Is That Charlton Heston or Rupert Murdoch?

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In my vision, Rupert Murdoch ambles to the front of a stage. He’s
wearing biblical robes. In each hand, he holds a stone tablet. Scratch
that. He holds iPhones. And Apple’s Safari browser isn’t loaded with
NYTimes.com like in the commercial. Instead, it’s WSJ.com.

As the stage lights turn Murdoch’s face to wrinkle and shadow,
he starts to sing. Slowly. Mournfully.

“Let my content free.”

Anyway, I just thought I’d share. Rumor has it that Murdoch is inclined to drop the subscription fee for the Wall Street Journal‘s WSJ.com Web site. We’ll see.

Market-share mania

This just in, Google is rolling up the competition in search market
share. Still.

That’s the news from Nielsen//NetRatings, which reported in its
“MegaView Search” that Google dominated August with 4.2 billion
search queries fielded. That’s good for 53.6 percent market share.

Coming in second was Yahoo, which did not announce a reorganization this week. It came in
with 19.9 percent market share. And in third place was Microsoft with 12.9
percent.

The kids and their Facebook

In other market-share news, comScore reports that Silicon Valley frisbee squad Facebook is the fastest-growing social network in Europe. It
grew 422 percent between January and July.

The next fastest-growing site, Bebo.com, felt great about its 62
percent growth until just now.

United Kingdom-based Wanobe did not finish in comScore’s top 10. Wanobe is the “lifestyle place for those over 50,” and it
gets a mention here because on the site, co-founder David Noble writes, “The kids have dominated the fun stuff on the Internet for over a decade, so I
think it’s time all of us over the age of 50 have a place of our
own to play in, explore and enjoy.”

It’s worth quoting because, as you’ll notice, Noble used the phrase
the kids in a non-ironic fashion, and you just can’t get enough
of that.

Newspapers, radio and billboards…oh why?

We already know Google is fiddling around with television, newspaper
and radio advertising. Is it getting into billboards now?

That’s Valleywag’s theory, after spotting a post on Mike Blumenthal’s blog about a billboard he saw advertising Google’s 800-GOOG411 service.

Search Engine Land supposes that Google is testing whether
advertising increases usage of the 411 service itself.

Given Google’s willingness to try anything in advertising, the bet
here is that Google will be offering marketers billboard
advertising in no time.

Expect them to tout it as geographically targeted.

This article was first published on InternetNews.com.