Microsoft optimizes its portal for the mobile phone with a new interface and loads of information mashups. The new MSN mobile portal can be accessed by pointing your phone’s browser to http://mobile.msn.com. Once the mobile phone connects to the MSN mobile portal, the system would automatically identifies the handset used by the user and adjust the portal’s presentation accordingly. Neat, eh?

Wait, there’s more, the newly refurbished MSN mobile now features the following features:

• Sports - Get game scores, schedules, stats, and more
• Weather - Look up the week’s forecast
• Entertainment - Find movie reviews, show times, and more
• Money - Get instant stock quotes and money tips
• Search - Find the info you need fast
• Mail - Read and compose email while you’re on the go
• Local - Search local listings, get maps, directions and more

Aside from these features, the portal’s navigation and overall site design was greatly enhanced.

Looks like MSN is gearing up for the big battle on the mobile platform, especially now that the most anticipated mobile phone is set to come out before this month ends.  Well, it’s about time that MSN step up on its mobile web functionality. It has completely lagged behind Google and Yahoo, but it’s not too late to catch up and MSN might actually pull some user attention, especially since its mobile portal currently doesn’t have too much advertisements.

Check out the new MSN mobile portal on your mobile phone and see for yourself it its really that promising or not.

Gah. I’ll never catch up on email; might as well blog a little bit.

I had a really good time in Seattle. I got to meet many more members of the Google Kirkland office, go up in the Space Needle, visit the Science Fiction Museum, walk around Pike Place Market, and even see a little bit of West Seattle. West Seattle was especially fun. I ate delicious macaroni and cheese at West 5 and picked up the new album from The National. It’s called Boxer and it sounds like a little like Lou Reed and The Feelies had a love child. I like it.

Also, there was a search conference. This was the first SMX conference, and it was a blast. I think Danny did the right thing by pitching the first conference to an advanced audience. It made for a really friendly, laid-back atmosphere. I had a lot more people just walk up to say hello than I usually do, and that was wonderful. I met nice people from Austin, Isla Vista, and all over the world. If you look at the end-of-conference picture, you can just barely see me at the very top left (I’m wearing my green Ale-8 Tshirt). I talked to several Googlers during and after the conference, and we all got good feedback and ideas from the attendees.

As you may know, SMX joins two other major search conferences: Search Engine Strategies and PubCon. I don’t know how the competition between the industry conferences will turn out, but it’s good that each conference is ready to offer what they believe is the best experience for SEOs and webmasters. Adam Lasnik spoke on three panels at SES Toronto last week, and I’m looking forward to sitting down with him and going over the feedback from the last couple weeks. Please be patient though; I’m still digging out from my vacation too.

A few highlights of the conference:
- Seeing all the familiar SEO faces at the MSN party the first night (and getting to meet a few new folks!).
- Starting out the conference with a Q&A session with Danny, me, and the audience. Danny and I got to use these little headset mikes as if we were a boy band. I pretty much despise PowerPoint-heavy presentations, so it was fun to just talk search with a few hundred webmasters. We covered everything from supplemental results (and how they’re indexed) to Wikipedia to Stephen Colbert. You can read the write-ups in live-blogging style, a slightly more cleaned up “Susan Esparza” style, an abbreviated summary, or even a write-up in haiku format. Some write-ups don’t mention that to keep the conference fun and casual, Danny agreed to strip from his normal suit into shorts and red Vans.
- Patrick from feedthebot.com asked why the webmaster guidelines aren’t more detailed, and then Riona and Vanessa managed to launch more detailed webmaster guidelines in time for the second day of the conference.
- If you like video, Mike McDonald caught me for a video interview later that day to recap the topics that had come up at the conference so far. I also got Matt-jacked into a dark room by Rand for the “SMX Diaries” video interviews. And WebProNews had some snippets of me from the Q&A session.
- If that’s not enough Matt-video for you, I just realized while doing this write-up that someone posted the video of the keynote Q&A session that I did at SES London a few months ago. That’s pretty funny.
- A nice Yahoo mixer, complete with Yahoo ice cubes (they’re purple plastic and light up when you put them in liquid). I saved a couple as prizes for my team.
- A good dinner with other search folks.
- Meeting lots and lots of cool people at the Google party. I never made it into the dance floor until the party was winding down, but I did get to see the vintage arcade games that were set up and the cool Google ice sculpture. Thanks to the Googlers who helped organize the party or manned tables to answer questions there!
- Meeting Satya Nadella and hearing his Q&A with Danny Sullivan.
- Lots of other fun panels the second day, including the “Give it up!” session.
- The end-of-conference photo and the general niceness of the Third Door team to take care of speakers.
- Woohoo for wifi! I really don’t want to attend any conference without wifi at this point.
- Hitting the SEOmoz SMX party. It was a bit of an off-night in terms of my ability to represent Google well. I bowled a 133, which is okay but not spectacular. Plus Rebecca “Bec” Kelley and Cameron Olthius beat me and a guy from Microsoft at eight-ball. I’d love to blame the MSFT fellow, but in truth I started the game trying to sink the wrong team’s balls. Of course, Cameron let me sink a ball before mentioning that. On the bright side, Danny and I got to rumble in pool. He brought his A-game, and I barely managed to eke out a win. Add in the chance to compare notes on how Google is doing with a couple blackhat spammers, and overall I’d call it a great party. Well done, SEOmozzers.

I know I’m missing a few things, but those are some of the things that stand out looking back a couple weeks later.

“Googler” is what Google employees call themselves, and most people interested in Google heard about “gayglers” (gay googlers) as another funky Google name, along with nooglers (new googlers) or looglers (googlers from legal department). Through instant messenger we talked with Google’s Bennet Marks, gaygler himself, to find out more.

Could you first tell us who are you and what are you doing at Google?

I’ve been a tech writer at Google for about three years. Previoulsy I was a software engineer at Apple, where I started the LGBT group (Apple Lambda).

Oh, interesting. And are gayglers also an organized group? The word basically means just “gay googlers”, but we know about meetings, official t-shirts, Google banners on the gay pride parades. Someone even spotted a poster for an internal “Ask A Gaygler” website in Google Tel Aviv Office. To what extend are gayglers a formal group?

We have a mailing list (actually, several, for different locations) and a steering committee. Most of what the group does originates in the steering committee. Wes Thierry has done all the arranging (a lot of work!) for SF Pride this year, but he passed every decision through the Steering Committee. Other people have been working on NY, Dublin, and Madrid Pride

How did you choose people for this comittee?

Whatever people’s personal opinions about gay rights, they know that respecting their colleagues is the googley thing to do

Any Gaygler can join. There’s a steering committee mailing list, and meetings. We don’t really have elections or officers, although I’m the semi-official “coordinator.”

What is your main aim?

Everyone would probably have a slightly different answer. But I think the main idea is to ensure that Goolge is a place where all employees, including gay ones, feel safe, respected, and included. And also to make sure that prospective employees know that, so they’ll be even more eager to come to work for us. Also to have fun – we have lunches, the Parade, other events – these are both useful for our goals and a real googley pleasure.

What are main activities organized by a group? Do you mostly just hang out together and have fun or maybe usually you prepare some actions?

Pride is probably the biggest activity of the year – it takes a lot of preparation. We’ve also had speakers, with authors@google, and sponsored a photography exhibit (Love Makes A Family). Some Gaygler events are just for Gayglers to get together and get to know each other, but we also need and have events to educate the whole company on issues of importance to LGBTs.

Does the fact that you feel need to educate your co-workers means that sometimes you are faced with symptoms of homophobia at Google?

Less at Google than at any other company I’ve worked at. But people who are simply unaware of LGBT issues can always benefit from a little education. They can just forget to use inclusive language, for example. The other thing is to make sure that people know that Google is a safe space – so that they can feel free to come out, and know the company will back them in the unlikly event that they run into any bad experiences.

But in such a big company like Google there have to be people with more conservative points of view, who basically don’t like gays. Is there any opposition to gayglers within Google? Do you meet people who don’t like that this group is so active in Google?

I have run into no people at Google who have objected to the existence of Gayglers (or any of the other employee networking groups). The Google attitude of acceptance and cooperation is very strong in the culture here. It’s emphasized here from the top on down. Whatever people’s personal opinions about gay rights, they know that respecting their colleagues is the googley thing to do.

Are people discussing such issues like gay rights on internal forums, or do people prefer rather not to discuss controversial stuff?

In some ways Google is still a young organization and we are figuring out what’s appropriate

Some controversial issues are discussed on lists for that sort of thing – politics, ethics, etc. Sometimes political issues come up on our misc list, but gay rights haven’t been one of them. The general response has been favorable – my boss is very excited for me when I tell her about some of the cool things going on in Gayglers.

Didn’t you have any problems with getting permission to use Google logo for such events like gay parades?

Last year we ran into the usual brand concerns that come up in all areas. We used the standard Google logo – there were no problems with that. This year – now that we know more people around the company – we worked with the right folks to create a specific Gayglers logo. It’s beautiful! We can get you a copy for your piece if you want.

Most gayglers actions are performed internally. Is it possible in the future that gayglers will do something for an external audience, for example Google’s service for gay audience, similar to Yahoo Gay & lesbian Pride Portal, or educational website?

We’re looking into such things, and figuring out what’s appropriate for Google. In some ways we’re still a young organization. Recently Google bought a table at a fundraiser for Outlet, a local organization for LGBT youth, so we are helping the community.

Do you feel that Google is unique in its treatment of homosexuals and other minorities?

I think Google is an extremely positive place for minorities of all sorts – not just tolerant, but truly accepting. It’s part of our general culture of treating people with respect.

[By Ludwik Trammer | Original post | Comments]

Google in China removed their cache feature a while ago. This feature was available during the launch of Google.cn, as the link reading “网页快照” (“cache”) below the result snippet in the “before” screenshot from January 2006 shows*. According to a report by Pacific Epoch, the feature was removed on April 26 this year, with Google China stating that this would be relaunched after an upgrade.

The Google cache of web pages is one of those features known to be widely blocked for Chinese users thanks to China Mainland internet service providers, outside of the responsibility of Google. The missing “cache” link however is now in the responsibility of Google. It’s another form of self-censorship Google has committed to in China, and the reasoning for this may be similar to previous forms of Google.cn self-censorship; Google may argue they aim to provide a better user experience with that feature removal, as people clicking on the cache link before weren’t ending up on the actual web page cache. This also means that indirectly – and whether or not the Chinese gov’t actively pressured Google to remove the feature – it’s another step in Google.cn becoming the kind of search engine the Chinese government (more precisely, its ministry of information) would like to see. Through control of one side of the technology – ISPs – the gov’t exerts indirect control over Google, as going by Google’s logic of “we need to shield Google users in China from broken links/ services"**, they can block certain features of Google to then have Google remove them on their end, too.

Blocking parts of Google is not the only way the Chinese gov’t can potentially influence Google; they can also escalate the issue of Google’s lack of their own required Internet Content Provider number (Google operates under the ICP license of its local partner Ganji.com).

Currently, additional to web search, Google in China agreed to censor parts of Google Books, Google News, Google Maps, as well as Google Images. Google says that if they censor, they do so “in response to local laws, regulations, or policies.”

*The screenshot shows a search for [human rights china] from then and now. On a side-note, this query returns one of Google’s self-censored results.

**In 2004, Google admitted to omitting certain news sources for Google News China. “For users inside the People’s Republic of China, we have chosen not to include sources that are inaccessible from within that country.” Google argued that “Leaving aside the politics,” showing links which are known to be blocked presents them “with a serious user experience problem”.
Quality problems were also the reasons behind Google’s web self-censorship move, according to Google in 2006: “Google users in China today struggle with a service that, to be blunt, isn’t very good. Google.com appears to be down around 10% of the time (...) the level of service we’ve been able to provide in China is not something we’re proud of. This problem could only be resolved by creating a local presence, and this week we did so, by launching Google.cn, our website for the People’s Republic of China. In order to do so, we have agreed to remove certain sensitive information from our search results.”

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

Just released the newest version of the Better Gmail Firefox extension, compiled lovingly by my very own tapping keys. This version adds 3 new features: a Mac Mail-like skin, bottom posting when replying to email, and split screen Google Reader integration, as well as fixes for a few niggly annoyances in the current version.

Version 0.8 removes the envelope icon when Gmail compose is enabled, and also fixes the TinyURL script's key combination on Windows, which no longer conflicts with Firefox's "open last closed tab" key combo. Version 0.8 also includes performance improvements that make the extension snappier than ever, as well as some security and code readability fixes. Most exciting, this release makes Better Gmail fully localizable, so that it can now support non-English languages. Got translation skills? Here's how to contribute to the Better Gmail extension. In the meantime, check out a few screengrabs of Better Gmail's new features and get the download.

These are just the new features added to v.0.8. Head over to Better Gmail's homepage to see the complete feature listing and 0.8 changelog.

Important Note: Due to a mistake on my end, you cannot upgrade to version 0.8 using Firefox's built-in update. You must go to the extension homepage and download it manually. (My apologies for the inconvenience.)

Got a Greasemonkey user script you'd like to see in Better Gmail? Let me know in the comments. Thanks to all the user script hackers and readers who've made Better Gmail as useful as it is.

Are you a Better Gmail user with linguistic skillz? Help us translate the extension to as many locales as possible. Multi-linguists, after the jump, submit your translation.

Now that Better Gmail's set up to handle multiple languages, us only-English speakers need some help hooking up the translations. Below you'll find the text we need translated; in the comments, note what language you're contributing, copy and paste the text and fill in the translated version. Alternately, send in your translation to tips at lifehacker.com with the subject like "Better Gmail translation."

Here's the extension text in need of translation. For the lines in the format variable_name=English text, don't translate the variable_name, just the text it equals.

Better Gmail
Click on the script homepage for more info:
Refresh Gmail to see your changes.

bettergmail.tab.label.general=General
bettergmail.tab.label.compose=Compose
bettergmail.tab.label.messages=Messages
bettergmail.tab.label.sidebar=Sidebar
bettergmail.tab.label.skins=Skins
bettergmail.tab.label.help=About


script_by=By 

gcal_title=Add Google Calendar link
gcal_desc=Adds GCal link to folder list.

greader_title=Add Google Reader "Feeds" link
greader_desc=Adds Feeds link to folder list.

greaderintegrator_title=Integrate Google Reader
greaderintegrator_desc=Show GReader feeds below Gmail messages.

airskin_title=Air Skin
airskin_desc=A Gmail skin inspired by airways.

composeto_title=All pages' mailto: links compose in Gmail
composeto_desc=Adds compose message in Gmail link next to all email links.

attachmenticons_title=Attachment Icons
attachmenticons_desc=Adds attachment filetype icons.

attachmenticonsbigger_title=Attachment Icons (Bigger!)
attachmenticonsbigger_desc=Adds bigger attachment filetype icons.

attachmentreminder_title=Attachment Reminder
attachmentreminder_desc=Reminds you to attach the file you mentioned.

bottompost_title=Bottom Post in Reply
bottompost_desc=Inserts cursor after quoted text in reply (plain text only).

conversationpreview_title=Conversation Preview
conversationpreview_desc=Right-click message bubble previews in list view.

datesearch_title=Date Search
datesearch_desc=Find all the messages for one single day.

filterassistant_title=Filter Assistant
filterassistant_desc=Appends an easy filter creation button on a message.

fixedfont_title=Fixed Font
fixedfont_desc=Use a fixed font for composing plain text messages.

secure_title=Force encrypted Gmail connection (https)
secure_desc=Forces encrypted https:// connection to Gmail.

hideinvites_title=Hide Invites to Gmail
hideinvites_desc=Hides the Invites box.

spamcounthide_title=Hide Spam count
spamcounthide_desc=Hides Gmail's Spam messsage count.

hidelabels_title=Hide Labels
hidelabels_desc=Hides the Labels box.

labelcolors_title=Label Colors
labelcolors_desc=Optionally colors label names (with a #color suffix).

macrosbn_title=Macros keyboard shortcuts (press H for help)
macrosbn_desc=Adds keyboard shortcuts.  Press h in Gmail for details.

mailskin_title=Mail.app
mailskin_desc=Mac-like skin.

oneclickconvo_title=One Click Conversations
oneclickconvo_desc=See recent conversations with a certain contact.

revisited_title=Revisited
revisited_desc=Adds rollover highlights and enlarges buttons.

savedsearches_title=Saved Searches (cookie)
savedsearches_desc=Saves searches (in cookies, so per computer.)

savedsearcheslb_title=Saved Searches (contact)
savedsearcheslb_desc=Saves searches (in a fake contact, so per account.)

diskspacebar_title=Show disk usage as progress bar
diskspacebar_desc=Display your disk usage as a bar.

sigfloat_title=Signature Settings: Float/HTML/No dashes
sigfloat_desc=Adds message signature options in Settings area.

smartread_title=Smart Read Button
smartread_desc=Adds dynamic Mark as Read or Unread button.

superclean_title=Super Clean
superclean_desc=Skins Gmail with a clean, white look.

tinyurl_title=TinyURL selected link
tinyurl_desc=Shrink a URL with a key combination.

unlabelled_title=Unlabeled Message Search
unlabelled_desc=Adds a search for unlabeled messages.

none_title=None

Thanks in advance for any time and help you can offer.

In an increasingly networked world, users frequently use online sources to create and exchange information. Email, instant messaging (IM), message boards, websites, and blogs are all existing communication technologies through which users can create and distribute content to other users. Frequently, in creating such content, a user may wish to reference other online information sources. For example, a user authoring an email may use a browser to navigate to a web page that the user would like to reference in the email, copy the link (e.g., the uniform resource locator (URL)) from the browser to a "clipboard," and then paste the link from the clipboard into the email. In this manner, the user can create an email message that contains links that are accessible by an eventual reader of the email.

Search engines are a popular tool through which users enter a search query describing information of interest and receive back documents or links to documents that relate to the search query. Frequently, when "researching" content for an email message, IM message, message board post, website post, or blog post, the user may perform one or more searches using one or more search engines to locate online documents relevant to the content. The user may then copy a link into the document using the above-described method of copying and pasting a link to the document. This process for annotating user created content can be tedious, difficult to perform for average users, and often results in textual links in the final content that can be difficult to read.

Instead of waiting for a user to provide a search query, the UDS may automatically generate search queries based on, for example, entity recognition techniques performed using the content entered by the user. (..) Entity recognition techniques are generally known in the art, and may include, for example, techniques designed to recognize entities such as products, places, organizations, or any other entities that tend to be subjects of searches. The entity recognition techniques can be based on linguistic grammar models or statistical models. In one possible implementation, the entity recognition techniques may be particularly adopted to locate terms that correspond to commercial products or terms that define an address, such as a postal address. In other possible implementations, the entity recognition techniques may be particularly biased to locate terms that are associated with a profile of the user, such as profile explicitly generated by the user (e.g., by the user filling out a questionnaire) or a profile automatically generated for the user, such as a profile based on the user's search history or based on documents created by the user.

Many people have a love/hate relationship with LinkedIn, the somewhat popular business networking network that helps you connect with people in similar industries. Web Worker Daily has come up with a whopping twenty different ways to use LinkedIn more productively.

Tips include boosting your business, using LinkedIn to check references, and branding yourself, among others. Have you used LinkedIn? Has it helped you or hindered you? Thoughts in the comments.

I told you Google Calendar's public calendars last week; well, this week, techie site Mashable has come up with the top ten best GCal's for that oh so charming geeky side in all of us.

There's Mozilla Development! HD DVD release dates! Geek Holidays! Any self-respecting geek (of which I'm sure we have quite a few among our intrepid LH readers, right?) will be sure to find something that fits his or her style here; but hey - if you've found yet another goodie in the Google Calendar public offerings, let's hear it in the comments.

Want to search multiple video search engines/services all in one place? Try uLinkx, a site which offers up vids from Youtube, Google videos, Myspace, Metacafe, iFilm, Revver, Yahoo videos, Grouper, Dailymotion, and more.

These videos are viewable within uLinkx itself, so you don't go skipping from site to site; plus, you have the ability to bookmark videos from multiple video search sites in one convenient playlist. It's an easy way to get your Spice Girls fix (don't look at me like that).

Productivity blogger Dumb Little Man has put together twenty of the most basic tips that can make your Google searches more efficient.

Most of these are old-hat to our intrepid Lifehacker readers, but they are definitely worth a lookover: anything from quotation marks to cached pages is covered here. If you've already mastered these basic techniques, move on up to more advanced Google searching.

On Monday and Tuesday, I’ll be at Search Engine Strategies Miami to cover the two day conference on Search Marketing to the Latino Market (Spanish & Portuguese speaking countries).

SES Latino, organized by Nacho Hernandez will be featuring Gonzalo Alonso, Google’s General Manager for Spanish-speaking Latin America, as the keynote speaker and will offer both a basic and advanced tracks for sessions.

If you will be attending SES Miami / SES Latino, please contact me or leave a comment here on Search Engine Journal and we can meet up (I speak basic conversational Portuguese and used to live in Curitiba, Brasil; so if you represent a Brasilian company, please feel extra free to contact me).

If you have any questions about the conference, see this thread on Search Engine Watch Forums about the conference and events.

Google has rolled out a new way to limit image searches to faces only - completely under the radar. Here's how it works:

• Search for someone - say David Hasselhoff.
• In order to limit your image search to images only, place this text string at the end of the search results URL: &imgtype;=face.
• Now you get all the David Hasselhoff smiles you could ever possibly want.

Pretty cool, I must say; however, it still is kind of under construction, so there's not a lot of functionality with it (but I'm sure that's coming soon).

There are two current forum discussions where people spotted new YouTube features: a mobile version of YouTube that’s supposed to let you watch streaming videos on your phone, and a new YouTube online video editor. Neither one works for me, so I can’t say much on it.

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post]

Lifehacker posts snowing you under every day? Get a digest of our best posts delivered to your newsreader once a week using our Highlights feed. If that's not enough for you, instead grab our daily top stories feed.

This week's best posts include:

• Top 10 Network Utilities
  "Forget arcane command line tools. Today we've picked out 10 of our favorite, free, point and click software applications and webapps that help you make the most of the giant web of connected computers that is your network."
• Organize your digital photos with Picasa
  "What's a girl with literally thousands of pics to organize on her 'puter to do? Enter Google's free desktop software, Picasa, which is basically the Walker Texas Ranger of photo organization packages."
• Top 10 Apps That Should've Been in Leopard
  "Now that Apple's locked down the feature-complete version of the newest iteration of OS X, it's hard not to think about what could have been."
• Virtualize AND dual-boot the same Windows on your Mac
  "The problem with dual-booting Windows is the inconvenience of having to restart your Mac entirely. The problem with virtualizing Windows is that it can be unreasonably slow for a prolonged session. Now that Boot Camp and Parallels work together, you can choose."
• Get Safari's best features in Firefox
  "Here's a list of Safari's best features and the Firefox extensions that bring them to our favorite browser."
• Add scrolling iPhone-like contacts to your Windows Mobile phone
  "Get a good idea of how it works from the video, and after installing it on my phone I can say it works surprisingly well."
• Under-desk pegboard gadget mount redux
  "A while ago you mentioned using peg board to organize all your gadgets under your desk, so I went and bought some for my office."
• Expand Windows desktop with ShellEnhancer
  "ShellEnhancer offers several of visual enhancements like rolling up windows, making windows transparent, forcing windows to always stay on top, and forcing windows to keep focus."
• Keep tabs on where your money goes with Expensr
  "...a promising, stripped-down online alternative to wrestling with Quicken or Microsoft Money on your desktop."
• Give Windows an OS X-like dock with ObjectDock
  "With all the buzz surrounding Apple yesterday, this little application was too good to pass up."
• What's new in Leopard and how it will affect your life
  "Steve Jobs' 10-point Apple WWDC keynote highlighted the new and improved Finder, the desktop manager Spaces, the automatic back up utility Time Machine, some great collaboration tools built into iChat, among several other updates."
• Leopard Desktop heavy on eye candy, light on useful
  "Apple takes a page from Microsoft's playbook and touts Desktop as the lead feature in the new version of OS X, Leopard - and all told it amounts to a bunch of pretty graphics and some animation."
• Leopard to usher in much-needed Finder improvements
  "We've long been complaining about Finder's general stuck-in-the-mud suckiness as compared to the rest of OS X, and wishing it would act more like iTunes. Well, the Apple gods today are granting our wish."
• Safari 3 beta now available for Windows too
  "Steve Jobs said today that Safari is faster than Internet Explorer and Firefox..."

Here’s some advice to anybody who is silly enough to provide feedback to Yahoo! Services, keep it for something else or you might end up losing your account over it.

In my opinion, they do not want being criticized, hear suggestions for how to improve things and know about bugs in their site. Send them praise and kiss their butt. Then, maybe they will give you some freebies in return for that.

Why am I saying that? It is true. I experienced this myself. You do not believe me, do you? Continue reading this post and let me turn you into a believer. This one is about the YSM and the Yahoo! affiliate marketing team (primarily the latter), but I also have other tales to tell from other Yahoo! departments, such as Yahoo! Answers, maybe later.

Part 1 - April 8, 2007 – The Flaw

I wrote back in April about a flaw in the Yahoo! Search Marketing landing page, which allows the manipulation of the URL and make Yahoo! acknowledge promotions that never existed and old promotions that expired already.

I contacted Yahoo! and got a response that they are fixing it. Their developers did obviously not read my recommendations regarding how to fix it, because they only changed it to make obviously false promotions like my “GO-GOOGLE-ADWORDS” coupon not work anymore. Other coupons that could be real Yahoo! coupons, but are not, still work in some cases.

It shows for the coupon USCJ17, which used to give new subscribers $50 in free clicks that the coupon expired. This is correct, because I know that the coupon was retired and replaced with coupon USCJ16 ($25 in free clicks) back in April when Yahoo! consolidated their affiliate program. This response for coupon USCJ17 must be hard-coded. I will explain why shortly.

I responded to Yahoo! to let them know, but did not get any response. Okay, if they do not care, then why should I care, right? That was what I thought at that time.

Part 2 – May 11, 2007 – The Mistake

It is funny how things happen sometimes. It is actually ironic and more like something from a bad written movie script rather than something you would expect to happen in the real world.

I received without prior warning an email from the Commission Junction Program Quality department on May 11, 2007. Commission Junction (or CJ) is the affiliate network used by Yahoo! for all their referral programs. The email informed me that I am in violation with CJ Publisher Service Agreement, because I generate traffic to the Advertiser (Yahoo!) with a promotion that is expired, namely coupon USCJ16 (the $25 in free clicks coupon that replaced USCJ17 a month earlier). I have 15 days to get my site back into compliance or CJ nay exercises the right to terminate my account.

I thought “What?” and checked the site and then CJ interface right away. The link on my site with the USCJ16 coupon still works and is still active in CJ.

What?!? I responded bluntly that they should check their facts first, before sending out accusations like that. I would also like to know if the coupon is really expired or not, because I cannot rely on the Yahoo! landing page to determine it myself. May be it is expired and somebody at Yahoo! forgot to expire the link in CJ (It would still work after that, but that is an entirely different story).

I also wrote a blog post at ReveNews.com about this incident. I was mad, because I was written off for not doing anything wrong and worse, maybe because of a flaw, which I reported TWICE. I was also upset that Yahoo! did not contact me directly, after having direct communication just a month earlier.

Yahoo! did not respond (at first), but Commission Junction did. I got two phone calls, one from a normal client services representative and another from a VP of partner development. They apologized for this incident and provided some excuses about internal communication and structural issues and that they will clean things up. They asked me, if I have any questions. Yes, could somebody please tell me, if the coupon USCJ16 is valid or not.

Part 3 – May 18, 2007 – The Reaction

I did not hear back from CJ or Yahoo! until May 18, 2007 when I received the following email from Yahoo!

This communication is to inform you that Yahoo! will be terminating our affiliate relationship. We believe that in recent public statements you intentionally distorted facts and we have no desire to partner with affiliates who publish fabricated information about our program
.

CJ’s Program Quality team regularly monitors our program for fraud and abuse. In this case, CJ believed they had found a violation and contacted you directly. If you had any issues with this email you could have contacted me to resolve the problem but instead you chose to make this a public matter. This is not the sort of behavior we expect from a trusted partner.

Your Yahoo! Affiliate Program Terms will set to expire in 7 days.

What is this now? Was the thought that came into my mind. First of all, thanks for getting back to me after over a month, second; Which facts did I distort and what information did I fabric? Third, “I should have contacted them to resolve the problem?” What did they think I did over the past weeks prior this?

I collected all correspondence with Yahoo! and CJ, including the blog posts and blog comments and put it into a PDF file. I sent the PDF file to Yahoo! and to Commission Junction and requested to review the facts that show that I did not distort any facts or fabric any information.

I got no response from Yahoo! but a phone call from the CJ VP that she will get back to me, when she is back in the office (she was traveling to a conference or something else business related). Time was passing by and nothing happened. I called Yahoo! and CJ and left messages to remind them of this outstanding issue. My relationship with the Yahoo! publisher program was terminated on Friday May 25, 2007 as stated in the email from the previous week.

Part 4 – June 15, 2007 - The Consequences

It is now three weeks after the termination and I still did not hear anything back. My last attempt to contact CJ, who are responsible to a large degree for this mess as well, was last weekend.

I kept my links to the Yahoo! offers up as a sign of good faith and provided them with free traffic and new customers without being compensated for it.

I did not receive an answer to this day, if the coupon USCJ16 is still valid or not. I checked the CJ interface today and noticed that the link is still active. You can see on the screen shots that I can still access available links, which were provided by Yahoo! via the interface, even though I have no partner relationship with them anymore. And here is the link to YSM! with the coupon USCJ16 embedded.

I do not believe that this is a guarantee that the coupon is “officially” valid and I do believe that the message for the coupon USCJ17, which is invalid for sure, is hard-coded. Here is a little example to demonstrate why I believe that. Yahoo! does obviously not care, unless you are an affiliate. If you are not an affiliate of the Yahoo! partner program, feel free to use this “special promotion” to sign-up at Yahoo! and receive $75 dollars in free clicks. The coupon code is…. …. USCJ99 and here is the “official” link that makes Yahoo! confirm it and a screen shot to proof it. Take a screen shot (don’t use mine) when you sign-up to present it to the Yahoo! customer service. We do not want them start believing into parallel universes, don’t we?

Enjoy $75 in free clicks for Yahoo! Search Marketing.

Okay, I have to go now and start removing links to Yahoo! offers and services from my site and some other Yahoo! accounts to terminate while I am at it. They might shut them down, because they feel like it (I doubt it, but I also doubted other things before this happened). I do not want to take any chances.

Note to Yahoo!: I still have the 21 pages (now a few more) of “fabricated information” and “distorted facts” as PDF. You can get a copy any time you want it. Just should me an email to Carsten at Cumbrowski dot com. I will make it public, if you claim again that this is all not true and have people make up their own mind about them.

Carsten Cumbrowski
Owner and operator of Cumbrowski.com

Disclaimer: The opinion expressed in this post is my personal opinion and not the official opinion of SearchEngineJournal.com. Search Engine Journal did not make me add the disclaimer. I added it by myself to protect the Site, its owner and its other editors.

Mailbox Maps is Google Maps mashup that shows you the closest set of mailboxes and the pickup times at each so that you can be sure to get your package out on time.

All you have to do is enter your address. Mailbox Map quickly shows you the nearest mailboxes, and clicking on the mailbox icon shows you the pickup information. We posted about a similar tool a while back, but my biggest complaint was that it need a better interface. Mailbox Map does exactly that and then throws in the pickup schedules and driving directions to the mailbox.

Get your website to celebrity status and rank!

In today’s search algorithms, popularity types are one of, if not the main factor for rankings and on-page content is treated secondary, if not even tertiary. Links are obviously powering sites and they are being built by webmasters any way they can (Buy them, sell them, trade them and roll them). The biggest companies are guilty of buying more links than the average Mom and Pop can afford. It is so common, that Google has requested that competitors try and report text link buying.

While competitors reporting anything worries me (competitors can very easily fake lots of things), the idea is to potentially penalize sites buying and/or selling text links (of course this excludes links with tracking and Google’s own Adwords). But the biggest marketers push through this with no fear and believe that links are only helpful for traffic as well as rankings. In fact, many webmaster believe that if Google does not pass you traffic, links will. This is the way of the internet, promote, advertise and link websites to be found. “Do it or perish into oblivion”.

Plain and simple the emphasis is on popularity types and how they link to your website. Popularity can now be categorized into several types to differentiate:

1. Link popularity: simply links coming into any website from any and all sources. This is a broad term as other popularity types will fall under the effect of Link Popularity because the link is the method.
2. Industry Popularity: the relationship of a site in its known industry to the industry. Are the big industry sites pointing to the site? There are always a few blogs in every industry that stand out, and become celebrity blogs. Matt Cutts, Graywolf, Shoemoney, these are celebrity blogs they gain high industry traffic and link out to their industry. The “BlogRoll” becomes the popularity factor and passes far more power than any directory. Industry popularity focuses on a sites’ prominence in the industry, it can be effective, but it tends to make a group popular and misses the larger core of the industry, so this popularity needs to be factored appropriately. Problems with Industry popularity include blogroll spam, now very common and a potential cause for future devaluation of blogrolls.
3. Social Popularity: very similar to Industry popularity, except here it is values passed from social sites like digg and del.icio.us. Multiple instances of a site on a social site are factored in the algorithms.
4. Click Popularity: used lightly and in conjunction with analytics data to determine bounce rates. Since this is the least accurate measurement, it is believed to be used lightly in its importance for ranking. Click popularity is pulled mainly from the main search index and clicks are counted. Click popularity tends to me more of a theory and is definitely used in PPC campaigns to track and determine traffic patterns on sites.
5. Blog Popularity: this one is a “throw in” and is related to Google more than other engines, Google places more emphasis and trust in blogs, mainly because they have almost grown up on them and because they feel the human element is there. You can negotiate this till the cows come home, but there is more than enough evidence to say that Google favors blogs and blog links over the more traditional website. So, in summary, Blog Popularity is the ratio of incoming links solely from blogs – in theory.

So, now that we have defined a few types we can consider gaining popularity. This is the most important part of any SEO campaign. In theory, if your website is popular, the mere mention of a similar word or a semantic version of the term, would result in a top rank in the search results. So on-page optimization can, and should, be weak while popularity factors need to be higher and trusted site links need to be acquired if the number of links coming into a site is growing.

Utilizing methodologies that produce traffic and connecting with industry related sites, is the strongest method to success. Link baiting works for some sites, but not every site is a viable site for certain industries. So treating every site the same in a marketing campaign would be wrong. Every industry has different factors for the top ranking sites, and knowing them is half the battle. Since modern search engines are concerned with popularity and not direct relevancy, we understand what every site needs to achieve without going to far and going back to the end of the results.

Alan Rabinowitz is the CEO of SEO Image, a New York based SEO and Internet Marketing company which focuses on corporate branding and positioning in search engines.

According to a new report from research analysts at IDC, search is about to lose its dominance of the online ad market, to be overtaken by video and rich media ads by 2011. According to Enid Burns at ClickZ News, the report suggests Google, and to a lesser extent Yahoo, will suffer as the search market loses ground to other online advertising formats. However, the recent acquisitions of YouTube and DoubleClick by Google, and Right Media by Yahoo, should help them compete better in the display ad market.

In the spirit of reader sharing engendered by the Coolest Workspace contest, we're going to try something new here on Lifehacker: the "Show Us Yours" series.

It's like this: We know you guys are what makes Lifehacker great, so we want to tap into your brains a little more so we can all continue to benefit from your big, throbbing hive mind. That's why we're asking for pics of all kinds of stuff you've got going on, from the computer-related to household. We'll publish a gallery of the best submissions for each theme every Thursday so that we can all get a close look at how brilliant you are. Hit the jump for this details on this week's call for submissions and to find out how to submit.

This week, we want to see your iGoogle. If our referrers are any indication, it's the most popular personalized homepage among Lifehacker readers, and we want to see exactly how you personalize it. If you've got a great iGoogle, snag a screenshot (should be viewable at 600px wide) and send it as an attachment to tips at lifehacker.com with the subject, "Show us your iGoogle."

Feel free to tweak your iGoogle to your heart's content before submitting, but remember, we need a little lead time, so you should try to get your submission in by 12 noon PST at the latest. Also, if you want to include details and links to the gadgets that make your iGoogle so good, we'll include the details with the screenshot. Submit as many pictures of your iGoogle as you want, but remember that one is all we need.

Lastly, if you've got something good you'd like to show off (remember, it doesn't have to be computer-related), feel free to suggest a Show Us Yours theme suggestion in the comments or at tips at lifehacker.com. Here's looking forward to your submissions!

Whether we admit it or not, we're all at least a little in love with the iPhone. However, a lot fewer of us are $500-in-love with the iPhone. If your clunky old Windows Mobile phone is just sitting around collecting iPhone jealousy dust, you can either scrounge together 500 leafy Sacagaweas, or you can customize your Windows Mobile phone to emulate several of the iPhone's more interesting features, like the iPhone's home screen, flick-scroll contacts, and the fancy slide-to-unlock.

Today I'll highlight a couple of methods for skinning your Windows Mobile phone to look and feel like an iPhone.* Hit the jump to see some videos of the Windows Mobile iPhone's in action and to find out how to achieve the same results.

* NOTE: No, no matter what you do, it still won't be an iPhone, and I agree, you shouldn't try to make an orange into an Apple (har har). But some of the iPhone's features as implemented using the methods described below are, frankly, are either better or more intuitive than the Windows Mobile default, and I'm thrilled to bring even an ounce of that usability to my smartphone.

There are actually two methods I'm going to highlight, both of which give good results, neither of which are the definitive tools for the job (the Windows-Mobile-as-iPhone community is suprisingly active). One method is relatively simple, the other requires a little more legwork.

Part 1: The easy way

The easy method uses revolves around a skin (see the video for a closer look) which you can download here (look for the res_ppc-custom.icons.zip link). From your download, you'll want to copy the following files to a folder on your Windows Mobile phone (you should to be connected to your computer via ActiveSync):

• launcher.exe
• config.ini
• GFX folder

After you've copied the files onto your smartphone, you can give it a quick test by navigating to the folder you've copied them to with File Explorer and running the launcher.exe. Launcher should give you the iPhone-like home screen. However, you will notice by default that the buttons on the home screen won't all point to something you can use, since each button points to a program, and some of them won't match anything on your Windows Mobile device. Luckily, this just requires some tweaking that we'll get to below.

Now download Slide 2 Unlock, the app that will give you that clever iPhone lock screen. This one's an installable .cab file, so copy it to your Windows Mobile phone and install it. It should install itself in your Program Files directory.

Now back to customizing the programs in our iPhone launcher. You can edit the application that each button points to by editing the config.ini file that resides in the same directory as launcher.exe. Since you can't open it directly from your device, just copy it back to your desktop and open it in your favorite text editor. I should look something like this:

[Button Config]text=\Windows\tmail.execalendar=\Windows\calendar.exeetc...

In order to edit the programs that each button launches, just find the button in the config.ini file and edit the path to the to-be-launched application. For example, I don't need to tap the Clock button to see my clock settings. Instead, I've mapped clock to run Slide2Unlock, which has a big, beautiful clock. To accomplish this, the new line in the config file looks like this:

clock=\Program Files\Slide2Unlock\slide.exe

If you wanted to take things even further, you can customize the images in the GFX folder that you copied to the same directory as launcher.exe. Inside are all of the small BMP graphics that make up your interface. Just copy your own buttons into the GFX\Icons folder with the same name as the button you want it to replace (the names are hard-coded, so you have to keep with the same naming scheme). To change the actual text, you'd need to edit the images in GFX\Res (it does get a bit tedious if you take the customization to this level).

That's really all there is to it. Once you've customized one button, you should get the idea of how you could customize any of the buttons (both visually and behaviorally). That said, here are my recommendations:

• Leave SMS, Calendar, Photos, Camera, Calculator, and Notes as-is. These all pretty much link where most of us would want them to out of the box.
• Map the Maps button to either Google Maps Mobile or Windows Live Search. (According to Gizmodo, Windows Live Search is better—at least on Windows Mobile devices.)
• Map the Clock button to launch Slide2Lock (as described above)
• This is certainly personal preference, but I prefer the Settings button to launch the Wireless Communication manager tool. If you use your regular Settings tools more than I do, you might want to keep this the same.
• I remapped Phone to open up the flick-to-scroll contacts app, iContact. (You can always just hit the Call key to get to your phone dialing skin.)
• Map web to whatever browser you prefer, from the built-in IE to Minimo or Opera (Safari may be in Windows, but don't look for it any time soon in Windows Mobile).

• Point your iPod key toward your favorite media player; for example, if you downloaded it once-upon-a-time, the pPod/iPod skin for Windows Mobile.

To be honest, I'm not entirely sure yet what to do with Stocks or Weather, since I don't actually know of any good and free Windows mobile apps that cover those areas; if you do, please tell us about them in the comments. Otherwise, you could certainly change the icons and programs they launch altogether if the mood strikes you.

Finally, there's a great iPhone dialer skin available in the zip file made available in this more comprehensive, more complicated WinPhone tutorial (more below—you can also see it in action in the video below). If you download the file, you should find the installable .cab file in the Dialpad folder.

Part 2: The harder way

The method I described above, however convoluted it may seem, is actually very easy, especially in terms of Windows Mobile customization. If you want to really go all out into skinning your WinPhone to look more iPhoney (isn't that Steve Jobs' nickname?)—from every detail down to the keyboard and calculator—check out the download and instructions available here. I had less luck setting up my phone with this method (your mileage may vary), but as you can see from the video, the results are a bit more comprehensive. If you've got the time to install and troubleshoot, and you really want to iPhone your WinPhone, you might want to give it a go.

And that's that. While I can understand that this whole process might seem a bit frivolous to some, I stand before you as a man who does not like Windows Mobile. The 15 minutes it took me to set up my phone using the first method will be well worth the payback I get in the long run from improved usability. If you love the iPhone interface and still don't see the point in tweaking you Windows smartphone thusly... well, June 29th is just a stone's throw away.

Adam Pash is a senior editor for Lifehacker who is into the iPhone. His special feature Hack Attack appears every Tuesday on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Hack Attack RSS feed to get new installments in your newsreader.

At SES Toronto this week, Google's Universal Search, personalization, and the death of SEO were among the hot topics discussed. In her ClickZ column today, "Search Works Harder, So Must Search Marketers," Rebecca Lieb offers some highlights from the show.

For other coverage of SES Toronto, check out:

• SES Toronto 2007: Built By People, for People and Robots, Traffick
• Canada, It’s Time To Clue Into Search!, Search Insider
• SES Toronto - Day0.6, Reflections on the Canadian Search Sector, Jim Hedger
• Afterthoughts on SES Toronto, Optimize and Prophesize
• Top 10 Fun Things I Learned at SES Toronto, NLC Internet Marketing
• Commentary on Search Engine Strategies in Toronto Canada (video), Web Marketing Watch
• Canada, Search Marketing and Gord Hotchkiss., Webmama
• Search Engine Marketing Opportunities in Canada, Ten Golden Rules

Forget learning Microsoft Access and Visual Basic: the newly-revamped Zoho Creator is an easy-to-use online database creation tool.

Set up your database's fields (like for an address book: Name, Address, City, State) and then build drag and drop custom entry forms with different input types like radio buttons, check boxes and dropdowns. Ambitious types can add custom logic to the application using the script builder, and the whole shebang can be added to your web site or blog (say, for a feedback form or survey). Looks like a nice way to create a powerful interface to customized data, instead of wrangling with boring spreadsheets. Add this to Zoho's suite of web-based apps that in many ways outdoes Google's more popular offering. Hit the video demo above, courtesy of the Zoho folks, to see Creator in action.

Google requires a photo ID and a sworn statement from people who want out of Maps' Street View photos.

The Search Marketing conference & workshop circuit just got more interesting as WebmasterWorld Inc and SEO Class Inc. have partnered to produce a PubCon SEO Class.

The two-day premium SEO Class SEM training programs are limited to less than 50 participants and focus on midrange to advanced Search Engine Marketing and Search Engine Optimization curriculum.

According to Brett Tabke, WebmasterWorld’s founder and CEO:

“This type of advanced training is something we have wanted to do for several years. Many of today’s leading edge linking strategies, search engine marketing programs, bid management techniques, organic optimization, and social marketing methods were invented by this group of key speakers and educators. When we started to compare notes for session content, I was impressed by the level of expertise displayed by these marketers in their specific fields. Each of these marketers carry out effective, real world marketing action items on their own sites and client sites. Their ideas and techniques are ground breaking in their depth of knowledge and often, the brilliance of their novel ideas is in the simplicity.”

The speakers for Pubcon SEOClass are: Brad Geddes (ewhisper), Michael Gray (GrayWolf), Joe Laratro (Tandem-interactive.com), Todd Malicoat (stuntdubl), Greg Niland (GoodROI) and Brett Tabke (WebmasterWorld).

The Search Marketing curriculum on the first day will focus on Content Creation, Brand Management, Usability & Conversion, Blogging, and Link Management. The evening is rounded off with a complimentary dinner with the speakers.

The second day will focus on Social & Viral Marketing, Research Techniques, Paid Marketing Campaigns, Technical Setup, and Internet Marketing Tools.

The inaugural two-day SEO Class by PubCon is scheduled for New York on July 30th & 31st. Space is limited and attendees should register at http://SEOClass.com. Registration is $2999; however, early bird attendees qualify for a discounted rate of $1999 for registrations before June 30th. Additionally, all attendees will recieve a 30% discount coupon for this year’s WebmasterWorld PubCon Las Vegas.

I’ve been writing a few post about the Future of Online Advertising that went on last week in New York. The most interesting and eye-opening session to me was Electric Sheeps Joel Greenberg, “Advertising In The Virtual World.”

If you think Social Media has given us marketers a great new space to market a product or brand, wait until the virtual space online really opens its door to us. Joel described the virtual space as, “connected community that has game like immersion (without game-like goals) and social media functionality”

You must of heard of Second Life by now, the largest virtual world online with 7+ million registered users. There are many ways of advertising and branding through this channel, and it really is only the beginning! This video really describes its functionalities and opportunities:

Here are some interesting stats I found that should interest you (not new statistics but should be in the same area today):

*25% of Second Life’s users are from outside the USA, with UK the second-largest country of origin.

*The average age of users is 32, and the median age of users is 36.

*There are $5 million USD in virtual transactions per month conducted between users.

*75% of users are buyers, 25% are sellers.

*”Low hundreds” of members call Second Life their full-time job

*Anshe Chung, Second Life’s most notable land baron, makes $175k per year flipping virtual real estate.

*$6.5 million USD in transactions took place in the last 30 days since March 7, 2006.

*75 million instant messages relayed in Second Life in the last 30 days since March 7, 2006.

*Second Life is growing at a rate of 15% per month.

Other up and coming virtual sites to be aware of are There.com and Kaneva.com. The virtual space, much like Social Media, will start breaking down into all types of niches and you will find your target audience/demographic.

YouTube is making the migration over to Google Accounts for login and registration synergy which is letting existing users associate a YouTube account with a Google Account or create a new Google Account.

The new YouTube login page reads:

After Yahoo and Google started buying up the major Web 2.0 communities of Flickr, YouTube and del.icio.us; migration into the parent company registered accounts has been a touchy subject amongst loyal members of each community.

When done slowly however, easing the user into a prefered account registration seems to make the migration a tad easier.

Looking to do some summertime link building and save a little bit of cash for the beach?

Two of the Internet’s most trusted and valued web directories are offering summer discounts which can expand your company’s Internet marketing budget and get your link juice ready for the 2007 holiday shopping season.

First, save 20% from Best of the Web. Enter the promocode BEACHBUM when submitting your sites, or those of clients, to Best of the Web and save 20% off of the review fees.

Next, Search Engine Journal’s In-House SEO columnist Jessica Bowman of Business.com was interviewed by Aviva yesterday and offered readers 20% off of Business.com listings:

We would be pleased to offer your readers a 20% discount off of our $199 internet directory listing product. Just use promotion code AVIVA when you submit your site to receive the discounted price of $159 per annual listing.

Keith Chan, 18 years old, lives in Hong Kong and writes the daily Google blog gSpy.

According to the Official Google China Blog, AdSense China has a new feature in hopes to protect publishers’ accounts from being sabotaged; they call it Allowed Sites. Publishers can enter a list of allowed domains (which they own) and only impressions, clicks and earnings generated from that list of sites would be reported in the publishers’ AdSense account.

The main aim of this feature is to prevent publisher IDs from being placed in spammy sites that do not belong to those publishers. Currently, you can enter up to 100 sites in to the allowed list, and it will take up to 4 hours before the list is activated.

What is interesting is that ads would still show up in sites out of the list though any clicks wouldn’t generate earnings for the publisher, and there is no mention by Google whether advertisers are charged for these clicks.

It seems that this feature has not yet gone international. AdSense publishers, would you welcome this new feature?

[By Keith Chan | Original post | Comments]

Google-DoubleClick probe just the beginning

Two weeks after the Federal Trade Commission opened an anti-trust investigation into Google’s proposed acquisition of online ad company DoubleClick, The Wall Street Journal reports that the FTC plans to examine deals by Microsoft and Yahoo! as well.…

Here’s the official statement from Official Google Blog  about the state of  YouTube’s video ID tool, an issue which received some media buzz the past couple of days.

“We are beginning tests on an automated system to identify and match specific videos. The technology extracts key visual aspects of uploaded videos and compares that information against reference material provided by copyright holders.”

The statement further clarifies that although the technology may be in place and actually work, but still,  it may not be the most effective method of stopping copyright infringement on video contents uploaded in YouTube. The same is true for identifying and pulling out of pornographic materials.

Google still advocates member vigilance in reporting and flagging uploaded videos which clearly violate  YouTube terms of use and appropriate copyright laws.

The bottomline still is not how good the technology is, but how concern YouTube users are in ensuring that the YouTube community is always  populated by clean user-generated videos only.

The Official Google Blog announces the launch of CNN/YouTube Debates, a compilation of user, or better yet, “electoral-generated” videos of questions for U.S. Presidential Election candidates.

Kicking-off this project is the Democratic debate happening on July 23. So from June 14-July 22, users can formulate their own questions, create videos of themselves asking those questions, and upload the videos in YouTube. A CNN political team will then evaluate those videos and select the most creative and compelling questions and air those videos live on CNN during the coverage of the Democratic debate on July 23.

All submitted videos of questions to be asked for the Presidential candidates must meet the following guidelines:

• Keep it quick— less than 30 seconds.
• Make it look good— high audio and video quality.
• Choose your focus— one or all of the candidates on a single issue.
• Be creative— unique settings and approaches.
• Be personal— perspective and general relevance.
• Subject to the YouTube Terms of Use.

So, start creating your videos now, and if you get lucky, you just might get your own 10 seconds of fame on CNN.

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."

My last one, two, three posts that involved Xing.com did always contain a comparison to LinkedIn. This time is it no different, although there nothing directly to compare. Xing does something, that LinkedIn did not do yet and probably also not anticipated.

Xing announced today that they agreed with ZoomInfo.com on a mutual partnership.

Quote from the official Xing.com Blog:

The partnership will provide XING’s 2 million-plus members with immediate access to profiles on nearly 36 million business people and 3.8 million companies directly from the XING platform.

Furthermore, XING Premium Members will have the ability to contact over 18 million professionals directly and securely. ZoomInfo’s 4.5 million unique monthly visitors will also be able to join XING’s business network directly with a simple two-click process.

The Integration between the Xing and Zoom platforms is planned to be completed by fall this year.

See also the offical press release that was released today.

This is a very smart strategic move by Xing to close the membership numbers gap between Xing and LinkedIn, which is a staggering 8 million (two million Xing members versus ten million LinkedIn members).

The benefits of a social networking site for businesses plus the access to the vast databases of both, Xing and ZoomInfo to find potential business partners or customers will be intriguing, especially for business people in the United States, who use LinkedIn only, for the most part. This partnership is certainly a good reason to consider the signup at Xing.com in addition to LinkedIn.

Xing is strong in the European market and expanded aggressively into the Asian market too. It was less successful in the U.S. market so far, but who knows, maybe this partnership will change it and allow Xing to gain significant numbers of new U.S. members by next year.

We will have to wait until fall and the completion of the integration to see how it will play out.

I already have both, a LinkedIn and Xing account. Something I would suggest to anybody who has business relationships inside and outside the United States.

Carsten Cumbrowski
Internet Marketing Resources at Cumbrowski.com, including the updated Internet Marketing Tradeshows and Events Calender for SEO, SEM, AM, DM and other internet marketers.

Betty Birner at the Linguistic Society of America discusses how some linguists feel that the language you speak, and your cultural background, affects the way you think. While there is no discussion of search engines, if this hypothesis is true, your background likely affects the way you search - and possibly your success at it. A study of linguistics and search techniques could be the key to successful semantic search engines.

For example, there’s a mention of a language called Guugu Yimithirr, which is spoken in North Queensland, Australia. It does not have words for left, right, front or back, and instead uses the equivalent of north, south, east and west to describe the same thing.

Then there are words that are pluralized in English but not in other languages. Or there are nuances of state, such as multiple words for types of snow in some Native Canadian cultures. In India, depending on where you are, there’s a difference in wording for rice depending on whether it’s cooked or not - but not in all parts of the country. As well, there are different words for the relationships between family members dependent on their relative age to their own siblings.

Now that’s not to say there isn’t a term for certain words in English. Rather, in English, we might use a compound form instead. Birner concludes that learning another language will probably not change the way you think. I disagree, both from firsthand experience as a multilingual and from observing other English-speaking multilinguals of various ages and cultures.

Still, even if I’m wrong and my observations are a fluke, it’s possible that when we’re talking semantic search, an English-speaking searcher may expect/ accept different search results depending on their non-English backgrounds. As such, a welcome personalization feature in a semantical search engine might be a choice of culture. This might especially be true for voice-based search engines, since we tend to be less formal in voice conversations than in print. Thoughts?

In case you haven’t seen it, Vanessa Fox has decided to leave Google. I’m really sad to see her go, but the work she’s done has really helped webmasters and Google. In the years that Vanessa has been at Google, she’s helped to launch and improve the webmaster console, communicate policy and get feedback with the outside world, and bring search engines together on the Sitemaps standard. She’s done a bunch of things to make Google a better company and search engine.

As a result of Vanessa’s influence, Google does a lot more webmaster communication than we did even a couple years ago, from conferences to blogs to user forums. I’ll miss her dearly, but the communication she began will be continued at Google. When I visited the Kirkland office a couple weeks ago, I was struck by just how many high-quality people the webmaster central team had. And as Vanessa mentioned yesterday, the team of people who communicate webmasters continues to grow.

Vanessa, thanks for all the wonderful things you’ve done at Google, and I wish you the best at Zillow or anywhere else you go in the future. Let me know if you ever need a glowing recommendation. Or I guess you can also just ping some of the tons of webmasters you’ve helped over the years.

Big news from the world of Vanessa Fox. She is leaving Google, and moving onto a new role at Zillow. It should be fascinating to see what changes result from this.

Google will miss her, because she developed into one of their public faces (ala Matt Cutts, and Adam Lasnik) that they could keep in the spotlight on a regular basis. Vanessa has done a great job of helping to humanize the search giant for webmasters, and always had a smile on her face, even when she was accosted by a troubled webmaster at every turn at Search Engine Strategies and other industry gatherings.

She leaves Webmaster Central to the newly expanded team, which will carry on the good work in her absence.

I am sure that Vanessa will do well in her new role. She is very smart, and very personable. So a public best of luck to Vanessa!

The guys who coded the YouTube video player left some interesting debug comments in their Flash file, as Chad Upton found out. Some of the comments (cursing ahead!):

• we got meta fuck yeah
• showing the goddamn play button
• The connection just got tea bagged - reset and reload
• Fuck bandwidth detection script its taking too long or not working so fuck it hard
• Flash is affecting badly the performance of the ****.com website
• This feature does not work and crashes the player fix laterz
• HACK HACK HACK HACK HACK this scuks

Chad’s advice: set your Flash export to omit trace actions, and don’t really put anything in the code (including variable names) you wouldn’t want the public to see.

[Via Barry -> InsideGoogle.]

Correction: Only the first two lines were pulled from the YouTube player apparently, the others are from other non-YouTube Flash files. [Thanks Dylan Bennett and Ludwik Trammer!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

Google Video went through many reincarnations in the past. It allegedly started out as one of those 20% side projects within Google, and Larry Page admitted, “We’re not quite sure what we’re going to get, but we decided we’d try this experiment.” In its first version, you weren’t even able to watch videos at the site (you’d only see stills & captions from TV shows).

This lack of direction in the past felt weird, because a video search engine makes most sense in terms of what people go to Google for, and in terms of what Google is good at. Well, as the Google Operating System blog reports, it looks like Google realized their strengths and finally turned Google Video into an actual web-wide video search engine: the latest update will not only incorporate results from different sources, like YouTube, Vimeo.com, CollegeHumor, eBaumsWorld, MetaCafe, Google Video itself, Yahoo Video or MySpace... it will also present those in a new frame wrapper, similar to what you’ll be used to at Google Images.

On top of the new wrapper, which you’ll land on whenever you click on one of the search results (meaning you spend more time on Google property), you can see the title of the video and a list of related videos. You can also rate the video from 1-5 stars via Google Video, or email the page (this feature was broken when I tried it, as the link Google sent out to me returned a file not found). And naturally, you can remove the top frame and go straight to the page. (If the page has a framebuster script, it will actually get rid of the top frame immediately; this happened with results from MySpace, and it’s a bit of a problem for Google Video.) Below the top frame is the video in its original context, like the Yahoo Video page, so that you can play it or use any of the additional features the video page offers. (This strangely results in you having two places to add ratings now, among other features that are now appearing twice.)

What Google does not seem to do at this time is to include video source files, like WMV, MOV or MPG, which are directly linked from smaller sites. A Google Video search for site:metacafe.com for example returns around 83,000 hits, whereas a search for site:blog.outer-court.com doesn’t find any of the videos hosted here (including embedded YouTube content). To turn this meta video searcher into an even more useful tool, Google might have to look into ways to index all the video out there, and not just those (Flash-wrapped) files hosted on popular video sharing sites.

With the latest Google Video redesign, the strategic difference to the acquired YouTube is getting more clear. While you can still upload videos to Google Video or comment at Google Video, these community features are not at the core of the site anymore (neither does the Google Video store – where you can buy licensed content if you’re in the US – seem to be). I wonder if this change of plans was part of the reason why recently, Google Video director Jennifer Feikin called it quits. As a straight video search engine, Google Video is now doing a nice job – for instance, you can expand a list of thumbnails straight from the result page, giving you a quick overview what the video is about (and perhaps we’ll see more of these features become integrated into Google’s “universal” web search over time):

It’s small search features like these which make information useful, and perhaps Google can now finally concentrate on improving the site in this clear search direction over time.

In other recent video news, YouTube is currently testing a new interface... and now also allows you to log-in with your Google Account (you’ll be asked to provide details like gender, location or date of birth, which can then be theoretically connected to your Google Account).

[Thanks TomHTML and David Hetfield!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

• Upload, tag and share your videos worldwide
• Browse millions of original videos uploaded by community members
• Find, join and create video groups to connect with people with similar interests
• Customize your experience with playlists and subscriptions
• Integrate YouTube with your website using video embeds or APIs

Two or three weeks ago, the European Union Article 29 Working Party sent Google a letter asking about some of Google’s privacy practices. Google responded to the letter in a blog post today and made its entire response letter available (PDF link).

The two pieces of news I see are:
- Google previously committed to anonymize its server logs after 18-24 months. Today Google announced that it plans to anonymize server logs after 18 months.
- Google is considering reducing its cookie expiration time:

We are considering the Working Party’s concerns regarding cookie expiration periods, and we are exploring ways to redesign cookies and to reduce their expiration without artificially forcing users to re-enter basic preferences such as language preference. We plan to make an announcement about privacy improvements for our cookies in the coming months.

Cool. Those are good changes in my book.