Google announced today the beta availability of TiSP, a new in-home wireless broadband service that literally flushes internet access down the toilet.

Introducing Google TiSP (BETA), our new FREE in-home wireless broadband service. Sign up today and we'll send you your TiSP self-installation kit, which includes setup guide, fiber-optic cable, spindle, wireless router and installation CD.

Finally, a way to leverage your home's plumbing for high-speed internet. Sure, it sounds like a piss-poor idea at first, but damn if it doesn't bowl you over after you jiggle the handle a bit. — Rick Broida

This week an intro to optimization for Baidu, the difference between Baidu Japan and the Chinese version as well as the latest on Yahoo search. And not to forget, more foreign blog services are blocked again.

Optimize your site for Baidu

What does Baidu like in a website is an important question for those targeting Chinese internet users as the search engine dominates the Chinese search market.

Baidu search results are different from the leading American search engines as far as having “clean” natural searches on the left side and the sponsored results on the right side. Baidu prefers paid results over natural results if there is demand from advertisers.

A Chinese search for “Shanghai hotels” will show you a full page of paid results

Click here to see the full page with sponsored results.

There are still a lot of areas where the SERP’s are not loitered with paid results. This is the part where optimizing your website for Baidu comes into play. Fili, over at Filination.com has done a great job of listing the basics for Baidu.

Some snippets from the article:

Site location and domain name : If you are opening a Chinese website/mirror/translated-mirror, then you should know that it seems Baidu would love you more if you have a China domain, like .com.cn or .cn, or if you’re hosted in China. Domains and webhosting in China are amazingly cheap, though extremely slow for outside access.

Translated SEO parameters: Make sure it’s not only content and text that are written or translated in Chinese, but also other important SEO parameters like the image “alt” field that describes the images in your blog etc…

Metadata : … That’s also true for metadata, namely metatags like keywords and description. While Google lowered the importance of this factor to almost nothing, Baidu still loves metadata.

Baidu’s popular Japanese p*rn search

Baidu Japan is live and according to the first impressions the majority of its users, 55.9%, are coming from Mainland China which is somewhat of a surprise at first sight. There may be a good reason for this as Ya I Yee points out in a post with the title “Baidu Japan’s P*rn Images”.

But…as you saw the title, some Chinese Male Bloggers have noticed that it’s quite convenience to use the Japanese search engine to find something that could be found easily on other search engine - a scale of porn images, like this link and this( Warming: DO NOT click them if you are under 18).(edit: links deleted)

According to the theory of Chinese Government, dirty images are not permitted and any foreign websites who provide porn pictures should be censored. So I’m wondering if the Baidu Japan will be blocked one day?

The question will be, will Baidu get blocked in China or will they start censoring their search results in Japan?

Yahoo Search Engine Yisou

Yahoo China, which is part of Alibaba, has a new search engine, Yisou, in Beta.

Luyi Chen over at China Web 2.0 Review explains:

Before Yahoo China was acquired by Alibaba in 2005, Yahoo China run a separated search only site Yisou. Yisou terminated its operation in late 2005 after acquisition. In August 2006, Yahoo China unveiled Yahoo.cn to provide search service. Now, Yahoo China plans to relaunch Yisou under a new Chinese name.

You may remember, we reported a search service called Easysou, which is developed by Yahoo’s Engineers. So if you compare new Yisou with Easysou, you will know new Yisou is based on Easysou. Yisou has an innovative user interface, the search results is tabbed and ajax-powered. In web search, it will adjust the number of search results in a page automatically according to resolution rate of your monitor, then you need not pagedown or scroll the screen to read all the results, that’s quite useful. But its tab design has its shortcomings; for example, Yisou now can only return 10 page results. In case you haven’t found results in first 10 pages, sorry, Yisou cannot provide more results for you.

On the right sidebar, it shows related search keywords, thumbnails of images search results and music search results. Music search results can be played directly without leaving the page.

Like Lu Yi Chen, I also wonder why Yahoo feels the need to have 2 search engines. It may have something to do with what Yahoo China President Zeng Ming recently said.

From Pacific Epoch

Yahoo China’s main focus is improving search services, rather than the company’s Internet portal, according to Yahoo China President Zeng Ming, reports Beijing Times. Zeng also said Yahoo China will develop customized and ‘artificial intelligence’ search capabilities in 2007.

Foreign blog services almost all blocked

It’s an ongoing farce here in the Middle Kingdom that keeps at least all the foreigners living here busy. After having had the luxury for some time to have access to blogspot blogs the Nanny has decided that it’s time to add a block. As we speak, Livejournal, Xanga and Wordpress blogs are all unavailable and I may have missed some.

The Chinese version of MSN spaces is still available as are the many Chinese blog providers. These are subject to the Chinese censorship regulations.

Like I mentioned, it affects foreigners living in China more than the average Chinese user.
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Gemme van Hasselt is an Internet Marketing Consultant, living in Shanghai, and owner of the China Directory.

Ionut Alex. Chitu learned about Google Writer. It’s basically a smart tool from Google that helps writing your blog posts by automatically pulling quotes and related media into your posts, along with auto-completion of sentences. Maybe in the future it won’t even need a human writer anymore and blog on its own? That would certainly save a lot of time for busy bloggers. [Thanks Randy J.!]

Join the ongoing comments.

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post]

[Advertisement] Google books at eBay: background info on Google, AdWords, AdSense, Blogger and more...   [Advertise here]

Google introduces “Gmail Paper”, a change from virtual reality mail, to, ugh, reality mail:

<<The cost of postage is offset with the help of relevant, targeted, unobtrusive advertisements, which will appear on the back of your Gmail Paper prints in red, bold, 36 pt Helvetica. No pop-ups, no flashy animations – these are physically impossible in the paper medium.>>

And there’s no limit to how many paper mails you can send: “You can make us print one, one thousand, or one hundred thousand of your emails. It’s whatever seems reasonable to you.” Plus, Google says that “Gmail Paper is made out of 96% post-consumer organic soybean sputum, and thus, actually helps the environment.”

[Thanks Keith Chan, TomHTML, Jaleel and Hashim!]

Join the ongoing comments.

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post]

[Advertisement] AdWatcher. Detect Click Fraud. Prevent Click Fraud. Get Your Money Back.   [Advertise here]

The Register reports that Google and Apple join forces to create the “ultimate phone”:

<<In keeping with the iPod tradition, the “ID” has no power switch. In fact, there are no buttons at all. More surprisingly, Jonathan Ives’ industrial design means there’s no room for a SIM card, or any embedded cellullar radio circuitry.

As a consequence, the “ID” is incapable of making or receiving telephone calls - but Apple says this is a feature most of its target market won’t miss.

“People said they wanted an iPhone above all, to make a statement about themselves,” an Apple engineering source told us. “Let’s face it, they don’t like talking and most of them have no one to call anyway.">>

[Thanks David Hetfield!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

[Advertisement] Google books at eBay: background info on Google, AdWords, AdSense, Blogger and more...   [Advertise here]

The official Google blog briefly had a post live titled “We Will Drive You Crazy” but it’s been pulled now. Another April Fool’s joke? Does anyone have screenshots of the full post? [Thanks Tim!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

[Advertisement] Google books at eBay: background info on Google, AdWords, AdSense, Blogger and more...   [Advertise here]

Matt Cutt’s blog looks defaced today... but remembering it’s April 1st, trust no one and nothing! The blog reads ...

<<This site have been hacked by

Dark SEO Team.

nous sommes le proprietaire de toi

Shoutz to Dan “the man”, the 302 hijack t33m, NYC SEO gang, Linusx [and so on]>>

... pointing to DarkSEOTeam.com (this link at the defacement isn’t nofollowed).

Join the ongoing comments.

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post]

[Advertisement] Google books at eBay: background info on Google, AdWords, AdSense, Blogger and more...   [Advertise here]

TiSP is Google’s new toilet-based, free in-home wireless broadband service. (Yeah, OK, it’s Google’s April Fool’s joke!)

[Thanks Pokemon, Arnd and Randy J.!]

Join the ongoing comments.

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post]

[Advertisement] AdWatcher. Detect Click Fraud. Prevent Click Fraud. Get Your Money Back.   [Advertise here]

Spherical challenge

Exclusive Apple and Google have abandoned their individual mobile phone projects for a joint venture, The Register has learned.…

Holy calendar, it's April tomorrow! Just in case you were too busy being productive this month, here's a rundown of March's most popular posts:

• Alpha Geek: 10 cool cell phone tricks
  "What has your cell phone done for you lately? Mine just updated my blog. Then it told me my friend Craig was just a few blocks up the street. Then it showed me my Google Reader feeds. Then it told me what song was playing on the radio. Then it got me out of a really boring meeting."
• LH Top 10: Must-have Firefox extensions
  "...the ten add-ons you'll find in the following pages are highly-evolved, robust and have proven their usefulness over and over."
• LH Top 10: Free Mac Downloads
  "Sure there's tons of fantastic Mac software out there, but most of it isn't free - unless you know where to look, that is."
• LH Top 10: Free Windows Downloads
  "At every turn on the internet, someone's offering a free software download for your PC. But separating the wheat from the evilware-addled chaff isn't for busy users with better things to do than test applications all day long."
• Make your brain learn faster
  "Make your brain absorb information more fully with this list of 77 (!) learning hacks..."
• Hack Attack: A beginner's guide to Quicksilver
  "Quicksilver is bar-none the best productivity application on the market today."
• Calculate your caffeine intake
  "Ever wonder just how much caffeine you're ingesting every day? The Caffeine Database's point-and-click calculator will tell you."
• Alpha Geek: Make Microsoft Word less annoying
  "Microsoft Word can drive you nuts. It piles on features few people need, plagues you with annoying auto-corrections and just generally acts like a pain in the ass."

Want a better shave? Of course you do - and with these tips from Deeper Motive, you're sure to have that baby smooth skin that you're shooting for (you *are* shooting for that, right? Not the Grizzly Adams thing.).

One of the better tips here is don't go cheap on the supplies - your face will not appreciate it. Buy yourself some good razors, creams, and cleansers and you're already halfway to your optimum shaving experience. We've blogged about getting a good shave before, but do you have any more tips you could add? Let us know in the comments.— Wendy Boswell

The latest site to offer RSS feeds? Why, it’s Nordstrom!

Pearson teaming up with Google to release math videos.

Q&A With Gary Price. Some great overviews of Ask.com features.

John Backus.

Microsoft paying corporations to switch to Windows Live Search. Icky on so many levels. Live Search is not terrible, and there seems to be a lot of active, sensible development on it. If I were queen of Microsoft the first thing I’d do is change the flippin’ name (”Live Search” makes me wonder about “Dead Search” or “Just a Flesh Wound Search” or “I’m Not Dead I’m Getting Better Search”) and the second thing I’d do is concentrate on what Google isn’t doing. Like podcast search. Or fuller integration of RSS feeds. Or a blog search that isn’t spammed out the wazoo.

If you want to get Greasemonkey information, the place to go now is Greasespot.

Generate heat maps on top of Google Maps. Yow.

Find stadiums across the US. Many different sports covered. http://www.stadiumhunt.com/.

10 Yahoo Pipes for Video Viewing. Nifty.

Thanks to Family Matters for their very nice comments on my book Information Trapping.

The name of the site sounds like the noise I make when someone asks me what I want to do for dinner. “Do you want to go out?” “Enth.” But it’s not a search engine for people indifferent to meal choices, it’s a search engine for sports stats that uses natural language. Enth is in beta testing at http://www.enth.com/ .

Enth, according to its announcement, can get data on any baseball player who played in the established major leagues since 1871. It’s noted that National Football League data is available now but there’s no indication of how far back THAT goes.

The searching is natural language. I started with What Cubs player hit the most home runs in 2004?. After a few seconds, I got, not the specific answer, but a table of the players who hit the most home runs in 2004 for the Chicago Cubs — starting with Moises Alou (39) and going down to Nomar Garciaparra (4). The result page also showed how the query was broken down and which words were ignored.

Enth doesn’t do as well with more ambiguous questions. I asked Who was the worst player on the 2002 Texas Rangers? I got two sets of player listings — one for pitchers and one for batters — but couldn’t easily determine what was determining the order for each list. It’s better to request some kind of stat in your questions when asking about teams as a whole.

Asking about individuals is something else entirely. To get stats on a person just put their name in the search box. I entered Catfish Hunter (don’t enter quotes, you’ll make Enth throw up.) I got back two lines of data — one for his pitching career and one for his hitting career. These are lifetime stats. To get stats for just one season add a year to the query. Catfish Hunter 1971 provided only hitting and pitching stats for 1971. The National Football League search works much the same way, though you’ll get more lines of data — offense, defense, special teams, etc.

I did find times occasionally when the information was not complete. The late Fred Lane, for example, was signed as an undrafted free agent by the Carolina Panthers in 1997. Enth had information on his rushing yardage, but not on standard player stats like position, year signed, school attended, etc.

There were very few holes like that I found, however, and Enth was very responsive to natural language questions. You’ll need to be a bit of a stats wonk to unravel the data provided, but it’s very easy to search through. Worth a look for the sporties.

The Yahoo Publisher Network may be testing the blocking of YPN contextual advertisements from serving in certain countries according to the accounts of some webmasters who are running YPN on their sites.

In what may be an attempt to curb International click fraud and spillover of intended US audience only advertisements, reports have come in from various webmasters that YPN is not serving ads to International visitors, specifically India.

A thread was started last week on Webmaster World about this trend and one of my clients also reports similar findings:

YPN reports started showing my ad impressions down by about 20% on my two small sites running YPN. The YPN impressions reduction has been consistent ever since.

Meanwhile, both sites traffic has remained stable — as they have mostly been for several years.

My belief is that YPN has simply stopped displaying ads for untargeted countries (or stopped counting them). One of the two sites has a portion of its traffic from India — about enough to account for the report difference.

Although the blocking of displaying YPN ads outside of the United States may attribute to a hefty drop in revenue for some publishers, the end result will be beneficial for Yahoo & its advertisers and this is something YPN should have developed when they decided to limit their YPN Beta to the US only market.

The blocking of YPN ads to some International visitors does seem to be a test, as reports are claiming significant drops in revenue and International users are able to see YPN some days, and not others.

This may be one of the first initiatives by Yahoo Search Marketing’s new ‘Click Fraud Czar’ Reggie Davis :

Davis will hire a dedicated staff to manage across all of Yahoo!’s cross-functional quality teams and ensure that customer input is integrated into all efforts to address click fraud, traffic quality, network placement and other marketplace quality issues. Davis and his team will also be responsible for increasing Yahoo!’s dialogue with advertisers and publishers on quality related matters.

If you are a YPN publisher, are you experiencing similar drops in ad performance and International blocking?

Advertisement: Text Link Ads Smart Link Marketing

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - April 1, 2004 UTC - Amidst rampant media speculation, Google Inc. today announced it is testing a preview release of Gmail – a free search-based webmail service with a storage capacity of up to eight billion bits of information, the equivalent of 500,000 pages of email. Per user.

The inspiration for Gmail came from a Google user complaining about the poor quality of existing email services, recalled Larry Page, Google co-founder and president, Products. "She kvetched about spending all her time filing messages or trying to find them," Page said. "And when she's not doing that, she has to delete email like crazy to stay under the obligatory four megabyte limit. So she asked, 'Can't you people fix this?'"

Google's one gigabyte of storage claim led to some speculation about the Gmail announcement being a hoax since it took place on April Fool's Day. Google has pulled April Fool's jokes on the tech community before, including jokes about pigeons being the driving force behind Google's search technology and that Google was looking to start a new research center on the moon.

In addition, the press release about Gmail was fairly goofy(...). But Jonathan Rosenberg, vice president of the products group at Google, said the Gmail announcement was legitimate. He did concede that the company did get caught up in the spirit of April Fool's Day in its press release.

Sergey Brin is telling employees to stop making old products and start improving new ones. "For example, said Chief Executive Eric Schmidt, Google plans to combine its spreadsheet, calendar and word-processing programs into one suite of Web-based applications."

For a once-weekly update on Lifehacker's best posts, subscribe to our Highlights feed - or get our daily, cream of the crop with the top stories feed.

This week's best posts include:

• LH Top 10: Must-have Firefox extensions
  "Over the past 2 years we've tried, loved and posted dozens of feature-adding extensions for our favorite web browser. But today we have the master, grand daddy list of 10 must-haves."
• Alpha Geek: Start-page showdown
  "I put five "home" heavyweights to the test: Google, Netvibes, Pageflakes, Windows Live and Yahoo. Which one rocks hardest? You may be surprised."
• Hack Attack: A beginner's guide to Quicksilver
  "Whether we're talking Mac, Windows, or Linux, freeware or shareware, this Mac-only, freeware application launcher-and-then-some is the best productivity booster I have on my computer."
• Geek to Live: Mount a file system on your Mac over SSH
  "MacFUSE has progressed to the point where it's dead simple to set up. Here's how."
• Screenshot Tour: A look under the hood of Quicksilver
  "Understanding this bit will go a long ways toward increasing your Quicksilver power."
• Stop web sites from resizing Firefox windows
  "Tired of sites that forcibly resize your Firefox window?"
• How to mount a Windows shared folder on your Mac
  "Turns out that Mac OS X can connect to Windows shared folders very easily. Read on to find out how."
• Add Vista-like taskbar window previews to Windows XP
  "Free software Visual Tooltip can give you Vista's pretty taskbar window previews in XP."
• How passwords get cracked
  "One Man's Blog explains how alarmingly easy it is to crack passwords and offers tips on choosing safer ones."
• Office Supplies Fetish: Power plug ID labels
  "There are 12 outlets on that power strip under your desk, and you hate playing the "pull the plug and see what gadget cuts off" game to identify what's what."
• Google Notebook gets a facelift
  "Web-clipping service Google Notebook has a new interface and a couple new features..."
• iTunes adds Complete My Album feature, charges only once for a song
  "iTunes [now] lets you purchase the rest of the songs from an album you've already bought single tracks from for a reduced price."

Similar to the Starbuck's SMS search tool that we wrote about a few weeks ago, Yellowpages.com today announced text-based local search tool for mobile devices. Any cell phone user can now send a business name or category in a text message to YP411 (97411) to receive the three top listings for that term.

Brands that have tried to launch SMS search tools have received limited traction because of the relatively low adoption of mobile search so far. Starbucks might be able to get away with it because of the power of it's brand (and the addictiveness of its product).

Instead, success with SMS search products will only come from trusted brands that aggregate local search results. Current offerings in this space include GoogleSMS, Yahoo! Local, Superpages On the Go, and now Yellowpages.com (among a few others).

If you blog, you should get the Linkify bookmarklet that Laurence Gonsalves wrote.

How does it work? It’s an easy 2 step process:
1. Drag the Linkify bookmarket to your personal toolbar.
2. Dang! There is no step 2! Sorry about that. I, um, got mixed up. There’s just one step.

Now how do you use it? Well, see the link I made to Laurence Gonsalves? To do that, I wrote the words “Laurence Gonsalves,” selected that text, and clicked the “Linkify” bookmarklet. Here’s what you see:

Up pops a frame on the right-hand side of your browser with search results from Google (this is powered via Google’s AJAX search). You mouse over the result links to see which one you want, and when you find the answer you want, click “create link”. The selected text will turn into a hyperlink.

It’s that easy. If you’ve noticed that I’ve had a few more links in my last few posts, it’s because Linkify reduces the annoyance of making a hyperlink.

Thanks to Laurence (who happens to be a Googler) for writing this handy tool. Hat tip to Ionut Alex. Chitu for mentioning this bookmarklet. And thanks to Danny Sullivan for jogging my memory that I wanted to write about this.

Disclaimer: This bookmarklet works great for me on Firefox 2. If it doesn’t work for you on your browser, sorry to show you a glimpse of joy that doesn’t work for you.

Steve from Reddit announced Wednesday on the Reddit Blog that Wired & Reddit will be adding advertising to the Reddit interface.

Part of the reason reddit was acquired was so that eventually it could be used to sell advertising….We’ve always held that content is our #1 priority, and that isn’t changing. Towards that end, we’ve specifically asked for ads with no moving parts, and we’re not rearranging any content to make room for them.

Plus, I think we found a way to track the ads so we can let you vote/comment on them.

The ability to vote on ads will be a breath of fresh air, if it does not backfire, for Reddit - say the users vote negatively for all of the ads.

Reddit’s largest competitor and Google AdSense partner, Digg.com, has not integrated advertising into their “Digg” and “Bury” model, probably for the same reasons. Instead, Digg blasts banners and box ads above and to the right of their content.

Other social sites have experimented with alternative forms of advertising which add to their community appeal.

ThreadWatch, the SEO blog community, started serving interactive advertising in posts where readers and community members could comment on the products advertised. This model never really worked as well as TW (under previous ownership) had expected due to the honesty of the comments - both positive & negative.

ThreadWatch’s idea did however lead to the launch of other alternative forms of ads, such as the now defunct Performancing ad network and the paid review model used by ReviewMe.

A more recent and successful form of alternative 2.0 advertising are the sponsors at TechMeme, where the advertiser blogs and blog posts are featured on the site, instead of simply a link to the advertiser homepage. The sponsored posts, differentiated by background colors and full disclosure, have however brought about controversy since sometimes they appear listed with regular content.

More coverage on Reddit Advertising:

New to Reddit: Ads and Voting Capability

The game play tracking operations may track game player input information. For instance, in most simulation games as in a Formula One racing game, a user may select a real world make/team of a car (e.g., Ferrari, Williams-BMW, McLaren-Mercedes, Renault, etc.), a particular driver (e.g., Michael Schumacher, Fernando Alonso, Rubens Barrichello, etc.) as well as the racing track desired to compete in (e.g., Monte Carlo/Monaco, Nurburgring/Europe, Indianapolis/USA, etc.), car color, type of tires, etc. (...) If a user selected a racing car from Dodge, the system may show a Dodge ad or something related.

Game state-based information may include information about the user's game-play. For example it may include, how fast the players are going through the levels, how familiar the players are with the game, what level are the players in (...), how long have the players been playing the game, how frequently the user plays various games, play-pause habits, game information stored to non-volatile memory, etc. (...) If the user has been playing for over two hours continuously, the system may display ads for pizza-hut, coke, coffee and other related goods.

The play characteristics of users, particularly in online RPG games (e.g., time spent chatting with other virtual players versus fighting, time spent bartering versus stealing, time spent exploring versus building, time spent trying new items versus completing levels, decisions made by players leading to certain situations (good versus bad, strategic versus short term), avoiding conflict (risk averse) versus being aggressive, cooperating and collaborating versus doing things alone, friendly versus hostile, etc.) may be particularly useful. User input information may be useful to help infer information about a user. Some other examples user information that may be inferred includes familiarity with a game(s), time spent playing a game(s), how fast is the user advancing and/or skill level, etc. Inferences drawn from such user input information may be made using known classification means such as neural networks, Bayesian networks, support vector machines, etc. Such inferred user information may be useful to help target ads. For instance, users that spend a long time bartering instead of stealing in a game may suggests that they are interested in the best deals rather than the flashiest items so the system may show ads reflecting value.

E-consultancy reports the launch of WebFetch, a new meta search engine in the UK. In addition to web search results from Google, Yahoo Search, MSN Search, and Ask.com, WebFetch also offers image search, audio search, video search, news search, a business finder, and a people finder. The news search results come from only four sources: Fox News, ABC, Yahoo and Topix.

Paying customers of the Google Apps suite are starting to question the company’s ability to offer guaranteed services, like basic uptime.

Google seems to have problems keeping its uptime pledge to some paying customers of its Google Apps suite of hosted services according to PC World.

Little over a month after introducing Google Apps’ Premier version, which includes a 99.99 percent uptime commitment, Google is failing to meet that service level agreement (SLA) for an undetermined number of customers.

“Google has not met its SLA with me, that’s correct,” Grant Cummings, an IT professional from Ohio and Premier customer, wrote in an e-mail interview.

On Tuesday, Google Apps’ Gmail service suffered significant availability problems that began in the morning (U.S. Eastern Time) and were declared officially solved for all users early Wednesday afternoon. The problems also affected Gmail users who aren’t on Google Apps.

Twan Eikelenboom from the Netherlands is currently studying Media & Culture at the University of Amsterdam. He has a special interest in “navigating and exploring this seemingly endless space that new media realities give us.”

When the invitation for the Benelux Google Geoday 2007, shaped in the form of the Google Maps marker which has risen to fame in the past years, landed in my mailbox it promised to become an interesting day in Amsterdam’s EXPO XXI this Thursday. With presentations by Bernhard Seefeld (Google/Endoxon), Brandon Badger (Google) and Remco Kouwenhoven (Nederkaart) in the morning and workshops on Google Earth and the Google Maps API in the afternoon. With a big thanks to the people at Generation Next who were responsible for my ticket in the first place.

Google’s Geo development (Google Earth and Google Maps) has taken a big step in the previous years, with the coming of Earth and Maps there is a definite focus on adding layer after layer of information on the globe. Like graffiti on a wall everyone can apply meanings to the maps made available by the Google Geo team. As Lev Manovich noticed in The Poetics of Augmented Space: Learning from Prada when talking about Augmented Space: The 90s were about the virtual, the 2000s will probably be about the physical. Not the infinite Internet, but the finite space of the physical land. And it seems that Google eagerly agrees with this prophecy. Below is my account of the day.

Keynote by Bernhard Seefeld

Dangerous dragons were used in the early days of mapping if parts of the map were not known yet to the cartographer. This is one of the examples Seefeld uses from the early mapping practices, which stands for the improving of the image and the filling of the gaps. The early cartographers did not have the information to fill in the holes so they just drew dragons. Another example given is the map of New Holland, or what is now called Australia. The interesting thing is that the Portuguese probably reached this land first, but the Dutch were the first to draw a map of it and therefore being ’responsible’ for the discovery of the land (a discovery from a Western perspective, anyway, as the Aboriginees were already there).

Seefeld takes the first example and also the mapping of New Holland, which was not accurate at first to say the least as the shape of the land on this image shows, to the present. He notices that the Google Geo team faces a similar situation in pasting together the best available satellite imagery to create the globe of Google Earth. Sometimes the information is available, sometimes not and in that case lesser detailed imagery has to be used. It is not about drawing dragons, but about improving satellite images.

So now we have an explanation of Google’s basemap philosophy, pasting together a globe in a way that perhaps reminds us of the patched body of Frankenstein’s monster. Building on top of that basemap is the next step and this is also the core of the Google Geo team’s stated mission: Organize the world’s geographic information and make it universally accessible and usable. Which is derived from Google’s overall mission statement, which is actually the same but doesn’t include the term geographic.

Instead of discovering new land, like in the age of navigation and in the second example given above, the user is now able to discover new information, the era of the information age. The emphasis here was especially on the enhanced content applied to the base like web links, reviews of places, photographs and featured content. Seefeld actually went as far as too say that the base is nice and the content makes it great. The base is always the same, just like the physical. But it is information and meanings applied to the physical space that make it what it is. The new idea is that meaning is applied with the use of the virtual, leaving aside the physical. Through the geo applications, new discoveries can be done in the physical space. As an example Seefeld showed the Google ant; a species that got discovered with the help of geo applications.

But all this information applied to the surface of the earth requires a way to search the information. This is the territory of the spatial web, which is all about geotagging, KML and more. Making the meanings applied to the earth searchable. But nowadays discovering the earth isn’t as dangerous as it used to be. The dragons are gone; discovery has become a safe practice. Boring? Perhaps. You can always try the navigation option in Google Maps and Earth and follow the directions, even if it asks you to swim across the Atlantic Ocean.

What is fascinating is the applying of so many meanings to the finite globe with the help of this virtual reality. I asked Seefeld the question what his views are on potential conflicting meanings. He emphasized the role of the user and also said that it is important to have access to all opinions. Getting everything 100% true is very difficult but the goal is to fix it again and again until it is good, with the help of user opinions. This really reminded me of the already infamous Wikipedia wars, which are more about events, persons, etc. while Google Earth is about space and meaning. As Dorling & Fairbairn say in the chapter Alternative Views from their book Mapping: Ways of Representing the World: “Maps have always presented pictures of ’truth’ and just as many people have many different truths, so there are many maps to be drawn.”

“From API to mashup” by Brandon Badger

The key to presenting all these various views on planet earth and what a website developer can show his/her visitor are mashups. Using the base map and applying content, meaning, to it. Badger emphasizes the essential role of the user and giving us a rather simple and commercial equation: Google’s tools + You = Victory. A more convincing model for the concept of the mashup was that the sum of its parts is greater than the whole: 1 + 1 = 2,53542. I guess it is a good thing Time magazine named us as persons of the year, but it also makes us a lot busier with supplying content for Web2.0 applications. When will “we” get too busy with supplying content until the point that we don’t want to do it anymore? It will probably mark the end of Web2.0: The death of the user.

Mashups by Remco Kouwenhoven

On his website Nederkaart.nl Remco Kouwenhoven shows lots of examples of mashups with the use of the Google Maps API. He showed us some of these on the screen, but the one that struck me the most was this map about the air traffic above Schiphol. What it intends to show is the high density of airplanes at Schiphol airport paired with complaints about the noise.

This reminded me of a remark by Mark Monmonier in the Dorling & Fairbairn piece I already mentioned above: “Cartographic propaganda can be an effective intellectual weapon against an unresponsive, biased, or corrupt bureaucracy.” These mashups can provide this cartographic propaganda in real-time. Current issues can be addressed with the help of real-time information gathering. On Kouwenhoven’s website a lot more examples can be seen and it is a definitely worth browsing and importing some of the examples into Google Earth.

More impressions from the Geoday and Google’s Amsterdam office (with Google bikes) courtesy of Remco Kouwenhoven.

The Workshops

After a morning of presentations the afternoon was reserved for us, the user, to start creating content using the tools supplied by Google as Badger pointed out. Although I’m not sure for how long these links will be online you can check out the small assignments of the workhops at these links: Google Earth workshop and Google Maps API workshop. More technical info is also available through code.google.com. There was one jawdropping example in the Google Earth workshop that I didn’t know about, which is an incredibly detailed 3D city model of Berlin. Definitely a must-see.

After spending two hours being immersed in the representation of the physical space on the screen, the pavement on my way to the train station also had some new meaning applied to it. A strange awareness of how easy meaning can be applied to the physical space we navigate each day, or to the places where we live. Being unaware which meaning has been applied in the virtual to the places we call home. What also struck me after this day is the dependence of Google on the user, who is responsible for supplying the content. It makes you think, but for some reason I’m just feeling lucky right now.

[By Twan Eikelenboom | Original post | Comments]

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Google managing counsel Michael Kwun wrote a peppered letter to the Washington Post in regards to the Viacom/ YouTube court case. His choice of language makes it sound as if the two parties involved are really wearing their battle gear, and you can only imagine the screaming and biting that went on in the background negotiations before Viacom started to sue! Some quotes (my emphasis):

<<Viacom’s lawsuit is an attack on the way people communicate on the Web and on the platforms that allow people to make the Internet their own. (...)

Content-hosting sites such as YouTube, Craigslist and MySpace that want to take advantage of the DMCA’s safe harbors must promptly remove infringing content if the copyright owner so requests, giving owners a quick remedy that doesn’t require going to court. Copyright owners, in return, have the responsibility to identify infringing material they want removed. Viacom’s lawyers helped craft this law but apparently don’t like it, after all. (...)

Viacom is attempting to rewrite established copyright law through a baseless lawsuit. In February, after negotiations broke down, Viacom requested that YouTube take down more than 100,000 videos. We did so immediately, working through a weekend. Viacom later withdrew some of those requests, apparently realizing that those videos were not infringing, after all. Though Viacom seems unable to determine what constitutes infringing content, its lawyers believe that we should have the responsibility and ability to do it for them. Fortunately, the law is clear, and on our side.>>

I dunno. It seems unrealistic both to expect of Viacom to monitor YouTube, or for Google/ YouTube to do so themselves – both models make it almost impossible to get a social media site running. The “safe harbor” seems to be favoring sites like YouTube in favor of the content owners like Viacom, because it puts the burden of proof on Viacom, not YouTube. But which solution would be feasible while making everyone happy – Viacom, the YouTube users, and Google/ YouTube? Is it enough if in the future, content creators like Viacom’s network simply don’t own their content (or the content location) anymore, but they’ll just be benefitting from the side-effects of increased attention (if they’re smart enough to provide the right means to fulfill the expectations of the attention stream, e.g. by offering high-quality subscriptions downloads of Colbert Report)?

[Thanks Ricardo R.!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

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Tonight I went to a meet-up of Bay Area Blawgers (a blawger is a law blogger). Why did I go to this, when I normally don’t do blogger meet-up kinda stuff and don’t know much about law? Well, the get together was just a little down the road at Santa Clara University. And the shindig was coordinated by Eric Goldman. I’ve mentioned before that I enjoy reading Eric’s blog for coverage of web legal issues.

I came in just before things started and happened to luck into sitting by several neat people. On my right was Mike Masnick of Techdirt fame. If you don’t browse Techdirt from time to time — dude, you need to read fewer SEO blogs and broaden your horizons. Mike and the writers at Techdirt provide an independent take on news items. Mike’s got a long memory (like Danny Sullivan, but with general news), so he does a good job of putting news items into perspective. In my experience, Techdirt does a deeper level of analysis than most sites, so when Techdirt rakes Google over the coals for something, I tend to give that critique more weight.

To Mike’s right was Kurt Opsahl of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. My advance planning for the meet-up consisted of wearing my EFF T-shirt, so all that hard planning paid off. Kurt polled the group on interesting questions about the DMCA (”How many of you have gotten a DMCA takedown notice?”). Afterwards, he talked about the info on this page where you can register as an online service provider with the U.S. Copyright. It’s a one-page form and an $80 fee. We also talked briefly about Google’s decision to anonymize our logs data after 18-24 months. I still hope to circle back around to that topic at some point (I’m a fan of the decision).

On my left was Colin Samuels. Colin is the general counsel for Accela, which makes government software. Colin told a good story about how he learned the ropes of white-hat SEO and built his reputation up enough to be the #1 Colin Samuels in the world, handily beating a Colin Samuels who skis.

Other tidbits:
- I didn’t realize that Sun’s general counsel is a blogger.
- We discussed whether it was better for a law blogger to mention legal cases that could be negative for a firm (it definitely bolsters your credibility as a blogger). We also talked about the pros and cons of anonymous blogging, and a little bit about online bullying.
- Chris Hoofnagle was there. I hadn’t seen Chris since the Computers, Freedom & Privacy Conference in Berkeley in 2004. Which reminds me: I want to hit some non-SEO conferences this year. Maybe Defcon or SIGGRAPH.
- One of the more entertaining people there, Kevin Underhill, runs a legal humor blog. That’s right, the law can be funny:

In a long-awaited and dramatic decision, the Supreme Court held today, unanimously, that in the context of the Guam Organic Act’s debt-limitation provision, 48 U.S.C. section 1423a, Guam’s debt limitation must be calculated according to the assessed valuation of property in Guam.

Like we didn’t all see that coming. In your face, Supreme Court of Guam!

I think a good time was had by all. Thanks for pulling so many blawgers together, Eric.