By Kevin Riley

Today, I saw another of those “doom and gloom” videos by one of the “big guru” marketers. The names I have for these bozos are not fit to print (remember, I was once a carpenter and have a rather colourful language – and the worst words pertain to these doomsayers).

Look, nothing annoys me much more (other than a sudden shortage of Irish whiskey at my local liquor store) than hearing these muppets go on about how the Internet as we know it is coming to an end … only to see they are about to plug their new, whizbang $597 membership program that “will solve all your problems”. Excuse me while I stick my finger down my throat.

Hotel brand managers should impose stricter terms on their affiliates and channel partners, who, according to MarkMonitor, are ‘brandjacking’ hotels to the tune of $1.9 billion in lost annual online bookings.

Based on recent research conducted by the firm, MarkMonitor reckons affiliates – particularly hotel aggregators – are effectively ‘brandjacking’ hotels by bidding on hotel brand terms in the search engines. According to MarkMonitor’s research, affiliates are costing the hotel industry around $1.9 billion in lost annual online bookings.

May 2011 research from InboxQ indicates that Twitter users want businesses to respond to them when they have questions, complaints or comments about those businesses.

Interestingly, such Twitter users don’t necessarily direct their Tweets to a given company with a @ reply or direct message. Instead, they’ll send the Tweet to all their followers. Yet, according to InboxQ, more than half (58 percent) of Twitter users still want the business to respond to them.

Add Disney to the list of major companies that have forgotten to review key domain names. In Disney’s case, it forgot to renew the Club Penguin domain name – that same Club Penguin for which Disney was willing to pay up to $700 million.

Fortunately for Disney, the company managed to recover the domain name and, following a period during which the site was down, the site is back to normal now.

Google recently introduced Instant Pages, a new feature of its Chrome web browser that will pre-render the web page of the top search result before you visit it. In other words, after you perform a search, Google will get the web page of the first search result ready for you, before you even click on that result.

Google says it will only pre-render a web page where it has ‘very high confidence’ that it’s what a search engine user is looking for. How will Google develop such confidence? According to Google software engineer, Ziga Mahkovec:

So how DO you get your site to the top spot of the first page of Google, Bing and the other search engines? What are the most important factors for getting a high search engine ranking? What should you spend most of your search engine optimization (SEO) time and budget on in order to increase your organic search engine rankings?

These and similar questions are likely to occupy much of your time and attention as an Internet marketer or search engine marketer. Especially as Google, Bing and the other search engines do their best to maintain the secrecy of their search engine algorithms.

According to eMarketer, Internet marketers are set to spend more money on online display advertising than search marketing by 2015.

While search advertising attracts the most online ad dollars right now, the steep growth in online video ad spending, combined with steady increases in banner advertising, mean that display advertising will usurp search within the next four years.

Major news publications can ask for subscription fees and erect paywalls all they like, but a recent study shows that 80 percent of U.S. adult Internet users are NOT willing to pay a single red cent to read a daily newspaper online.

Recently The New York Times joined a growing list of major daily news publications that require visitors to pay subscription or other fees to access news content. Other prominent news dailies to do so include The Times in the United Kingdom and the Australian Financial Review in Australia.

Move over PayPal. Move over credit cards. Move over dollar bills. Introducing bitcoins – a peer-to-peer (P2P) virtual currency that is, according to Jason Calacanis, “untraceable and un-hackable… that could topple governments, destabilize economies and create uncontrollable global bazaars for contraband.”

So, um, what is a bitcoin… or what are bitcoins… exactly?

Bitcoins are a form of virtual currency. Each bitcoin is a virtual coin that takes the form of a file you can store on your computer. As with other forms of currency, bitcoins are negotiable instruments you can trade for goods and services which, in turn, enables the new holder of the bitcoins to trade them for goods and services. Or you can simply give and receive bitcoins. Either way, bitcoins are a store of value you can use to buy stuff.

Social media generates less than 1 percent of traffic for the average website, according to research by ForeSee Results.

According to ForeSee’s research, social media websites are not directly responsible for much website traffic, but still play an influential role.