UK online spending to double by 2010
UK web shoppers will spend £6.25 billion on groceries a year by 2010, an increase of 235% over last year, according to a study by Paypal.
Research by the payment firm suggests British online spending will double to £39 billion, with the grocery sector taking the lion’s share of the market.
Thousands of holidaymakers duped by fake sites
Scammers have fooled thousands of British consumers into paying for non-existent summer holidays online, the Association of British Travel Agents (ABTA) has warned.
The Metropolitan Police has launched an investigation into at least five UK-based websites pretending to sell package holidays to European destinations.
AOL keyword suggestion tool published
SEO Scoop has pointed out a keyword suggestion tool that has now been set up, based around the search data infamously published by AOL a couple of weeks ago.
The tool estimates the volume of searches for different keywords on the three biggest engines, based on their market share and the number of queries contained in AOL’s data.
Paypal refunds users after technical error
Paypal, eBay’s online payment system, has refunded some of its UK customers after a technical glitch saw them charged twice for transactions.
AOL search data still available
The AOL search data saga continues, with news from Techcrunch that the first web interface to the 20 million search queries ‘mistakenly’ released by the firm last week has been published.
Google issues malware warnings
Google has begun issuing warnings to users if they are about to access a site containing harmful code.
Forming part of the 'Stop Badware' initiative, the alerts appear if users click on a link to a page known to host spyware or other malicious programmes.
Online card payments rise in UK
More than 50% of UK adults made an online purchase with their credit or debit cards last year, according to new research .
Payments association Apacs says 25 million adults (52% of all adults and 74% of internet users) bought goods online during 2005, an 11% rise over the previous year.
Image spam continues to evade filters
More warnings have been issued over the spread of image-based spam, through which pictures are used to lure victims into downloading spyware or falling for scams.
While it seems surprising, to say the least, that supposedly best-in-breed filtering software is still being bypassed by image-based emails, Computer Weekly reports that attackers are increasingly using them to beat existing controls.
Netscape cracked, presumably by Digg fan
The Netscape vs Digg war has escalated to new heights over the past few days and is reaching some sort of crescendo today after a Netscape security hole was spotted by – presumably – a Digg fan, who promptly inserted a pop-up with the message: “Hi to all you Diggers out there ; )”.
For those of you not following this sometimes hilarious battle of wits, the conflict escalated after Jason ‘mad dog’ Calacanis offered $1,000 to the top Digg contributors to migrate to Netscape, which is widely viewed as a clone of Digg.
eBay says no way to Google Checkout
Bang bang, eBay has - rather unsurprisingly - shot down Google Checkout, preventing people from using it to pay for auction items, according to a post on AuctionBytes.
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Web 2.0
Graham Charlton
Strategy & Planning
