Martha Retallick has published for sale an excellent Excel spreadsheet for tracking marketing expenses a number of different ways. Besides providing a great list of possible ways to market, the spreadsheet also includes a marketing plan and the ability to compare marketing expenses by type, for example, not just raw costs but also the cost to obtain a customer. This is an excellent tool for smaller businesses that want an easy one stop place to track their marketing activities and costs.
URLs:

http://www.passionatepostcarder.com/25_marketing_tools.html

"Yahoo is poised to launch an ad network for small Web publishers styled on a similar offering from Google, sources familiar with the plan told CNET News.com, a move that promises to sharpen competition between the search giants.

While Yahoo and Google already go head-to-head for major search advertising partners such as America Online, Google has largely enjoyed a monopoly serving its signature text-only ads to smaller publisher Web sites, including ever-more-popular blogs."

Background article from CNET
URLs:

http://news.com.com/Yahoo+seeks+to+expand+in+Google+territory/2100-1024_3-5609792.html

"Confirming seeming odd data coming from companies relying on cookie tracking, a new Jupiter Research study showed that two out of five users wind up having their cookies deleted at least once a month. Many marketers and certainly marketing technology firms have come to rely on the ubiquitous cookie to measure ad performance, conduct frequency caps on ads, gauge audience size and innumerable other basic metrics. But in a study of about 2,300 users, 10 percent said they deleted their cookies each day, 17 percent did so each week, and 12 percent did it monthly. Consumers generally deleted their cookies for fear of invasions of their privacy, and tended not to understand the convenience aspects of persistent cookies - like not having to log in each time visiting many websites."

From MarketingVOX.
URLs:

http://www.marketingvox.com/archives/2005/03/14/many_delete_cookies_invalidate_ad_measurements/

"Last year, I transferred money from an online brokerage account to a large nationwide investment management firm. The investment firm sent a confirmation e-mail to the online brokerage containing my name, Social Security number, account number, and estimated balance, along with the account numbers necessary to wire the money to the new firm. The firm put me on the CC line so I got a copy of this message. I was completely furious. Repeated complaints to the investment firm went unanswered. When I finally reached someone, the response was "it is our routine practice to send account transfer confirmations via electronic mail" and the company refused to change or even review their information security procedures. Needless to say, I do not wish to do business with a company that is so lax about their data security.

I traced the details of the path that particular e-mail took between the three parties involved. It went through a total of 37 individual pieces of computer equipment. I had control over three, and the investment firm and online brokerage each had control over four or five. That left at least 25 other pieces of equipment, all out on the public Internet, and all controlled by people other than the three parties in the e-mail. There were at least nine other companies owning equipment that this readable message passed through. Any employee of any of those nine companies who had access to any of those network components may have intercepted that e-mail."

A nice if chilling overview about email security written by our IT guy (Rick Dexter, NDynamics) and published in the Almaden Times Weekly, a newspaper in Silicon Valley (California).
URLs:

http://www.almadentimes.com/032405/comp_col.htm

"Many companies have systems for tracking customer habits, but Amazon has collected info longer and used it more proactively. It now has technology that tracks data on those you buy gifts for, and it reserves the right to sell it all."

Good catch up article on Amazon and privacy issues about the data they collect. If you remember, around 2000, Amazon changed its privacy policy to allow them to sell your data without your consent (you can opt out, of course, and stop using their site). From Wired News.
URLs:

http://www.wired.com/news/ebiz/0,1272,67034,00.html

"Devotees of Home & Garden Television, sitting in the comfort of their living rooms on the 33rd floor of a Manhattan high-rise, probably could not care less about commercials for lawn mowers or snow blowers. If they have TiVo, they probably zap right through the ads; if not, they can just change channels.

Soon, however, viewers may no longer be assaulted by ads that all but demand to be ignored. Technology, cable and satellite companies are scrambling to offer advertisers the ability to learn enough about who you are and where you live so that the likes of Home Depot will be able to send a different, more suitable ad to an apartment dweller - say, an ad pushing a kitchen upgrade."

One version of the future for businesses that advertise on TV. From the New York Times (free registration required).
URLs:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/27/business/yourmoney/27dvr.html

I found two interesting bits of research that shows email newsletter open and clickthrough data by industry. MailerMailer (PDF), an email service provider, offers their research completely free. Omniture requires you to provide your contact information. Both sets of data should be useful to compare your results.

"comScore Networks today announced the launch of comScore World Metrix, the first true estimate of global online audience size and behavior based on activity from the world’s largest online behavioral research panel. The comScore World Metrix panel has active representation from countries that comprise 99 percent of the global Internet population. In launching comScore World Metrix, the company announced that 694 million people, age 15+, used the Internet worldwide from all locations in March 2006, representing 14 percent of the world’s total population within this age group. This number marks the first worldwide universe estimate based on a consistent methodology across all countries.

Notably, comScore World Metrix includes measurement of the major Asian countries, including China, Japan, India and Korea, which represent nearly 25 percent of the total worldwide online population (or 168.1 million users), and which, in the aggregate, are 11 percent larger than the U.S. (152 million users).

"Today, the online audience in the U.S. represents less than a quarter of Internet users across the globe, versus ten years ago when it accounted for two-thirds of the global audience," said Peter Daboll, president and CEO of comScore Media Metrix. "This is a sea change of enormous proportion, and comScore is pleased to be able to provide measurement to aid the world’s largest marketers in understanding how the world uses the Internet."

A press release from comScore.

"You may have never heard of Rolf Molich. Yet, if you’ve done any usability testing, design evaluations, or heuristic inspections, then you’ve been affected by his pioneering work.

Since entering the field in 1983, Rolf has produced some of the most impressive and forward-thinking research on effective discount usability techniques. Two of Rolf’s more renowned contributions include the co-invention of the Heuristic Inspection process with Jakob Nielsen and the more recent CUE (Comparative Usability Evaluation) studies.

The Heuristic Inspection approach turned the usability world on its head when Rolf and Jakob suggested that you could get value by having experts review interface designs. However, in recent years, Rolf has revisited his thinking on this method and now is questioning its effectiveness for all projects."

Nice interview from UIE, a usability vendor. They also have a wonderful explanation of the CUE project, CUE: A Usability Bake-Off. You also might want to visit the CUE website for details.

"So far we have looked at the fundamentals of design in a rather abstract way, discussing and illustrating the concepts using simple shapes and forms. This is an excellent way to introduce the principles and elements of design, but does not bridge the gap between theory and practice. In this article we will be reviewing many of the topics previously covered, but we will be doing so using actual Web sites so that we can see how everything we have been talking about fits together."

Digital Web Magazine has a wide-ranging set of articles that are great for business people (and designers) who want a quick overview of issues related to interface design. The articles include lots of illustrations and reads quickly.