Ancestry announced last week the Scotland Census Collection, 1841-1901. The collection contains over 24 million names. You can see the press release at prnewswire.com, which in addition to providing information on the new collection, also gives us the skinny on five folks of Scottish descent, including Donald Trump, Alexander Graham Bell, and Andrew Carnegie (natch.)

Version 67 of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography is now available, and now features over 2900 articles, books, and other resources related to scholarly electronic publishing online. It’s available at http://www.digital-scholarship.org/sepb/sepb.html . The 2006 “Annual Edition”, a PDF file designed for printing, is available from http://www.digital-scholarship.org/sepb/annual/annual.htm . You can get updates about the Bibliography through Digital Koans, at http://www.digital-scholarship.org/digitalkoans/ . You GO Charles Bailey.

Catching up … Google has announced in their blog that they’re down with the “so easy a cave man can do it” meme. Oh, and they’re also allowing users to make their own Google Maps with the new My Maps feature.

The instructions for using the new My Maps feature are at http://maps.google.com/help/maps/userguide/index.html . As you might expect, you’ll have to have a Google account to use the My Maps feature. Start at maps.google.com, and choose the My Maps tab. You’ll be given an option to create a new Google Map as well as browse other maps that folks have created.

It’s surprising what you can add to a map. You can add placemarks, of course, as well as lines or shapes. But you can also add photographs or even videos. You can use rich text or HTML descriptions as well. To get an idea of what’s possible, visit the map of Olympic locations, which has a little commentary, different placemarks, and HTML and images in the descriptions.

(I tried to use Google to see how other people were using the My Maps feature and had a little luck with the query inurl:ms site:maps.google.com/maps/ . But there isn’t much there.)

Once you’ve generated the map, you have the option to make it public or private as you choose. You can also get a KML file that you can display on Google Earth. You can grab a distinct URL that you can share with others.

What you CAN’T do — and the reason I probably won’t be using this feature much — is embed the map in your own page. I looked around for some way to JavaScript a generated map onto your own site, and I didn’t see one. I like the flexibility that’s been given — you can really make and personalize a map — but how about a little more help getting it on your site?

[editorial] Google appears to be going after paid links, and they want you to do the work for them by reporting such links, regardless of the reason they were bought or sold.

Check out Matt Cutts’s post How to report paid links and notice that he appears not to have responded to the comments that mention Text Link Ads or similar brokers. This will be a huge disappointment to all those small websites that make a bit of money selling sponsored links. Whatever reason the sponsor uses them for is their business, but if they perceive Google’s move to mean ditching the links, then there goes a lot of revenue.

The other problem is that they seem to want us, web surfers, to make the distinction between whether a link is used for SEO or for traffic. If the ad code uses Javascript, according to Cutts, then it’s for traffic because there’s a redirect or nofollow. Any other form of sponsored code means the links were sold for SEO (even if they were free).

So that means that little publishers like me who earn roughly $35-55/mth in AdSense and a bit more from paid links - and work very hard to earn even that much - are going to get screwed by some jealous newbie blogger who thinks the other person is making a fortune because they have a lot of sites. Or if I do a link exchange with a site to get relevant niche traffic, and it’s misconstrued as a paid link. Very nice.

Cutts says in his article that they’re collecting datasets to test some algorithms. He repeatedly refuses to clarify how the information supplied by unpaid tattletales will be used.

Google seems to be going after a monopoly on advertising, telling webmasters what they can or cannot have on their sites. Does anyone else now think it’s a conflict of interest that search engine as powerful as Google is monopolizing advertising?

By the way, SEJ’s Carsten Cumbrowski left a very detailed, rational explanation of why this move cannot possibly work. It’s as valuable a read as any other comment, if not more, and less hot-headed than this post.

According to Australian Associated Press, a 15-year old sent a fake takedown notice to YouTube, posing as ABC Television and demanding the removal of hundreds of clips, mostly from “The Chaser’s War on Everything.” Apparently, not only did YouTube follow-up on the request and take down videos, they also sent copyright infringement notices to the YouTube users who uploaded the videos... threatening them that their accounts may be closed if they persist. Mashable’s Pete Cashmore adds that “[a]s it turns out, the ABC actually encourages the spread of Chasers clips, since they consider the comedy series to be a good promotion for the channel’s content.”

[Thanks Ludwik Trammer!]

Join the ongoing comments.

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post]

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When you install the Google Toolbar for Firefox, two boxes are checked for you:

<<[x] Use Google as my default search engine in Firefox
[x] Allow downloads from Google>>

What does the second one mean?

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

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Not sure if many blog and wiki platforms offer this feature already, but it’s implemented on this blog since some time and I’m really happy about it: fading out nofollows. This means that a link that is posted in the comments will be nofollowed, but if the link is not removed by a moderator after a couple of days, the nofollow will be automatically removed from the link. Why should outgoing links in comments (or wiki pages, for that matter) be considered less valuable than links from blog posts? Besides, spam ought to be removed in any case, nofollow or not – it doesn’t help anyone if a blog or a wiki is indefinitely littered with hundreds of spam links (and nofollow certainly didn’t get rid of all link spam, so the maintenance job remains a necessity).

Wouldn’t it be neat if popular blog and wiki platforms offer the “fading out” feature as default setting, as it seems to be a good compromise between using no nofollow at all, and nofollowing every user-created link?

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

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I saw that Wendy’s had introduced a new spicy chicken sandwich, and I like spicy stuff, so I had to try it. It had pepper Jack cheese, spicy chipotle sauce, and jalapenos. So how did it measure up?

It wasn’t as spicy as I was hoping for. If you want a mass-market spicy sandwich, I’d opt for the spicy chicken sandwich from Jack In The Box.

Until recently, Silicon Valley had another option: the habanero hamburger. The Prince of Wales Pub recently closed, but for a long time, it was the spiciest burger in the valley. A few years ago, a Googler stumbled across this bit of valley history:

Eating a Habanero Hamburger was once a rite of passage for new and departing operating systems engineers at Silicon Graphics. The tradition is apparently still alive and well in the graphics group. Having set the Silicon Graphics company record for number of Habanero Hamburgers consumed, Brian Totty brought the fine tradition to Inktomi Corporation.

That sounded like a neat idea, so a few years ago several of us Googlers made a pilgrimage to the pub in San Mateo. To make a long story short, the habanero burger was painfully hot. The habanero part referred to a thick red paste that sat atop the burger patty. After we ate the burgers, the staff clued us in on a few tricks: ordering the burger with mayonnaise or a glass of milk would reduce the burn. Knowing that beforehand would have saved a day or two of intestinal discomfort. My wife couldn’t believe I was willing to eat an entire burger — but it was a good bonding experience with some fellow Googlers.

The pub is closed now, but there’s a video of someone eating a burger. If you watch it, you can see the burger heat from their facial expressions. The Prince of Wales Pub evidently closed in January 2007; does anyone know where else to get spicy food in Silicon Valley now?

Google in China is cooperating with CCTV for a new microsite to vote on Chinese cities, as part of Google’s “Rebang” website.
What’s CCTV? Let’s consult Wikipedia:

<<China Central Television ... is the major broadcast television network in Mainland China. Organizationally, it is a sub-ministry of People’s Republic of China’s central government within the State Administration of Radio, Television, and Film and as such it does not have any editorial independence from the PRC government.>>

Wikipedia adds that CCTV’ “news reporting follows parameters directed by the Propaganda Department of the Communist Party of China” but that it mostly shows “Chinese soap operas.”

[Thanks Xujie!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

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Google’s Matt Cutts raised quite some controversy in his blog by telling people how to report paid links. (Use the spam report form and include the word “paidlinks”.) He disclaims that this is just an experiment to collect more data at this point, but it still leaves a bad taste among many of the commenters on Matt’s post. When Matt talks about reporting “paid links” as opposed to e.g. “spammy paid links,” it leaves us to think that paid links in general aren’t wanted by Google.

Paid links, you may ask? Aren’t those the things on Google search results, powered by AdWords? Do we have to report Google search results now, as Roger Browne comments?

No, Google is attacking specifically those links which are “real” links – the way the World Wide Web Consortium tells people to link. Links which aren’t using JavaScript, or rel="nofollow” attributes, or any other means that render them inaccessible (or put up a warning flag) with certain tools*. Links which, incidentally, are used by some of the AdWords competitors out there – like Text-Link-Ads.com, for example.

The reasoning behind this is that Google suspects some of these linking schemes to be set up to game search engines, because “real” links happen to trigger Google’s algorithms to transfer PageRank from one site to another... and Google rightfully tends to ban stuff that games search engines. (Yes, paid text links which are real links may increase the chance your site’s in trouble in Google’s rankings.)

But are all webmasters who use paid links trying to spam search engines?

Let’s reiterate some of the history of this issue. Back in, say, 2004, when a webmaster wanted to sell ads on their site (and – gasp – they didn’t want to use Google!), they might have sold text links on their own, or through a third-party system. If the webmaster believed that the W3C defines the web standards, and they wanted to create the most accessible types of links, they used the “a” element. Now switch to 2005, when Google, MSN, Yahoo and others – but not the W3C – united to introduce a new attribute value, the “nofollow” (to battle comment spam, by the way, not link ads!). All of a sudden, those webmasters who only worked with W3C recommendations, specifically not writing their web pages for search engines, were somehow suspect – they were suddenly, if ever so slighty, marked as “spammer.” This wasn’t made explicit, but Matt’s latest post, for instance, does make it more explicit.

To repeat: without doing any single change on their site, the webmaster who didn’t keep up with search news in 2005 is now suspect. She might’ve had a text ad on her blog about sailing which was intended to be there for her human audience, a link reading “buy a sailing boat” leading to a site which the author even trusted. (A relevant link – this is more than I can say of many of the random sites AdSense display, which are often leading to very weird pages.)

The thing is: some paid links are intended to game the web and reap revenue without added value to end users. But you know what? Some AdSense too are intended to game the web and reap revenue without added value. There are tens of thousands to millions of AdSense-based spam farms out there which make it harder for search engines like Technorati to find good content. Please, Yahoo, MSN, Ask and Technorati: give me a spam report form where I can paste the keyword “adsense”. And make sure you post something on your respective company blogs, or unofficial employee blogs, that communicates to people, implicitly or explicitly, that using AdSense might get your search rankings in trouble.

Peter Dawson asks: why does Google care what my business with another company is? Indeed, Google, ideally, should behave as a passive by-stander. It shouldn’t tell people how to make websites. That is the responsibility of the webmaster, who can and should of course check the recommendations put forth by the web’s standards body, the W3C. I think that there are many groups which should get together to fight those paid text links which are only gaming search engines; to get together to fight AdSense-powered spam farms; to get together to battle undisclosed ads, too. The problem starts when the most visible group in this effort has a major conflict of interest as they’re competing in the paid links** business. Like Google.

(Disclosure: I too had paid text links on this blog in 2004, before the nofollow surprise came along***. Not poker ads, but hopefully related tech stuff... and I also advertised Text-Link-Ads itself – you may too, if you’re using Google AdSense. I know both Matt Cutts and Text-Link-Ads’ Patrick Gavin and think they’re both cool guys, on a personal level.)

I don’t have a problem with voluntarily helping search engines to discover any kind of spam, and that includes a site about sailing which has 20 undisclosed, non-nofollowed links to “poker bots” and “viagra shops” (and I’ll continue to list relevant case studies of such sites). I also don’t have a problem of nofollowing ads, in fact, I do (it’s my choice, but you may well decide that you don’t want to nofollow ads because you only accept trusted advertisers anyway, and this argument is valid, too). I do have a problem with search engines becoming too aggressive in dictating netiquette (and then not following netiquette themselves when it comes to cases like W3C recommendations – no one spending a week reading W3C-related material will use the misnomer “ALT tag," for instance – or, say, web censorship).

Google’s webmaster guidelines include an interesting test that may help us evaluate the issue. Google urges you to ask yourself:

<<"Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?">>

The answer is simple: nope. No one would use the “nofollow” attribute if search engines didn’t exist.

Paid links merely intended to game search engines are a problem. If I look at cases like Wikipedia nofollowing all outgoing links, or Slashdot.org nofollwing those who provide tips, or beginning webmasters now potentially being scared of looking into alternatives to Google’s AdSense, I have to conclude though that increasingly, the search engines’ “nofollow” attribute is becoming the bigger problem.

*The Google webmaster guidelines admit as much: “If fancy features such as JavaScript ... keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site.” So ads shouldn’t be visible in text browsers? Why not?

**Google’s paid links are not transferring PageRank from one site to another, but they’re still paid links.

***As opposed to how the W3C shapes recommendations, there was no public draft of the nofollow proposal before the search players released it as “final version.” For instance, somebody might have told them that verbs never make good HTML, because they’re leaving out semantics of what this thing is (which would’ve had the benefit of opening up several specific interpretations, interpretations which then can be improved over time as new problems become visible).

[Thanks Pd!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

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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."

Okay, enough Google posts for a bit. I’m not much of a picture-taker, but I’ve been looking through some different images recently. Here are a few of the fun ones:

This is a still image from the trailer that Danny put up of some commercials from Ask:

If you squint just right, you can read some DOS command-line text in the picture. Can anyone else read what this is saying? I have to admit, I like the “The algorithm did X” aspect of Ask’s marketing campaign.

This next image is from my old cell phone; it’s a funny poster I saw in a church in Oakland:

My favorite is “Chicken’s ROOL!!” followed closely by “Chickens Rool like Chesse”.

And to close out this batch of images, I was in rural North Carolina about a year ago and in a small-town newspaper, I saw an ad for anti-spyware services:

Spyware, the little demons inside your computer. I thought that was a really creative ad.

By the way, if you think botnets are intriguing, you’ll enjoy this post by Google software engineer Neil Daswani. It’s about a recent USENIX paper (PDF link) in which Neil and other Googlers talk about Clickbot.A, which was a bot that clicked on Google ads last year.

The high-order bit is that “Google identified all clicks on its ads exhibiting Clickbot.A-like patterns and marked them as invalid,” but you may want to read the full paper if you’re interested. At the end, they even show one version of the source code of the botmaster. The attacker apparently left a backup file lying around, so you can see that functions are named things like “ThisIPIsClick()”. I thought the paper was a fun read.

Near the end of 1999, Google Inc. had thirty-nine employees, most of whom were engineers of one stripe or another. Omid Kordescani, Google's newly hired sales chief, was still plowing the fields for enterprise deals, but they were few and far between. With more than $500,000 (and growing) going our the door each month and less than $20 million in the bank, you didn't need a Stanford PhD to do the math: the company needed a business model that worked.

There was always the failback of simply running banners on Google's prodigious traffic — one deal with DoubleClick, an ad network that specialized in serving graphical banners, would probably net the company millions of dollars. But that felt like a sellout — DoubleClick's ads were often gaudy and irrelevant. They represented everything Page and Brin felt was wrong with the Internet "They didn't want to turn the Web site into the online version of Forty-second Street," recalls investor and director Michael Moritz.

Instead, the young executive team decided to try a more focused approach—it would sell text-only ads to sponsors targeting particular keywords. When you searched for "Ford cars," for example, an ad would appear at the top of the results for Ford Motor Company. These first advertisements were sold on a cost per thousand (CPM) model. (…)

Turns out the ads worked well enough, but they didn't scale. Revenue was limited by Kordestani's ability to sell, and despite his talents, it was difficult to book enough orders to create a healthy business. "It didn't generate much money," Brin recalls, referring to the program as a "hand-patched life preserver." DoubleClick, he adds, was the ocean liner Google would swim to should the life preserver fail.

Phillipp Lenssen over at Google Blogoscoped published a fake press release  that is dated a bit over 10 year in the future titled: “Google Acquires Internet (May 2017)”.

The press release is a parody of Google’s webcast from yesterday where the CEO, Eric Schmidt, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, some other Google Execs and the CEO of Doubleclick “answered” questions to the free press about the announcement of Google to acquire the Ad Network DoubleClick, which also owns the affiliate network/search agency Performics for $3.1 Billion.

The representatives of major newspapers, analysts and other high profile professionals that attended the live teleconference call did have a lot of very interesting questions indeed. The only problem was that none of the real questions got answered during the 45 minute Q&A.

Phil, got the ”Google Talk” pretty well  copied that used a lot of words without saying anything except worthless catch phrases that mean everything and nothing.

Google should consider hireing Phill for their next teleconference with similar subject. Phill would cover the whole Q&A all by himself and save the Google management a lot of time and energy. :)

Funny and easy to digest entertainment for everybody who is still recovering from the tough days at SES N.Y. hehe.

For anybody who prefers (and is already able to digest) more serious speculations about the future of what changes the acquisition will bring to Google and search, check out the post by David Lewis over at ReveNews.com  titled: Google’s Advertising Everywhere.

Cheers!

Carsten Cumbrowski
Internet and Search Marketing Resources at Cumbrowski.com, including real News and real Events.

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MAY 12, 2017 - BUSINESSWIRE. Mountain View-based search giant Google Inc today announced they’ve acquired the internet for the astounding sum of $2,455.5 billion in cash. The deal had been rumored in various search blogs since the beginning of the year and was now confirmed by the company’s CEO. “This is in line with our vision to make information more accessible to end users,” says Eric Schmidt. “With the acquisition, we can increase the speed of indexing as everything will already be on our servers by the time it’s published.”

In a conference call earlier today, Larry Page explained the strategy behind the acquisition. “We realized it’s not very cost-effective to buy the internet in smaller portions.” During the past two decades, Google had acquired YouTube for $1.65, DoubleClick for $3.1 billion, AOL for $12.5 billion, and last year, Microsoft for the record sum of $120 billion.

Questioned on the first steps the company would take integrating the internet onto their servers, Eric Schmidt announced immediate plans to redirect Yahoo.com to Google’s own search engine. “From an end user perspective, having two search engines is just bad usability, and [causes confusion]. While we appreciate Yahoo’s recent advances in search technology, we felt this move is best aligned with the interests of our advertisers, users and shareholders.” Eric added, “By leveraging third-generation mobile platforms in sustainable verticals, new monetization opportunities can manifest into an improved web experience, greatly benefiting investors and digerati alike – a true paradigm change synergizing the Web 6.0 framework on the enterprise level.”

Accompanying Google’s acquisition revelation, privacy groups today released a paper criticizing the move. However, Larry Page argues that privacy is improved by Google’s acquisition, explaining that “[the] main privacy issues for users today are data leaks to third parties. By eliminating all third parties, we closed this hole.” Eric Schmidt adds that Google intends to replace their current privacy policy with a “privacy scale” which better balances necessary compromises. “When you can improve the privacy of a large group of people by violating the privacy rights of a small number of people, in the end this improves overall privacy.”

The Chinese government in the meantime congratulated Google Inc on their move. Regarding the potentials of expanded censorship, Sergey Brin told members of the press that Google would now drop all search results filtering and instead “address the root problem from a publisher perspective” by directly blocking certain keywords the time they are entered in Google-owned tools such as Blogger, Gmail, Page Creator, Yahoo 360 and MSN Spaces. Amnesty International and Reporters Without Borders were not available for comment at this time due to temporary technical problems with their web-based email clients.

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

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Google News Archive search is a nice way to recap coverage of a person or company throughout the years. Here are bits and pieces of past DoubleClick coverage. While lots of coverage deals with DoubleClick in regards to privacy criticism, and I’m sure lots of it is based on real issues, we also need to keep in mind that news sometimes hype privacy issues (think of the stories that erupted when Gmail came along with targeted ads, for instance). On the other hand, there’s the fact that privacy policies are simply not always adhered to by the companies that put them forth, and users have little ways to measure this (and are left to rely on faith).

So will Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick increase privacy issues? Already, Google through Gmail, search and such pretty much knows everything about you when you’re logged in, and other issues (like Google’s cookie life-time, or Gmail ads) are almost negligible in comparison. It doesn’t get anymore private than email, spreadsheets, docs and search, so if you don’t trust Google (your mileage may vary), don’t log-in, and don’t store your data on their servers! The only additional risks in this acquisition might be increased potential for Google to track users and user movement (through the network of sites utilizing DoubleClick, among other DoubleClick data), as well as Google’s existing data becoming available to an even larger circle of tools, companies & people – with sometimes, new chances of correlating information.

HighBeam Research in April 1996 writes:

<<DoubleClick: ’We’re no peeping Toms.’ (...)

Go surf the Internet – and, a few cynics allege, have your privacy invaded by DoubleClick Inc.

DoubleClick is a media-buying division and service recently launched by New York-based Poppe Tyson featuring a software program that can monitor an Internet browser’s every move through Web sites in the DoubleClick media network.

Diane Filippi, a spokesperson for DoubleClick, defends the company by noting that names and addresses are kept confidential>>

CNet in November 1996 says:

<<Ads find strength in numbers

Ad networks have become popular so quickly because Internet ad networks promise some of the most highly targeted advertising available. Networks such as DoubleClick, today’s leading network, for example actually collect Internet user and organization profiles. Advertisers then design their ads for a specific audience by selecting from a wide range of criteria about the kind of customer they are trying to reach. When a user hits a Web site that is a member of the ad network, the sites knows to display the advertising banner that best matches the user’s or organization’s profile.>>

Wired in March 1997 writes:

<<DoubleClick Tries to Force Hand into Cookie Jar

DoubleClick Software is fighting to save its business life.
That’s because a subcommittee of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has written a standards draft for tracking cookies that would threaten the ability of DoubleClick and other Web ad agencies to silently track user movements between sites run by clients on their advertising networks. Without this information, DoubleClick said it can’t count unique users, and therefore cannot send its custom-picked ads to users.>>

CNet in August 1997 reports:

<<DoubleClick networks in Asia

Internet advertising network DoubleClick announced today that it will launch DoubleClick Japan, a network focused on the Pacific Rim.>>

CNet in March 1998 writes:

<<DoubleClick hot, set to expand

DoubleClick (...) has captured Wall Street’s attention, and now faces the challenge of proving the value of Internet advertising to mainstream America.

The company went public during a hot period for tech IPOs and its shares have risen along with those of other Internet stocks. But it still faces stiff competition in an unproven market, as well as a privacy controversy about its product.>>

TheStreet.com in July 1998 writes:

<<DoubleClick’s Double Talk

On June 30, the Internet advertising-placement company put out a statement saying it had the “third largest audience reach on the Internet behind America Online (...) and Yahoo! (...), according to Media Metrix,” which measures Web site use. (...)

Never mind that Media Metrix disavowed the release. After all, throwing seemingly good news on fiery Net stocks makes them erupt. Wall Street pushed shares of DoubleClick as high as 77 1/8 from 49 11/16 in just four days.

Now, with the stock back at 44 5/8, DoubleClick is backpedaling. “We compared apples to oranges just to prove a point,” says Amy Shapiro, a company spokeswoman. “It was misleading. We didn’t explain it clearly enough ... and we realize that we should have explained more clearly what we were trying to say.">>

CNet in October 1998 writes:

<<DoubleClick launches ad service

DoubleClick, the company known for creating an advertising network that plants cookies in people’s browsers, today is introducing a program that allows advertisers to even further target their ads to users. (...)

DoubleClick gets information from Web surfers by planting cookies – digital tags that remain on a user’s computer every time a surfer visits a site in the DoubleClick network. (...)

While privacy advocates have at times complained about the practice, DoubleClick says it maintains privacy because it never actually identifies people by name – just by their digital codes.

Once the cookie is planted, the surfer is then identified every time she visits another site in the network. Each time she does something on the site, DoubleClick can add the information to its database about that user.

With the service Boomerang, it can use the information to send specific targeted ads to the customer. If, for instance, the Web user shops for ties on one site, and later she goes to another unrelated site in the network, the site selling ties can send her an ad>>

Wired in June 1999 reports:

<<Groups Keep Heat on DoubleClick

Consumer privacy groups urged stockholders of a marketing firm to block a proposed merger of the company with a Net advertising firm.

“This open letter urges you to disapprove the proposed merger of Abacus Direct and DoubleClick, and to demand disclosure from the companies on certain key questions affecting it,” the letter to DoubleClick shareholders said.>>

Also in June 1999, CNet writes:

<<DoubleClick not worried about privacy charges

DoubleClick says it hasn’t received any complaints about the pending merger, and that no consumer groups have contacted the company directly.

“We don’t think it’s an issue,” said Kevin Ryan, DoubleClick’s president.

“I’ve been very active on the online privacy issues with the FTC since 1997,” he added. “We spent a lot of time on this in discussing the merger – if consumers are not happy, neither one of us has a business.">>

The Washington Post in February 2000:

<<DoubleClick Is Probed On Data Collection

Michigan’s attorney general said she will file suit against DoubleClick under that state’s consumer laws. DoubleClick’s consumer monitoring “is a secret cyber-wiretap,” said Attorney General Jennifer M. Granholm. “The average consumer has no idea that they are being spied upon,” she said, and that lack of warning constitutes “a deceitful practice under our consumer-protection act.”

The probes come as privacy advocates have stepped up their criticism about DoubleClick’s business practices. Last week, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), a privacy advocacy group, filed a formal complaint with the FTC, accusing DoubleClick of unfair and deceptive trade practices and demanding an immediate investigation.

EPIC’s complaint alleged that DoubleClick was unlawfully tracking the online activities of Internet users, combining their surfing records with detailed personal profiles contained in a national marketing database of a firm DoubleClick recently acquired. That practice, EPIC charged, ran counter to an earlier promise by DoubleClick that the information it collected on Internet users would remain anonymous.>>

The Register in June 2000 writes:

CNet in October 2000 reports:

<<DoubleClick buys direct emailer for $191 million

Online advertising company DoubleClick today said it will acquire NetCreations, an opt-in email marketing service, for $191 million in stock.

The deal adds to DoubleClick’s existing email marketing resources. The company now will be able to help Web marketers reach consumers by tapping NetCreations’ database of 15 million email addresses, on top of its own 7 million addresses. DoubleClick handles online advertisements for companies and sells anonymous information about people’s surfing habits to help advertisers better target their messages.>>

Forbes in December 2000 writes:

<<DoubleClick Loses A Customer, Causes Jitters

Although DoubleClick is the undisputed leader in the Internet advertising space, speculation that it could lose its ad-serving customer base has sent the stock plummeting. (...)

Shares of DoubleClick went from bad to worse, falling from an opening trade on Monday of $35.62 to a close of $28.50 on Tuesday, a drop of about 20%.>>

In January 2001, USA Today reports:

<<FTC clears DoubleClick

The Federal Trade Commission on Monday ended its investigation into the data collection practices of DoubleClick, the nation’s largest Internet advertising company. The FTC began its investigation in February 2000, questioning whether DoubleClick improperly amassed personal information about Internet users. In a letter to DoubleClick’s attorney, Christine A. Varney, trade commission official Joel Winston wrote: “DoubleClick never used or disclosed” consumers’ personal identifying information “for purposes other than those disclosed in its privacy policy.” (...)

The complaints against DoubleClick were sparked by the company’s $1.7 billion purchase last fall of direct marketing company Abacus and DoubleClick’s plans to cross-reference its records of consumers’ online habits with a Abacus database that includes names and other identifying data. The company eventually scrapped those plans.>>

In July 2001, CNet writes:

<<DoubleClick: Web ad market isn’t improving

The online advertising market won’t get better this year, DoubleClick executives said Tuesday after reporting second-quarter results. (...)

Although DoubleClick is taking market share from rivals, the overall industry remains in a slump. Growth in online ads has plummeted since early 2000.>>

In January 2002, CNet writes:

<<DoubleClick turns away from ad profiles

Online advertising company DoubleClick has phased out its Internet ad profiling service as part of its shift from media services, proving consumer tracking doesn’t always pay.

The New York-based company jettisoned its “intelligent” targeting service effective Dec. 31, a company representative confirmed Tuesday. Launched in 2000, the product allowed marketers to target ads based on a database of some 100 million profiles. The technology tracked people online anonymously and then served ads based on personal tastes. (...)

In the last 16 months, DoubleClick has worked to deflect its dependence on the sickly advertising market. It has built up its research, data and technology divisions while slowly dismantling its media division.>>

TheStreet.com in February 2002 writes:

<<DoubleClick Finds an Uncomfortable New Privacy

(...) What happened? In part, it was the dot-com flameout. What looked at the time like steadily increasing advertising revenue was actually just cheap venture capital-provided money looking for places to be spent. When the VCs disappeared, so did the ad spending.>>

CNet in May 2001 reports:

<<DoubleClick able to settle privacy suits

DoubleClick on Tuesday received federal court approval to settle state and federal lawsuits that charged the Net advertising company with violating the privacy of Internet surfers.

The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York granted final approval of the class-action settlement agreement, which requires DoubleClick to provide consumers with a privacy policy that will clearly describe in “easy-to-read sentences” its online ad-serving service, use of cookies, as well as other services and technologies.

The settlement also requires the company to purge certain data files of personally identifiably information, including names, addresses, telephone numbers and e-mail addresses. Among other provisions, the settlement requires DoubleClick to obtain permission, or so-called opt-in agreements, from Internet surfers before it can tie personally identifiable information with Web surfing history. (...)

Moreover, the company will retain an independent accounting firm that will conduct an annual review regarding DoubleClick’s compliance of the settlement.>>

Wired in August 2002 writes:

<<DoubleClick to Open Cookie Jar

For years, ad-serving cookies have crept about the Web like silent, virtual stalkers – tracking surfers as they hop from site to site in the name of targeted marketing.

Now, Net users may finally get a glimpse of some of the data such tracking applications collect.

As part of a settlement with regulators in 10 U.S. states, the Internet ad-serving firm DoubleClick said it will begin allowing Web users to view some of the records it compiles through the use of cookies.

The feature, described by the New York Attorney General’s office as a “cookie viewer,” will show the categories in which DoubleClick (...) has placed individuals, based on information about their surfing habits. DoubleClick uses the category system to sell advertising targeted to particular interest groups.

It’s unclear when the cookie viewer will actually be available, however.>>

BusinessWeek in February 2004 writes:

<<A Quiet Comeback for DoubleClick

Remember DoubleClick (...)? Investors haven’t heard much lately about this once high-flying online advertising play. Formerly ranked among the Internet’s blue chips, the stock fell from grace, along with hopes that online ads would ever become a profitable business. DoubleClick traded as low as $5 in the depths of the bear market in 2002.

Now it’s early 2004, and the online ad business is enjoying a handy comeback.>>

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

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• The top 500 fonts on the Web
  "There are five pages of really good fonts here, I don't think I saw any that I didn't like."

$3.1 billion -- ClickZ has the story.

Cliqueishness is part of normal human behavior - an extension of clannishness. Though when it comes to websites, you don’t expect that sort of thing, except maybe in a blog network. Why not? Well, isn’t the Internet about promoting global views? Being part of a clique of websites linking to each other could harm your SERPs rankings. (I’m not insisting this is true, but it could be - which is what I’m examining here.)

How do the SEs (Search Engines) know you’re part of a clique? Hypothesis: probably using graph theoretic methods, which are a sub-discipline of mathematics. Look at the “Hyperlink Cliques” graph diagram. Each node in the graph represents a website (or weblog). Each line segment represents a hyperlink, in the direction of the arrow, from any page on the source site to any page on the target site. A double arrow means there’s a reciprocal link, but not necessarily page to page. The terminology here, cliques and clusters, is mine.

Can you spot the link cliques? Why are the five sites A-E in the bigger circle part of a link clique? Why are the other two clusters not cliques?

Purple Cluster

Look at the purple cluster. Every site there has a link to every other site. This might signify a blog network, but only if the topics are sufficiently different. If they cover the same general topic, they’re a topical clique. This could be perceived as link collusion between the bloggers and could affect your rankings. (Suggestion: vary your blogroll.)

Blue Cluster

Is this a clique? No. Site F is the authority domain (relatively speaking) because all of the other sites, G-J, are pointing to it. But there isn’t a hyperlink between each and every pair of sites. There is, however, a short “path” between each pair. That is, through 1-4 clicks on hyperlinks, you could travel from any one site (F-J) to another in that cluster. For example, to get from F to I, you’d travel F-H-I, in that order.

Peach Cluster

Mmmm. Peach cluster. Ahhhhhh, tasty. Ahem. This cluster of sites isn’t a clique. In fact, it’s not even a cluster since you cannot travel from, for example, node M to N without going through K then I (which is part of Blue cluster). Thus, the linking between Peach sites is much more natural (excluding the social behavior of similar blogrolls) and likely “tastier” to spiders. Of course, this is only an example, and cliques do form naturally over time. So just because you’re a part of a topical clique isn’t necessarily a bad thing if it came about organically, over time. Reciprocal links just shouldn’t come too quickly.

Now, there are other clusters in the graph. Can you see them? Growing niches start with small cliques that expand, drawing in satellite cliques and clusters into their connectivity graph, but which are not part of the primary clique. This is normal linking behavior.

This is just an overview. I’ll be exploring the graph theory aspect of link building again in the near future, including having a look at different topographical types of blog networks.

Hey, what’s up with the odd Yahoo Search Blog URLs? Well, no matter — I’m here to tell you about Yahoo’s new feature wherein they will send a page of search results to your mobile phone.

That is, if you’re searching for local information — regular old Web search apparently won’t cut it (which is too bad; sometimes I wouldn’t mind being able to do a quick Web search and then just send the information to my phone.) Anyway, do a search for local information with keywords and then some kind of location information, like paintball 90210. (When I tried searching for movies 90210, that apparently tripped another Yahoo Shortcut and it didn’t work.)

Anyway, when you do a search like that you’ll get a list of local destinations and then a link like Get results for “paintball 90210″ on your mobile phone. Click that link and you’ll get a popup window into which you put your cell phone number. You’ll get a text message with a link to the search results. Just a link, mind you. Not the actual results. I guess they’re trying to save people who might have to pay a lot for text messaging, but the option to get actual content would be nice…

Yahoo also has a regular mobile search, of course, if you want to browse from your phone. It’s at http://m.yahoo.com/.

Catching up… Ancestry announced last month that is has digitized all available Iowa census records from 1836 to 1925. For those of you playing along at home, that’s over 14 million Iowa census records and over 3 million images, covering 28 censuses. Details etc at http://www.ancestry.com .

Bonaparte also played at chess, but very seldom, because he was only a third-rate player, and he did not like to be beaten at that game... - Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne, Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte