Here’s a short summary of the recent Google blogging brouhaha:

- Google has a new health advertising blog. This weekend Lauren Turner, a Google employee, did a relatively negative post about the movie Sicko. She also mentioned that health care companies that disagreed with Sicko could use advertising to get their viewpoint out.
- Philipp Lenssen at Google Blogoscoped called foul.
- When I read the post myself, I thought “Hmm. That was a bit impolitic. I’ll sit out round one of the reaction. Let’s see how this goes.”
- Lots of bloggers piled on negative commentaries.
- Lauren quickly did a second post this weekend to clarify that she was giving a personal opinion of Sicko, not Google’s opinion.

Things will die down from this post eventually, but there are a few evergreen tips to consider if you’re thinking of blogging on your company’s behalf.

The easiest time to make a blogging gaffe is when you’re starting out. When you’re about to start blogging, ramp up slowly:
1) Ask someone experienced to read the first several blog posts you do. They can flag inaccuracies or tell you if you misjudged the tone of a post.
2) Write a few posts that you’re willing to throw away. You still get the practice, but without as much pressure.
3) Do a guest post or two on someone else’s blog first. At Google, we have lots of official blogs. It’s better to try things out as a guest before you step into the spotlight on your own blog.
4) Practice on forums first. For example, Google has a lot of discussion and help forums where Googlers chime in from time to time. For Googlers, that’s a great place to start. For other companies, find the most relevant forum and practice chatting with people (make it clear that you work for your company so that people don’t think you’re astroturfing).

Don’t criticize other companies or people. This isn’t a hard and fast rule. But for a company blog, it’s usually unnecessary and unwise to throw dirt at other companies. For one thing, it lowers the level of discourse. Plus Silicon Valley and the blogosphere is a small place; the person that you publicly rake over the coals now might work with you down the road. I know that the temptation is strong, but resist it as often as you can.

Don’t post when you’re angry. Pretty much every time I’ve posted angry, I’ve regretted it later. The pace of the blogosphere conversation can be torrid, so reacting quickly can be critical to get your side of the story out on Techmeme or other places. But if you can afford the time, take an extra day to get a little perspective. Sometimes other people make the same points that you would have made.

Learn which stories matter and which ones don’t. You don’t have to respond to every criticism that someone makes. If a story is little more than insults, maybe it’s better to work on developing a thicker skin. And sometimes people are just baiting you trying to get attention. Usually there is a core issue that someone is angry about though. Tackle that issue and don’t sweat the insults.

If you make a mistake, don’t clam up. If you work hard enough for long enough, you’ll eventually make a big mistake. Think of it like skiing: if you never fall down, you’re not pushing yourself hard enough. The important thing is to keep participating in the conversation. Post again to clarify your stance. Don’t yank the original post. If you have to change the original post, make it clear how you changed it, e.g. adding a postscript or striking out what isn’t right.

Here’s a bonus tip specific to this situation: include a datestamp on all your posts. The posts on Google’s health advertising blog are currently month-stamped and time-stamped, but not date-stamped. I’d recommend changing that template to be like most other Google blogs. That lets people see that a clarifying post went up within a day or so after the original post.

In the grand scheme of things, I’d say this Sicko controversy is only 100 milli-iPhones of blog storm (it looks like Sicko had a strong opening weekend, by the way). I think Michael Arrington identified the most important issue:

What I don’t want to see is Google start to reign in its bloggers. As a public company Google is almost certainly putting blog posts through their legal and PR departments before they go live (how this slipped through is a mystery). If too many situations like the one above occur, they’ll start to add more policies and layers of review. If that happens, we’ll all have less insight into what’s going on there. I’m hoping it doesn’t.

Agreed. I’d rather be communicating a lot and sometimes get scalded than not be blogging. I think Google realizes the importance of communication/blogging and tries hard to get it right. Sometimes Googlers mess up, just like anyone else. But I expect more Google blogging over time, not less.

When I was shown around Google Hamburg to take some snapshots earlier this year, there wasn’t any research & development in sight. Instead, the 100-plus employees at the German Google headquarter are mainly divided into three groups: the public relations department, which tries to communicate to the press and watch over Google’s image; the ad sales department, which was split up into many sub-departments (like health, legal, entertainment, industry, each with their own items on display as pictured above); and the system administration, who ensure that the former two departments can get their work done hassle-free. A lot is known to the outside world about Google’s many smart engineers, but relatively little is known about the work of the ad space sales people.

Google now called the advertisement market place they’ve created a “democratic way” to “participate in public dialogue” (in response to another blog post by Google’s Lauren Turner criticizing the movie Sicko, as mentioned earlier). This market place displays ads both on Google search results through AdWords, as well as on websites and blogs (like this one, too) in the form of AdSense. A couple of things are remarkable about this “democracy”:

1. In this “democracy,” it will cost you money to participate; the more money you have, the more you can participate.
2. This “democracy” co-exists with a second, somewhat competing democracy; the one under the rule of PageRank, which Google says relies on “the uniquely democratic nature of the web” by analyzing links.
3. In this “democracy,” Google is actively involved in talking to the various candidates to spend their campaign money with them.

Let’s take a look at each of the three characteristics.

1. You need to pay to participate

For the first point we can find easy proof: it costs you money to create an AdWords campaign, and the more money you invest in the campaign budget, the more often your ad has a chance to be displayed. Now that’s the case on average; other factors, such as click rates on your ad, play a role too, so you should be smart about the ad’s message. Then again, you can also spend over $50 a day with Google AdWords, and if you’re new to the program that will hire you a Google employee to write “compelling ads promoting your product or service" for you as part of the Google Jumpstart program.

2. Search ads co-exist and compete with search results

To analyze the second point – the ads “democracy” co-exists with web search results democracy – we’ll take a hypothetical search for “Acme Inc” on Google. If the official company homepage AcmeInc.com turns up on top for that search, there is no reason for Acme Inc to invest in an ad campaign (well, Google Inc regularly does that with their own products even when these are already top-ranked, but that’s a different story; perhaps they’re so rich they can accommodate for fluctuation due to local/ personalized results). Why? Because clicks on AcmeInc.com in the web democracy are free to begin with, as the web voters decided that AcmeInc.com was the most relevant result for this search query.

As this example illustrates, there are only a couple of real reasons left to advertise with Google, switching from the link democracy to that paid “democracy”: 1) your site is so new that you have reason to believe the web democracy didn’t yet get a good look at it to cast its fair votes, 2) you believe that the “public should be educated” about an issue on which it cast the wrong vote, by your measurement, 3) your site is merely related to the search query, offering something the searcher might not have thought of but might find useful in retrospect, or 4) your site is irrelevant, harmful or misleading, which is why people steered clear of linking to it.

Oftentimes in Google search results it’s indeed the latter case, that a site advertised is much less relevant than the top-ranking ones from the “non-paid democracy”... which is why many experienced searchers avoid clicking on AdWords in search results. (A fifth reason comes to mind when we move to look at those ads displayed on webmaster’s sites, outside of Google search results: the aim to restate a message over time; a product or service may be relevant but also older, and the site owner might have shifted focus to other topics of relevance.)

As Google’s business is to “sell user demand” (to quote Patrick Keane, Google’s Head of Advertising Sales Strategy in 2004), the company as whole has the two conflicting tasks of selling ads to Acme Inc, while improving the relevancy of their web results to make users stay, which in turn can lower Acme Inc’s incentive to pay.

A somewhat similar conflict is apparent not just in search results, but also Google applications like Gmail (which must keep “the ads non-intrusive,” as Google employee Niniane Wang told us, even though those ads are the Gmail revenue). It’s also apparent in the same health sector Google aims to sell ads in. Google’s Adam Bosworth for instance is doing officially sanctioned lobbying for quite some time now for people to “access all online health data about them” (it’s not hard to imagine that Google wants to play a role in this area then, too – “we at Google may be able to help,” as Adam puts it), and he says: “Consumers can organize into communities which are protected from inappropriate commercial exploitation but allow consumers to share their experiences with others whose medical situations are similar”.

One of Google’s self-proclaimed core values, displayed at Google Hamburg as well, is “Our business practices are beyond reproach,” followed by “We make money by doing good things.”

3. Google campaigns for you to spend your money with them

The third point is somewhat less known about Google, which people often think of as purely engineer-driven (which, as a Google engineer told a group of us this year, it’s certainly not always; the ad sales people get more respect in certain meetings because they’re the ones directly driving in revenue, whereas engineers are the ones creating costs. I’ll grant this wasn’t an official Google statement, nor do I believe it’s shared by every engineer internally). Google in their “consumer packaged goods” blog clarifies that Google’s sales teams “are organized by industry so that we can focus on the distinctive qualities and business needs of our advertisers and marketers.” (Not all industry needs are cared for though; hard liquor, firearms and cigarettes are not permitted, for instance; so are ad texts “advocating against any ... person”.) In their opening post, the consumer packaged goods blog wrote, “Our goal for the blog is to communicate with you, our advertisers and agencies.”

Google has different other public ways outside of blogs to communicate with potential advertisers. Their industry overview page collects such areas as automotive, real estate, healthcare or travel, providing tips and case studies. One of the case studies provided in a healthcare context study mentions how an advertiser wasn’t able to use mass spam mails anymore due to the arrival of “more sophisticated spam filters” but was happy to find a new home at Google AdWords:

<<Given its shoestring budget when it started, DentalPlans.com used bulk email as its main marketing tool. “We had no money to pay for advertising,” Babyak recalls. But with the advent of more sophisticated spam filters, that was no longer a good solution. The co-founders turned to Google AdWords to reach their customers more effectively. Babyak remembers typing “dental plans” into Google’s search engine and seeing another company’s ad listed first. Babyak’s reaction was instantaneous: “We want to be there too,” Babyak said.>>

On Google’s automotive page, Google connects to advertisers by stating that “Google’s renowned search results give us tremendous reach to the millions of buyers looking for cars and auto products online,” claiming that “Google is #1 in automotive search referrals, sending more traffic to auto sites than all other search engines combined.”

But don’t expect a clear-defined agenda here for particular industries – Google is not in this to e.g. specifically sell more cars – except going for the biggest budgets; another case study aims to analyze how Viacom’s Paramount Vantage film division built awareness for the movie An Inconvenient Truth through advertising. (Google goes on to attribute the movie’s breaking of the “all-time per screen record for any documentary movie in history” to the “impact of Paramount Vantage’s marketing campaign.”) And Google sells ads to campaigners within meaningful areas of our lives, as well as the more trivial ones... and everything in-between. Google in another case study writes:

<<The name of Clif Shakun’s website, HospitalGowns.com, may describe his product clearly enough. But it doesn’t reveal his passion for providing colorful and comfortable designer hospital gowns and surgical caps. The customer testimonials on his site demonstrate that Shakun has struck a chord with customers around the world. Scores of people have written enthusiastic endorsements and heartwarming stories about facing health emergencies and anticipated surgeries, and how much better things seem to go when wearing his memorable designs. Doctors, dentists, veterinarians, nurses and other healthcare professionals also buy his surgical caps to inject some color and fun into their workplace.>>

All that in mind, it’s an interesting “democracy” indeed. Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land has a less complicated state form to offer, though: “Google ought to get back to just selling space and not trying to be an ad agency to these groups. That’s what ad agencies do, and they aren’t hit by the burden of also having to run supposedly unbiased information resources.”

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

With the new and improved version of Google Docs and Spreadsheets just out of the gate, Web Worker Daily has come up with their list of the most useful keyboard shortcuts for this application:

• Ctrl-J: Full justify
• Ctrl-Shift-L: Bulleted list
• Ctrl-L: Left alignment
• Ctrl-E: Center alignment
• Ctrl-M: Insert comment
• Ctrl-Space: Remove formatting
• Ctrl-1, 2, or 3: Header style 1, 2, or 3
• F2: Edit active cell (spreadsheets)
• Ctrl-Spacebar: Select entire column (spreadsheets)
• Shift-Spacebar: Select entire row (spreadsheets)

Mmmm...keyboard shortcuts. We've written up a few Google Docs shortcuts before, but I do believe that these are the best of the bunch. What shortcuts do you use the most often? Let's hear them in the comments.

Google added last Thursday a nice little video to their YouTube account without mentioning anything significant to their blogs as they usually do for announcements of new product features.

Search Engine Roundtable noticed it on Friday and made a quick post, Lifehacker posted about it on Saturday. 

The new feature is in my opinion significant and worth more than the short video. If you use the driving directions feature from Google Maps, you will be able to drag and drop the “route” from anywhere during the suggested route to somewhere else, to use a different street or make a detour. Google Maps automatically adjusts the route on the fly for you. You can still manually insert additional stops, detours and destinations to your trip manually, but the drag and drop feature certainly helps.

See the animated image below where I dragged and dropped the suggested route from San Francisco to Los Angeles, which is via using Highway 5 to Highway 101, which is much slower, but not as crowded. I could have dragged it further to the coast to Highway 1, which is even slower but in return much more scenic and worth a trip by its own (Hearst Castle is for example on Highway 1).

The Google video shows another practical example where they used the feature in combination with the “Show Traffic” feature to change the route quickly to avoid highly congested areas.

Check it out. Cheers!

Carsten Cumbrowski
Cumbrowski.com, the internet marketing resources portal, resources like statistics and research data. 

1-800-GOOG-411 has added a new feature - the ability to get maps of the businesses that you're looking for texted to your mobile device.

All you need to do is call the number, say "map it", and the text message will come to you with a map of what you're looking for right there on your phone. It's an easy way to figure out where you need to go.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Earlier this week, Ionut Alex. Chitu noted that Google was planning to integrate with Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster’s dictionary and thesaurus. After a bit of digging around, I’ve found a way you can enable the dictionary and thesaurus features now – even before they’re released!

Once activated, you will see three new items in the menu when you right-click words or highlighted phrases:

• Dictionary definition for “[word]”
• Encyclopedia article for “[word]”
• Thesaurus tool for “[word]”

Dictionary definition for “Google” displays the following Merriam-Webster definition:

As you can see, there are still a few bugs with the encoding.

And Thesaurus tool for “digging” displays the following Merriam-Webster thesaurus tool:

Unfortunately, the “Encyclopedia article” link currently just returns an empty window titled “Encyclopedia Britannica" for now.

Selecting a word which doesn’t have a dictionary definition or thesaurus entry will sometimes give you a list of “similar” words, although similar words for “Google” currently returns cackle, chuckle, cockle, cycle, giggle, goggle, guzzle, jiggle, joggle, juggle, quackle, quickly, shackle, sicky, sizzle, squiggle, suckle and swizzle!

Highlighting more than one word also seems to cause problems. (Highlighting the phrase “digging around” returns nothing but an error message for “diggingaround” without the space, for example.)

It’s obvious why this hasn’t been released yet, but if you don’t mind the bugs and want to play with this feature for yourself, here’s how to do it:

1. Open a Google Docs document.

2. Paste the following code into your browser’s address bar and hit return:

   javascript:void(INCLUDE_BRITANNICA_INTEGRATION=true);

3. Right-click any of the words in the document to view the extra items in the menu.

[By Tony Ruscoe | Original post | Comments]

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

One thing that does distinguish users is the difference between a novice search user and an expert user of search. Novice users typically type queries in natural language while expert users use keyword searches.

Example Novice and Expert Search User Queries

NOVICE QUERY: Why doesn't anyone carry an umbrella in Seattle?
EXPERT QUERY: weather seattle washington

NOVICE QUERY: Can I hike in the Seattle area?
EXPERT QUERY: hike seattle area

On average, it takes a new Google user 1 month to go from typing novice queries to being a search expert. This means that there is little payoff in optimizing the site to help novices since they become search experts in such a short time frame.

There was the time when I used Feedster a LOT. Visited every day, sometimes multiple times a day. Relied on it.

Now, not so much. But I did want to note that Feedster has announced a new 2.0 version. The URL is still Feedster.com .

It’s very… green. Mostly green (and, if you’re using Opera, all green with a warning message that you should get a different browser. Pleh.)

The blog announcement goes on at great length about the feedbuzz, and making widgets to go on your blog, &etc. Also mentioned is a tweaked search that is supposed to minimize spaham. I think it needs to be tweaked again; do a search for used cars and you’ll see what I mean. (And if you think that’s too much of a leader, search for Feedster and look at all the discontinued feed notification entries.) Speaking of search, Feedster does have some pretty spiffy operators but doesn’t promote them much. Visit http://feedster.com/help/search.php for a list of what can be done including some very nice site operators. (You can also search for podcasts now on Feedster, which is new from when I was using it.)

I seem to recall that Feedster used to offer an RSS feed for its search results. I don’t see that readily to hand. If I wanted to create a Widget that’s obvious, but if I want to just take an RSS feed and do my own thing with it, that’s a little tougher.

The advanced search options are intriguing but the search seems a bit slow and I’m not interested in playing with Feedster widgets. The number of standalone blog search engines I like remains at two: Bloglines and IceRocket.

Props to the groovy people at Cool Tools for the pointer to a directory of hostels around the world — http://www.hostelz.com/ . This site contains information on over 22,000 hostels in over 6,000 countries in the world.

Searching from the front page is extremely simple. Enter the name of the city or country you wish to stay, or the name of the hostel. I’ve been reading a lot of Inspector Maigret stories lately so I searched on Paris. I got a couple dozen results of hostels in Paris (the results were not numbered) with the option to narrow down the results further by area of the city (a dozen different areas!) The results listing included a star rating, name, and a very brief description. Beneath the hostel listings you’ll also find reviews of the area itself.

Click on the hostel name to get to its page and much more extensive information, including address, price, direction, and contact information. The site has a great layout which contrasts the way the hostel describes itself with a Hostelz.com review. There are also often a lot of photographs available. After the hostelz.com reviews there were customer reviews available. It was a pleasant surprise to see that there were more places that had reviews than did not (on my sites I visit that’s reversed.) Some sites had dozens and dozens of reviews.

The left nav has links to other places in the area that you can link to, and also links to information resources (Wikipedia etc.) about the area.

All the places I looked at had contact information available, so you could get in touch with them directly for a reservation. Hostelz also had an option to look for reservations, but it seemed to take a bit of time to load.

Chock full of information and the reviews had a much higher usefulness percentage than I’ve seen on some sites. I would have only two suggestions — make there be some way to enlarge the pictures taken at the hostels (I clicked on them thinking I would get a larger version, nothing), and perhaps have some way to quickly show how old some of the visitor reviews are (maybe a shaded bar at the top of the review?)

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

Tech site Z-oc.com has written up a simple yet powerful tutorial on how to use Gmail to manage all of your email accounts in one fell swoop.

It's more than a matter of simply assigning forwarding rules willy-nilly, obviously - you get to set up a whole email management system. By the time you are finished with this, all your email can be actually managed from within Gmail with the domains kept separate but controlled inside of your Gmail workspace.

Google Translate has added a nifty new twist: dictionary translations.

For instance, say you're looking for ways to say "drive" en Francais; you can plug it into Google Translate and figure out that there are different ways to use drive, depending on the context.

Google once changed the top AdWords in their search results so that only clicking on the title of an ad – the link itself – you’d be taken to the advertiser’s site. Google said they did this (along with a change in ad colors from light blue to light yellow) to “help decrease the likelihood that a user will unintentionally click on an ad.” However, AdSense ads displayed on other sites are still clickable anywhere, including the blank areas, as shown in above screenshot of Digg.com. Doesn’t that mean (by Google’s logic) people are more likely to unintentionally click on an ad... which are the kind of clicks which take away from the advertiser’s budget mostly without benefit?

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

Web 2.0 tracker Mashable.com has compiled a monster list of fifty different methods by which you can track your website traffic.

We've posted about various stats packages here at Lifehacker, and there's even more goodies to choose from on this list. Anything from web site visualization, to blog and RSS analysis, to various ways to track market research data is covered here. It's a very comprehensive and well done list - do you see anything missing, oh mighty stats hounds? Let us know in the comments.

It’s unusual for a Google department to do peppered movie reviews. In Google’s health advertising blog – which is, well, trying to sell Google ads to the health industry – they talk about Michael Moore’s movie Sicko:

<<While legislators, litigators, and patient groups are growing excited, others among us are growing anxious. And why wouldn’t they? Moore attacks health insurers, health providers, and pharmaceutical companies by connecting them to isolated and emotional stories of the system at its worst. Moore’s film portrays the industry as money and marketing driven, and fails to show healthcare’s interest in patient well-being and care.>>

I haven’t seen the movie yet, but all I can say is bad, bad Michael Moore! Now go invest in Google ads to, as Google puts it, “manage” your “reputation.” One of several areas Google determined to get particularly little focus in the often “sensationalist” media coverage are the health industry’s “philanthropy efforts,” so I guess if you’re involved in that it makes sense to shift some of your philanthropy budget over to Google. As Google’s Lauren Turner goes on to say ...

<<We can place text ads, video ads, and rich media ads in paid search results or in relevant websites within our ever-expanding content network. Whatever the problem, Google can act as a platform for educating the public and promoting your message.>>

Update: The discussion continues now that Google’s Lauren Turner posted a follow-up (after the story went on to Boing Boing, TechCrunch, ZDnet, Slashdot and many other places).

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

The abundance of Lifehacker posts cloggin' up the ol' feedreader? 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 DIY office projects
  "Anyone can drop cash on spendy office gear, but it takes a little ingenuity to rig up your workspace just right with stuff you've already got around the house."


• Publish and map your photos with Picasa
  "Besides using Picasa to organize and edit the digital photos on your computer, you can also use this versatile photo editor to create web albums, send and resize bulk photos to Flickr, and geotag photos using Google Earth."


• Sync your Firefox extensions and profiles across computers
  "Since the dawn of time, humanity has longed for a simple way to sync Firefox extensions, themes, bookmarks, and saved passwords between computers so that no matter where you're working, your browser is customized in the exact same way--the way you always intended it."


• Separate your email from your to-do's
  "Everyone gets task requests via email all day long, and it's so easy to let these messages slip through the cracks."


• Show Us Your Firefox, Part 1
  "Firefox's strong point is its extensibility, and after taking a look at the way Lifehacker readers extend Firefox to do their bidding, it's hard to understand why anyone would choose any other browser."


• Build your own underwater camcorder housing
  "DIY'er Kipkay puts together a waterproof casing for his video recorder to capture underwater action in the pool."


• Turn a C battery into a D with quarters
  "Build a makeshift D to C "adaptor" with a few regular, conductive, George Washington quarters."


• Watch internet video like TV at Chime.tv
  "New video aggregator Chime.tv offers internet video from all the big providers in a slick, television-like interface."


• Find the closest place to go on the go with MizPee
  "Web site MizPee finds the closest and cleanest bathroom by location from the ease of your mobile phone."


• CallWave replaces your voicemail, transcribes what's important
  "Transcriptions are not verbatim. Instead, the feature (called Vtxt) trims out the fat to give you the gist of the message. The text is then sent as a text message or an email so you can get to the point quickly."


• Screencast your favorite shortcut for a signed copy of Lifehacker
  "You've got a few great shortcuts and timesavers up your sleeve that help you get stuff done faster on your computer. Now we want to see 'em in action!"


• Drag and drop to tweak your driving route
  "Change the driving directions by grabbing the blue route line and dragging it to create a new destination point, which will in turn create a new route."

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."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Docs, Spreadsheets, Folders

It's only a matter of time before Google unveils a full-fledged online operating system. This week, Microsoft's biggest rival rolled out a new version of Docs & Spreadsheets - its online answer to Word and Excel - adding Windows-like folders, an improved search engine, and an all-around prettier interface.…

Powerset, the most talked about semantic search engine that no one has seen, is slowly opening its doors to scrutiny. Last night, the company hosted an event for bloggers and tech media at its San Francisco headquarters.

Some coverage of the event:

• ZDNet's Dan Farber (Powerset: The natural language search mashup platform)
• Nitin Karandikar of Software Abstractions (Powerset is Not a Google-killer!)
• Tailrank's Kevin Burton (Powerset - Out of Stealth)
• Ethan Stock (PowerSet: Let's Re-Invent Everything )
• John McKinley of Great Falls Ventures (Powerset - no pretender to the throne, but the real deal)
• Microsoft's Don Dodge (Powerset - Open Source approach to beat Google)
• Mike Masnick of Techdirt (Powerset: Is There More Than Buzzwords And Patent Threats?)
• Google Blog Search
• Techmeme

The company gave attendees a look under the hood, and introduced a new developer platform called Powerlabs. Both the search engine and partner program are expected to launch in September. “We want as many people in Powerlabs to help us build and test the product. Powerlabs tells us when we are ready to go. We could have 50,000 people QAing our product,” said Steve Newcomb, COO and co-founder of Powerset. So far, Powerlabs has 10,000 users, according to ZDNet's Farber.

Google has started to roll out their AdSense referral program (the one with non-Google products) to even more publishers, Search Engine Land reports. To see this, check your AdSense Setup -> Referrals page, set your market and language (like “Germany, English”), and pick some product categories (like “Entertainment” and “Telecommunications”) or specific products. You’ll end up with a code snippet for your website as usual. (Note that you’re only supposed to add three AdSense referral ads to your pages, additional to three pay-per-click AdSense ads.)

The crucial difference between referral ads and “normal” AdSense is that you won’t get paid per click, but only if the visitor who clicked the ad buys something from that site, too (or performs another action, like a newsletter subscription). For every ad, you can check the detail view to see what action needs to be performed and what revenue it will bring to you. Referral ads mostly look like normal ads, but they read “Referral Ads by Google.” And there’s one other layout option which normal AdSense don’t have: the link-only ad type, because this link will automatically adjust to your page’s font settings, and not break the text flow (and it will also not carry any Google-branding, or disclosure).

I’ve included a referral AdSense on one of my other sites. Note that the part reading “Ad:” is my own HTML, and only the “Comics T-shirts” part is served by Google (I surrounded it with a “strong” tag to display bold). Because I added only this single referral ad to my AdSense cart to generate the JavaScript snippet, there’s no rotation of any kind – this link will always display the same. As these JS-served links don’t pass on Google-juice, they’re (obviously) also not against the Google webmaster guidelines.

Now I’m not quite sure how you are allowed to promote referral AdSense. As you may know, the AdSense terms don’t allow you to tell people to click on pay-per-click ads. For referral ads, Google says you can endorse them (like “I use this product and suggest it to you too”), though you’re still not supposed to use language like “visit these links to support our site.” I wonder where they draw the line between the two. (I’m also not quite sure if you’re now allowed to click on your own referral ads – after all, the advertiser wouldn’t get billed for that anyway.)

With Google’s new selection interface, it’s weird that you have to pick a specific market; the help file says you need to “choose the combination that best reflects the profile of your users,” but what if my visitors come from all over the world instead of mainly from one country? Why can’t I select no market, as an option, and rely on Google handling the geolocation aspect (as they can check the user IP for every request)?

Other problems I currently encountered with the service is that navigating categories feels sluggish, and products don’t always seem to fit the category they’re placed in (“diet pill” in “telecommunications"?). Also, there just aren’t too many advertisers to choose from at this moment (and some advertisers which were displayed resulted in the message “The product you have chosen is no longer available”), though this is probably to be expected as the service is still young.

All in all however the new service has potential to be a neat new way for webmasters to make money from their sites. (I find it much easier to use then some of the competing affiliate systems, too, especially Commission Junction.) I’d say manually picking referrals could work particularly well for those sites of yours which cover a specific restricted topic, and where you believe you know the type of audience well. The text link type is also a good alternative to the usual AdSense ad boxes, and may lend itself especially well to fine-tuning of the ad placement. Now time will tell if these ads pay well, too... I’ve replaced normal AdSense with referral AdSense on some of my sites and can now start to track the difference it makes.

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

The European Commission in cooperation with YouTube has launched EUTube, a video portal showcasting the works of the European Union. The EC hopes to disseminate the activities of the Commission through videos and at the same encourage its citizens to comment on the video clips being uploaded in the EUTube channel. The EUTube channel would contain video news releases by and about the European Commission. Through these videos, the EC hopes that its citizen would be enticed to view other videos in the channel making them more and more aware of what the EC is doing.

Mikolaj Dowgielewicz, spokesman for the E.U. commissioner for institutional relations and communications strategy said that EU turned to YouTube so that:

“When a user watches clips on the channel, he or she is prompted to view other clips from the same source,”

Already there are varied reactions on the EC’s strategy of using a web 2.0 video uploading site such as YouTube. But the EC believes that this a way of reaching out to its people who uses YouTube. But then again, one can help but wonder why such a big international organization would utilize such highly commercialized web service instead of coming up with its own technology.

Let’s just hope that we won’t see an EUspace in the near future.

In the meantime, why don’t you check out EUTube and enjoy watching how everyone can save the planet through an animated cartoon video.

There’s an old golden rule in terms of choosing a career or venture which still applies today, even to blogging; love your work. Being passionate about our jobs, entrepreneurial endeavours, or daily routine can make the difference between success or failure.

From a personal standpoint, I’m passionate about growing this blog and covering the search engine world, but honestly, after 4 years of doing so, spending a sunny Friday afternoon onside to write about tweaks to an algorthim can be challenging.

Then, I talk to someone like Ken Savage, and I feel the invigoration of taking my first blogging breath all over again.

Ken’s Blog Story

A few years ago, Ken was diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes, and in an effort to learn more information about the disease, and share that information with others, Ken launched the BattleDiabetes.com blog.

A search engine marketer for Kronos.com, during the night & weekends, Ken blogs about happenings in the diabetes research world and the importance of the prevention of Type 2 diabetes via diet & exercise. His wife does a lot of the research during the week, in what Ken says is a motivational tool to keep him on track.

Making Blog Money : AdSense & AuctionAds

What started as an educational project is now bringing in supplemental income, almost $40,000 a year - thanks to Google AdSense, AuctionAds and Text Link Ads.

The revenue generated from BattleDiabetes.com is split as follows :

• Google AdSense : 40%
• AuctionAds : 40%
• Text Link Ads : 20%

Ken says that his revenue really improved once installing the AuctionAds advertising spots on BattleDiabetes. Best of all, the eBay product auction generated ads do not interfere with Google AdSense, so both formats can be run on the site at one time, and by smoothly integrating the ads into the site, the click thru rate is higher.

Building Traffic to the Blog

BattleDiabetes.com attracts 7,000 to 9,000 pageviews on a given day and Ken says that the majority of traffic comes from search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Ask.com.

Wordpress is used to power the blog and after some basic Wordpress SEO Plugin installs the backbone can be made very search engine friendly. Ken also practices strategic linkbuilding, with sites like TheDiabetesBlog.com linking back to his blog.

But Ken says that one of the most recent jumps in search driven traffic came after he listed BattleDiabetes.com in major web directories such as Best of the Web, DMOZ, Aviva Directory and Business.com.

Ken also takes full advantage of the social media outlets like StumbleUpon, Netscape and Digg to build some of his traffic. Almost all articles are submitted to StumbleUpon, which can drive major traffic if its users give the article a ‘Thumbs Up.’

StumbleUpon actually requests that webmasters submit their own content for the SU community to vote upon, and this is paying off well for Ken, as Buzz.StumbleUpon.com/Health is one of his biggest referrers.

Submitting articles to Digg & Netscape is done on a more conservative note, as only the most informative and interesting pieces are submitted to each.

To wrap things up, using a balance of passion, education, sharing, basic SEO, link building and contextual advertising; Mr. Savage has taken the diagnosis of a major and life threatening disease and turned it around into a commercial opportunity; while at the same time combatting his own disease and helping to prevent others from developing full blown Type 2 diabetes.

You might have seen this older video of a kid freaking out over his new Nintendo 64... now check out the iPhone parody!
[Via Boing Boing.]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

Google recently beefed up our webmaster quality guidelines with more info, examples, etc. Normally I’d start the conversation and highlight important points. Let’s turn it around this time. Check out the additional info in the webmaster guidelines — what do you see that is unclear? Are there places where you think the wording is poor or confusing?

When I first saw the press release about the new Mildred Wirt Benson archive, I had one reaction. “The Secret of the Old Clock.” The first Nancy Drew novel. Man, I must have read that book twenty times when I was a kid.

Mildred Wirt Benson wrote the first Nancy Drew novel in 1930 under the pseudonym Carolyn Keene, and wrote nearly two dozen of the series. Benson donated her personal papers to the University of Iowa Women’s archives, starting in 1992 until her death in 2002. These papers, plus other materials, make up the new Mildred Wirt Benson collection available at http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/mwb .

From the front page you can browse all the items in the collection or view a timeline, but I recommend looking at the sample categories at the bottom of the page, including biographical information, photographs, and short stories. (Read the autobiographical sketch if you get a chance. I have great respect for people who can write fiction to start with — but to write so much of it so quickly! — you’d think she was Georges Simenon.

If you read any of the Nancy Drew books as a kid, the cover gallery will take you back, as it contains sixty covers from not only the Drew series but a variety of other youth series as well. Included here are covers from the “Dan Carter” “Dot and Dash” and “Honey Bunch” series. The second and third pages of covers have more Nancy Drew covers. A lot of these look familiar! When you click on the cover you’ll also get the opportunity to look at the other parts of the book — table of contents, endpapers, flyleaf, title page — everything but the actual content.

Fascinating to get a glimpse into one of the first writers behind Nancy Drew. Very interesting stuff!

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

TorrentSpy and ISOHunt to begin search filtering. I’m
only stunned they were able to hold out THIS long.

There are new digital maps resources at the National Library of Scotland.

Threadwatch closing down. That’s too bad.

Kool-Aid Pickles?????? Really? Ick.

New Virtual Ducati Museum.

Google Calendar now allows you to get event reminders via SMS. New?

Xerox semantic search.

70 Years of Indiana All-Stars.