Someone types the word “dresses” and hits enter. What will be the very first result?

There are, of course, a lot of possibilities. Macy’s comes to mind. Maybe a specialty chain, like J. Crew or the Gap. Perhaps a Wikipedia entry on the history of hemlines.

O.K., how about the word “bedding”? Bed Bath & Beyond seems a candidate. Or Wal-Mart, or perhaps the bedding section of Amazon.com.

“Area rugs”? Crate & Barrel is a possibility. Home Depot, too, and Sears, Pier 1 or any of those Web sites with “area rug” in the name, like arearugs.com.

You could imagine a dozen contenders for each of these searches. But in the last several months, one name turned up, with uncanny regularity, in the No. 1 spot for each and every term:

J. C. Penney.

The company bested millions of sites — and not just in searches for dresses, bedding and area rugs. For months, it was consistently at or near the top in searches for “skinny jeans,” “home decor,” “comforter sets,” “furniture” and dozens of other words and phrases, from the blandly generic (“tablecloths”) to the strangely specific (“grommet top curtains”).

This striking performance lasted for months, most crucially through the holiday season, when there is a huge spike in online shopping. J. C. Penney even beat out the sites of manufacturers in searches for the products of those manufacturers. Type in “Samsonite carry on luggage,” for instance, and Penney for months was first on the list, ahead of Samsonite.com.

Read full story at the NY Times.

Rather than learning from or trying to emulate HuffPo’s hugely valuable editorial technology, then, the NYT is sticking its head in the sand and retreating to a defensive stance of trying to make as much money as possible from its core loyal readers. There’s no growth in such a strategy. Indeed, the opposite is true: the NYT is making it both hard and expensive to become a core loyal reader. Meanwhile, the open web will become ever more accessible and social, with friends pointing friends to news in a site-agnostic manner. The NYT is distancing itself from that conversation, standing proud and aloof. It’s a strategy which is doomed to fail.

Read more here….

The news that Goldman has taken a stake in Facebook, the white-hot social networking giant, has tongues wagging from Wall Street to Silicon Valley. As first reported by DealBook, Goldman has invested $450 million in a deal that values Facebook at $50 billion. As part of the deal, Goldman is looking to raise as much as $1.5 billion from its wealthy clients to invest in Facebook alongside the firm.

The move is straight out of Goldman’s playbook. The firm has a long history of “friending” America’s hottest companies and chief executives. By collecting so many important friends, Goldman generates big fees.

Full story at the NY Times.

In just the past 24 hours, more than 81,000 blogs were born.

The new additions bring the total to nearly 150 million blogs on the Web – and counting, according to the Nielsen Co.’s BlogPulse. But just how many of them will still be around next year? Or for that matter, in a couple of months?

That’s the predicament that faced Tumblr founder David Karp when he tried to start a blog four years ago. Like others, he wanted to carve out a place online to share what was going on in his life. But after three months, he quit. He also discovered something about himself.

“I’m not a writer,” he said. “It was a huge burden to keep this thing up.”
Enter Tumblr, one of a new generation of blogging tools quickly gaining momentum on the Internet. They make it easy to post just about anything online: a photograph here, a video clip there, a link to an interesting news article and, of course, words.

Read more…

Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, the identical twin brothers portrayed in the Sony Corp. film “The Social Network,” talk about their lawsuit against Facebook Inc. founder Mark Zuckerberg who they accused of stealing their idea for the social-networking website. The Winklevoss twins resolved litigation with Facebook for $65 million in 2008 and are contesting the settlement claiming they were misled about the value of the site during negotiations. They speak with Margaret Brennan on Bloomberg Television’s “InBusiness.”

On average, a Facebook user who “likes” your content has more than double the number of friends than does a typical Facebook user. This could mean the user is more “social” or more influential; on the other hand, it could mean the user is an attention-seeking narcissist.

While it’s fatuous to read too much into that statistic, the number does show that the average “liker” is more active from a social-web standpoint.

An even more interesting stat about the likers is that they click on five times more links to external sites than the typical Facebook user. If clickthroughs are what you’re looking for from your social media strategy, this is good news.

Read more…

Though it’s the No. 1 Web-based e-mail product in the U.S., ahead of both Gmail and Hotmail combined, Yahoo Mail has recently watched its user totals slip, according to ComScore figures quoted by the Journal. The service has seen:

*a year-over-year drop in U.S. users from 107 million visitors last August to 97 million this August,
* a worldwide year-over-year drop in users of 7 percent (while Hotmail has seen 3 percent growth and Gmail has enjoyed a healthy 22 percent spike),
* the loss of its No. 1 spot in India to Gmail, which had 24 million users there in July, to Yahoo’s 21 million.

Read more at CNet….

Read more…at the NY Times

Google (GOOG) had 71.59% of the U.S. Internet search market in August, according to Experian Hitwise, up a bit from 71.43% in July.

Meanwhile, Yahoo (YHOO) had 14.28% share in the quarter, down from 14.43%, while Microsoft (MSFT) Bing had 9.87% of the market, up from 9.86%.

For the week ended August 28 – the first week in which Yahoo switched to Bing for search service – Yahoo and Bing combined had 24.456% share, with Yahoo at 14.32% and Bing at 10.24%.