links for 2007-05-18

InfoToday reports: Alacra, known for providing a wide range of business databases to enterprise customers, has decided to open up its content to on-demand purchasing by individual business professionals and consumers. The company has just launched the beta of its new Alacra Store, an e-commerce Web site that taps into 30 of Alacra’s premium content…

Consumers Union created a web-based ad spoofing prescription drug warnings in an effort to convince people to contact Congress and lobby for a law requiring more disclosure of drug trial test results.  An article describes how they promoted it. Schneider and Kathy Mitchell, who directs Internet advocacy at Consumer Union’s Austin, Texas, office, decided early…

An interesting statistic from the 9/5/05 issue of Red Herring magazine: 30 million Americans have downloaded cell phone ring tones and 78 percent of them (23 million people) paid for them.   

Reuters reports: Nearly one-fifth of Web users who read newspapers now prefer online to offline editions, according to a new study from Internet audience measurement company Nielsen//NetRatings. The first-time study from Nielsen//NetRatings found that 21 percent of those Web users now primarily use online versions of newspapers, while 72 percent still read print editions.

Charlen Li explores an interesting concept: the third page of search. I’ve been noodling around the idea of the "Third Page" of search (credit goes to Perry Evans from LocalMatters for prompting this train of thought). The first page of search is the query page (like www.google.com), the second page is the search results, and…