I have mentioned our overall redesign for Internet.com. I had hoped to introduce the redesign by today, but alas we are delayed a few days. Hopefully we will turn on the new look by next week.

In the meantime we are adding several new blogs. One is really neat. It is written by longtime colleague Pedro Hernandez. Pedro has been with us since 1998 and has taken on numerous editing tasks. Now, among other jobs at Jupitermedia, he is writing a new blog for us dealing with "Green" computing and technology.

I am sitting in the Austin, Texas airport on my way to Houston using WiFi. I decided to check the stock market and saw that Amazon was up $16 on great earnings news. This caused me to reflect on Internet history.

When you go back to the early 1990s and think of the beginnings of Internet hype and think of all the ups and downs for the Internet in the 90s and into this decade you have to conclude that Jeff Bezos of Amazon is indeed the one person who has accomplished the most (both critically and financially).

Think of all the barbs he faced about Amazon's model, financial questions, competition and more. But Bezos and Amazon overcame everything to be a dynamic online retailer and information provider and resource. In fact, it looks like things are getting better and better for Amazon.

Before ending this post, also think of Tim Berners-Lee - the creator of the World Wide Web. Berners-Lee has to be the most selfless person of the last 100 years. The guy could have made billions but instead chose to remain a researcher and academic. He is known but largely forgotten by the financial press. He certainly deserves a Nobel Prize of some sort.

I have done quite a few deals over the years. It is always nice to get press coverage of a deal. The Mediabistro deal we announced last week tops the charts in terms of online and ink coverage.

Some pieces were flattering, some were not. Yesterday Simon Dumenco over at New York Magazine online wrote a terrific piece about the deal and the founder of Mediabistro, Laurel Touby. It is on the mark.

In the few days since we closed the deal we have had several meetings between the key players at both companies. We are more enthused than ever about the many ways both organizations will be able to grow various business lines. I will keep readers informed.

I met with the Mediabistro team the other day. It was informative and fun. Great exuberance percolated from the team of young men and woman. We sat around a big table and had lunch. I left the meeting with the feeling that Jupitermedia had scored big with this latest acquisition.

There was some good give and take. The meeting resulted in this post which makes for good reading.

The program for this important event is now complete.

It is important for everyone thinking about this topic to understand that digital rights technologies means a lot more than encrypting iTunes files so that they will only play on iPods. Content owners have various means at their disposal to track and protect rights, ranging from noninvasive and forensic to proactive technologies like encryption.

DRM is now a cliche. And a negative one for sure. This conference will be looking at the bigger picture and over the horizon - long after iTunes is dead and buried. It is important for everyone involved in digital content distribution to understand the broader range of this topic and not just rely on sensationalism (either from the RIAA or the EFF).

Also remember that our website DRMWatch.com (digital rights management watch) updates all of these issues daily.

We bought Mediabistro yesterday. Incredible press coverage! Bloggers have had a field day feasting on the price for the deal, Laurel Touby's personality, metrics and history.

I have been amazed about how many reporters have gotten so many facts wrong. Regardless of whether one likes the deal or not, reporters and bloggers should do some fact checking.
Valleywag really got things wrong. First it attacked the New York Times for calling us a research company, but then went on to say we sold Dice (the online job site) for $200 million!

So why did we buy this stellar company? See the title of this post! We like everything about the business, but we love the job board. It is, in our opinion, one of the better "vertical" job boards in the world and one that has large potential for continued growth. We also feel that Mediabistro's readership lines up nicely with many of our 20 million monthly unique visitors. Obviously we feel Mediabistro services will be of interest to a good many of these readers.

Look for us to add webinars and trade shows to the Mediabistro mix and to expand its job board skills into other areas. Finally we get to work with Laurel. Laurel is creative and successful. She will also now have the extra capital to invest and further build out Mediabistro and allied ideas. We look forward to working with Laurel and her fine staff.

Program chair Bob DuCharme has most the of the program and speakers for our first Semantic Web Strategies tradeshow posted.

It is interesting for me to see an acquaintance from the early days of the Internet as a speaker - Nova Spivack. Nova was a founder of Earthweb. Earthweb went public in 1998 and ultimately we bought the Web sites in late 2000. Nova is a true original thinker and was recently featured in an article on the future of the Semantic Web in Business 2.0 magazine.

In the meantime our new Web site Semantic Web Zone is gaining significant daily page views for a fledgling Web site on a somewhat obscure topic. Generally gaining traffic on a Web site is a good sign for the future of a new tradeshow, but of course we will have to await results from the our first show to see if this correlation is a correct one.

Many readers know we have gone back into the tradeshow business. Two weeks ago we ran a successful Web Video Summit in San Jose, California. Our east coast version will take place in December in New York City.

I have also written about our upcoming Semantic Web Strategies event scheduled for late September. However a few days before the new SW show, we are running our first Digital Rights Stratgies event in New York City. Noted digital rights expert Bill Rosenblatt will be chairing the conference. Among other things, Bill edits our Digital Rights Management Watch Web site that is probably the only daily DRM focused publication in the world. Talal Shamoon, CEO of InterTrust will be keynoter.

Digital Rights in our fast changing digital world should be the concern of any organization involved with intellectual property. We believe that this new show is going to be the top conference for this topic.

There was a recent article from stock photo expert Jim Pickerell (paid subscription service) dealing with image counts at a variety of microstock Web sites.

Interestingly Fotolia has recently culled a significant number of images that have not sold for the previous 18 months (about 1 million). On the other hand sites like Istockphotos and Shutterstock continue to add photos without culling.

In contrast our Stockxpert.com has fewer images than the aforementioned sites. Part of the reason for this is that Stockxpert started in business after these competitors. However their is a different philosophy behind the scenes at Stockxpert. And that is the desire to have the highest quality microstock imagery in the world. We could easily add 25,000 or more images per week but tend to only accept about 12,000 per week. This quality issue is well known by contributors who tend to complain about the higher standards of the Stockxpert acceptance philosophy.

I believe that in coming months and years our quality approach will payoff as more and more customers will seek out our quality offerings. In the meantime we now have about 700,000 quality microstock images. Check out the difference.

Web Video Summit had a good two-day run in San Jose last week.

We had press coverage online. For example check out these Flickr photos.

Coverage ranged from critiques of presentations to emphasis on the VC aspect of the topic.

All in all it was a winning show and could very well significantly increase in size for the fall version (December 10-11) at the Roosevelt in New York City.

Our next show deals with Digital Rights Strategies. And then a favorite topic of mine dealing with the the Semantic Web. I will keep readers up to date on the build up to these events.

For those readers who celebrate the 4th of July - have a good day off.