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Internet giant Yahoo, which has suffered some bad PR lately from a round of layoffs and revelations that it has been selling pornography and adult products, has announced that it will no longer facilitate porn sales. Such material will be pulled from its shopping, classified and auction sites. Also, the company will no longer sell ad space to purveyors of adult entertainment. Yahoo confirmed reports last week that it had recently stepped up its efforts to sell adult videos, DVDs and other sexually themed goods. Adult products had been available across Yahoo for about two years, but within recent weeks, Yahoo had boosted its offerings and made it more difficult for underage shoppers to purchase porn. Yahoo doesn’t actually possess the adult inventory--third parties sell the goods through its shopping and auction channels. Analysts had disagreed on what sort of effect adult-merchandise sales would have on Yahoo; some said it would outrage prudish advertisers while others felt it would have boosted revenue since web users’ appetite for adult merchandise appears to be bottomless.
24/7 cans workers and may close offices
Internet ad network 24/7 Media has announced it is firing 100 employees and either closing or downsizing some of its offices. Post-layoffs, the company will employ 850 people. The job cuts and office shutdowns are expected to save the company $10 million. So far, the company is mum as to which offices and which jobs will be affected. There has been some internal turnover at 24/7 as well. The company’s senior vice president of strategic planning, Tony Plesner, will become its chief operating officer. Its former COO now heads 24/7’s email unit, Exactis. Also, R. Theodore Ammon, the company’s non-executive chairman, has left 24/7’s board. 24/7 and other internet advertising companies have not been weathering the dot.com downturn well. The slowdown in ad sales has hurt their bottom line and decimated their investors’ confidence--as evidenced by the price of 24/7 shares, which are trading in the 30-cent range.
Chinese nationalists seek revenge online
Still angry about the collision between an American surveillance plane and one of its own fighter planes, Chinese nationalist hackers have taken their aggression to the internet with a concerted effort to deface U.S. web sites. So far, at least nine U.S. web sites, both government and business, have been hit. The victims include two Navy sites that aren't strategically critical to the U.S. Of those, only one was successfully vandalized. At the same time, the hackers are continuing to recruit more anti-U.S. cyber-vandals in China's chat rooms and message boards. The attackers have not made any known attempts to steal sensitive data or upload malicious viruses. Instead, the typical attack replaces an official web site with pro-China, anti-U.S. messages, such as the Chinese flag. One attack, which struck a Marin County, Calif., web site for local artists and writers, replaced the site's main page with threatening messages, an image of the Chinese flag, and an audio file of the Chinese national anthem. Security experts are telling hacking victims--and potential victims--to treat the rash of hackings as an opportunity to assess network security.
Email environmental protest swamps White House
President Bush’s environmental decisions, from relaxing standards for keeping arsenic out of water to abandoning international global warming standards, haven’t proven popular with web-savvy environmentalists. Since last month, activist group Friends of the Earth has been orchestrating an email protest campaign that has so far sent more than 100,000 online complaints to the Oval Office--causing the White House server to crash five times during the past week, according to some reports. The 100,000 figure comes from Friends of the Earth, which should know a thing or two about server trouble since it receives a carbon copy of each protest email and has itself come close to crashing during the campaign. The international climate change talks will resume in July. Bush, however, recently swore off email use, meaning that he might be impervious to the flood of messages.
AOL vows to clarify ad privacy policy
The country’s largest ISP, America Online, has agreed to change the wording in some of its advertising to indicate it cannot guarantee consumers’ online privacy at all times. AOL is doing this because of an objection made by the Better Business Bureau to an AOL TV spot that declared, "At America Online, your security and privacy are always protected." Strictly speaking, the BBB pointed out, that’s not true since AOL has no way to control how web sites outside of its network gather information on consumers, or how the other sites use that data. The Bureau praised AOL’s privacy standards across its own sites, but noted that the ad’s language might lull AOL users into a false sense of security about their privacy on the web at large. AOL will change the ad’s language to more accurately depict the privacy situation.
Study: Journalists are indeed web-savvy
Journalists feel at home on the internet, and more of them are using the web than ever, according to a Middleberg/Ross study. The study found that journalists think that the internet has simplified their jobs and enhanced the quality of their work. Ninety-eight percent of the reporters and editors surveyed went online at least once a day last year to check their email. In 1995, just 59 percent of reporters and editors used email. Last year, they spent a minimum 15 hours a week reading and writing email. Ninety-two percent of journalists conducted research for stories online last year, compared to 66 percent of journalists in 1995. Additionally, 70 percent of reporters and editors communicate with readers via email and/or discussion groups. Eighty-one percent of the print journalists surveyed reported that they go online daily to conduct internet searches. But 71 percent say they don’t have training in computer-assisted reporting, which is a more involved and technical practice than using the web.
April 16, 2001 © 2001 Media Life
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