Marketers typically cut interactive spending in a recession. But a Forrester survey of 333 interactive marketers revealed strong support for maintaining or increasing budgets, reported Forrester’s Josh Bernoff.

The categories of choice include search optimization, social networking, email and blogging. In fact, among 12 major categories only online displays ads looked soft.

According to Forrester, professional services, financial services and media marketers are most likely to plan increases in interactive marketing.

In a recession like this, Bernoff suggested marketers should focus on the measurability of their online and social applications and think in terms of building long-standing assets, not one-off campaigns to pump up quarterly sales.

Microsoft recently launched U Rank, a search engine that allows online users to organize, edit and annotate search results, and share information with others.

Here’s what Microsoft has to say about U Rank.

The percentage of Internet users who use search engines on a typical day has been steadily rising from about one-third of all users in 2002, to 49 per cent, reports PEW Internet.

That’s huge. In fact, the number of those using search engines on a typical day is pulling ever closer to the 60 per cent of Internet users who use e-mail — to date, the Internet’s biggest app.

Other popular daily Internet activities include checking the news (39 per cent) and studying the weather (30 per cent).

Those using search engines on an average day are more likely to be “socially upscale” reports the study, with at least some college education and incomes over $50,000 per year. They are also more likely to have six years of online experience, have their homes wired with high-speed connections, and be young and male.

Kiss those bulky hardcover telephone directories goodbye.

Just one comment captures just how fast the Web’s killing TV.

A friend and his crew taping a 2010 Olympics-related event in Vancouver were approached by a group of kids, ages six to 10 years old, who asked excitedly: “Cool, are we going to be on YouTube?”

YouTube. Forget about TV from the decades past. And when the group was told no, but that they’d be featured on TV, that news was met with a big, disappointing “Awwww.”

The new generation is onto something.

Sooner than later, those TVs in the family rooms will be giant screen monitors powered by the Web. The tipping point is here.

During a meeting to discuss an upcoming project, a marketing director from a U.S. firm suggested the client would be better served investing more on print materials, including print ads and direct ad mails, versus search engine ads and search engine optimization (SEO).

While print ads and direct mail have their place in the marketing realm, Webcopyplus strongly suggested the client stay the course and focus mainly on SEO.

The client, who is introducing a new type of data storage component for computers, is targeting a broad market — virtually anyone who uses a computer.

Even if you gain access to a direct mail list of individuals who recently purchased computer products, there’s no accurate way of forecasting current or future purchases.

Meanwhile, SEO allows you to target your audience when consumers are at their peak point of interest.

That’s when they are most likely to make a purchase, which translates to high conversion rates, and your best return on investment.

The New Yorker recently featured “Out of print: The death and life of the American newspaper.”

Journalist Eric Alterman speaks of the Internet’s rise, and how it’s made newspapers seem “slow and unresponsive.” Plus, the dawn of websites like Craigslist is killing print classified advertising.

The outcome, according to media entrepreneur Alan Mutter, is that independent, publicly traded American newspapers have lost 42 per cent of their market value in the past three years alone.

“Until recently, newspapers were accustomed to operating as high-margin monopolies,” wrote Alterman. “To own the dominant, or only, newspaper in a mid-sized American city was, for many decades, a kind of license to print money.”

Meanwhile, eMarketer reported more than $8.6 billion was spent on search engine advertising in 2007, an amount that could reach $16.6 billion in 2011.

It gives the impression it’s just a matter of a few years before newspapers become obsolete.

Despite major drawbacks of Flash-based sites, some business owners continue to fall into this trap.

As previously noted in Backbone Magazine, Webcopyplus recognizes Flash is an outstanding tool for adding audio, video and animation to a site. However, Flash-based sites can’t be indexed by search engine spiders, which account for the majority of traffic to websites. As a result, these beautiful websites often draw little, if any, traffic.

Moreover, Flash intros prove to be a waste of time and resources. Fortunately, most businesses and designers are moving away from this pointless gimmick, which squanders visitors’ time and web owners’ money.

The Flash topic is one that many individuals are passionate about. In fact, the noted Backbone article prompted a prolonged Ubuntu Forums debate that involved more than 3,400 viewers, more than 300 votes and more than 100 responses.

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Many valuable writing resources are out there, including The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White.

While revisiting this classic, which was originally published in 1918, I was amused by the manner in which writers are encouraged to revise and rewrite their prose:

“Quite often the writer will discover, on examining the completed work, that there are serious flaws in the arrangement of material, calling for transpositions. When this is the case, he can save himself much labor and time by using by using scissors on his manuscript, cutting it to pieces and fitting the pieces together in a better order.”

It makes one appreciate the convenient tools of today: ergonomic keyboards; large, adjustable monitors; fast and friendly document software; spell check; cut and paste features; and so much more.

The concept of a typewriter dates back to 1714, with the first practical one launched by Remington Arms in 1873. While some writers stick to their traditional equipment – such as novelist Danielle Steele, who devotedly uses a 1946 Olympian – fewer and fewer young adults in today’s workforce have come in contact with these trusty machines. May they rest in peace.

Traditional media can’t simply emulate their products onscreen.

That reflects the message put forth by Times Online editor Anne Spackman at a Society of Editors conference in Manchester this month.

“Digital evolves extremely fast, it wasn’t that long ago that our websites represented our newspapers on the computer screen,” said Spackman, who was appointed to her position last year and has expedited Times Online’s integration of print and website operations.

In fact, she likened the current pace of change to the Wild West. Indeed, given the fact that newspapers compete with thousands of websites around the globe, they need to progress with the rapidly evolving digital world.

The pressure is intensified by the content-driven nature of Web 2.0, which creates armies of public reporters. To stay relevant, major media groups need to deliver quality news that’s accurate, objective and up to date — and fully embrace the power of the Web.

Otherwise this new wave of “citizen journalists” will make today’s media giants obsolete.

Internet users who don’t speak languages that are written using the Roman alphabet can now test web addresses in their native language.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers — which is responsible for the global coordination of the Internet’s system of unique identifiers, such as domain names — has created a test that allows users to visit web pages with URLs in 11 additional languages.

“This is one of the most exciting times yet in the development of IDNs,” said Dr. Paul Twomey, ICANN’s President and CEO. “Internet users who speak the 11 languages of the test can play a key role in testing how IDNs operate, and help us move toward full implementation for all the languages of the world.”

Internet users around the globe can now access wiki pages with the domain name example.test in the 11 test languages — Arabic, Persian, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Russian, Hindi, Greek, Korean, Yiddish, Japanese and Tamil. The wikis will allow Internet users to establish their own subpages with their own names in their own language — one suggestion is: example.test/yourname.

The wiki pages can be accessed by typing example.test in the characters of one of the 11 languages, or by going to http://idn.icann.org.

“These wikipages are key to the test. We want to know how the URL displays in the Internet browser, if it works when you cut and paste it into the body of an email to a friend, and how all of this impacts the root zone,” Dr. Twomey added.

The 11 evaluation wikis will remain online until IDNs are fully implemented and the first top-level domain is introduced in the evaluation language.

The full introduction of IDNs will mean that people can write the whole of a domain name in the characters used to write their own language. Presently you can only use these characters before the dot, so .com, .net, .org and the like can only be written in characters from basic Latin. IDNs will change this so literally tens of thousands of characters will be available to the world.