The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article on the very recent rise in online fraud. It certainly suggests that fraud rises in the downturn.

We were honored to be nominated for the Semmy Award for best PPC post of 2008 for our post on Search Engine PPC Trademark policies.

ICANN had been planning on a radical transformation of the gTLD system in May 2009 that would result in a tremendous expansion of available gTLDs (current examples of gTLDs include .biz, .mobi, .com, .org). The proposal would basically allow anyone with $185K to buy a new gTLD (although technically those are application fees).

I spoke with Chris Sanderson of AMWSO yesterday to learn a bit more about search in Asia as well as to provide him an overview of BrandVerity. Chris put together a good summary on the importance of monitoring PPC policy abuse as well as some of his early thoughts on PoachMark on the AMWSO blog. He also offers advice to new PoachMark users on how best to utilize the system (we're taking a few of his thoughts to heart as we evolve the trial program).

Techcrunch reports that CitizenHawk recently raised a $3M round.

Last week, BrandVerity entered closed Alpha. We have a handful of alpha testers up and running and we are conducting daily monitoring of their search terms.

BrandVerity is now accepting a limited number of customers into our closed alpha program.