Mr. Fox is among a small group of Google employees who keep a watchful eye on the vital signs of one of the most successful and profitable businesses on the Internet. The number of searches and clicks, the rate at which users click on ads, the revenue this generates — everything is tracked hour by hour, compared with the data from a week earlier and charted.

“You can see very, very quickly if anything is amiss,” said Mr. Fox, director of business product management at Google.

Mr. Fox and his “ads quality” team can also quickly see whether something is working particularly well. His group’s mission, to constantly fine-tune Google’s ad delivery system, has one overriding objective: show users only the ads they are most likely to be interested in and click on.

Google runs a complex auction-based system that determines which ads will appear where, and in what order. Every time the team alters the formulas that select and rank ads, Mr. Fox can run a test and quickly see the effect of the changes on users, advertisers and Google’s revenue — which, in this year’s first quarter, came in at the rate of more than $2 million an hour.

The job has given Mr. Fox, a soft-spoken 29-year-old with an obvious affinity for nuance and numbers, a detailed understanding of the complex dynamics at work inside Google’s ad-driven economic engine.

Mr. Fox, who graduated from Harvard with a degree in economics and spent two years at the management consulting firm McKinsey & Company before joining Google in 2003, also helped organize its Revenue Force. This select group of engineers, sales and finance people, product managers and statisticians from across the company is charged with keeping top executives apprised of the forces that make Google tick.

Google reveals little of these forces to the outside world. Even on Wall Street, many experts describe Google as a giant black box that they struggle to comprehend.

In recent months, for instance, analysts and investors grew increasingly worried about reports of a decline in clicks on Google ads in the United States, which they interpreted as a sign that Google’s business could be suffering from the economic slowdown. But inside Google, Mr. Fox and others were growing confident that the company would do just fine.

“I wouldn’t quite go so far as to say we are recession-proof,” said Hal R. Varian, Google’s chief economist. “But we are recession-resistant.”

Google’s financial results for the first three months of the year surpassed expectations. Still, some analysts point out that Google’s growth is slowing, especially in the United States. The extent to which that slowdown is the fault of the economy or just the size and maturity of Google’s business remains a matter of debate on Wall Street.

Mr. Fox acknowledged that searches and clicks in some areas, like real estate and travel, have grown more slowly recently. But he noted that there is not an exact correlation between clicks and revenue: “Clicks are only part of the story.”

The idea of linking ads with search results was first developed not by Google but by GoTo.com, which later changed its name to Overture Services and then was bought in 2003 by Yahoo. Overture ranked ads based on how much advertisers were willing to bid for a certain keyword. The higher the bid, the better the placement.

As Google’s engineers developed their own search advertising system, they understood early on that giving top billing to the highest bidder would have little benefit for Google if that ad did not attract clicks. That is because advertisers typically pay Google only when a user clicks on their ads.

So Google decided to rank ads based on a combination of bid price and “click-through rate,” the frequency with which users click on a given ad. Mr. Fox’s team took things from there and gradually became better at figuring out what ads would work with users.

Yahoo tried to catch up by building a new search advertising system that works more like Google’s. It helped increase revenue, but by Yahoo’s own account, Google still earns 60 percent to 70 percent more on average than Yahoo on every search. Microsoft has also lagged, in part because it lacks enough advertisers. It acknowledged as much with its recent attempt to buy Yahoo.

Mr. Fox said Google’s ability to constantly fine-tune its operations was intricately linked with its obsession with measuring just about everything that happened on its system.

Seeking to capture the imagination of educated, adventurous gourmand prospective customers, he instead set out to draw more people to his Web site and his Portland, Ore., shop by writing an informative, entertaining and provocative blog, “Salt News.”

Bitterman knows that people, including reporters, visit both the site and the blog, and many eventually come through the doors to see the 60 or so varieties of salt. “You can’t tell if it gets you new traffic or if it just shapes the expectations of those who come to the shop,” he adds. There are probably as many varieties of marketing a business and increasing sales as there are versions of high-end salt. But you can’t expect to compete as a small business today without choosing from a growing arsenal of online marketing tools. Here are four smart ways to get your business noticed on the Internet.

1. Create a simple, effective Web site.

Does your Web site describe your product or service in a succinct, compelling and visual fashion? Does it answer potential customers’ needs in, say, less than 10 seconds? “Once they click to your Web site, you have between 5 and 8 seconds to convince them you can help,” says Larry Bailin, CEO of SingleThrow Internet Marketing in Wall, N.J., and author of the soon-to-be-published Mommy, Where Do Customers Come From? (Larstan Publishing).

Your home page should include the bare essentials, Bailin says. “People are looking for exactly what they typed in, with calls to action,” he says. “It’s critical that you address their issues on your home page. Get to the point and get rid of anything that doesn’t need to be there.”

Your Web site should be easy to navigate and right on target, and a “Contact Us” button should be prominent. Also, make sure your site appears high on search engines’ results pages. By including keywords and terms in the code, your site will appear higher up on Google and others. These days, any good web designer will be able to handle such search engine marketing as part of the design and programming package. Still, it’s up to you to know the best way to describe your product and service to potential customers and then turn them into qualified sales leads.

“Don’t think too much about the bells and whistles,” warns Bailin. “Think about the connection that you’re going to make and the way you’re going to help people. Make it clear to them and you’ll win every time.”

2. Become a blogger.

Entrepreneurs who blog can reach a new audience by writing in a conversational way and showing the human and personal side of their business, according to William Beutler, senior online analyst for New Media Strategies, a Web 2.0 marketing firm in Arlington, Va.

“Make your industry interesting to people by writing in a conversational manner,” he says. “Give people a glimpse into a world they don’t know.” Beutler believes new businesses can benefit greatly from blogging. “There’s still an untapped audience in a lot of industries that are just starting to grow,” he says. “You have the potential to establish yourself as an expert in the field just by being the first person to write something interesting about your field.”

3. Try podcasting.

Podcasting is a relatively simple technology that is being taken quite seriously by some Fortune 500 companies. And all you really need to get started is a decent microphone, a digital recorder and editing software.

Podcasts allow you to make the most of your inner impresario, plus, your show and the subscriber audience it may lure can give you an edge over competitors.

“Podcasting is still unique enough in many industries that it can allow you to stand out a bit,” says John Jantsch, a Kansas City, Mo., marketing coach and author of Duct Tape Marketing: The World’s Most Practical Small Business Marketing Guide (Thomas Nelson).

“Podcasting makes a ton of sense for many small businesses for several reasons,” says Jantsch. “A voice, rather than simple words on a paper can convey emotion and personality. It’s much easier to connect to that.”

Jantsch offers this tip for the podcaster trying to bring attention to his business: “Invite a key strategic partner to be a guest on the podcast and you’re likely to get the attention of high-level experts, authors and even prospects.”

4. Smile, you’re on YouTube!

YouTube is not just for classic media clips, cute pet tricks and bizarre dorm antics anymore. With a YouTube link on your Web site and vice versa, you have a new marketing tool. But don’t be so crass as to post blatant infomercials about your small business.

“What you want to post is something that the people on YouTube will find interesting or useful and will therefore watch,” says Michael Miller, the Indianapolis-based author of YouTube 4 U (Que Publishing). In his book, Miller cites the example of a pottery business that posted a how-to video on throwing pots on a pottery wheel. “That’s what gets them in the door and then you direct them to your Web site from there.”

My business is coming up the ramp;
Some other business is dead.
The other business that is dead is, unless you are speaking to a very depressed person, not the one he or she is in.

So it depends on who you are speaking to, or to whom you are speaking, depending on whether that grammar stuff matters to you.

Following are the businesses that are dead, if you hang around with enough bullsh**ters in a wide enough range of fields:

• The theater
• Movies in movie houses
• Public schools
• Radio, because of satellite radio,
• Satellite radio, because of Internet radio and ITunes
• Broadcast television, because of cable and Internet video
• Cable television, because of satellite TV and Internet video
• Satellite television, because of digital television conversion and Internet video
• Internet video, because of digital television conversion and downloading
• DVDs, because of downloading
• Downloading, because of the ubiquity of broadband streaming
• Personal computers with hard drive capacity, due to cloud computing
• Land-line telephones, because they’re so 20th Century
• Any internet company that is not Google (GOOG), for obvious reasons
• Google, because, well, how long can they keep THIS up?
• Books, of course
• Magazines, except the ones that we’re on the cover of, and…
• Newspapers

The only one that everybody agrees about right now, among the b.s.-ing class, is newspapers. Newspapers are dead. Dead dead dead. Yes, Rupert Murdoch doesn’t seem to believe so, but he is incorrect in this, or doesn’t see the truth right now, or whatever. Because you know newspapers? They’re dead.

This is not helped at all by the appearance of Sam Zell, who bought Tribune (TXA), and whose chief operating officer recently announced they would begin to judge the value of journalists by the column inches they produced in a year. This is sort of like saying that Chichi’s is the best restaurant in America because it serves the greatest weight in nachos.

That aside, however, everybody does agree: they’re dead. One day there will be no newspapers, because No Young People Read Newspapers. Is this true? My kids are of sentient age. They read newspapers. In fact, they’re both knee deep in Obamamania right now, and read everything they can get their hands on. I see people reading newspapers on the street, in parks, on subways and buses… when you get a bad story in the newspaper it still ruins your day…

But no. They’re dead. Know why? Because Advertising is Down in newspapers. Now of course, advertising is sort of down across the board, and actually MUCH more disappointing on all those social networks everybody loves so much… and newspapers still attract a HUGE proportion of total advertising…

But no. Newspapers are dead. And advertisers read that and, timid little lambkins that they are, cut their budgets even more, because after all who wants to advertise in a dead medium?

Finally, newspapers are, you know, dead because they Haven’t Changed With The Times and News Is A Commodity That You Can Get Just As Well Online.

Except guess what. It’s not. I’ll just say what I think and get out of here. As always, if you agree, lob something in.

• I like newspapers. I look at a few every day and even read some of each;
• I don’t believe everything I read in the paper, but I’m interested in what they think is interesting;
• Newspapers have been around a long time, from medieval days through the time of Horace Greeley (above) and beyond. Radio didn’t kill them. TV didn’t kill them. The internet will not kill them;
• If there were no newspapers, all we’d have is the Internet, whose capacity for the promulgating and dispensation of bulls**t is unparalleled;
• I am NOT interested in a PERSONAL, daily e-mail informing me only of the stuff I pre-select as of interest to me. What’s the pleasure in that?
• If we all had a euro for every article in some medium that declared another medium dead, we’d all be Europeans;
• Aggregators can only aggregate content if there is content to aggregate. No content, no aggregators;
• Contrary to popular belief, journalism is an actual profession that takes training, talent and skill, and one of the most rigorous and necessary places in which it’s pursued is in newspapers;
• 89% of all citizen-journalists are just full of it.

Now you guys in newspapers could probably help a little, going forward. Why not stop writing pieces every day about how dead every other industry is? Just a thought, tough guys.

A deal was agreed in principle and an announcement could be made as early as this week, a person with knowledge of the matter was quoted as saying. SK Telecom declined to comment.

SK Telecom, South Korea’s top mobile operator, said in May it was in preliminary talks with Virgin Mobile about strategic opportunities for its Helio U.S. arm.

Helio, which has been losing money, is 69 percent owned by SK, with EarthLink Inc holding 28 percent.

“Although there’s no guarantee that the combined company will succeed, it’s still a good move as SK Telecom can reduce risks from the U.S. business,” said Lee Shi-hoon, an analyst at Hyundai Securities. “Virgin Mobile has a scale and Helio has strong services, so the combination can work.”

The FT said the agreement would see Helio injected into Virgin Mobile USA and the Virgin brand will be retained.

SK Telecom has also agreed to invest a nominal sum in Virgin Mobile USA, the newspaper said.

Virgin Mobile, which is partly owned by Richard Branson’s Virgin and Sprint Nextel Corp, serves more than 5 million customers. It has seen growth slowing amid the U.S. economic slowdown and increased competition from rivals.

A merger between Virgin and Helio could make sense as both target young customers and rent space on Sprint’s network.

SK Telecom has looked to overseas markets such as China and the United States as expansion becomes more difficult at home where more than 90 percent of Koreans own a mobile phone.

In China, SK Telecom agreed on Monday with Shanghai Media Group, China’s second-largest media group by revenue, to cooperate in mobile TV, Internet and content businesses.

The web addresses I am talking about refer to the numerical Internet protocol (IP) addresses that denote individual devices connected to the Internet. They are unique to every system and are basic for all online communications, from e-mail and web pages to voice chat and streaming video.

Whenever you type the web address of any website, the browser actually search the IP address for that site from a big telephone book, commonly called a “Domain Name Server” (DNS). Say if you type www.google.com your browser will ask DNS the IP address for it and in return 216.239.39.99 will be sent by DNS to your browser. Your browser then heads off to Google’s website using the IP address as a map.

This doomsday can lead to a slower internet speeds and new connections and services (such as Internet phone calling) will either be expensive or simply impossible to obtain. The solution to the shortage is to upgrade to a new address protocol.

The Internet protocols are prepared by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), a large open international community of network designers, operators, vendors, and researchers working for the smooth operation of the Internet. The current IP address scheme, called Internet Protocol Version 4 (Ipv4), was introduced in 1981. At that time there were hardly 500 computers connected to the Internet. The address makers at that time allowed for four billion addresses, thinking they would last forever. But they have been nearly gobbled up in just under 30 years!

But no worries…..as the IETF are already prepared for the doomsday. A replacement system, called IPv6, had been devised as a solution more than a decade ago, providing enough addresses for billions upon billions of devices as well as improving Internet phone and video calls, and possibly even helping to end e-mail spam.

But still the problem doesn’t end with it. It was reported that the new system is not really compatible with the Internet of today. Taking the same example of Google, if it wants to support the new system IPv6, a whole new IPv6 web service will be needed to build, complete with new domain names, servers and bandwidth. The costs run into billions.

The OECD was quoted “immediate costs are associated with deployment of IPv6, whereas many benefits are long-term and depend on a critical mass adopting it”.

You can have a look at the countdown clock for the doomsday at penrose.uk6x.com.

Of course, large categories where e-commerce has hardly made a dent—such as autos, gasoline and groceries—skew the results.

The DOC data illuminates a seasonal trend: Online sales penetration is greatest in Q4. A likely reason for this is that the benefits of e-commerce—convenience, broad selection, cost savings, free shipping and avoiding crowded malls—shine brightly during the holiday shopping season.

Forrester Research used its own proprietary formula in May to estimate that e-commerce will represent 7% of retail industry sales in 2008.

Even some of the categories with online sales penetration rates that exceed the industry’s 7% rate still have strong growth potential. Forrester estimated that 20% of consumer electronics sales will take place online this year. Other Forrester data showed that online sales in this large category could grow to 29% of total sales by 2012.

Moreover, some of the least-penetrated categories such as auto/auto parts (2% penetration) and food, beverage and grocery (1% penetration) nevertheless generate respectable online sales.

Take groceries, for example. Many of the early problems that plagued online grocers are being addressed today through innovative business models. In this light, the fact that most groceries are still sold offline could be viewed as an opportunity for online food merchants who can figure out how to lure customers from physical stores.

The store will be called Sony StyleComcast Labs and ensconced in the Comcast Center, the newest skyscraper in Philadelphia and headquarters of the United State’s largest cable operator.

The store, more than 3,400 square feet (315 sq. meters), will show off such things as home broadband equipment that would enable people to surf at 100 megabits per second — roughly 17 times the average speed of cable broadband. Comcast plans to roll out service that fast by year’s end.

Sony will display a new TV running Comcast’s TV interface. It uses Tru2way, which is software that cable providers are rolling out to standardize their systems so the same set-top box can work with any cable operator. The store also will sell Sony PlayStations, laptops, cameras and camcorders.

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But a FreshDirect senior vice president said the upgrade would not affect the equipment that has led to occasional complaints about the company — a smaller motor that runs refrigeration equipment to keep the food fresh. The new equipment will shut off only the engine that powers the drive train. The two operate separately.

The state attorney general, Andrew M. Cuomo, announced Friday that his office and FreshDirect, based in Long Island City, Queens, had reached an agreement on installing the shutoff equipment after an investigation into consumer complaints that FreshDirect trucks were violating anti-idling laws.

A statement from Mr. Cuomo said the investigation documented at least 30 cases of illegal idling by FreshDirect trucks. Under state law, trucks and buses cannot idle for more than five minutes at a time. New York City limits idling time to three minutes, and in areas near schools, it is no more than 60 seconds.

FreshDirect, which averages 7,000 deliveries a day, has agreed to pay a $50,000 penalty for violating state and city anti-idling laws, the statement said. It said the penalty had been $120,000, but $70,000 had been suspended contingent on the company’s compliance.

Mr. Cuomo said that besides affecting public health and the environment, idling wastes fuel: an average of 30,000 gallons of gasoline and 20,000 gallons of diesel fuel in the city every day.

Jim Moore, FreshDirect’s senior vice president for business affairs, said the company has had experience with engine-control technology. It has the equipment on 20 to 25 trucks, the newest in its fleet. The engine turns off if the vehicle remains in park for more than three minutes.

The company promised that any new trucks would come with the equipment.

Mr. Moore said the company had received complaints about idling since its trucks hit the streets in 2002. He said the company had looked into those complaints and concluded that they stemmed from noise made by the refrigeration engines. Those are not covered by the agreement with Mr. Cuomo.

The free application, available to any Sortprice.com enhanced merchant with an existing Facebook account, works hand-in-hand with their product listing on Sortprice itself and allows them to build a virtual store right on Facebook. Merchants can have their full inventory available to Facebook users for shoppers to peruse and compare prices on, complete with photos and direct links to their own Web sites, according to Sortprice.

The tools give retailers complete control over the ‘look and feel’ of their stores, with dozens of choices for color schemes, an option to upload category images, and the ability to add a slogan to their page as well. Sortprice also included an extensive FAQ section to guide merchants through the process of configuring their stores while offering tips for promoting the application to internal and external audiences.

On the user side, Sortprice’s unique Drag & Drop feature for the merchant pages is now compatible across all web browsers, facilitating each user’s visit. Shoppers can now quickly and easily compile a “wish list” of desired items from a particular merchant’s store. These lists are viewable to all users and are the foundation for a truly interactive shopping experience. Visitors can comment on other users’ wish lists, indicate particular items that they “like”, and even invite friends and family to check out wish lists or specific products.

To learn more about the Facebook store application, visit http://www.sortprice.com/facebook_store