In the newest build of leopard, iChat 4.0 has a Google Talk option for account types.

Some people say they suffer ranking problems very soon after adding a sitemap for Google. Could it be that a sitemap.xml fle exposes them to widespread scraping?

Check it out, I won't be an ass and give it out.

Inside Adsense Blog is reminding Publishers about accidental clicks on Adsense ads implemented on their blogs. Adsense publishers must ensure that ads are properly placed on their blogs, specifically,

• not too close with Macromedia flash games,
• under pop-ups or download prompts,
• near site navigation controls.

Ads implemented in the said instances get accidentally clicked by blog or site visitors without necessarily purchasing anything from the advertising sites. And since they are recognized as valid clicks by the Adsense robots, then Google is obliged to pay advertisers the necessary click through rates of the corresponding ads.

To avoid getting categorized as invalid clicks, the Adsense blog reminds publishers to avoid placing ads near interactive elements of their sites. Better yet, read the adsense tips and guidelines again to review your Adsense implementation.

Is Google really losing a lot from these fraudulent clicks of Adsense ads? Or are fraudulent clicks from ads located near interactive site elements really produced invalid clicks to a signigicant degree? Oh well, better follow the rules than risk your adsense publishing account. After all, it’s better to gain a small amount in a legitimate way than get rich the wrong way.

(When you search Google for “she invented”, on the result page you’re asked: <<Did you mean: “he invented”.>> From what we know Google’s spell-checker at its core works on phrases which are popular on the web, as opposed to manual edits.) [Thanks Stephen Tordoff!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

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Silverlight might be Microsoft’s long-term answer to web office competitors like Google*. It’s a cross-browser plug-in that allows developers to create .NET applications – e.g. C# or Python-based – with a bit of a focus on visuals (like Flash). While it’s completely proprietary, and the plug-in hasn’t any real user-base yet (meaning you need to push users through the installation process), this looks pretty cool, and Microsoft’s Silverlight site does an excellent job of explaining the technology through tutorial videos. I’m currently downloading the (mighty big) GUI IDE called MS Visual Studio “Orcas” (along with the design-oriented front-end called Expression Blend) to play around with this. Did any of you develop something with Silverlight already?

*Jeremy Zawodny says Microsoft “decided to change the game – or at least bet that the game is changing. When they deliver a browser-based version of Microsoft Office, you can bet your ass that it’ll be built to run in the .NET CLR that Silverlight offers. It’ll work in Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, and maybe even Opera. On both Macs and Windows boxes.”

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

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Not that this would be surprising...just amusing. "For the third year in a row, the design-driven masters in Cupertino, Calif., lead the pack of creative firms on our list of the World's Most Innovative Companies. Apple manages to dominate any would-be contenders, beating out two-time runner-up Google with more than twice as many votes."

Confidential to Matt: Awwww…. woogie woogie woogie. Thanks for the nice mention . And as you’ll see when you read Information Trapping, I find Amazon’s search engine one of THE MOST FRUSTRATING THINGS ON THE INTERNET. Rant available if you’re interested.

This is the pinkest blog to ever mention one of my books. Go visit it. It’s pink.

Hoovers has The Hoovers Index. What companies are Hoovers subscribers watching? Very interesting.

New database: Festivals in Iowa!

Wireless networking in libraries — the Wiki!

Google Spreadsheets does GeoCoding. Verra nice. Another nice feature on Google — if you enter in a date in Roman numerals (at least all the ones I tried) the first result is a Wikipedia page for that year, so you can translate without having to go to a reference site.

I feel compelled to write up any site that makes me laugh. Berkeley and Craig Newmark (he of Craigslist) have gotten together to create an online game that points a camera out in Craig’s backyard, takes pictures of, and identifies wild birds. You can play Cone Sutro Forest at http://cone.berkeley.edu/ .

The first order of business is registering with the site, which requires a username, e-mail address, and password. (Note that you have to come up with a username, but when you sign in you use your e-mail address. Whatever…) Once you’re registered and have confirmed your registration, you’ll log in and be presented with a closeup view of some bird feeders and a wider view of Craig Newmark’s back yard (which is absolutely beautiful.) You’ll need to have Java for this to work.

You can move the camera around by drawing boxes and by using a set of arrow controls. I found the arrow controls easiest — I ended up drawing boxes all over the place and not figuring out how to aim them at a particular area. There are also multiple people controlling the camera — if there are multiple people playing, you can just watch people move the camera around and focus on birds (hopefully they’re better at it than I am.)

Hang out and look for birds. The video is really good. Watching the site for 15 minutes or so I saw plenty of birds, though sometimes they came and left before I could get them into focus. (I imagine with several people playing this could get to be a problem — everybody spots the bird at the same time and jumps on the camera controls.)

Find a bird? Zoom in (or let somebody else do it) and click on the TAKE SNAPSHOT button. A picture of the bird ends up in your gallery page, where you can go back and review it. You can take up to ten pictures a day but can clear out some pictures on your “daily roll” to make room for others. If you can identify the bird in your picture, click on it and slowly type in the name (so the database for the site can make a suggestion.)

Your My Gallery pictures also end up in the Public Gallery, so be sure to junk blurry/empty/bad pictures. Browse the picture gallery to see what other folks have found — I saw several sparrows, jays, hummingbirds, and at least two upside-down squirrels.

This isn’t going to be for everybody, but I was very impressed by the technology and there were enough birds flying in and out to keep me entertained.

"The screen shot purports to show Google testing a new layout for their search results. Of note is the introduction of a left navigation bar that directly links to related Google search options, with aesthetically pleasing gradient dividers breaking up the search results from the search box and newly listed options."

Catching up … Google recently announced that it was changing the name of Froogle to Google Product Search. Apparently not enough people were getting the pun, or something. Meanwhile, Google Catalogs, which I rather liked when it was launched, continues to quietly molder away in a corner. Unfortunate!

Anyway, the reason I’m bringing this up is to offer a couple of tips to people who dislike searching Google Product Search as much as I do — or rather did, since I found a way to alleviate the pain. I used to find Google Product Search hard to use, either bringing me too many results or too little. I found that using just one syntax — intitle: — made finding things a lot easier.

Usually what I do is put the general idea of what I’m looking for in the intitle: and then any additional keywords in the rest of the query. So if I’m looking for a red denim jacket, I might try red denim intitle:jacket . Cuts down the search results a lot.

You might want to explore http://www.google.com/advanced_product_search , though I find that the searching by price area is really a crap shoot, especially since you’re also searching eBay auctions. Sometimes the prices are really wacky…

There’s a metasearch for everything else, so why not. yoName, at http://www.yoname.com , allows you to put in a username, e-mail address, or first and last name, and find people across several different social networks. It’s in beta.

I first tried the search with a friend’s name. I know he’s on MySpace. yoName ran the search across several networks, including Xanga, MySpace, LinkedIn, and Friendster. Here’s the funny part — yoName announced potential matches on a few of the networks but for MySpace, announced confidently that it had found my friend. It hadn’t — it found somebody else with the same name. I didn’t see a way to say “Wrong one, try again.”

It gets even more complicated if you’re using a more general keyword. I know a lot of bands have spots on MySpace, so I tried doing a search for Wolfmother. Sure, I got Wolfmother’s MySpace page — and tens of thousands of other pages that mentioned Wolfmother, videos by Wolfmother, etc etc. So unless you search for a very specific name, you might get some extraneous results.

Enough crabbing, let’s talk about the good parts. When you get a set of results from yoName, you have the option to quickly preview the first ten results in-page. It doesn’t look like you can view all the results though — and if you’re only looking for a single person, why would you want to? Sometimes the previews are a little misaligned because of banner ads, etc, but they’re easy to read.

I don’t use MySpace, but just by doing some experimental searching with yoName I got a sense of the huge cross-section of people (and musical groups) that are on there. Possibly frustrating if you’re trying to do an absolute search, interesting as a browser/explorer.

This post came from ResearchBuzz, a site with news and information about online data collections. Visit us at ResearchBuzz.com .

I was arguing with my girlfriend about women not inventing anything useful. In an attempt to prove me wrong she Google "She invented" only to have ask Did you mean "He invented"

I love finding good music mashups, and MusicMesh is definitely one of the better ones that I've come across lately.

You've got a lot to look at here: just type in your favorite artist's name and you'll be treated to a smattering of related albums plus what you're looking for, as well as YouTube vids, track listings, user reviews, Wikipedia entries, etc. I got pretty distracted following the related music suggestions; they seem to be pretty well thought out as compared to other music services that in my experience can put some pretty wild stuff together. Worth a look and a listen.— Wendy Boswell

Now you can use an invitation for Google Docs & Spreadsheets more than one time, so I decided to test this feature by letting you edit a document called "Define:Google". You should write your own definition for Google or edit the already existing text, like in a wiki.

You can edit the document here if you have a Google Account. Unfortunately, only the first 200 people who sign in to the document can edit it (this is a limitation in Google Docs).

The document is public and will be updated after every change.

Van Jacobson gave a Google Tech Talk on some of his ideas of how a modern, global network could work more effectively, and with more trust in the data which changes many hands on its journey to its final destination. Watch the talk on Google's site The man is very smart and his ideas are fascinating. He has the experience and knowledge to see the big picture and what can be done to solve some of the new problems we have. He starts with the beginning of the phone networks and then goes on to briefly explain the origins of the ARPAnet and its evolution into the Internet we use today. He explains the problems that were faced while using the phone networks for data, and how they were solved by realizing that a new problem had risen and needed a new, different solution. He then goes to explain how the Internet has changed significantly from the time it started off in research centres, schools, and government offices into what it is today (lots of identical bytes being redundantly pushed to many consumers, where broadcast would be more appropriate and efficient).

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If you research the Karamay fire incident in Google China, the results will be partly censored by Google. Karamay is a city where a theatre fire incident took place in 1994, killing hundreds of people. Depending on your search query, the results will show fully, or be censored (due to local laws and policies, as Google disclaims in some places). For instance, a web search for “Karamay” in traditional Chinese letters will be censored. The page missing in Google is likely an article from Epoch Times about the fire, as it shows in Google.com Chinese results for the same search. A search for “Karamay fire” in simplified Chinese shows no censorship in the top 30 web results, but only in later results. The same simplified Chinese search in Google Images China however returns censored results on the first page (a PeaceHall.com article is missing). Censorship on Google News is undisclosed by Google – except for a blog post from 2004 – so it’s not easy to find out about it (perhaps one can compare results with Google News Hong Kong). Google Book Search China self-censorship is also undisclosed by Google, and Google does not give more details to the press regarding these issues.

Times Online explains the background of this incident:

<<WHEN the first flames flared around the theatre’s stage, many of the excited Chinese children watching must have thought it was all part of the show.

Within minutes 288 of them were dead, a tragedy that has haunted their parents for more than a decade but was forgotten by many as China began its headlong rush to prosperity.

It is not forgotten any more, thanks to a band of internet campaigners who have exposed the shameful truth: the schoolchildren perished because they were ordered to sit down in their theatre seats so that Communist party officials could leave first.

The revelations have prompted millions of Chinese to discuss the incident in recent weeks and forced the state-controlled media to acknowledge it for the first time.

The facts were suppressed for more than 12 years until Chen Yaowen, a reporter for China Central Television, posted on his website a documentary that he had made about the disaster but which the censors had banned.>>

[Via Reddit.]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

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Mashable presents 23 different ways for you to download a YouTube video to your hard-drive – “where evil attorneys won’t look,” as they put it. Some of the sites mentioned:

• YouTubeX
• KeepVid
• VideoDownloader
• YouTube Downloads
• Zamzar
• YouTubia
• VidGrab

[Via Digg.]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

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An anonymous reader writes "The BBC is reporting that the English Premier Football League has launched a lawsuit against YouTube and its owner Google, claiming unspecified damages. The league is sitting on high-profile content valued at $5.4 billion over the next 3 years in a recent series of auctions. This will be the second major suit against YouTube since Google's purchase."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If you use a lot of command line tools and you'd like one for searching Google, this site could be an option. You won't get an application that runs in the command line, but a search box that follows you wherever you go and lets you enter arguments that specify the type of search and the query. For example, to find images of cute cats, you'll need to type:

/images cute cats

or

/img cute cats

The "command line" at the bottom of the page is barely noticeable and saves you one click and one page load, assuming you search from your browser's search box and you don't have Google Image Search as an option.

If you are a fan of mind mapping but wish you could hook up with the brain power of someone else too, then MindMeister is for you.

Basically, MindMeister comes with your standard mind mapping features, with the added goody of being able to invite and add people to help you plan The Next Bit Thing. There's two plans: Basic and Premium ($4/month); I think probably most of us would do just fine with the basic version. — Wendy Boswell

Google AdSense has a new homepage that looks the same as Google AdWords homepage and offers more information about the service.

The old homepage, still available here:


The new homepage:


The redesign also reflects that AdSense started to migrate users to Google Accounts. "When you log into your account, you may be greeted by a screen (...) asking you to upgrade your login to a Google Account. If you like the email address you're already using, in most cases you'll be able to upgrade it to a Google Account and keep the same login and password. However, if you use another email address for other Google products like Gmail and Picasaweb, you already have a Google Account and you can finally use the same login for AdSense."

Google AdSense was launched almost four years ago, when Google didn't have an integrated authentication system and most of the services didn't require registration.

There is a brand new prototype that appears to build on the last one we talked about a few days ago.  The new one looks similar, but it has an added sidebar that makes it easier to view results for other types of Google searches. The last time a prototype was found, my instructions for [...]

Plaintiffs including English soccer's Premier League sue Google's YouTube for copyright infringement, the second such legal challenge to the popular video site in two months.

Feel like a little bit of shared file goodness? Try G2P.org, a site that makes it easier to use Google to find what you're looking for.

We've written up how you can use Google as your personal Napster before, but it's somewhat brain-hurting to remember those long search strings. G2P aims to solve that problem:

G2P (Google to Person) uses some crafty Google searches to help locate open directories or otherwise shared files. These searches are nothing secret (In fact, take a look at the results, so you can see how it is done. However, it is much easier to remember g2p.org than these complex searches.

Give it a go; I found some good stuff this way, and the results are relatively spam-free. — Wendy Boswell

mattnyc99 writes "In his weekly tech column for Popular Mechanics, Glenn Derene predicts that everyone will have a home server to network their house within 10 years—rendering Apple's .Mac accounts and Google's productivity software useless. As prices for products like HP's MediaSmart Server drop and as processing power becomes more pervasive, Derene says, 'you'll ultimately need a centralized server—that high-powered traffic cop—to coordinate the non-stop exchange of information between your new multitude of devices.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In February, Google started to test an interesting ad for Gmail that was actually a Google gadget. Now MediaPost reports that Google will allow everyone to advertise in the content network using gadgets. "Although Google executives revealed the beta during a marketing summit for the auto industry, the Gadget Ads will be available to all ad categories by this summer's planned launch."

The gadgets can already be added to iGoogle, Google Desktop and any web page. Their main advantage is they're interactive and content-rich, while being easy to code. Google offers libraries that let you get data from feeds, add tabs, drag & drop and localize a gadget.

Google will host the gadgets ads and offer the option to run the ads with CPC or CPM pricing. Using the integration with Google Analytics, advertisers will be able to measure the performance of each feature of the gadget.

Nial Kennedy says that Google strives to offer more options for advertisers and publishers. "By the end of 2007 Google will offer its traditional text link advertising, display advertising, and interactive gadgets to its huge network of advertisers. AdSense publishers can select the interactive marketing unit that best suits their need, and the Google bidding system can select the most profitable ad content."

Although Gmail, Gcal, Google Reader, et al. are great apps, they're not perfect. Here's what Google needs to do to improve.

Rack's lack of a ponytail of transparency

Google confirmed the deaths of more penguins this week by admitting to a mega data center in Oklahoma.…

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

This week's best posts include:

• Lifehacker Code: Swept Away (Windows)
  "...a simple system tray utility that automatically minimizes applications that you aren't using."
• LH Top 10: USB thumb drive tricks
  "Is that a gigabyte in your pocket? And are you putting it to good use?"
• How to stream your music to any PC
  "Thanks to broadband, the internet's pipes are now fat enough to ferry your music just about anywhere."
• Set up a healthy, usable workspace
  "...a few important pointers for setting up a healthy and usable workspace to keep you effortlessly and painlessly cranking out work."
• Getting Things Done with Google Notebook
  "...one of Google Labs' less-hyped applications, Notebook, is very well-suited to instant capture and easy processing of your GTD lists."
• The multi-monitor havens
  "A surprising number of readers have displayed a surprising amount of screen real estate on their desks, so this week we're featuring the coolest multi-monitor/multi-computer setups that readers have submitted so far."
• Download of the Day: Madotate (Windows)
  "...manage open windows by way of a nifty 3D barn-door effect."
• How to install a RAID on your MacBook Pro
  "This machine is really much faster now."
• Download of the Day: Vibe Streamer MP3 server (Windows)
  "...a slick little MP3 server, one that supports multiple users and even groups."
• Ask Lifehacker: How do I store my data on a separate partition in Windows Vista?
  "There are some computer gurus out there (especially the Linux variety) who recommend you put your data on a separate partition from your OS..."

Reader Paladin launches Firefox with a set of his favorite sites open in tabs from Windows' Run box:

When I sit down at my school computer lab (they're configured for programming, so the Run box works and Firefox is installed) I hit Win+R, then type "firefox gmail lifehacker consumerist userfriendly.org". This pulls up Firefox, with a tab for Lifehacker, GMail, Consumerist, and User Friendly (a webcomic).

Check out some more ways to work with groups of tabs in the 'fox - like setting multiple homepages. Thanks, Paladin! —Gina Trapani

Web site CogMap lets you create and edit organizational charts in a drag-and-drop, wiki-like environment.

If you've ever worked in a large company that was sorely missing any sort of good org chart where you never knew who did what, or even who your boss was, putting together a CogMap chart for your own organization might be a good idea. They're collaboratively editable and version controlled, so the charts aren't set in stone, and you can change them with the organization. You can also check out the org charts of popular companies like Google or Microsoft, which is less useful and more fun. From the looks of things, CogMap is a more friendly, usable version of Forbes' OrgChartWiki. — Adam Pash

Dion Almaer created an interface for browsing Google Tech Talks, a series of presentations and conversations about interesting topics that happen at Googleplex.

"One of the great parts of working at Google is that every day there are tech talks that I really want to listen too. More than I can spend the time to actually see. Last week I talked about Philip Wadler of Monad / Generics / general functional fame. Yesterday, Linus showed us his strong opinions. Next week, G. LaForge is in to chat about Groovy. This is a strong subset of the great talks. We record these talks, and place them on Google Video for anyone to see. This is great content, and most don't know it exists," writes Dion on his blog.


Another good think about the tech talks is that most of them have closed captions, so you can search inside them, not only in the description.

Related:
Google Tech Talks @ Google Video

Rumors are circulating that Microsoft is looking to purchase Yahoo for $50 billion.  If the deal actually went through (Microsoft tried this in 2006 as well), would it put significant pressure on their business?  I can already hear Eric Schmidt saying something along the lines of "Competition is good — in fact we welcome it" [...]

<<"In the sixth century BC the philosopher-poet Epimenides, himself a Cretan, reportedly wrote: The Cretans are always liars.”
– The Liar Paradox>>

It’s interesting to see that Wikipedia has a whole extensive (and good) article devoted to the subject of... criticism of Wikipedia.

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

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Google-owned YouTube is now sharing ad revenues with a selection of popular YouTube content-creators, as Danny Sullivan points out. YouTube names a couple of users but they don’t show the full list (perhaps it’s a small selection right now). I wonder why this is invite-only – you’re supposed to “express interest” in their “partnership lead form” (where’s that?) – and why they don’t just give every uploader a share of the ad revenue, scaling the pay-out with the views the uploader’s videos received (along with the typical minimum pay-out of say, $100)?

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

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There's a new link to Google Scholar in the list of services from the "more" box. Google's search engines for scholarly papers was available on the homepage only if you visited Google from your school.

Google Scholar includes a big list of scientific publications and some of them aren't available in Google's main index. "Google Scholar covers peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts, and other scholarly literature from all broad areas of research. You'll find works from a wide variety of academic publishers and professional societies, as well as scholarly articles available across the web."

The Illegal Subset of the Integers writes "According to Ars Technica, Congress has sent letters to 19 universities identified by the RIAA and MPAA has havens for copyright infringement. In it, they not only seek to discover what these universities are doing to dissuade students from infringing activities, but give the implied threat. House Judiciary Committee member Lamar Smith (R-TX) was quoted as saying, 'If we do not receive acceptable answers, Congress will be forced to act.' One wonders, though, what the universities are supposed to do when international disrespect for imaginary property rights is so widespread that there are currently over two million hits on Google for a certain oft-posted illegal number, up from the three hundred thousand hits from sometime yesterday."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is resuming its pursuit of Yahoo in order to become a viable competitor to Google, the New York Post reports.

Comic book writer Alan Moore explains the difference between idea and plot in his essay Writing for Comics from 1985. This distinction is not limited to comic books, but covers the whole creative process. Alan writes:

<<[W]e may as well get the more intangible and abstract element out of the way first before processing to the finer and more precise aspects of the craft. A good starting point would perhaps be the aspect that lies at the very heart of any creative process: the idea.

The idea is what the story is about; not the plot of the story, or the unfolding of events within that story, but what the story is essentially about. As an example from my own work (not because it’s a particularly good example but because I can speak with more authority about it than I can about the work of other people) I would cite issue #40 of Swamp Thing, “The Curse.” This story was about the difficulties endured by women in masculine societies, using the common taboo of menstruation as the central motif. This was not the plot of the story – the plot concerned a young married woman moving into a new home built upon the site of an old Indian lodge and finding herself possessed by the dominating spirit that still resided there, turning her into a form of werewolf. I hope the distinction here is clear between idea and plot, because it’s an important one and one ignored by too many writers. Most comic book stories have plots in which the sole concern is the struggle between two or more antagonists. The resolution of the struggle, usually involving some deus ex machina display of a superpower, is the resolution of the plot as well. Beyond the most vague and pointless banality like “Good will always triumph over evil” there is no real central idea in the majority of comics, other than the iea of conflict as interesting in itself.

Naturally, the idea needn’t always be a deep, meaningful and significant one. There are lots of different kinds of ideas, ranging from the “What if...?" ideas that lie behind most science-fiction writing to the idea of everyday life as seen in the work of Harvey Pekar or Eddie Campbell. “What if..." ideas are the basis for most short science-fiction stories of the “future shock” variety, examples from my own work being short five-pge items like “The Reversible Man” (What if people perceived time as running the opposite way?), “A Place in the Sun” (What if it were possible for human beings to live on the sun?”) or “Grawks Bearing Gifts” (What if a group of coarse and vulgar aliens did to our society what our society did to the Red Indians and other aboriginal tribes?). The nature of the idea isn’t really important, what is important is simply that there is an idea in there somewhere. It can be silly and frivolous, perhaps just a single gag idea, or it can be complex and profound. The only thing that the idea should definitely be is interesting on some level or another – whether as a brief entertainment designed to hold the attention for five minutes or a lengthier and more thoughtful work intended to engage the mind long after the comic has been put down.>>

Alan goes on to describe where ideas come from (they “germinate at a point of cross-fertilization between one’s artistic influences and one’s own experience”), and to elaborate on why you don’t need to always start with an idea, but that you may be able to introduce it a later point. The whole essay is definitely worth a read, if not for the very specific discussions of the comic book craft, which feels a bit dated – Alan admits as much in a new afterword – but for the general concepts like above, which tell you much about the creative process as well as the kind of thinking that goes into the work of a very creative person.

[Photo of Alan Moore Creative Commons-licensed by Rachel 2006.]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

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Based on the Google Suggest result above, I’m concluding that the luckiest person on earth has a passport, six pack abs, a partner who loves them, and a book published. Congrats, whoever you are.

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

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Google Calendar has expanded its notification options to include individual events--including those not on your primary calendar. Here's the scoop according to Google Operating System:

For each calendar, you can set what notifications you want: pop-up window inside Google Calendar, email, SMS, or a combination of all of these. Just click on the arrow next to each calendar from the left sidebar and select "Notifications," then add up to 5 event reminders. In order to receive SMS messages, you need verify your phone number first.

Nice! You can pluck events from family, co-worker and public calendars and set up notifications for just the ones you want. Unfortunately, this new capability seems to be on hold temporarily, as it doesn't appear on my calendar, and several commenters to the above-referenced post have mentioned that it appeared and then disappeared. But it's also mentioned on The Official Google Blog, so it will undoubtedly return soon. (If you have updates, share 'em in the comments.) —Rick Broida

An undergraduate-oriented explanation of the beautiful and simple linear algebra that lies behind an important facet of Google's PageRank algorithm. The page has some demo code.

Google's YouTube will begin paying top users for the video content they submit under a new revenue sharing partner program that will let the creators share in AdSense revenue generated by their videos.

“A select group of content creators will get promotion on the YouTube platform, and we will help them monetize their content,” Jamie Byrne, VP of marketing at YouTube, told Om Malik on Thursday. “This will help erase the stigma around the user-created content, and, to be honest, these guys are media entities in their own right.”

In a post on the YouTube Blog, the company said it is extending its partner program, previously only available to big media companies like CBS, Sony BMG and UMG and the NBA, to include "thousands of mid-sized to large content creators who range from video game companies to universities to production houses."

"Up until now there’s been a distinction between the content you create and the content created by YouTube's professional content partners. We want to start changing some of the perception here. Which is why we’re adding several of the most popular and prolific original content creators from the YouTube community to our partnership program."

The big news this morning is that Microsoft is looking to acquire Yahoo for $50 billion. Over at Search Engine Land, Danny also covers the possible merger. Ironically, DigitalPoint members are hoping that this ends the the Google search monopoly:...

A few days ago, Danny spotted Google Product Search Results in the regular Google SERPs. The problem with this is that Google has asked others not to do this in the past, but they apparently weren't practicing what they preached....

A DigitalPoint Forums poll is currently open that asks the obvious question given Google's recent press: Is Google going to become a search monopoly? The results (currently) are not so surprising: Yes, that's where we're heading.2064.52% No, I don't think...

Google as film critic

Google clip dump YouTube is to trial revenue sharing with normal users by adding some of its favourite uploaders to its partnership programme.…

Today’s news on the possible acquisition of Yahoo by Microsoft is red hot, hot enough to increase Yahoo’s stock value by over 18% as of 10:30 am.

With reports of Microsoft offering a $50 Billion buyout of Yahoo, and other reports brewing of a possible merger, the question is, would such a venture be beneficial to Microsoft or Yahoo?

What does Yahoo have to gain? What about Microsoft?

Do you think it would be intelligent of Yahoo to accept such a merger or takeover? Should Microsoft continue to pursue Yahoo?

Please voice your opinion in the comments below.

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Over at Wolf-Howl, Michael Gray tackles the question: Can W3C compliance and accessibility impact your Search Engine Optimization?

From my experience having a site that is 100% code compliant doesn’t give you any SEO benefit. That said throwing up a page with complete disregard for valid code is looking for trouble.

If you put your page into a validator and it comes back with hundreds of errors you may be looking for trouble.

Depending on what your errors are you may have made it harder for a bot to crawl your website.

However if you can get it down to handful of errors, it might not be worth the time obsessing over those last few details.

Read the full post and comment conversation at : Does W3C compliance and accessibility impact your Search Engine Optimization

Alexa.com is now selling sponsor boxes in the 125×125 graphic format which have been made popular by blogs such as Search Engine Journal, TechCrunch, FederatedMedia and Mashable.

The ad spots are sold at a rate card price of $15,000 per month, which is somewhere around a $.50 CPM.

Alexa is one of the first major sites I’ve seen which is not a blog running these sponsor boxes, which goes to show they are becoming a more affordable and effective form of online advertising and brand building.

Given that Alexa attracts mostly bloggers and webmasters into its traffic ranking stats and service, the use of these ad spots only makes perfect sense.

We've seen plenty of unfounded speculation lately about Google's plans to acquire NBC, or Dow Jones. Now we've got another rumor that Microsoft is asking Yahoo to consider a merger. It's being reported by both the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal, both citing unnamed sources.

The two companies had preliminary talks last year, but that was before Microsoft built its own search ad system, and Yahoo upgraded to Panama. Now there's not a whole lot that a merger would offer either company, at least on the search side. On the content side, it might make a bit more sense, since the two networks draw different demographics. It's not likely that anything will come of these rumors, but stranger things have happened when competitors start getting scared, and merger-mania strikes an industry.

UPDATE: The idea is being discussed all over the blogosphere today, as you can see from the Techmeme coverage.

Forrester's Charlene Li says it's a great idea (on paper at least) for Microsoft, but not so much for Yahoo. She goes on to say it will never work. "Given the messiness of a full out merger – and also the limited benefit it would bring to Yahoo! – I believe that a merger won't be in the works anytime soon. More logical would be partnership agreements where the strengths of each company are shared."

Former Wall Street Analyst Henry Blodgett, in his Internet Outsider blog, says that if the two decide to merge, the best plan would be an immediate spin-off of the combined entity. "If it doesn't, both Yahoo and MSN will die," he says. That seems to defeat the purpose of a merger, though, as Nicholas Carr notes in his Rough Type blog: "Microsoft has come to believe, for instance, that advertising will be central to the software business in the future. It's not going to spin off its ad networks or search functions."

UPDATE 2: The opinions keep coming, with the majority of people appearing to think this deal makes sense on some levels, but would never happen for various reasons:

A DigitalPoint Forums thread discusses a blog post by the Google AdSense team about how to avoid accidental clicks on campaigns. Ads placed in the following areas are more susceptible to be clicked, according to the Google AdSense team, and...

"Stung by the loss of Internet advertising firm DoubleClick to Google last month, Microsoft has intensified its pursuit of a deal with Yahoo!, asking the company to re-enter formal negotiations, The Post has learned."

Google Docs improved the way you share your documents with other people. Now you can send invitations to mailing lists, but only 200 people can sign in to the document. Another limitation is that only 10 people can edit the document at the same time. Only 50 people can edit a spreadsheet simultaneously, but there's no limit for the number of people you are allowed to share the spreadsheet.

If you select "Invitations may be used by anyone" when you share a file, the same invitation can be used multiple times. For example, each group from Yahoo or Google Groups has an email address for posting messages (Google Groups displays it at the bottom of the group's homepage).

There's a new file format for exporting documents: plain text, especially useful if you use Google Docs to edit code collaboratively.

For Hebrew and Arabic documents and spreadsheets, you can make the page text align right-to-left in the settings.

CNet’s Elinor Mills interviewed Stacy Savides Sullivan, who has the exotic job title “Chief culture officer, Google.” Basically, she tries to ensure that new employees are fitting into the Google culture, and that existing employees are kept happy within that culture as well. Stacy hands out a sample question for job interviews (more to see how someone thinks, whether they’re pragmatic about getting a job done, and what steps they go through to solve something), I’ll pass it on to all of you: “How many bread boxes could you fit in an airplane?”

[Via Valleywag.]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

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Lonelygirl15 among video contributors sustaining "large, persistent audiences" the Google site is offering a partnership.

Today the search and stock market news channels are buzzing with talk of a possible merger between Microsoft and Yahoo, which would see the two technology powerhouses teaming to take on Google in the world of search, advertising and beyond. It is also being reported that Microsoft has offered $50 Billion to Yahoo in an effort to acquire the company.

According to Kevin Delaney of the Wall Street Journal, Microsoft and Yahoo executives are weighing the possibility of merging the two companies, a year after Microsoft originally approached Yahoo in takeover talks.

In what appear to be early-stage discussions, executives at Microsoft and Yahoo are taking a fresh look at a merger of the two companies or some kind of match-up that would pair their companies’ respective strengths, say people familiar with the situation.

The renewed talks are a sign of the continued growth in Google’s power and problems over the past year with in-house efforts at Yahoo and Microsoft to ride a boom in Internet advertising. Meanwhile, management changes at both companies could help pave the way for a pairing that a year ago couldn’t happen.

The merger would result in a search technology which would own cose to 39% of the search engine share, trailing Google’s 48% hold (comScore). Additionally, in the world of Search Marketing, Yahoo and Microsoft have a rich past together, as Yahoo! Search Marketing / Overture supplied MSN Search with sponsored listings for years.

Microsoft launced its own sponsored search offering, adCenter, but the long term relationship and the launch of Yahoo’s Panama search marketing interface could lead to the two companies taking the best of each offering, and creating a total web, TV, mobile and search oriented advertising system, especially with Yahoo’s latest acquisition of the Right Media ad exchange network which rivals Google’s DoubleClick acquisition.

The merger talks even have Wall Street jumping as Bloomberg reports that Yahoo shares have increased over 18% in value in pre-market trading.

""Internet users interested in Belgian news and users of Google's search engine may have noticed today that the Web sites of the Belgian French and German-language daily newspapers ... are again referenced on the search engine," a joint statement issued by Google and Copiepresse said."

Windows only: The PC Decrapifier removes crapware--the system-hogging, usually unwanted programs vendors stuff onto new PCs.

You know the drill: You fire up your new machine, only to find the desktop littered with icons and a deluge of pop-ups to install this, register that and update the other. The PC Decrapifier, which is a simple executable that doesn't even require installation, can detect upwards of 50 common programs and optionally remove any of them. Of course, once they're gone, they're gone (unless you have a system-restore CD that includes the shovelware), so be selective about what you delete.

I don't like The PC Decrapifier--I lurve it. It's simple, effective and free. And it's designed for Windows XP and Vista systems; the program very likely won't work with older PCs, according to the developer. Got a crapware sob-story to share? You know where: the comments! —Rick Broida

Michael Arrington has the scoop on Yahoo closing down its Yahoo Photos service, and integrating its users and photos into Flickr.

The service will be shut down in favor of the newer and more social Flickr, which they acquired in March of 2005. There has long been an issue at Yahoo where newer services have competed with older services, and Yahoo has finally taken some strong action to getting their house in order with a consistent set of product offerings.

Yahoo is not forcing transition to Flickr - instead, users are being given the option of choosing among a number of top photo sharing sites. If you are a current Yahoo! Photos user, you will be given the option to export all your photos into Flickr (a one-click process) or you will be able to export to a few other services such as Photobucket, Snapfish, Kodak Gallery or Shutterfly

Yahoo Photos is the largest photo sharing site online, with 2 billion stored photos, but according to Arrington and Yahoo, Flickr is growing at a more rapid pace and has more traffic than Yahoo Photos.

Yahoo Photos was also never really designed to be a social photo sharing site, instead a more intimate online destination for sharing photos with friends, family, and ordering prints.

Interesting that Yahoo is choosing the Flickr brand over the Yahoo! name in this decision and it makes me wonder if Yahoo will decide to further brand Flickr as a Yahoo service, something they are kind of doing now very quietly.

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Yahoo and Microsoft are Google Inc’s biggest competitors... now just imagine what happens if the two joined.

[Thanks Mathias Schindler!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

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A DigitalPoint Forums post links to an interview Eric Enge had with Google's Search Evangelist, Adam Lasnik. In the interview, Adam discusses paid links, nofollow links, duplicate content and crawling, validated pages and how they are handled by the algorithm,...

JOHN BATTELLE, the former Wired editor who wrote the widely-thumbed tome on Google called The Search, has an interesting snippet about that old Google wish-it-was, Yahoo.

Search engine Exalead has a new search type especially tailored to Wikipedia. You’ll get thumbnails straight from the images the Wikipedia pages use, as well as related search pulled from the Wikipedia entry. E.g. a search for Google (with the expanded option selected from the top right) results in:

[Thanks Mathias Schindler!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

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Finally, in recognition of selected popular members’ contribution to its growing video content, YouTube is elevating the status of selected users to Partners. If you are an avid YouTube user, you might be familiar with members such as, LisaNova, renetto, HappySlip, smosh, and valsartdiary. Well, they are the chosen YouTube members who will be given the rights to participate in YouTube’s revenue sharing and promotional activities.

The official YouTube Blog has this to say regarding the members’ new privileges:

Participating user-partners will be treated as other content partners and will have the ability to control the monetization of the videos they create. Once they’ve selected a video to be monetized, we’ll place advertising adjacent to their content so participating user-partners can reap the rewards from their work.

How much these members will earn from the ad revenue sharing program depends on the traffic that they create from the videos they download.

I think this is not related with Adsense, because if it does, YouTube might as well share Adsense revenues to other members as well. Or is this a prelude to such events happening in the future. That we will have to see.

I continue to be fascinated by Ask and its mix of innovative ideas (Ask X, Ask City) and guts (the “information underground“). I have often put myself in CEO Jim Lanzone’s position and tried to think how one might get consumers’ attention and grow usage. It’s a very challenging problem and I don’t envy him.

Today, the Wall Street Journal (sub req’d) writes about the forthcoming Ask ad campaign:

The multimillion-dollar campaign, which follows a similar effort last year, is expected to last a year and is designed to raise consumer awareness about what the company considers its secret sauce: Its algorithm, or the formula a search engine uses to determine which Web pages are most relevant to a particular query.

Ask, which is owned by IAC/InterActiveCorp of New York, plans to drum up interest in its algorithm through the ads, in which people slip the word into casual conversation with phrases such as “Do you have a lame algorithm?” or “I was all algorithm-ed out.”

Algorithm “is a funny word that people don’t hear every day,” said Jim Lanzone, chief executive of Ask.com. This phase of the campaign won’t go into details about how the algorithm works, he said. “The point is to introduce technology in a nontechnical way.”

But some observers wonder how widely the ads — designed by Crispin, Porter + Bogusky of Miami, a unit of MDC Partners Inc. — will appeal to consumers. The concept of an algorithm may be too nerdy for the average consumer, said Charlene Li, an analyst with Forrester Research. “Most people would not know what an algorithm is,” she said.

I’ve been seeing the billboards for several weeks in the SF Bay Area: “The algorithm killed Jeeves.” While industry insiders know what an algorithm is, Forrester’s Charlene Li (quoted above) is absolutely correct — ordinary people do not.

As he did in this Forbes Interview, IAC’s monetization guru Peter Horan would say:

We’re already noticing the marketing efforts. There are billboards on the Highway 101 in San Francisco that say “The Algorithm Killed Jeeves.” Across the country there are signs that say “The Algorithm is from Jersey” and “The Algorithm Constantly Finds Jesus.” In the U.K. there are signs supporting a mock uprising against an unnamed dominant search engine. It’s hard to tell, but these are all from IAC. What’s it all about?

Horan: The thing we’re trying to address is that people are sleep-searching. They’re not thinking about which search engine they’re using, and of course that benefits Google. We want to cause consumers to think about another option. The campaigns here and in the U.K. was designed to be intriguing and disruptive.

We want to highlight our search algorithm because somewhere, deep in the heart of a search engine, is a difference. Ours is fundamentally different from Google, and we want to put the spotlight on that. What you’re seeing is the first few weeks of a longer-term campaign. It’s typical to start a campaign with a teaser phase. That’s what this is. The branded elements are coming soon. Soon we’ll go heavily into answering these questions. It’s the opening shots of a war.

As Horan and Ask CEO Lanzone point out, this is designed to get attention, which it does, before going on to other claims and arguments. That part of the campaign will be interesting to see because if it tries to say that Ask is better based on some “technical” arguments it’s not going to work.

Depending on the market segment being addressed the messaging has to be adjusted, but it all must be clever, funny and simple. Anything that gets into the mechanics of search will be lost on consumers.

Everyone over 30 might want to see how using Ask is more effective or efficient or simpler; basically how it “works better.”

Anyone under 30 (maybe 25) would probably be more persuaded by emotional arguments that go to self image (think of the old Apple “Think Different” campaign).

Speaking of Apple, Ask can take a lesson from Apple’s current commercials (vs. PC), which are very entertaining and reinforce the Mac’s image of simplicity and effectiveness. They do so by personifying the Mac and PC and putting them in very humorous discussions and situations. There’s also demographic messaging in the ads.

They just work and they don’t really get into any “under the hood” debates. If they do touch on mechanics, they do it in a simplified and amusing way. Ask should take a page from Apple’s playbook and do something similar. However the ads have already been shot and the media buys made. We’ll see if they are effective.

Meanwhile, Yahoo is doing its own multimillion dollar ad campaign “Be a Better . . .“

When it was first launched last June, I wasn't a huge fan of the Google Gadget Designer — it seemed to defy all convention when it came to user experience.  Properties weren't sorted alphabetically, tabs had to be closed through an awkward menu item, and several other things. The newest version of the gadget designer [...]

Google is constantly confronting portions of their user base with layout prototypes in order to collect usage data. If you want to reproduce above search layout, which is a mixture of several layouts tested in the past, go to www.google.com/ncr, enter the following in the browser address bar, and hit return:

javascript:document.cookie="PREF=ID=9d04e374b01fd77c:TM=1177187296:LM=1178229339:DV=AA:GM=1:IG=3:S=Iiqx5SsQA0p79zvy;path=/; domain=.google.com"

(As usual, to revert back to the old Google version, just delete your Google cookies.)

[Thanks Phillip B.!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

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Gmail's translation messages include a lot of references to features that were tested and might be released to the public. Among them:

* Skip spam classifier as an action for a filter.

* Information about your login: "This account is open in N other locations", "Last account activity".

* Attach inline images.

* View attached images as a slideshow.

* Multi-user conversations in Gmail Chat.

* Integration with AIM in Gmail Chat.


{ Via Google Blogoscoped. }

There have been a number of attempts to create a specialised search engine for kids. Yahoo did it - once Yahooligans now Yahoo Kids beta. Ask nearly changed to a kids site completely - or so the rumors go....

A new entry to the field is Quintura for Kids.

The space is a tough one and I think possibly one that has overreached itself. My 14-year-old uses Google... she would be insulted if she were told to use the kids' search engine.

Kids search engines should be for 3-10 year olds. After that they expect to be treated like young adults and the allure of cartoon drawings and puzzles just doesn't cut it anymore.

URL Snooper is a free Windows software that lets you monitor your network connections and see the addresses of all the files that are downloaded to your computer and all the addresses from HTML files.

The program was created to identify the URLs of audio/video streams. "Many links to streaming audio and video that you come across on the web are hidden behind JavaScript or ActiveX scripts. Because of this, it is sometimes very difficult to figure out the actual URLs that correspond to the streams being played."

But the software is also useful if you want to see the files downloaded by a program you've just installed. Or if you're wondering why Google Desktop needs an Internet connection. You can see in the screenshot above that Google Desktop connects to google.com to read a list of localized domains, the files for the Safe Browsing feature and to download information necessary for the gadgets (weather, news, etc.).

YouTube is launching a new animated science fiction show. The interesting part of this event is that YouTube is using the show, Afterworld, to test their marketing abilities.

"And with ambitions of tapping the Internet video advertising market, the producers of Afterworld will also provide Google-owned YouTube with its first real chance to demonstrate its revenue generating potential—just as the site gears up to roll out video commercials this summer' , Red Herring opined.

An innovative use of Google Custom Search - SeachQB.com - launched last week before the NFL Draft. The site plans to be "the search engine of choice for football scouts, GMs, journalists, and gridiron fanatics"

The company, Rokland LLC, has compiled their "own database of football related sites which are given preference vs. other sites, so that your results contain the most relevant web pages. At a regular search engine, if you search for the term "scouting", the first few pages of results will primarily contain URLs about boy scouts. What makes SearchQB.com different is that we already know you are here looking for football related information. Hence, if you do a search for "scouting" on our web site, the first few pages of results will primarily contain URLs about football scouting" the site explains.

Google has opened their Southeast Asian offices in Singapore which will represent ad sales in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and other area countries (I wonder if the Philippines and Indonesia are on this list, as Friendster is incredibly popular amongst users in these countries and is a strong Google advertising partner).

According to Google, the Southeast Asian region is rapidly growing with more affordable broadband access and e-commerce growing.

Expect Google’s Southeast Asian department to become involved in mobile technologies and monetization in the area as well.

“We see the Singapore environment as being very conducive to business like Google and in particular as information technology is such an important part of the government’s infrastructure,” said Richard Kimber, Google Southeast Asia’s managing director of sales and operations.

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Google Reader just made it a lot easier to share feed items via email with friends who aren't savvy with feed readers.

The Email link at the bottom of each item now pops up an inline email form that lets you address your message with the same autocomplete available for your Gmail contacts, add a note, and send the item in its entirety, images and all. Google Reader's shared items are intended to be the way you share items with Google Reader for the feed reader-savvy crowd, but I don't know of that many people who've ever done that. Email, on the other hand - god yes. Just give me a quick keyboard shortcut and I'm in love! — Adam Pash

Cash from cache

Google and Belgian newspaper group Copiepresse have come to an agreement on a minor part of their dispute over copyright, but have not agreed on the major point of difference between them.…

Aoife White, an AP Business Writer, reports that Belgian French-language newspapers are back in Google. In a joint statement, Google and the newspapers' copyright group Copiepresse said they had decided that Google could once again list the newspapers on the search engine.

But they are still in talks about Google News, one of the main parts of their dispute. "The Belgian French and German-language daily press publishers and Google Inc. intend to use a quiet period in the court dispute to continue their efforts to identify tangible ways to collaborate in the long term," they said.

An in depth four part series on Google's historical ranking and linking policies, and how the company can change such policies for the better.

A handy Google Notebook quickie I missed in yesterday's feature article: when you clip a street address and save it in a note, from the Tools menu you can choose the "View on map" item to launch a Google map of the location in a separate window. Fantastic for capturing all those must-visit destinations when traveling. NYC, here I come! —Gina Trapani

The Wall Street Journal reports on news publisher’s behavior to market their stories via Google AdWords:

<<The New York Times started buying search terms for general news in 2004, earlier than many rivals, and now buys tens of thousands of them a year. Now, almost every major outlet – from CNN and Fox News to ABC News and Washington Post Interactive – invests a portion of its marketing dollars in search keywords. (...)

Because keywords are sold through online auctions, prices often spike for those connected with big breaking-news stories. On the day of the Virginia Tech shootings, the cost per click of buying phrases such as “Virginia Tech,” “Virginia Tech shooting,” and “Virginia Tech massacre” jumped as high as $5. Over the following week, prices dropped to six or eight cents a click, according to Reprise Media, a search-marketing firm owned by Interpublic Group. A longer-lasting news term, such as “Iraq war,” costs on average 39 cents a click, Reprise says.

News outlets say they use search marketing to increase awareness of their Web sites, so that the next time people search for news they visit their sites first, instead of Google or Yahoo.>>

[Thanks Alek!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

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SEARCH OUTFIT Google has a fairly spectacular NDA according to a bloke who leaked it onto the Internet before he signed it and was never heard of again.

'Crisis In Darfur', a collaboration between Google Earth and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, is designed to draw awareness to the ongoing human rights tragedy in that country by using the Web 2.0 functionality of the Google Earth program. To find out more about the project, DS put a number of questions to the CIO of the Museum

Yahoo has been involved with online gambling before, but not in the fashion of the controversial industry of online poker. Yesterday Yahoo UK & Ireland, in partnership with St Minver and Boss Media AB launched Yahoo! Poker.

The new “user friendly poker experience” will feature exclusive tips and how to’s from professional gamblers and also come equipped with video tutorials and interactive guides via a partnership with Endemol Gaming.

Jim Ryan, CEO of St Minver adds; “We are delighted to welcome Yahoo! UK into Boss Media AB and St Minver’s partner-based International Poker Network. We have created a simple, safe and entertaining online poker offering that will be engaging for Yahoo! customers. Poker continues to be one of the most popular online card games and the introduction of Yahoo! UK in to the sector is definitely going to broaden its appeal.”

Yes, this is Yahoo! UK. Yes online gambling may be less regualted in the European market than in the US. And yes, there are some ethical questions behind a company like Yahoo condoning online gambling.

On theother hand, Yahoo UK also offers ‘real money’ Bingo and other betting options, so the addition of poker seems to add to the pie.

I found this line interesting (from CasinoCityTimes.com)

Party Poker CEO Mitch Garber said a few years ago, the real competition starts when the Internet giants enter the market. And Yahoo! is ready for the fight to begin.

On WebmasterWorld, a member mentions that he received an email to upgrade his AdSense account to be handled under a Google login. He did not know if the email was legitimate because there was no official word from the AdSense...

CNet reports that PC World’s editor-in-chief, Harry McCracken, quit his job because of (according to several sources who wish to remain anonymous) pressure from Colin Crawford, online senior vice president, to avoid stories critical of major advertisers.

On another note: news bloggers today often close their own ad deals, many taking up the role of publisher, editor and writer all in one. Are they free of conflict of interests, and if not, does that influence the honesty of the reporting?

[Via Digg. Photo of Harry by Dave McClure with some rights reserved.]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

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Tall Eye is a Google Maps mashup answering the question: “If I walk in a straight line around the world, where will I pass?”
[Thanks Luis F.!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

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Wikisky.org* is like Google Maps for the sky. It’s not based on the Google Maps API actually, but the interface works quite similar. [Via Infosthetics.]

*No Google, I did not mean “whisky”.

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

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Internet Explorer and Firefox only: TrendProtect is a browser plug-in that helps you avoid unsafe web sites.

Using a variety of methods, TrendProtect analyzes individual pages (not just entire sites) and alerts you if it detects anything malicious. It also analyzes Google, MSN and Yahoo search results, flagging each link with a familiar red-light/green-light color code. You can mouse over any link to see more information.

Unnecessary, you say? IE 7 and Firefox have their own such security features? Consider this: I recently stumbled upon an eBay phishing site, and to my surprise, neither Firefox nor the Google Toolbar caught it. (Another surprise: Internet Explorer 7 did.) TrendProtect did seem to slow Google searches a bit, but that's a small price to pay for an added layer of protection.

TrendProtect is free. It's available for Internet Explorer and Firefox, but only the Windows versions of each. —Rick Broida

A number of WebmasterWorld members reported that they have received monetization tips from the Google AdSense team on how to optimize their campaigns. Some of the tips they received were: Placing more than one ad unit on a page often...

Elite Retreat is coming to Orlando, Florida on Friday June 8th and Saturday June 9th. With individual attention, a casual environment, and hands on reviews of attendee online business models, as the purpose of Elite Retreat is to prepare and educate attendees on how to take their business to a higher level.

Attendees are strongly encouraged to bring their business plans and current site objectives with them. We will help attendees organize and optimize their business structure. It would greatly benefit attendees to bring their team or their coder so that improvements can immediately be implemented based on what is learned.

The Elite Retreat Orlando conference will feature Jeremy (Shoemoney) Schoemaker, Lee Dodd, Kris Jones, Neil Patel, and David Adams. The Keynote Speaker will be Alex Zhardanovsky, who co-founded AzoogleAds, one of the largest performance-based networks, with over 28,000 registered publishers and over 450 advertisers. For more information on the conference members, please see their profile page.

Search Engine Journal is offering an exclusive $500 Off Coupon for our readers who wish to attend Elite Retreat Orlando. The code to use when registering with Elite Retreat is CODE ERB500.

“The high price tag made a few waves in our industry, but all that talk will be put to rest once the blogs and reviews start flaring up. The fact is, buying consulting from top industry experts is expensive, and when you have one leader for every 3 or 4 attendees, you basically are buying consulting. Imagine that, a few grand a day for some kick ass consulting. This was not general advice for the masses. At times it was a workshop about my site(s). When speakers spoke about broad topics, they either spoke about them DIRECTLY as it relates to one of our verticals, or about one of THEIR verticals. In explicit detail.” - Chris Hooley

If you are currently working for a business, or running a business, which uses Internet marketing in your overall marketing mix, or want to hone your expertise in the Internet marketing and Search Marketing fields, Elite Retreat Orlando should be a no-brainer for your company. The initial investment of $4,950 to attend these small and active sessions ($4,450 after SEJ coupon) will pay for itself with the knowledge acquired after two days.

An anonymous reader writes "Google's motto is "Don't Be Evil" — but they sure have an evil non-disclosure agreement! In order to be considered for employment there, you must sign an agreement that forbids you to 'mention or imply the name of Google' in public ever again. Further, you can't tell anyone you interviewed there, or what they offered you, and you possibly sign away your rights to reverse-engineer any of Google's code, ever. And this NDA never expires. Luckily, someone has posted excerpts from the NDA before he signed it and had to say silent forever." At the bottom of the posting are links to a few other comments on the Web about Google's NDA, including a ValleyWag post that reproduces it in its entirety.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For those that are following the thus far (and hopefully always) unsuccessful attempt by Rupert Murdoch to buy Dow Jones, publisher of the WSJ, here’s a Bloomberg piece (via SEW) that speculates that Google may be in hunt for the paper:

News Corp. may have opened the door for other bidders, including General Electric Co., owner of the CNBC news network, Haverty said. Washington Post Co., Gannett Co. and even Google Inc. may be interested, said Michael Chren, managing director of Allegiant Asset Management Co. in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida.

There are many people who were skeptical about the prospect of some of the Google deals that have come to pass (e.g., YouTube, DoubleClick). In each case I was not. But I would be totally struck dumb (as they used to say) if Google actually were to make a bid.

In this merger mania environment anything is possible I suppose but the culture of a traditional publisher and Google are not well suited to one another. DoubleClick and YouTube are Internet companies. There’s a cost structure and overhead that Google would acquire (not to mention other challenges) along with Dow Jones that are not in keeping with its internal cultural attitudes or goals.

As valuable a brand as the WSJ is and as valuable the information and assets that Dow Jones possesses, it’s just not a scalable asset in the Google sense. And to Google, scalability is everything. The other traditional media companies and publishers are much more likely acquirers if the Bancroft Family (which controls the voting shares) ultimately decides to sell. The other issue is that the $5+ billion price tag would be very rich even for Google.

I always could be wrong. But if two weeks from now we’re discussing the Google acquisition of Down Jones, Hell will have frozen over and monkeys and donkeys will be seen flying through the air.

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Greg Sterling is the founding principal of Sterling Market Intelligence, a consulting and research firm focused on online consumer and advertiser behavior and the relationship between the Internet and traditional media, with an emphasis on the local marketplace.

Yahoo’s oneSearch beta, their user friendly mobile search offering which has changed the way that I search via my mobile phone, is expanding into Canada, the UK, Spain, Italy, Germany and France.

Yahoo oneSearch is quite hot right now, especially in local, as the local results are served automatically based upon user location. So, if you’re in New York searching for just “pizza” (not “pizza new york”), you’ll still be served local results to your area based upon the location of the provider tower you are connecting with. Fly to Miami and the same search delivers locations in the Miami market.

This expansion is large for Yahoo Search, but possibly even larger as it adds numerous new marketplaces to Yahoo’s mobile advertising services; pay per call, pay per click in sponsored mobile search results, and display advertising. To test out Yahoo oneSearch on your PC or to use it on your mobile, simply go to m.yahoo.com.

In March I reviewed Yahoo oneSearch:

In a mobile form of what reminds me a bit of the content driven Ask.com Smart Answers, Yahoo! oneSearch has the primary goal of bringing mobile web searchers exactly what they want on their mobile device : instant answers. The idea is to bring the most relevant and useful information to the mobile user in the most efficient time and space available, making best use of the small mobile browsers and judging the intent of the searcher.

The assumed intent of the searcher is the factor in deciding which Yahoo! content is served first during the oneSearch mobile experience. Yahoo oneSearch keeps track of current trends to deliver such targeted end results to the user, so a search for ‘300? would result in movie information while a search for ‘pizza’ would list local pizza joints automatically instead of web sites about pizza.

For example, if the mobile user wants to go see 300 at the movies, they just need to type the name of the movie into the search box. The search results would first list the movie, including a user rating, local theaters the movie is playing at, news headlines related to the movie and more.

Paid blog review broker ReviewMe has launched a new advertiser marketplace where advertisers can create campaign offers which bloggers can review, then decide to accept the task of reviewing that company. ReviewMe used to work on the basis of the advertiser contracting the individual blogger, but now bloggers can find advertisers which they want to review, and bring in a part of that advertiser’s budget; which begins at $10 a review.

Example : Advertiser has a $3000 blog review budget. Advertiser enters marketplace and states that they will pay $50 per review. Bloggers then sign up to review that advertiser and get paid.

This new system is probably going to be much more advertiser friendly than advertisers looking for individual bloggers, contracting them, then waiting for that blogger to accept or deny, which draws out the review buying process.

From ReviewMe

This new advertiser marketplace gives more control to the advertiser while still giving the blogger 100% control over what review offers they accept.

Advertisers get to set up the information they would like reviewed, the number of reviews they would like to receive and how much they would like to spend per review. The minimum review price is $10. Advertisers now have the flexibility of purchasing reviews of top reviews individually or creating campaigns for many relevant bloggers to blog about!

Now that the minimum review price is $10, ReviewMe is asking smaller bloggers who did not make the cut when ReviewMe first launhced to resubmit their blogs for inclusion in their new Advertiser Marketplace.

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