News about what is happening in technology today!

The Register reports that nogoodniks have developed a Trojan horse program that produces fake Google ads posing as the real thing. The as-yet unnamed Trojan replaces legitimate ads served via Google AdSense with promos for penis pills, porn sites and the like. Techshout says the Google AdSense team confirms ‘that these are fake Google ads, formatted to look like legitimate ads. We agree that this phenomenon is likely the result of malicious software installed on your computer.’

JMP Securities on Tuesday raised its global advertising forecast for not only this year but for next year and beyond. The firm now expects the global online ad market to grow at a 25 percent clip annually for the next five years, up from a previous forecast in the low 20 percent range.

In the next year the Wall Street firm expects the online ad market to grow to $26.4 billion worldwide and to $33.2 billion in 2007.

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This article describes an interesting experiment with the Google Adwords service; in an effort to fine-tune the price per word, a mirror site was set up, paying a different price per word. I turns out the second site had to pay more in order to reach a similar click-through rate. My questions to the slashdot community: are organizations like Google redefining the law of demand and answer? To what extent does this imply a competitive advantage for larger companies? Do we need an ethical framework to direct companies to make such algorithms open source?

HTML isn’t a very good language for making Web pages. However, it has been a very good language for making the Web. This article examines the future of HTML and what it will mean to Web authors, browser and developers. It covers the incremental approach embodied by the WHATWG specifications and the radical cleanup of XHTML proposed by the W3C. Additionally, the author gives an overview of the W3C’s new Rich Client Activity.

SEOmoz has an interesting writeup regarding search engine optimization. The article has quite a bit of info and is geared so that even the inexperienced used can learn the basics of search engine optimization. From the article: “It is our goal to improve your ability to drive search traffic to your site and debunk major myths about SEO. We share this knowledge to help businesses, government, educational and non-profit organizations benefit from being listed in the major search engines.”