It may be an exaggeration to say that Newspapers are dying.

But here's a startling number:

Newspaper advertising revenues for 2011 are HALF of what they were just 6 years ago (2005).

The vast bulk of that lost money has gone into online advertising.

Interesting new study.

If you leave out searches for restaurants, bars and clubs, who searches for local businesses?

The general answer: EVERYBODY.

There is essentially no difference between age groups for example. That's right, 65+ users are just as likely as 20-somethings to do local searches.

The ONLY significant variation is income and education levels. The higher the income, the higher the educational level, the more likely someone will do local searches. There's about a 50% increase from lowest to highest.

Here's the original article on this:

Local Businesses Other Than Restaurants Bars and Clubs

The first spam email was from 1978. That was before the Internet actually existed, it went out on ARPANET, the Internet's predecessor.

And the battle was on.

The wondrous thing is the continued creativity in inventing new ways to spam, but I have a point to make.

What is the opposite of spam?

In my humble opinion, it is quality. What is the essence of spam, after all, but that it is especially low quality advertising.

Now look at some of the greatest successes of the Internet era:

Google, a way to get more exactly the results from your searches that you were looking for.

Apple: Music players, phones, tablets with more capabilities, better looking and more user friendly than anyone would have imagined.

Facebook: A better way to keep up with your friends and acquaintances.

Twitter: A superior way to keep up with who and what in the universe you are interested in, in the most efficient way.

Look at that and tell me what direction do you think you should go with your Internet marketing?

Go for lots of low-quality links or a few really good ones?

Tons of mass-produced web content or well-written, well thought out and accurate articles that really answer people's questions?

A word to the wise is sufficient.

Fonts have a long and storied history.

Did you know that Garamond, one of the most popular and effective type faces, traces its history to the 1540s?

This infographic traces some of the milestones:

A History of Western Typefaces

(For schooling on the basics of type terminology, see the Wikipedia article on typeface.)

First reports prior to Thanksgiving had online spending up 14% over last year:

U.S. Online Holiday Shopping Already Up 14 Percent

Now reports have Black Friday sales up more than 1/4 over last year:

Black Friday online sales jump 26 percent

This is good.

The market research firm Nielsen asked 6-12 year old kids what they wanted for Christmas.

Their number 1, 2 and 3 choices?

An iPad, iPod Touch, and iPhone.

You think maybe Apple has this marketing thing down?

Read the article here: U.S. Kids Looking Forward to “iHoliday” 2011

Are printed Yellow Pages books dead?

Not quite.

What we are seeing is similar to what we've seen with other media when new media came along. Their role becomes more limited.

Where it once was essential for ANY business to be in the Yellow Pages - and for any local consumer business to advertise - that is no longer the case.

Nevertheless, there are types of business where it remains not only highly important, but very profitable.

Here's a great article for guidance on when to consider Yellow Pages vital to your marketing. A couple sample factoids from Confessions Of A Yellow Pages User:

75% of YP advertisers are service businesses or installed product (think floor covering) businesses. The more service-heavy, the more valuable the directory.

Businesses that have large, infrequent sales (roofer, divorce attorney, windshield repair) are very likely to receive a big return.

Read it.

I'm sometimes asked if you can do something about a domain that uses your name, your company or product name or something similar. The answer is usually no, but there are exceptions.

Here's the basic rules - with a classic violation (source: Google Goes After YouTube Domain Typo Squatter):

the three primary criterion are “identical or confusingly similar to a trademark” (check), “owner has no rights or legitimate interests in respect of the domain name” (check), and “domain name has been registered and is being used in bad faith”

This by the way, is not handled in court, but through the procedures of ICANN, the international organization that controls domain name registrations.

Recent flooding in Thailand have caused a global shortage and price increases in hard drives. Shortages may last more than six months.

Why? Most of the world's makers of hard drives do a significant portion of their manufacturing in Thailand. I don't know why that is but it's a fact.

There were shortages of some Apple products following the Japan earthquake / tsunami. One critical part is only manufactured at one facility in Japan.

Increasingly it's not just a small world. but a connected world.

There's no disputing that reviews have become tremendously important. They build credibility, give you exposure and help improve search engine rankings - all in one go.

But how do you get reviews?

You have to have a system and that system has to be based on one key fact: Reviews is a numbers game.

It has been reported that 90% of all reviews are done by only 6% of customers.

How are you going to find those 6%? There's nothing that makes them noticeably different. They aren't more enthusiastic.

No, if you want to get 10 reviews, that just means you need to ask 125 people. So you have to have a system that makes it easy for you to ask lots of people to do reviews for you. THEN you can win the reviews game.