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The New York Times plans to jump into the jobs-and-careers web site space. As part of a redesign and relaunch of its Job Market channel, the company will let site visitors search job-related classifieds from its print newspaper online and access career-themed newspaper stories, a résumé bank, company research, job opening alerts and other tools. The service will be aimed at job seekers of all levels, from college grads-to-be to laid-off workers hit by the recession. The fortification of the New York Times’s job site follows the announcement in December that it would be teaming up with the Boston Globe and Wall Street Journal to give advertisers the opportunity to place job ads on the web sites of all three at once.
Feds put lid on faux anthrax cure-all claims
Many web sites and spam emails have touted oregano oil as an effective preventive measure for anthrax. The government thinks that’s snake oil, and it has cracked down on online quacks that make such claims. To that end, the Federal Trade Commission has warned 50 web sites to stop claiming that their wares are effective against bioterrorism. The sites were selling questionable medicine for anthrax, smallpox and other diseases that can be used as biological weapons. Since the warnings, about half the sites have backed off from their claims. In all, about 71 warnings were issued; the citations also extended to sites peddling gas masks and anti-nuclear and chemical protective gear, plus so-called mail sterilizers. The FTC fears that many of the gas masks for sale may have expired filters and that many of the goods are next to useless. In all, the FTC found about 200 sites selling bioterrorism-associated products.
Online holiday shoppers were procrastinators
Many shoppers waited until the last minute to carry out their holiday shopping, according to Jupiter Media Metrix. The research company found that traffic to shopping sites spiked during the week before Christmas. Notably the traffic jumped 57 percent for the week ending Dec. 23 when compared to the same time period in the year 2000. EBay received 98.6 percent more traffic than it did in the same week in 2000, and Amazon.com received 58.6 percent more. As Dec. 25 drew near, more and more people logged onto greeting card and florist web sites. 1-800-Flowers.com, for one, experienced a 142 percent rise in traffic, to 155,000 daily visitors, for the week ending Dec. 23, compared to the week before. Traffic to Americangreetings.com jumped by 184,000 people to an average of 675,000 unique visitors a day.
Dirty-minded Charlotte Church fan site shuttered
Fans of 15-year-old pop-opera singer Charlotte Church were dismayed to find that some of their fellow admirers have more on their minds than the young Brit’s arias. According to reports in the U.K. news media, attorneys for Church and her record label, Sony, have shut down a salacious online homage to the soprano. The site featured a ticking 24-hour clock counting down to her 16th birthday, which is next month. The clock carried the caption “How long left until Charlotte Church is legal?” and displayed pictures of her. The identity of the party responsible for the site has not been released. Sony says it is doing all it can to protect the young multimillionaire, who leapt to stardom at the age of 11. Still, similar web sites featuring so-called “countdowns to legality” for young celebrities are nothing new on the internet. Such a site was posted in 1999 to track the minutes until actress Natalie Portman turned 18, but no one was sued over it.
Number of web sites slips slightly
The number of web sites on the internet has decreased by a few, according to one firm’s measurements. U.K.-based internet consultancy Netcraft found that the total number of web sites slipped by 182,142 between November and December 2001. Still, there are more than 36 million sites out there, up dramatically from August 1995, when Netcraft first tallied up 18,957 sites. This marks the second time ever that the total has fallen. August 2000 also saw a drop in the total number of sites. Both decreases, according to Netcraft, can be blamed on the general dot.com downturn. Back in 1999 or so, the speculative registration of web domains was common, because people believed they would be able to sell the names. But many of the names were never sold and have been allowed to expire. Additionally, quite a few dot.coms have either gone out of business or merged with others.
January 3, 2002 © 2002 Media Life
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