Monday News Bits

There is a lot happening today. Here is a quick wrap-up and we’ll dig deeper into individual topics later.

—Washington Post tech columnist Leslie Walker has a good piece today about the growth of local, blogging and social media Web sites.

—The targeting and low production capabilities of Internet-delivered user-generated video and self-produced small-business video advertising will start to be seen in political campaigns, according to this Washington Post article.

—There has been increasing concern from advertisers that their marketing messages will show up near racy content online, according to this WSJ article.

—SEW, meanwhile, reports that Google will add a feature to AdWords that lets advertisers specify preference of where they don’t want their ads to show up (i.e., below a certain SERP position).

—CNET is further diversifying by getting into social networking with a new site called CollegeLive. It will build upon CNET’s Webshots online photo-sharing service and specifically target college students (an .edu e-mail is required to sign up). This will include social planning tools to organize events around which photos will be taken and shared on the site.

—Here is a good introduction to the ins and outs of pay-per-phone-call.

—The New York Times Web site has gotten a facelift and a functional upgrade that includes an embedded video player and news personalization. Other features include wider pages for large monitors and the ability to search and organize articles by person, place, company or subject. More here.

—And speaking of online news, the Newspaper Association of America has reported that 55 million Americans visit a newspaper Web site each month. Unique traffic also increased 21 percent from January 2005 to December 2005, and total page views increased 43 percent.

—Lastly, Yahoo! continues to blaze a social media trail and has added reviews to the popular Yahoo! Finance. More here.