Rapid, monolithic growth and control of almost 30% of the global media does not guarantee success. AOL, the beleaguered wing of AOL-Time Warner Media yesterday released details of its new business plan at an event dubbed “AOL-Day”. Apparently, unimpressed investors were not sold on AOL’s plan to reinvent itself by offering premium services culled from other Time Warner divisions to broadband (high-speed connections) internet users. AOL Time Warner stock dropped 13% after new AOL-CEO Jonathan Miller announced AOL was moving it’s service and support to broadband (high speed) users. In many ways, AOL invented the community portal business model and has made several innovations since. It is also losing a lot of money. AOL built itself into the world’s largest Internet Service Provider by selling an easy to use Internet access package that combined personal connectivity, a simple user interface, and pre-packaged news, sports and entertainment features to an ever-growing number of subscribers. The idea was to build a community of Internet users and sell advertising space to subsidize the high costs involved with running and advertising their global network. When the Banner-Ad market crashed, so did AOL’s profits.

Now AOL has retargeted users in a high-speed market and hopes to sell content from other arms of the AOL Time Warner media empire. Time Warner content can mean anything from a series of Time Magazine articles to a Mariah Carey CD to the latest Harry Potter movie. This plan may work, as file-swapping services are being legally challenged and computers are becoming the core of personal home entertainment units, however as investors demonstrated yesterday, the plan announced by AOL sounds dubious and short sighted. Internet users have continually found ways around paying for digital products and services. Plans to sell content to users have failed for CNN (an arm of AOL), and CDNow, (another arm of AOL). Investors and Internet analysts tend to agree that AOL’s plans will not produce the profits and that AOL will again be required to reinvent itself. Perhaps a move away from reinventing the squared wheel would be a good start.

Google's Regional Listings
Seem A Bit Too International
Have you ever tried doing a regionally based search on Google before? For the sakes of this example I will use a term that I was researching for a Canadian client of ours, "realtor directory". Now to conduct a search for 'pages from Canada' you have to go to www.google.ca , type in the search phrase and then select the "pages from Canada" radio button below the search box. Our results were less than stunning, what about yours? First, we get a legitimately Canadian web site under the first three positions BUT when either of the 2nd or 3rd positions are selected, the links are broken (same site). Second, out of the Top10 placements

on this page only 6 are actually Canadian! We checked many other phrases and we encountered an approximate 60-75% success rate from Google. The other 40-25% being U.S. web sites 100% of the time.

What does this mean? Competing in Google under a regional listing may not mean less competition even if your web site is completely unique within your borders. Now with Google powering Yahoo!, we all have one less chance to get regional exposure. If we are to ever obtain any semblance of the regional placements that Yahoo! once presented, the Google team had better get back to work on their regional result filter.

"Making Nature Part of Your Everyday Life"

Nature's finest elements are used to create beauty, bath and skin care products exclusively made in Canada for you. Restore your natural balance and harmony, physically and emotionally by incorporating natural botanicals into your everyday life.

Our Aromatherapy Collections contain distinctive blends made with 100% pure essential oils and natural botanicals. Products include: essential oils, glycerin soaps, diffusers, enviro room sprays, candles, bath salts, bydrosols, skin healing balm, shaving kits, travel bags, gift collections and much more.

Visit www.whitefeatheraromatherapy.com

Improving Link Popularity and Relevancy: In our Oct 30th newsletter we noted the importance of external links to your web site. Now we would like to give you some ideas for expanding your incoming links. The next few issues will be focusing on this issue. This week is Tip#1.

1. Search out similar online companies and offer a link to them on your "Links" page in exchange for a link on their site. As long as the similar company is not directly competitive (either regionally or whatever you deem direct competition) exchanging a link with them will do amazing things for your placements. Keep in mind that plain incoming links are useless unless they come from sites with content directly relevant to yours.

Stay tuned for next week's Tip #2.

Kazaa users watch out! Currently the online file sharing system called Kazaa is in big trouble. A US District Court Judge in Los Angeles is trying to determine whether Sharman Networds, (Kazaa's holding company) has established enough presence in the United States to be liable under American copyright laws. Kazaa, which is registered in the tiny Pacific island nation of Vanuatu is facing a newer and more immediate challenge in the Danish courts. AntiPiratGruppen, a Copenhagen-based anti-piracy organization sponsored by Danish entertainment companies has targeted 150 individual users of the Kazaa and e-Donkey file trading software, getting their names and addresses from their ISPs. AntiPiratGruppen traced the individual users by their IP addresses, which act as an Internet fingerprint of sorts. Once AntiPiratGruppen had names, they sent bills and settlement offers ranging from $100US to $13,333US. Users were asked to pay up by December 1st and to delete all pirated files from their hard-drives.

Just to hammer home the net reality that a free lunch will often give you heartburn, a closely watched U.S. case has the Recording Industry Association of America seeking a court's authority to obtain from Verizon Communications the names of people suspected of trading music files online. You can be sure this story will evolve rapidly.