David Sifry outlines the state of the Blogosphere in the first quaterly report 2007

+ =Italy Google Maps Mashups!I’m back with my second Italy Google Maps Roundup post (here is the first). I’ve listed these new mashups from Italy by multilingual and Italian language to help everyone discover those which are viewable in languages other than Italian. By the way, a new Google Maps themed blog has emerged that describes the Google Maps/Earth scene, in Italian. It’s over at Google-Mapping.Blogspot.comMultilingual:(Updated Mar.27/

Europe’s largest telecoms operators - with one American firm - are planning to launch a mobile phone search engine to rival Google and Yahoo. The companies concerned include Vodafone, France Telecom, Telefonica, Deutsche Telekom, Hutchison Whampoa, Telecom Italia and US firm Cingular. Combined, they have a user base of 600 million people - with some 20% in the UK expected to have broadband speed mobile phone access by the end of 2007.

The Google monster came under concerted attack from Francois Bourdoncle, CEO and founder of France-based search engine Exalead in the opening keynote of Search Engine Strategies Paris. The press in particular should be worried about becoming sub-contractors of Google, he …

A recent Hotwire Ipsos MORI survey, identifies blogs as one mos the most influential information sources, second only to newspapers.

The study reveals that 34% declare they have not purchased a product after reading comments on the internet from customers or …

Now this is interesting. Italian prosecutors are investigating two Google Italy employees as part of an inquiry into how a violent video appeared on Google Video.
The two are being investigated for allegedly failing to check on the content of the video posted on the Internet search engine’s Web site.

As Reuters points out, the investigation doesn’t imply guilt, but it’s interesting that Italy appears to be holding the two Google employees accountable, as opposed to Google itself

The Italian National Institue of Statistics, Istat, has issued an update on PC and Internet Usage of Italian Population for the current year:

41,4% uses a PC (was 40% in 2005)
34,1% of population over 6 uses Internet (was 31,8% in …

Jupiter Research, released a report on the European Online Advertising Forecast, 2006 to 2011.

The executive summary presented by emarketer provides an insight on the European online expenditure future trends. Europeans are buying more online.

Predictions by Internet Retailer see …

eMarketer reports on Internet access via mobile devices.

The study was conducted in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, UK, and the US. while 29% of European Internet users regularly access the Internet from their mobile phones, only 19% of US …

Ratings were released on the internet usage of Italians for September 2006.

The report indicates a substantial stability in the number of online users with a significant increase in the amount of time spent online. The number of users increased …

Steve Rubel of Micropersuasion reports on the Edelman and Technorati study of the most influential blogs in German, French and Italian.

Further information will be available during a presentation later this week in Milano where the results will be …

Emarketer reports Ecommerce trends for the next few years, associating robust growth in online sales to the increase of DSL lines installed both at home and at work.

The report identifies the UK as the most “mature” of all …

Italian Small and Medium Enterprises show an increasing interest in VOIP and instant messaging as an effective means to communicate on both short and long distance.

A post by HTML.it reports a strong increase in Skype users amongst small businesses. …

+ =Italy Google Maps Mashups!When I last did my Italian roundup back in December ‘05 I could only find 2 Google Maps mashups for Italy. This was before street mapping was available for Europe and only satellite maps existed. Now more mashups have surfaced and I’m back with a roundup of all known Google Maps mashups for the country of Italy. Know of another one not mentioned? Add to this list by posting a comment! I’ve indicated what language the

internet-pro offers information on the dynamics of DSL pricing over the last 12 months taken from an emarketer.com report The results of the analysis show …

Accoona has launched its search engine into the European zone - in fact western Europe. The search engine - which is on a .eu at www.accoona.eu searches by language - rather than country. Currently, the EU version runs …

Interested in the most popular blogs in Italy ? Qix offers a list of the top 200 blogs providing an insight as to what Italians are following, and trends in Italian blogging. Politics (Beppe Grillo) , Blogging (WordPress), Search Engines …

TAGora is a Research Project funded by the European Union. The TAGora project aims at exploiting the unique opportunities offered by the increasing popularity of computer-mediated social interaction and social networks.

The project will develop along several lines:

A systematic and …

Abondance tells us that the Agence pour l’innovation industrielle (Industrial Innovation Agency) gave an update this week on progress with regard to 6 of its projects including the European search engine project ‘Quaero’. The project has a budget of …

Il Sole 24 Ore ha reported Ecommerce B2C (Business to Consumer) numbers are on the rise with a 45% increase when compared to 2005, and an economic value of 4 billion Euros, still les than 1% of goods and services …

Accoona - the new European Search Engine

The European Journalism Observatory presents the results of a recent study conducted in Europe on the progressive integration of blogs and traditional media, and how Journalists are relying more and more on blogs to pick up new stories.

Blogging reaches top level government in Italy. Yesterday afternoon the new ministers were sworn into office - business as usual ? Not really if you consider that 6 ministers are active bloggers, in particular neo minister of communications Paolo Gentiloni.

The debut of Search Engine Strategies Italy was certainly a successful one. Although I cannot report on the number of participants, it was apparent and for all to see that the number of people attending various sessions was very encouraging …

Search Engine Strategies has opened for business today in Milano, the first SES conference to be held in Italy. The turn up has been significant considering the event being a first time. 20 sessions ranging from organic positioning to pay …

Threadwatch and ThomasB report that Google has extended the GoogleMaps application to cover many more countries in Europe. Then have even followed route E30 all the way to Moscow!

As Thomas writes, the implications for local search are significant. With multilingual …

A recent survey reported by SPOT & WEB Media Communications Magazine shows an increase in search engine usage as a key element to identify products, independent of their value, prior to purchasing on line or off line.

The number of broadband subscriptions throughout the OECD continued to increase in 2005 on the rise from 136 million in June 2005 to 158 million by the end of the same year.

Broadband rate of growth during the same period …

The European Commission is following with great interest the ongoing rush to purchase a .eu domain name and believe the new TLD is an indication of a renewed interest in Europe as a common marketplace of both citizens and industry.

Punto …

French registrations of .EU domains show a clear rejection of the name by the French. After 24 hours, the French have only registered one fifth the number of domains (48,000) that the British have registered (260,000) - …

The BBC reports on the opening of the doors of EurID to allcomers trying to register one of the valuable .EU domains - now on a first come first served basis. Already 300,000 have used the sunrise period to …

Jim Lanzone, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Ask.com will attend Search Engine Strategies Italy as a keynote speaker. This is the first Search Engine Strategies Conference in Italy, scheduled on April 26 and 27 in Milano.

Ask.com Italia …

ADEx Nielsen estimates report online marketing expenditure on the rise in Italy up 51,3% over a 12 month span from January 2005
to the same month of this year. Marketing & Publicity investments in Italy reach € 601,4 Million with an …

The Italian Communications Authority has recently deliberated and approved one of the first set of rules and regulations addressing the VoIP sector in rapid growth.

The newly approved legislation introduces the prefix 5 to identify so called “nomad” telecommunications which …

Barry Diller launched the new look Butler-less Ask at the Search Engine Strategies show in New York revealing that Ask has a China-based R & D team working on a local search engine for China. He also said that …

The number of applications for .eu domain names seems to be somewhat tardy in the UK, according to the current figures from Eurid - where Germany - not surprisingly - is way in the lead with 81,000 applications, followed …

The long awaited .eu domain name opened today for applications. The ’sunrise’ period will run from 7th of December to 7th April 2006 to allow those with prior claim to secure their domains before they are made available on a …

Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) Italy hosted the 3rd forum on Interactive Advertising on November 3rd in Milano.
IAB is the Italian charter of IAB Europe, a non-profit Association representing major players in online marketing, media planning, and advertising campaign management. …

Last week, on October 25th, Seekport, often referred to as the European search engine, made a European re-appearance in nearly all of its six locations (Austria, France, German, Italy, Spain and UK). Local press conferences and interviews were held to …

Nielsen Media Research (NMR) Italia is now including online marketing expenditure in their monthly monitoring of the Italian Advertising Market.

A joint workgroup between the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) Italy and AssoInternet has developed guidelines to monitor advertising expenditure online, …

ADSL 2, the new generation of DSL connections, will soon be available in a number of locations throughout Italy within the next few months. In a recent interview Andrea Podda, Technical Director of Tiscali, announced that new DSL profiles …

Mirago chose to launch its new advertising network in Sweden at the Search Engine Strategies conference in Stockholm where the first advertisers were formally signed up to advertise. Mirago is a UK-based pay per click search engine and has …

A recent study by the e-Media Institue of Milano has identified a strong 18% growth in online marketing expenditure in 2005 when compared to the previous year.

The study called NON SOLO BANNER was carried out between July and September of …

Speaking at the eyefortravel Sales and Marketing in Travel Europe conference in Berlin, Jan Oetjen, Travelocity’s managing director Germany, said that the search engine revenues would be cut following the likely consolidation in the travel industry. …

Jeteye beta, is an innovative way to search and share search results. Recently launched on August 23rd, jeteye offers the user a completely new way of exploring the web and organizing search results clustered in so-called “jetpacks”.

The jetpack concept …