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A renewed battle over so-called network neutrality is brewing. Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-North Dakota) plans to introduce a bill in January that would bar Internet providers (AT&T, Comcast) from blocking Web content, per Reuters. Dorgan said legislation is necessary to prevent telephone and cable companies from discriminating against Web content. Call it the battle of [...]

Several media veterans offered up some prescriptions on how marketers can change their business models to get ahead of the upheaval in media markets. One of the best words of advice: The difficult economic climate may actually be a good time for companies to create a new paradigm for marketing communications.

Another day. Another Google extension. The search king said Thursday it is adding a feature called On-demand Indexing to Google Site Search that lets businesses instantly index new Web pages to make them searchable. The upgrade makes product releases, news and promotions that marketing departments post to their company’s Web site quickly accessible.
 

Leonard Downie, Jr., the longtime executive editor of The Washington Post, spoke at the Nieman Foundation’s 70th Anniversary Convocation Weekend Saturday. The topic: ethical and moral obligations of journalists online. Downie thinks there should be, fundamentally, one set of standards. NiemanJournalismLabs respectfully disagrees. The link includes text and video.
 
  
 
 

Video: “Billions of exposures” are not being counted online, said media veteran Gene DeWitt. DeWitt tackles the challenges of online measurement and how to improve the link between media sales and accountability, among other issues that are now top of mind among media professionals. DeWitt, who has advised global brands such as AT&T and McDonald’s, also provides some insight on why in their battle for talent traditional media companies might have the upper hand on the Yahoos and Googles of the world and why print isn’t going away anytime soon.

A recent study offers marketers a roadmap of reaching a key, unheralded group of buyers: affluent, female consumers, dubbed ‘Marketing Multipliers,’ who spend more, know more and talk more about the products they like.

Call it an SOS for the media industry. Gawker Media owner Nick Denton writes in his personal blog that if you think things are bad for the media business now, think again. Media groups should plan for the worst, perhaps a 40% decline in advertising spending in 2009. (J.P. Morgan, cited in the story, has slashed [...]

Travel budgets got you down? Couldn’t make last week’s Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco? The three-day confab, featuring TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington, Digg’s Kevin Rose and Twitter’s Evan Williams, focused on the growth of social media and what role the Internet will play in the future of society. For some of the nitty-gritty from the [...]

But will there be a surge in Webcam sales? Google has introduced Gmail voice and video, which lets users have voice and video conversations through their computer. A new “video & more” menu has been added to the Gmail chat window; users can switch to a full screen view or pop out the chat window and [...]

Joe Scarborough, host of “Morning Joe” on MSNBC and former Republican Congressman, had the best line of the evening. “I know this is the heart of Palin Country,” Scarborough told a roomful of New Yorkers gathered at the Rainbow Room in Manhattan for a panel discussion titled, ‘The Media & The Presidency.’  (I loathe Scarborough’s politics, but [...]