Senate took a step toward it Tuesday when it approved by voice vote legislation that's popularly known as "Can-Spam" but could also be known as the bill that outlaws spam but no one really thinks is going to do anything about the problem anytime soon.