Forbes is reporting that the Australian unit of News Corp is trying to acquire realestate.com.au:

News Corp's Australian unit News Ltd said it has extended its 270 mln aud takeover bid for online real estate advertiser, realestate.com.au, to Nov 11 after having taken up 51.52 pct of the online company.  News launched its offer in August, initially offering 2.00 aud per share before raising the offer to 2.50 a share in October.

realestate.com.au's independent directors have continued to recommend that shareholders reject the offer.   realestate.com.au shares were valued at 2.48-2.73 aud each in an independent expert's report contained in the company's August 25 target statement.

Read the full story here.

UK Band The Arctic Monkeys are putting viral media to the test, by using it for song distribution - actually hitting the charts.  The Business Online reports:

DURING the dotcom boom of the late 1990s, analysts predicted that the internet would change the way people shared information and become a medium for content and advertising rivalling traditional distribution channels such as analogue TV, newspapers and magazines. With infinite capacity and connections, the internet and the developing digital world would allow people to do for themselves much of what the traditional media companies had been doing.

While the market got a little ahead of itself at the time, to say the least, some of these predictions are finally coming true. This is affecting the strategies of most European media companies, spurred on by an unsympathetic equity market and the attentions of private equity houses.

The Arctic Monkeys are a recent pop-culture example of people “doing it for themselves”using the marketing power of the internet. The Sheffield band’s single, I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor, entered the UK music charts at number one last week largely as a result of a “viral’” marketing campaign focused on word-of-mouth and fans sharing free songs online. The band has now been signed by Domino Records, but has no doubt given food for thought to the traditional music industry on how to manage and build profiles of bands in the digital age.

On the other side of the pond, Time Warner’s board has reportedly discussed the future of AOL, the epitome of boom-to-bust internet stories, but now the subject of attention from the likes of Google and Microsoft. BT last week outlined a service offering video on demand, personalised TV channels, online gaming, and high-speed broadband – all to be squeezed down phone lines.

Is any of this affecting the economics of the media business? You bet. Internet advertising represented 3.6% of the £18.4bn UK market in 2004 sandwiched between outdoor (5.4%) and radio (3.3%). More importantly, internet adverts grew 60%, according to the Advertising Association.

Read here for the full story.

Nepalnews.com is reporting that heavy protest is arising against the new media law being put in place there.  This new law was put in place recently to ban news broadcasts, as well as criticism of the key.  Externally, it was met with significant protest by India and the UK.  We'll let the local media state their story:

Journalists and law experts have said the recently promulgated ordinance that imposed fresh curbs on independent media is also aimed at controlling the political freedom.  Speaking at a discussion program on “Media Ordinance, Purpose and Its Effect,” organised by Nepal Journalism Students Association (NJSA) in the capital on Friday, they said the new press law goes completely against the spirit of the constitution of 1990 and that the intention of the royal administration is to control the activities of the political parties.

“The government has issued the media ordinance to control the activities of political parties in the context of the imminent municipal elections,” said Bhimarjun Acharya, a constitution expert and the president of Constitutional Lawyers’ Forum (CLAF).  Regarding the ban on newscasts in FM radios, he argued that there is no mention about “FM radio” as such in the ordinance.

The St.-Louis Post-Dispatch is reporting the following:

A large part of life is in attitude, the philosophers say. And Ed Goren has a positive one.  Goren, president of Fox Sports, knows that the World Series his network finished televising Wednesday night drew the lowest TV rating since records started being kept in 1968.

But it's a changing world, he points out, with competition from many sources that didn't exist in past decades. In those days, there were no more than four or five television stations available in most markets; the 100-channel cable/satellite TV world didn't exist. Neither did the Internet, VCRs, DVD players or many other diversions.

Accordingly, ratings for all over-the-air networks have declined significantly in recent years, but Fox points out that the World Series remains a major force considering the current environment. Goren was taking some time off after the World Series and couldn't be reached, but shortly before the Series ended he addressed the matter with the Chicago Tribune.

"Honestly, the ratings don't bother me," he said. "What bothers me is the press writing a simplistic, knee-jerk, easy story. A more intelligent person would look at the entire landscape of television. This is far and away the most competitive prime-time season in years. We're still going to win the week (among the networks), and that says something." Some may take that as spin, but in reality, Goren makes a valid point.

The eight lowest-rated World Series all have occurred in the past eight years.  But Fox says that dating to 2001, the Series rating has been 83 percent better than what CBS, NBC and ABC do in prime time during the television season as a whole. During the 1990s, the Series outpaced the regular network prime-time fare by 69 percent, by 58 percent in the 1980s and 52 percent in the 1970s.

Thus in the grand scheme of things in 2005, it's not as bad as it seems. Actually, the Series might be faring better than ever given the changing culture. Fox's 92 prime-time playoff telecasts over the past five seasons have averaged a 5.4 rating among the key demographic of adults in the 18-49 age bracket, better than any of the major networks in that target group. (NBC has averaged a 4.4 since 2001, tops in that facet).  "When the postseason numbers are great, they're beyond great," Goren said. "When they're low, they're still good."

Read the full article here.

Google yesterday reported a record $1.6 billion in revenue for Q3 2005, doubling the results it recorded in the same quarter for 2005.  In addition, net income increased sevenfold over last year's profits, to $381 million.  Part of this succes was explained by Google's expansion abroad, mainly in mainland China.

The news came one week after Google US operations announced they would be opening an additional engineering office in Phoenix, AZ, in addition to its US engineering center in Mountain View, CA.

Google, the we-do-it-all company has started making its ascent into commercial real estate.  The San Jose Mercury News reports that Google is talking to CoStar, owner of the largest real estate database in the US, in order to license information from them.  Google would be planning on incorporating this information within Google Earth, thereby making building information available on the internet in a synnergy with its global map representation business.  The options to make a success out of this one are virtually boundless.

Richard Rogers and Anat Ben-David of Govcom.org published a report this week in which they made use of a refreshing and modern method of media monitoring to build an analysis of the naming of the security fence between Israel and the Palestinian Territories. 

They reviewed the use of the official terms 'security fence' and 'apartheid wall' as well as many others, linking them to the different parties in the conflict.  You can download their excellent research paper here.  Their document is a great example of a new and refreshing way to use seemingly less important details of information that being made available continously on the internet.

The UK Financial Times has a great article about the self-dubbed "second internet boom", giving a nice overview of online media, the evolution of ads over the last few years.  Definitely worth a good read.

Verisign announced today that they have acquired MoreOver Technologies, a wholesale aggregator of real-time content for web sites and search engines.  Verisign intends to combine this aggregation service with VeriSign's feed management infrastructure, thereby offering bloggers, publishers, enterprises and web portals a real-time content platform.

The new aggregation services will utilize Verisign's newly acquired ping server infrastructure, so the complete content distribution network which the blogging sphere is becoming can be strengthened further.  Moreover currently aggregates more than 12,000 news sources (about three times those of Google News), together with millions of blogs.  It harvests this information in more than 25 languages, and uses a content tagging system to deliver unduplicated real-time content articles daily.  It serves customers such as MSN, AskJeeves and BBC.  As such it has taken the role of a modern "media monitoring system", a system for the internet much like the BBC provides for television and radio broadcasts.

Moreover is a company with merely 35 employees in two offices, and the acquisition was purchased with $30 million in cash. 

Who thought he really had enough information available with Google News probably didn't see this one coming.  The New York Times reports that Inform Technologies has launched Inform, the self-dubbed "Newspaper of the future".  The New York based company is launching the site as it feels it will deliver information in a way no other web site can match.  In addition to providing a central point of news collection, similar to Google and Yahoo News, it scans the article in real time while reading, offering additional related articles to the view. 

The article will then appear as it was written by the originating newspaper, including the newspaper advertisements, while Inform offers additional content in the border of the HTML page.  In addition, you can register, making it possible for Inform to create a "profile" based on your previous newsreading sessions.  This profile is then used to suggest additional articles and show you exactly what you're interested in.

Inform is not the first of its kind.  It's CEO, Neal Goldman, previously launched another news venture, CapitalIQ.  This venture offered a very similar service, which was targeted directly at the financial industry, was sold to McGraw-Hill for $225 mo.

The big question is whether this service is really what the average news reader is looking for.  In essence, Inform will offer a similar service to Google news, but with limited additional functionality.  It will also be difficult for Inform to compete with the major news gathering capabilities of Google.  There is no reference on their site as to how many sources they use, but this will most likely be more limited than Google or Yahoo.  Have a look, and let us know what you feel about this new service.

Bytestart has a great little article on the 8 top web marketing mistakes.  Covering the spectre from spamming over external links to bad code, this makes an excellent introduction for those just starting out in promoting their site.  If you've already been into the field for some time, you will not learn anything new.  For new entrants, this is a good document to review before starting your site marketing program.

On another note, MarketingSherpa has a good article on why many organizations make a mistake by only offering HTML e-mail without a text equivalent.  A good read regarding a popular mistake that didn't make Bytestart's list.

MTV Networks has announced they have paid a total of $49 million for IFILM, the online provider of short-form entertainment video, as well as hollywood trailers.  The deal was announced on Thursday, after which Viacom shares rose by $0.11. 

Viacom announced they intend to use the internet services provided by IFILM as an additional brand within the MTV portfolio, delivering media directly to the client, replacing the more expensive "middle men" such as cable providers by regular internet providers, whom generally do not discriminate by content.  They also intend to use the services to capitalize better on the phenomenon of viral marketing, the distribution of a marketing message by motivated individuals.

More information in the Viacom press release.