AOL

Ever stumble upon a box of old family photographs tucked away in a closet or attic and end up spending hours reminiscing as you flip through the images? I know I have. While entertaining, the experience often leaves you unfulfilled because you're unable to share those memories with others. Well, at least until now. A startup business from e-commerce veteran Jim Simon is helping consumers to relive and save their cherished memories.

A tremendous shift is taking place in online advertising right now. Google is pushing its display capabilities to new levels, Project Devil at AOL is bringing art back into advertising and organizations like the Interactive Advertising Bureau are pushing the industry to innovate with new ad formats. However, regardless of creative execution, the holy grail of advertising is the ability to reach the right person with the most relevant story — whether it’s through rich media or custom sponsorships — at the right time. At the end of the day, ads have one simple goal: to influence and drive purchases.

Over the past three weeks, there's been a spate of discussion in the search engine marketplace about the reduced quality of Google's natural search results. The discussion has centered around two key issues:

Over the last year and a half, AOL has spent tens of millions of dollars to build local news sites across the country through Patch.com. The idea is that the service would fill the gap in coverage left by local newspapers, many of which are operating on a string after declines in advertising revenue.

On day two of the Retail Marketing Conference in Orlando, Fla., last month, a panel of executives from Best Buy, Dell and 1-800-Flowers.com took part in a roundtable discussion on how their businesses have evolved their brand, e-commerce and marketing strategies to differentiate themselves from their competition through innovation.

Having come a long way from its modest beginning as a chain of floral shops in metropolitan New York, 1-800-Flowers.com usually has set trends, not followed them.

In the meantime, if you're looking to grow your housefile, there are a number of ways to generate new catalog requests and orders beyond the traditional list rental model. I've successfully used the following three services many times in the past. 

An increased reliance on the Sender Policy Framework (SPF) authentication method to determine e-mail legitimacy was the key finding of Lyris’ E-mail Advisor ISP Deliverability Report Card for the 2007 second fiscal quarter. The study, which monitors deliverability rates for permission-based e-mail marketing messages, measured the full-delivery trajectories of more than 436,000 permission-based e-mail marketing messages using ISP domains in the U.S., Canada, Europe and Australia. Here are some of the report’s findings: * Permission-based e-mails make it into U.S. ISP boxes roughly 75 percent of the time; * AIM.com topped the list with 97 percent inbox delivery, 10 percentage points higher than

An average of 19.2 percent of commercial e-mail was blocked from consumers’ inboxes between January 2006 and June 2006. But that’s down from 21 percent blocked during the same time last year, according to a report from e-mail solutions company Return Path. Looking at past e-mail delivery numbers, the trend appears to be reversing itself: * 20.7 percent of commercial e-mail was blocked from consumers’ inboxes in all of 2005; * 22 percent was blocked in 2004; * 18.7 percent was blocked in 2003; and * 15 percent was blocked in 2002; Other data revealed by the report: * In the first half

Much has changed in catalog retailing over the past five years. But as Michelle Farabaugh, a partner with catalog consultancy LENSER, sees it, there’ll be more change over the next five years than the past 30. She offered points and noted some key issues catalogers should be on the lookout for during a session at last week’s New England Mail Order Association conference in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. Search Engine Optimization (SEO): “Because search is so important,” she said, “it’s critical once we get customers to the site that they can acutally find what they’re looking for and we can find what they need and