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AOL Layoffs Coming Soon, Followed by Champagne and Cookies for Advertisers When HuffPo Deal Closes

Kara Swisher — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 08:29:48 +0000

[UPDATED: Corrections below and in headline that layoffs coming soon after close, but not today.]

There’s no question it’s a jarring contrast–layoffs versus champagne and cookies.

But that’s the reality at AOL as its acquisition of the Huffington Post closes this week, even as it sheds employees as part of its ongoing turnaround effort.

Sources said the New York-based Internet portal could announce layoffs as early as today.

[UPDATE: Layoffs will not come until after the Huffington Post deal is closed said other sources, although they are coming.]

AOL CEO Tim Armstrong indicated job cuts were definitely coming at a paidContent conference in New York yesterday.

“There will be job changes,” he said, when asked about layoffs.

Perhaps sooner than later.

BoomTown received several emails from worried AOL employees, noting that human resources staffers were taking steps to initiate the layoffs at 10 am ET/7 am PT this morning and that there would also be employee meetings then too.

I followed up with several sources close to the situation, who confirmed that the layoffs are imminent. Nonetheless, they could not specify the timing, size and scope of them.

[UPDATE: There will be an all-hands meeting for AOL staff with Armstrong, as well as new content head Arianna Huffington.]

The last time AOL laid off employees a year ago, it was a large action with job cuts of 2,300.

The latest slashing comes just as AOL management will try to aggressively tout the closing of its $315 million purchase of the Huffington Post.

The integration of the well-known news and opinion site will mean a significant change for AOL’s editorial efforts, as well as an opportunity to impress advertisers.

Thus, AOL is prepping boxes with Greek cookies and pricey champagne to send out to key advertising clients, to celebrate the deal’s close.

Why Greek cookies? Because it’s the original country of Huffington, co-founder and editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post.

I have emails into AOL for a comment.

A Web Ad That Tells You It's Stalking You

Peter Kafka — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 17:34:33 +0000

There’s a big debate about privacy and online advertising, and the personal data marketers use to hunt down the customers they’re trying to capture.

So here’s a Web ad campaign that cuts to the chase, and simply tells you up front that it’s stalking you.

And the chances are very, very high that you’re not going to care.

That’s because the ads come from AdExchanger.com, a very niche (and very good) trade publication that focuses exclusively on ad technology. And the only way you’re going to see the ads will be if you’ve visited AdExchanger.

And that means that you’re almost certain to understand and embrace concepts like “retargeting”–following a prospective customer from site to site using electronic tracking signals.

Which is why AdExchanger’s campaign comes right out and tells you that it’s using retargeting to serve up the banner ads–its an in-joke.

Again, anyone who’s seen the ads in their natural habitat understands what’s going on here, but to spell it out:

AdExchanger’s John Ebbert–he’s the publisher, editor, janitor, etc. for the one-man operation–sets an electronic “cookie” on his site.
That allows Google’s AdWords service to find browsers (it isn’t actually able to identify people, a fact that’s important for Ebbert and everyone else in ad tech right now) that have visited the site. Then it serves those browsers ads when they visit other sites.
The ad campaign is designed to remind people to come back to AdExchanger, and/or visit its Facebook page.

“It was an interesting opportunity to use retargeting to have a conversation about a conversation,” Ebbert says. And to use one of the oldest marketing techniques in the book–get people to give you free advertising by talking about your advertising.

Meanwhile, a side note for “content creators” trying to figure out how to make a living: Consider thinking small.

That’s what Ebbert has done here, and it’s working very well for him. AdExchanger is microscopic by Web publishing standards–it attracts a mere 35,000 unique visitors per month–but that’s all he needs to make a living in Manhattan.

That’s because that audience of 35,000 includes every single person in the ad technology industry, more or less. And because that industry is so red-hot right now–VCs are pouring money into the business, and start-ups are vying for the attention of potential acquirers like Google, Yahoo and AOL–he’s able to do just fine selling sponorships at rates much bigger sites could never land.

Microsoft's Steve Ballmer and Ray Ozzie Live at D8

John Paczkowski — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 15:17:47 +0000

As an indicator of the headwinds facing Microsoft and its CEO, Steve Ballmer, today, two pieces of news last week are worth considering. The first, that Apple (AAPL) had overtaken Microsoft as the world’s most valuable technology company, would seem to signal that Microsoft (MSFT) is no longer quite the driving force in technology it once was, particularly in the consumer space. The second, word of a restructuring that will give Ballmer greater oversight of Microsoft’s Entertainment and Devices Division, indicates that the company is scrambling to change this.

The enterprise space, though, is a different story, as Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie, who joins Ballmer onstage today, will tell you. In enterprise, Microsoft is still the undisputed leader, though here, too, the company is under attack by new on-demand computing services from formidable rivals like Google (GOOG) and Amazon (AMZN).

Full video is below, followed by the liveblog:

[ See post to watch video ]

Liveblog

8:09 am: Stay tuned. This morning’s interview will begin soon.

8:16 am: Before the main event, a few introductory remarks from Wall Street Journal Managing Editor Robert Thomson. Obligatory Steve Ballmer hoodie joke.

8:17 am: Thomson talking about Australia’s contributions to the technology industry. His top example: The Ugg boot, which solved Australia’s sheep overpopulation problem.

8:18 am: Thomson now drawing parallels between “Harry Potter” characters Harry/Hermione and Walt/Kara.

8:20 am: Walt takes the stage with a faux wand: “Expelliarmus!”

8:21 am: Ballmer and Ozzie take the stage.

8:21 am: Neither is wearing a hoodie.

8:22 am: This is Ozzie’s first appearance at D. Ballmer’s a veteran.

8:22 am: A first question for the pair: Where do you think the economy is these days?

Ballmer: I would say in the developed world, things have come off the lows for sure. I think our industry is even more revved up than others. But we’re in a good product cycle that has propelled the market. We’ve seen some comeback in business spending. What’s the old adage? Burn me once, shame on me [pause]–whatever it is. At least for now, we continue to see developed countries coming back. Emerging markets are a bit different.

Ballmer talks for a moment about China and intellectual property protections there, which are obviously problematic.

8:25 am: Walt asks about the cloud and the transition from the desktop. Microsoft has been the dominant company in local clients, but now you’ve said you’re “all in” in the cloud. What sort of opportunity is this?

Ozzie: I can’t remember a time when it’s been so exciting from the perspective of so many transitions happening concurrently. Now we’ve got everybody connected on the Internet…all devices connectible on the Internet. Now we’ve got companies around the industry coalescing around standards-based ways for storing data. We’re at a shift in the enterprise space and how it manages IT.

Ozzie talks about sharing-based operations in enterprise computing. How does the mobile phone connect to these scenarios? The real opportunity for us is how do we re-pivot to the cloud and make all these devices connect to the cloud.

8:29 am: Ballmer jumps in and notes that almost all players in the business believe the desktop will be important for some time, despite all that we’re hearing about the cloud and HTML5. At the end of the day, the world we’re talking about is driven from the cloud out, but it’s smart cloud talking to smart devices and apps that are controlled locally.

8:31 am: More from Ballmer–The experiences people want will almost always require some device with a reasonable amount of storage and graphics ability. The trend today is all about getting smarter on the client, not getting thinner on the client.

8:32 am: Ozzie says that regardless of what the device is, applications will feel more cached than installed, thanks to the cloud.

8:32 am: Walt–So the cloud isn’t a threat to you?

Ballmer: There’s nothing bad for us in the trend. It’s all good. But it’s a transition and as such, it’s a period of tumult. So we need to be smarter and more vigilant. But not because we’re moving from a world that’s fundamentally good for us to a world that’s not. We’re moving from a world that’s good for us to a world that’s potentially even more good for us.

8:34 am: Walt–Who’s your competition today?

Ballmer: The main ones are folks that people would guess: Google, Apple, Oracle (ORCL), VMware (VMW). And of course, we still always have the things that come out of Open Source–Linux, etc.

8:35 am: Walt asks about synching. He describes it as an unmet need. People need to synch their stuff across multiple devices, sometimes cross-platform. Why isn’t this just built into things today?

Ozzie: Right now one core synch tech is built into most devices these days. It’s called OpenSync. Synch is hard, but it’s a straightforward engineering task. What’s transpiring on the Net is unusual, because we’re spreading our data all over the Web. But we don’t really have a conceptual model for this that’s as clean as those of the past. I think at a high level, what we all want is how are we going to agree as an industry on some meta-data ways of how and where I keep my data. I don’t think we’ll end up in a world where all our data is stored in a single place.

8:39 am: Walt pushes ahead. Notes Zuckerberg’s appearance last night and the privacy implications of this.

Ballmer: There’s an innovation problem here. If you want to share some things and not share other things, you can wind up with something at a complexity level that people don’t want to or can’t engage. Getting the UI right is an innovation challenge.

8:41 am: Walt follows up, asks if competitors are coming together on a standard level.

Ozzie says they are, but not at an “experience level.”

8:41 am: Ballmer–Companies are going to try to get a differential advantage here and that means users are going to struggle with the privacy model for their information. Remember the cookie debate? Consumers didn’t understand what the cookie was. So how do you craft the discussion around issues like these so that they do?

8:43 am: Ozzie on privacy in the cloud–Businesses want to know that we’re not looking at their data. We’ve got to be very clean about this.

8:44 am: Ballmer–I think that the notion that there are different tastes in privacy and there are different opportunities to commercialize this is important, but there’s got to be a dialogue with the customer; the customer has to be allowed to make the choice.

8:45 am: Ballmer talks a bit about the differences between the consumer cloud and the enterprise cloud.

8:46 am: Walt recalls Tuesday evening’s Steve Jobs interview. Steve thought we’re on a course where fewer people will be using PCs and more portable devices (like the iPad). What do you think?

Ballmer: I think that people are going to be using PCs in greater and greater numbers for years to come. But I think PCs will look different…they’ll evolve. They’ll get smaller…they’ll get touch…their innards will change. The real question is, “What is a PC?” Nothing that’s done on a PC today will get less relevant tomorrow. I think there will exist a general-purpose device that does anything you want, because people don’t want multiple devices, or can’t afford them. I think the PC as we know it will continue to morph in form factor. So the real question is: Where do you push? Ballmer notes Jobs’s truck metaphor and says, “Windows machines will not be trucks.”

8:50 am: Walt circles back, notes that Ballmer uses the term “PC” to include things that most people don’t think of as PCs. Is the iPad a PC?

Ballmer: Of course it is. What do you do on it? Answer email. A guy tried to take notes on it at a meeting I was at yesterday–that was interesting [chuckles from the audience]. He suggests that the positioning of devices like the iPad as something beyond the PC is just a marketing tactic.

8:52 am: Walt talks a bit about Microsoft’s history in tablets. What’s the company doing in this area these days? Are there going to be tablets that look like the iPad that run Windows?

Ballmer: Sure. You’re going to have a range of devices over time that are light and don’t have a keyboard and will run Windows. Depending on what you want, there will be devices that offer a similar experience to Windows. There will be others that will be more customized, more optimized. This will be a real competitive form factor of innovation. We will, with our partners, drive innovation in form factor. Windows Phone, for example. Apple has chosen to do this as well.

8:55 am: Still more from Ballmer–Some people will want to have two different devices for two different purposes. But there has to be an option for an integrated device. The bulk of the market is going to stay with general-purpose devices.

8:57 am: A question for Ozzie–Do you think the tablet will have mass appeal this time around?

Ozzie: I think there’s going to be success in a number of form factors–in the pad form factor, in the tablet mode. I think there will be appliance-like screens that will be in our living rooms. This isn’t science fiction anymore; it’s possible. There are certain fundamental differences in productivity in consumption and creation experiences, though. Both must exist on these devices.

8:59 am: Ballmer says Microsoft and Apple will eventually “run into each other” in the market. Is the iPad really that different from the PC? No, it’s just a different form factor. The Mac’s got minimal market share; iPad’s got a surge of momentum. The race is on.

9:01 am: Walt–I think the Mac, while still at a low market share, has done pretty well for Apple.

Ballmer: Apple had a heck of a quarter last quarter, but their market share remains the same. He seems to suggest that the debut of the iPad is a signal that the Mac is going away. PCs running Microsoft software are not.

9:02 am: Conversation shifts to talk of the mobile space. Where are you now?

Ballmer: We had a good longtime employee who wanted to retire and he’s going to do so. And it doesn’t make sense to replace him. On the phone side of the business, we learned the value of excellent execution. We were ahead of this game and now we find ourselves No. 5 in the market. We missed a whole cycle. I’ve been quite public about the fact that I’ve made some changes in leadership around our Windows Phone software. We had to do a little clean-up. The excellence in execution is an important part of innovation. We’re driving forward in the phone business. But this is a very dynamic business; the market leaders here have shifted over twice in the past few years, and that’s an opportunity for us. So we’ve got to have great ideas and we’ve got to execute consistently.

9:05 am: Walt asks about rivals in the mobile space? Let’s talk about RIM (RIMM).

Ballmer: They’re obviously a good competitor. There’s this old myth that they’re primarily an enterprise company, but they’ve done quite well in the consumer market. As a general-purpose tech platform, RIM has less robustness than its competitors, but there’s a reason they’ve got such a huge following.

Walt: What about Nokia (NOK)?

Ballmer: I know they’ve got this huge global market share. But being in the U.S. skews your perspective because they’ve got such small share here. On the software side, they’re also trying to get their act together.

Walt: Apple?

Ballmer: They’ve done a good job of coming from nowhere a few years ago. They’ve done the best job on the browser. People focus on the apps, but the browser is really the thing that has distinguished their phones from others.

9:09 am: Ballmer–The irony of the situation is that the Internet was designed for the PC and then reoptimized for the PC. And partly what everyone’s trying to do with the phone is say, “Okay, I’m not a PC, I’m a phone–how do I plug into this?” So rivals like RIM that don’t have a PC business may be at a disadvantage. Or they may have better perspective.

9:11 am: Walt asks the pair’s thoughts on Google and its advances in mobile, tablets, etc.

Ballmer: On the phone, Android’s a real competitor. On the larger screen devices, who knows? I don’t know that these Android-based things will matter. But I don’t know that they won’t either. I don’t really understand why Google has to have two different mobile operating systems. Chrome? It’s like two, two, two operating systems–but they’re not in one! You want to know about Chrome, talk to them. (An odd comment to make considering Microsoft has at least 3 mobile operating systems that I can think of: Windows Mobile 6.x, Windows Phone OS 7.0, and whatever it’s got running on the Kin)

Ozzie: On the Android-versus-Chrome issue, Android is a bet on the past; Chrome is a bet on the future. When you install an app, you’re targeting a device. When you use Chrome, you’re looking at a cloud-based future.

Ballmer: So why do two? Why not focus on one? Having two OS’s is confusing. You need coherence.

Walt: Well, you have OS variations, don’t you?

Ballmer concedes this, but notes that Microsoft also has coherence. Do one. Make a bet and pursue it.

9:16 am: Walt–How is Bing doing against Google?

Ballmer: Well, we launched only a year ago, but we’re the first search engine to gain market share in a long time…but this is a long game. We’re up 54 percent in unique users year over year; our demographics are good. We overindex with younger crowds. We’ve done a lot to establish a name and to make a good product that delivers relevant results. But I think we have our work cut out for us in a battle with a very large behemoth.

Walt: Wait. You’re calling someone else a behemoth?

Ballmer chuckles, remarks on the Yahoo (YHOO) deal, notes that search is a scale business. Scale is important for improvement in product quality. The Yahoo deal will help with this, he says.

9:19 am: Walt–Is Microsoft taking an app ecosystem approach with Bing?

Ozzie says that it is. Suggests that the company is developing it with a plug-in architecture in mind. Talks about layering.

Ballmer: Rarely when you search do you want to search. You’re not looking for a list of Web sites. You want to find the Web site you’re looking for. You want to do something. If we can help the user take actions more quickly, that would be a great breakthrough.

Walt: You really could have a good encapsulate app in Bing.

Ballmer: That is what we have. The question is, is that extensible?

Q & A

Q: Is Apple right to dismiss the stylus?

A: Ballmer–We do think people want to take notes and draw. What’s the best way to do that? Well, there are different ways to do that and we’ll support them all. Today, we offer devices that do use a stylus. I certainly believe that people do want to take the things that they do today with pencil and paper and do them with new technologies.

Ozzie: The software here has not kept up with the hardware. With touch, we haven’t yet even figured what the control architecture should be. There will be slates you use a stylus on, there will be others that you use touch, etc.

Q: Talk about your degree of comfort in following the law in China. And how are you dealing with the security issues there?

A: Ballmer–Do we think there are hackers everywhere, including China? Yes. Are there professional hackers everywhere? Yes. Do we think that almost every government employs people to read things that they shouldn’t? I don’t know, but I suspect they do. I don’t find any of this amazing.

When it comes to China, if you’re going to stay and do business someplace, I’m not going to put my employees in harm’s way. The best way to make a difference in China and other countries is to stay in the country. We’re staying and trying to be part of a reformation process…and I think that’s the principled stand to take.

Q: Any advice for Apple and Google as they face potential antitrust troubles? [laughter]

A: [Ballmer grins] No advice. I just wish them the best in getting lots of good experience.

Q: Question about health care.

A: Ballmer–It’s a slow moving market. Certainly the money that was put into the health-care bill gives an incentive to have these things proceed a little more quickly.

Q: What do you want Microsoft’s role to be in media?

A: Ballmer–Media starts with what gets created, so we need great tools for creators to make content, and we need to make tools to help people monetize that. This is an area that the advantages Google has in search can and are being leveraged.

Q: Question about weak battery life in the laptop form factor.

A: Ballmer–We’re doing a lot with software. We’re doing work to support Intel’s (INTC) efforts to create chips with better power consumption. This is an area of improvement for us.

Q: What are your thoughts on cross-platform development?

A: HTML5 will show up everywhere. The question is, will that be enough to write great apps? Will there be folks that may have some things that run cross-platform? I think there will be. But developers are going to optimize for one platform.

Walt: Will Silverlight run on the iPhone?

Ballmer: It doesn’t. And my guess is that if it did, it would be blocked.

And that’s a wrap.

A note about our coverage: This liveblog is not an official transcript of the conversation that occurred onstage. Rather, it is a compilation of quotes, paraphrased statements and ad-lib observations written and posted to the Web as quickly as possible. It is not intended as a transcript and should not be interpreted as one.

Full Disclosure: ATD Adds Meebo Toolbar

Kara Swisher — Tue, 04 May 2010 18:11:30 +0000

As we have with every change to features and functionality on All Things Digital, today we are writing to give you details about a new Meebo toolbar on this site.

It appears at the very bottom of each page on our site.

The first thing you need to know: You can get rid of it whenever you like.

But we think you will like it, because it enhances our site’s navigation, highlights fresh content and provides instant-messaging functionality, all in one place.

Such as:

– Share Page: Drag the page–or individual page items, such as a headline or image–into social tools or chat tools to share with friends and colleagues

– News: The most recent headlines from BoomTown, MediaMemo and Digital Daily, as well as select headlines from The Wall Street Journal, MarketWatch and Barron’s

– Reviews: The latest product reviews and analysis from Walt Mossberg and Katherine Boehret

– Hot Topics: Links to our aggregated coverage of recent product launches and timely issues

– Twitter: An “uber feed” that combines all our tweets

Per our All Things Digital Privacy Policy, any toolbar usage information will be shared with Meebo solely for the purpose of using this service or for targeting advertising on the toolbar.

Meebo may use cookies to target these toolbar ads; for more information please read Meebo’s Privacy Policy.

If you want to use a chat tool, you’ll be asked to log in with a user name and password. Again, please see Meebo’s Privacy Policy regarding collection and storage of your IM passwords.

And as I said at the start, if you prefer not to use the Meebo service, click the down arrow at the far right of the toolbar to hide the unit. If you change your mind, click that arrow and the toolbar will reappear.

In addition, below is a video interview I did with Meebo founder and CEO Seth Sternberg about the toolbar addition, as well as his company’s new XAuth announcement.

XAuth is an open authentication effort, which includes Meebo and partners Google (GOOG), Yahoo (YHOO), Microsoft (MSFT), MySpace, JanRain, Disqus and Gigya. As described on its Web site:

XAuth is an open platform for extending authenticated user services across the web.

Participating services generate a browser token for each of their users. Publishers can then recognize when site visitors are logged in to those online services and present them with meaningful, relevant options.

Users can choose to authenticate directly from the publisher site and use the service to share, interact with friends, or participate in the site’s community. The XAuth Token can be anything, so services have the flexibility to define whatever level of access they choose.

Here’s the video with Sternberg:

[ See post to watch video ]

Comments? Ideas? Write us at feedback@allthingsd.com.

Google Dashboard Offers "Unprecedented" View of Stuff We Already Knew

John Paczkowski — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 15:13:56 +0000

Privacy advocates carping about the vast amounts of data Google collects about our Internet use can rest a bit easier today now that they know what the search company knows about them. This morning, Google (GOOG) rolled out Dashboard, a new service that consolidates user account information and settings for its various products onto a single page.

“In an effort to provide you with greater transparency and control over their own data, we’ve built the Google Dashboard,” the company explained in a blog post. “Designed to be simple and useful, the Dashboard summarizes data for each product that you use (when signed in to your account) and provides you direct links to control your personal settings.”

And it does do that, offering a nice single view of all of the data associated with our Google accounts. That said, it’s not quite the extraordinary achievement Google would have us believe.

I suppose it is true that “the scale and level of detail of the Dashboard is unprecedented,” as Google claims. That said, it doesn’t offer much in the way of new information. Noticeably absent from Dashboard is any view of the cookie data Google uses to target ads. Essentially, all Dashboard does is consolidate the admin pages of the services associated with a user’s account in a single place. Convenient, yes. But does it tell us anything we didn’t already know? Or, more importantly, how Google is using that information? No.

Here Are the Condé Nast Cuts: Modern Bride, Elegant Bride, Gourmet, Cookie Closing

Peter Kafka — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 14:56:55 +0000

Here are some of the long-awaited cuts that Condé Nast has been mulling: The publisher is shuttering Modern Bride, Elegant Bride, Gourmet and Cookie.

It’s not a huge shock to see some of those titles go: Cookie, for instance, wasn’t a prestige title for Condé–like Domino, which the publisher closed down earlier this year, it was founded in 2005.

But Gourmet is one of Condé Nast’s most famous titles, and editor Ruth Reichl is one of Condé’s best-known editors. Most observers would have figured that Bon Appétit would go instead. CEO Chuck Townsend says the Gourmet brand will live on, zombie-style, via TV and publishing deals.

Condé has long cultivated a reputation as the magazine world’s most glamorous outpost, impervious to the petty concerns that bedeviled lesser folk. But the double-punch of the ad industry’s move away from print titles and a recession that pole-axed the luxury brands Condé depends on, has staggered the publisher. (Disclosure: I do some free-lance work for Condé title Vanity Fair).

Signs of trouble showed up late last year when the publisher made uncharacteristic staffing cuts. And in 2009, it began shuttering magazines: In addition to Domino, it closed Portfolio in April, just two years after a high-profile launch.

By July, Townsend had brought on consultants from McKinsey and Company to help figure out where else it could trim; the news that September ad pages would be down anywhere from 17 percent to 47 percent made it clear that other titles would be going.

I wouldn’t expect this to be the last big set of magazine cuts, by the way: Time Warner (TWX), for instance, has made it clear that it wants to hang on to Time Inc. but that it thinks the publisher employs too many people who produce too many titles.

Here are the details on the Condé cuts, via an internal memo (intended for public consumption) from Chuck Townsend:

From: “Townsend, Chuck”
Date: Mon, 5 Oct 2009 10:16:52 -0400
To: Conde Nast Publications-All <_273fee@condenast.com>
Conversation: Announcing Changes within Condé Nast
Subject: Announcing Changes within Condé Nast

We have now completed an extensive review of our business–an important undertaking given the dramatic changes in the U.S. economy. The review has led us to a number of decisions designed to navigate the company through the economic downturn and to position us to take advantage of coming opportunities.

Condé Nast’s success comes from the ability of our publications to attract readers with a wide range of interests, as well as advertisers who value them. But in this economic climate it is important to narrow our focus to titles with the greatest prospects for long-term growth.

As a result of our review, Brides will increase its frequency to monthly to solidify its position as the most important brand in the bridal category, and Modern Bride and Elegant Bride will close.

Gourmet magazine will cease monthly publication, but we will remain committed to the brand, retaining Gourmet’s book publishing and television programming, and Gourmet recipes on Epicurious.com. We will concentrate our publishing activities in the epicurean category on Bon Appétit.

Finally, Cookie magazine will be discontinued, and resources that had been dedicated to its publishing will be invested elsewhere.

The editorial and business staffs of Modern Bride, Elegant Bride, Gourmet, and Cookie all have earned their magazines large and devoted followings. We have been proud to publish these titles, and we are grateful to the staffs for their hard work and dedication.

These changes, combined with cost and workforce reductions now underway throughout the company, will speed the recovery of our current businesses and enable us to pursue new ventures. In the coming weeks, we hope to announce initiatives to develop digital versions of our brands that will make use of new devices and distribution channels.

Condé Nast is now in its 100th year of creating the most respected and iconic brands in the publishing world. These changes will ensure that our unique publishing company will continue in its preeminent position for many years to come.

YouTube's White House Clips: Now 100 Percent Snoop-Free

Peter Kafka — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 12:15:18 +0000

President Barack Obama gets pretty high marks from the tech set for his embrace of all things Webby. Except when they’re giving him grief: After overhauling the official White House Web site to make it, you know, interactive and stuff, the administration caught flak from privacy advocates because of the way Google’s YouTube used tracking cookies on the site.

But after making an initial concession earlier this year, Google (GOOG) and the White House are going further. The Electronic Frontier Foundation explains: “Ordinarily, YouTube maintains a record of every YouTube video you’ve ever viewed, associated with your YouTube account, through use of the YouTube cookie. Now, they’ve agreed to exempt videos embedded on Whitehouse.gov from this logging.”

Will that be good enough to satisfy hard-to-please critics like the EFF? Amazingly, it does! Though of course, they’d like to see more. Here’s Cindy Cohn, the EFF’s legal director:

This is a good step and we commend YouTube and the Government for taking it. It shows that they recognize that tracking the government videos that Americans view is creepy and wrong. It also shows that Google/YouTube technologists can build and offer clever, useful privacy-protective modifications to their standard software.

Now we’d like to see them turn that cleverness to other places, not just the White House. Google/YouTube should offer this same “tracking-free” viewing to others. Human rights videos, politically sensitive videos, or even ordinary videos where viewers may want privacy should all be available without tracking…

In addition, the government should adopt “tracking-free” videos across the board for all government websites. Viewers of videos from the Internal Revenue Service, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, your member of Congress and other governmental entities deserve the same privacy protection that viewers of the President’s speeches.

The IRS has videos? Who knew? In the meantime, feel free to watch clips like this one, of Obama’s April victory over the UConn women’s basketball team in a game of “P-I-G” without worrying that the government is watching you watch.

Your Facebook Status Says You're Craving Coffee. Click Here to Find a Starbucks Near You!

John Paczkowski — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 07:01:07 +0000

We really need to move the thinking about the social graph. This exists out in the world, and has always existed. We didn’t invent it. How can we ‘own’ it? We’re just trying to map it out. We have a model of the social graph that we’re constructing.”
–Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg

We have address books, and the sum of the address books is the social graph.”
–Google CEO Eric Schmidt

Turns out that the “social graph” about which Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg so often speaks these days isn’t just a decades-old computer science term, it’s the basis for the monetization platform that will someday justify Facebook’s $15 billion valuation. Or so the theory goes.

On Nov. 6, Facebook will make a major announcement at the ad:tech conference in New York. And ad-industry executives familiar with the company’s plans say it will revolve around an advertising network reportedly called SocialAds. As described in Facebook’s Sept. 24 trademark filing of the term, SocialAds are “advertising and information distribution services, namely, providing advertising space via the global computer network; promoting the goods and services of others over the Internet.”

But–again according to those faceless ad-industry executives–the SocialAds network may be quite a bit more than that. It might use permission-based demographic targeting to deliver ads to users on Facebook–and off, says Altura Ventures’ Lee Lorenzen, who offers this hypothetical breakdown of the service:

Facebook (with Microsoft’s help) will offer a competitive solution to Google AdSense for non-Facebook Web sites.
You can think of this service as an open-source AdSense solution where Google can provide ads into it (if they document what the Web site owner will earn) but Google (and any other ad providers) will have to compete with ads that Microsoft can provide that are Facebook-enhanced.
The innovation here is that Microsoft’s ads will be able to pick up the user’s Facebook cookie (for the 50-million-growing-to- 200-million users who already have a cookied-Facebook account).
This means advertisers in Microsoft’s adCenter can offer a much higher CPC or CPM payment to the Web publisher because they will know that the user viewing the Web page is actually a Facebook user that, for example, happens to be an 18-year-old male with a birthday in three weeks who mentioned Xbox on his profile page.

If Lorenzen’s right, SocialAds might easily justify Microsoft’s $240 million investment in Facebook.

Your Facebook Status Says You're Craving Coffee. Click Here to Find a Starbucks Near You!

John Paczkowski — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 07:01:07 +0000

We really need to move the thinking about the social graph. This exists out in the world, and has always existed. We didn’t invent it. How can we ‘own’ it? We’re just trying to map it out. We have a model of the social graph that we’re constructing.”
–Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg

We have address books, and the sum of the address books is the social graph.”
–Google CEO Eric Schmidt

Facebook (with Microsoft’s help) will offer a competitive solution to Google AdSense for non-Facebook Web sites.
You can think of this service as an open-source AdSense solution where Google can provide ads into it (if they document what the Web site owner will earn) but Google (and any other ad providers) will have to compete with ads that Microsoft can provide that are Facebook-enhanced.
The innovation here is that Microsoft’s ads will be able to pick up the user’s Facebook cookie (for the 50-million-growing-to- 200-million users who already have a cookied-Facebook account).
This means advertisers in Microsoft’s adCenter can offer a much higher CPC or CPM payment to the Web publisher because they will know that the user viewing the Web page is actually a Facebook user that, for example, happens to be an 18-year-old male with a birthday in three weeks who mentioned Xbox on his profile page.

If Lorenzen’s right, SocialAds might easily justify Microsoft’s $240 million investment in Facebook.

Microsoft to Google: We Were Going to Call You, But … We Lost Your Number. … Yeah, That's the Ticket!

John Paczkowski — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 12:38:59 +0000

What an odd bit of coincidence this is. Amid increasing scrutiny of Google’s privacy practices and its planned $3.1 billion purchase of DoubleClick–which some say would concentrate too much consumer data in its hands–Microsoft and Ask.com are calling upon “leading search providers, online advertising companies and privacy advocates” to develop “privacy principles” for the search industry. “We have been thinking deeply about privacy related to search and online advertising and believe it is critical to evolve our privacy principles,” Peter Cullen, Microsoft’s chief privacy strategist, told the Seattle Times. “We’re really focusing on: how do we be more transparent … how do we give customers more control over what they want.”

To that end, Microsoft has promised to make search-query data anonymous after 18 months by permanently removing cookie IDs, the entire IP address and other identifiers from search terms. The company stated it also plans to “develop new user controls that will enhance privacy, such as letting people search and surf its sites without being associated with a personal and unique identifier used for behavioral ad targeting.”

Which is, of course, exactly the sort of opt-out control that Google has so far refused to permit. Now Google has made several positive adjustments to its data-retention policies recently–in fact, it shortened the lifetime of its cookies earlier this month. But you wouldn’t know it from the beginnings of this “industry dialogue” Microsoft and Ask.com have announced. Because Google wasn’t even asked to participate in the prediscussions that created it. “Google learned about this Microsoft/Ask initiative from reading about it in the press,” Peter Fleischer, Google’s global privacy counsel, told Search Engine Land. “We have publicly said that we’d support a process for further industry dialogue on online privacy issues.”

Omitting the industry leader from an effort to create “industry-wide standards” in online marketing and advertising does seem a ham-handed way to develop a common industry approach to privacy issues, doesn’t it? “An industry effort really should start on better terms,” said Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan. “Ask, in particular, shouldn’t be playing this game. After being left out of prediscussions on things like nofollow or site maps, excluding Google and Yahoo perhaps might feel like sweet revenge, but privacy is too important for PR games.”

Microsoft to Google: We Were Going to Call You, But … We Lost Your Number. … Yeah, That's the Ticket!

John Paczkowski — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 12:38:59 +0000

Searching Your Hard Disk

Walter S. Mossberg — Thu, 21 Jul 2005 00:01:00 +0000

Here are a few questions about computers I’ve received recently from people like you, and my answers. I have edited and restated the questions a bit, for readability. This week my mailbox contained questions about searching your hard disk, copying your Outlook Express address book and using the cookie-management features of a Web browser.

If you have a question, send it to me at mossberg@wsj.com, and I may select it to be answered here in Mossberg’s Mailbox.

I am moving from an old Dell with Windows XP to a new one. I want to move over a wonderful picture of a covered bridge that I use for my desktop. It has family significance, and it’s my only copy. But, I can’t find the bridge picture anywhere. I didn’t keep all my photos in the “My Pictures” folder and have no idea where they all are.

If you go to the Display control panel, select the Desktop tab and highlight the name of your bridge picture (which should be listed there), and then click on Browse, you may see the folder where the picture resides.

This doesn’t always work. If it doesn’t, because this picture has personal significance for you, I suspect it would be worth it for you to spend some time and effort to conduct a thorough search. And, since the built-in search in Windows is awful, I suggest you download and install one of two free search programs that can find pictures anywhere on your hard disk and show you a preview of them.

Both Yahoo Desktop Search (at desktop.yahoo.com) and MSN Desktop Search (at toolbar.msn.com) meet that description (the popular Google desktop search has no preview feature). They require time to index your hard disk, but, once they do so, they should be able to locate and find your bridge picture.

Is there any way I can copy the address book used by Outlook Express so I can move it to a second computer?

Yes. The address book is contained in a file whose name is usually your user name, followed by a period and the letters “WAB,” for Windows Address Book. It usually resides deep in a subfolder in the Documents and Settings folder.

To find it, use the built-in Windows search system (it’s weak, but can do this particular task) or a third-party search program to search for “WAB” or “.WAB”. It should come up. Once you find it, you can just copy it like any file to a removable medium, like a writable CD or a USB thumb drive, or even email it to yourself.

When you copy it to your new computer, remember where you placed it. Then, open Outlook Express on the second computer, and open the address book by going to the Tools menu and clicking on Address Book. Go to the address book’s File menu, select Import, and click Address Book (WAB). Navigate to the address-book file that you copied from the first PC, and then click Open.

Why do you recommend using antispyware software to get rid of tracking cookies? Isn’t it more effective to just use the cookie-management features of a Web browser to delete these cookies or block them in the first place?

No. The cookie-management features in popular browsers don’t distinguish between tracking cookies, a type of spyware that records your activities online, and the many helpful cookies you probably want to keep, like those that store your login information or preferences on a site. Some allow you to block or delete only “third-party” cookies, which might trap some tracking cookies placed by Internet advertising firms who aren’t the actual operators of the Web sites you visit. But this may not always work.

Instead, I recommend using a good antispyware program, which every Windows user should be running anyway. These programs aren’t focused on cookies in general, but on every kind of computer code, including tracking cookies, that qualify as spyware and adware. They detect tracking cookies by maintaining lists of the most common ones, and they update this information constantly. They leave nontracking cookies alone.

Of course, you could use both methods. You could set your browser to reject third-party cookies (assuming that this doesn’t impair your browsing experience) and still run regular spyware scans to catch any tracking cookies that still make it through.

Write to Walter S. Mossberg at mossberg@wsj.com