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Yes that’s right, AOL.  It seems like forever since I’ve seen anything significant from AOL in the news.  Yet today I found not 1, but 2 newsworthy articles relating to the struggling company.

Back in 2004 AOL purchased Advertising.com, a company which specializes in serving popup ads targeted to users.  The problem with the company is that they installed the software without users knowing.  The illegal software distribution happened before AOL bought the company yet they have agreed with the FTC to stop distributing pop-up ads, among other things.  Other terms have not been disclosed yet.

In other AOL news, the company today bought Xdrive – an online storage company.  It is expected that AOL will integrate online storage capabilities with their free internet offerings.  Xdrive allows users to store files, pictures and more online via any web enabled computer.  The files would then be accessible from any other web enabled computer.

Yahoo has released an Audio search engine and I must say, I’m very impressed.  You can search by artist or title, and the system allows you to compare prices from various providers.  There are even some free downloads.

Microsoft is soon going to throw it’s hat into the PPC ring.  MSN AdCenter will apparently be available next week to invited advertisers only.  But based on MSN’s recent beta testing, I would expect that this program will be opened to a wider audience within a few weeks.  MSN’s beta programs don’t last months and months like Googles.

Speaking of paid advertising and Google, the company has announced that they are thinking of increasing the copy size available on their ads.  Titles and display urls will remain the same, but advertisers will now have the capacity to write a description which is 200 characters long.  This too is invitation only at the moment, but will also likely expand in due time.

Continuing with the paid advertising theme – Ask Jeeves is committed to again reduce the number of ads it displays on a page.  This follows a previous reduction in the number of ads which happened in April.  I guess Ask figures that they can still make enough money with less ads by encouraging more users to search more often.  To me this is good news because while I like Ask I find the ads annoying.  Therefore I tend to not use it as much.  Perhaps with less ads I will use it more.

Looksmart, yet another PPC vendor, will be adding vertical search sites to it’s product offerings.  Soon, you will be able to purchase education related ads that will appear on an education search engine.  Other verticals to follow.

Finally, from the cool but kinda scary file, it appears that Sony Ericsson has filed filed a patent for a location aware cell phone.  That means that not only will the phone know where it is, but also what time of day it is, what the weather is like and so on.  Soon, you will be walking down the street on a hot sunny day and as you walk by your local 7/11 you’ll receive a text message informing you of the great special they have on slurpee’s.

I think I’ll keep my old Nokia, at least I know that its not going to try and “help” me.