Probably because it fears death by Google almost as much as it fears sexual ambiguity, Ask.com has decided to stop competing for all-purpose search engine renown.
Instead it hopes to become the go-to source for married women seeking health, grade school homework tips, entertainment, recipe and hobby information.
It is also laying off about 40 people.
Maybe if it wasted less time trying to engage us in expensive guessing games it would've had a better fighting chance. Oh well, such is life in the tubes.
Fighting to the end, Firebrand CEO Roman Vinoly shared his frustration over doubters of the ads-as-content concept with AdWeek, pondering, "Isn't it proven every Super Bowl and on lots of Web sites where people go? Isn't it proven by being one of the largest categories uploaded to YouTube? Is it that difficult to conceive that great creative created by great artists with all the money in the world could be compelling to consumers even though it's trying to sell a product?"
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Divinity Metrics has put together a chart measuring the top 20 brands in online video. It will be updated every week. At first we were gonna compare it to the AdAge Power 150, a measuring stick for the top media and marketing blogs, but it's not really like that. It's more like the Dow Jones.
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Ever fantasize about one-upping your boss? Forget about scoring a machine gun and leaving life in cubicletopia with a parting gift of unhinged chaos. Play Dodge the Boss instead. (For best results, do it on his or her dime.)
The game is simple but delightfully time-consuming. Use your mouse to avoid the boss-men without touching any of the sides. Dodging the boss as long as possible could land you tickets to see the sultry Kylie Minogue in Paris.
How's that for leaving the office in a blaze of glory?!
The game was disseminated by Rubber Republic and put together by Global Radio for Galaxy FM's "Love Music Love March."
This is sort of neat. Watch the sped-up drama of your consumption patterns on The Story of Stuff. Very rarely have we been able to sit still for 20 minutes to listen to something educational. Maybe it's narrator Annie Leonard's exciting grade school reading voice ... or the animated stick figures.
Anyway, this is useful information to know if you're an avid consumer of All Things Hype and Now. Everybody with an iPod -- listen up!
Make the Logo Bigger just introduced us to Mr. Robinson's Driving School, an online webisode campaign for Volvo that somehow bombs harder (and more expensively?) than when Tide did it.
We would rather watch Charlie Bit Me! 9.8 million times than sit through this working class wannabe-Isaac-Hayes crap even once.
Dance2DC is a new game by Shift Control for Barely Political. (Visit the site to play it and/or watch the video that inspired the madness.)
We don't know much about it aside from that Hillary is a disco fever inferno and Edwards channels John Travolta. Then it hit us: wouldn't life be better if we banished ballots and decided everything with sudden death dance-offs?
You can fake a smile, but you can't fake the funk.
A report from Melbourne's Swinburne University of Technology finds bloggers are less isolated, more connected to a community and more satisfied with friendships. (Dude. That's because, if not for blogging, we would have no friends.)
The study was conducted on MySpace (WTF?). 134 MySpace users completed a questionnaire from the researchers -- likely bulletin-spamming all their friends in the process -- with 84 intending to blog and 50 not blogging.
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Havas' BLM Quantum has unleashed a make-your-own-video (remember when we had simpler names for things?) contest on MySpace in the United Kingdom called Think Outside the Box which urges people to "get green" and recycle their pizza boxes into ingenious new uses.
Have at it CGM (oops, we mean make-your-own-video) fans.
We've written about ad network company Blulithium and its founder Gurbaksh Chahal several times before but we never thought we'd be telling you, according to ValleyWag, he's been buffing up his body by training with San Jose-based bodybuilder Tom Austin, star of several gay porn flicks such as Minute Man 24. But it all makes sense. You can't be a porn star unless you have a six pack, bulging chest, massive biceps and a bulging package to go along with all that super human manliness. Austin has all that. So it's just logical Austin would know how to buff up Chahal who has acting aspirations of his own.
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