Posted 10/12/09 at 10:15:24 AM by Pulkit Chandna

Online display ads account for around a third of the $40 billion online ad market. Advertisers mainly commission display ads to apprise internet users of their presence and not necessarily in the hope of immediate results. But click-through rates for display advertising have slumped to such abject levels that it is just too optimistic to expect immediate results with banner ads. 

According to market research firm comScore, American internet users are increasingly becoming immune to display advertising. A recent comScore study found that the number of American internet users that click on a display ad at least once every month fell by 50% over a 20-month period. But according to Andrew Lipsman, director of industry analysis at comScore, it is not always correct to measure the success of online ads with number of clicks as the yardstick.

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Posted 07/24/09 at 11:00:00 AM by David Murphy

A coalition of some of the biggest names in the OSS world have banded together to create Open Source for America, a brand-new advocacy group that's going to try and highlight the advantages of open-source software to help achieve the goals set out in President Barack Obama's push for an open-data government.  But as we pause to "ooh" and "ahh" at the list of companies and open-source celebrities contributing to the new group--Novell, the Mozilla Foundation, the EFF, Tim O'Reilly, and Mark Shuttleworth, amongst many others--let us not forget the uphill battle that the concept of "openness" tends to face in the government sector.

I just can't find myself getting that excited over open-source software when we still have fundamental issues of transparency and openness in governmental data. There's a wealth of information out there that's free and easily accessible to the public. But that doesn't mean that legislators, agencies, and departments are going out of their way to make this information as useful as it could be.  In fact, it was only as recently as two months ago that the U.S. Senate itself opened up its own voting records for third-party applications and mashups.

Click the jump and put on your safety helmet--we're going data diving!

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