Real estate ads moving to Internet

The nation’s newspapers have about four more years to dominate the real estate ad business.

Borrell Associates, a newspaper industry consulting firm, estimated recently that by 2009, more marketing dollars related to real estate will be spent online than in newspapers. This year, the consultants forecast, online ad spending related to real estate will rise to $1.8 billion, a 55 percent increase from last year’s $1.16 billion. If the estimate holds true, it will mean that online media will take a 15.9 percent share of all ad dollars in this category, Borrell said.

Blog upgrade due

Bloglines will spend the summer trying to design a world-class search engine for Web logs, according to BusinessWeek.com. Mark Fletcher, the company’s founder and CEO, acknowledged competitors like Technorati, Feedster and PubSub are trying to do the same thing, but hopes his service will better help people find blogs relevant to their interests and even rank them.

Bloglines (Bloglines.com) is owned by AskJeeves, and that company’s technology has improved Bloglines’ efforts, Fletcher said. He estimated his firm monitors and filters 2.5 million blog messages a day.

Ford listens online

Ford Motor Co. is letting people say how much they’d be willing to pay for a new mid-size car set to be introduced later this year. The company has begun what it calls a “listening” campaign, using e-mail to interested consumers, to drive them to a Web site where they can learn more about the new Fusion model, and even configure the car they way they would like.

But the pricing on the configurator is “for survey purposes only and (is) not official pricing. Prices may vary from visit to visit and will change before the Fusion is launched this fall,” says the Web site. Ford said 60,000 people have used the site to build their own vehicle, Clickz reported. The Fusion Web site is www.fordvehicles.com/fusion http://www.fordvehicles.com/fusion.