Category: Uncategorized

Officially Live in the UK

Windows Live, Live.com and Live Local Search officially graduate from beta in the UK. And now, Live Search will power MSN. Though, the company informed Danny Sullivan, that the beta moniker will linger as the update rolls-out through the entire network. (Meanwhile, ResourceShelf offers a list of Microsoft’s registered ‘Live’ domains.)

On demand ads, for low demand impressions

Right Media’s new Publisher Media Exchange (PMX) tool allows sites to bulk together non-premium impressions and sell them in a real-time auctions. Fox, Tribune, LookSmart, Tickle, and Six Apart, will be among the major sites using the customizable PMX to sell extra impressions to advertisers and ad networks on their sites.

Send a wire to Congress, before one’s set on you

Warrantless domestic wiretapping seems to be illegal, as well as widely unpopular. The due process from Congress? According to legislation proposed separately by Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA) and a group of Representatives (including Chairmen of the House Intelligence and Judiciary committees) …the response is to grant retrospective legal sanction to Presidential free reign, handicap Congressional and Judicial oversight and, to top it off— further expand the warrantless domestic wiretapping program.

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Growing Google library

Google is now permitting free PDF downloading and printing of classic and obscure books—in addition to out-of-copyright books. However, Google will still only provide snippets around search terms for materials under copyright, unless permission is extended by the publisher. link (Gary Price timely points out other sources for free book printing.)

AT&T hack exposes 19,000 ids

A hack on one of AT&T’s systems has exposed the personal data, including the credit card numbers, of 19,000 identities. link

Geotagging Flickr, more like an explosion

Flickr added a geotagging feature that in its first day gained more than 1.2 million geotagged photos. As you might guess, they’re thinking very hard about how to scale “over a million new photos being added on a good day… [and the] billions of bits of data that go into the search (more than half a billion tags alone), along with privacy controls, group membership, and so on.”

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Flickr images enter Yahoo

Yahoo begins to integrate Flickr images into search results. A corresponding new tool in Flickr allows users to remove their pictures from search listings. Everyone is asking: how are the images in results ranked? and how is Yahoo determining which keywords to use? Instead of all tags, only queries like “interesting photos” will return Flickr thumbnails. link

Checkout Affliates

Google Checkout launches an affiliate program with integration incentives for “e-commerce providers.” Checkout is also running back-to-school promotional, accompanied by themed reasons to shop, like: “Jockey.com: Extra Underwear, Starbucks Store: All-Nighters.”

Ask’s new hire

Ask announces their new VP of Technology and Engineering, Chuch Geiger, former CTO at PayPal.

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Another social site with web 2.0 goodness? Yes. Fanpop may standout, however, by picking the best qualities from a number of leading social sites and bringing them together in a neat integration. As they say, “We’re a little bit of Digg, MySpace, Yahoo! Groups, del.icio.us and Yelp all mixed into one.”

Users can create topical federations on just about anything, giving it a resemblance to Tribe’s flexibility. With 24 broad ‘channels’, Fanpop leaves room for communities to cluster around a long tail of interests. In the Fanpop spots, users can add links to relevant websites or news links, like Delicious. But in addition, submitted websites gain momentum from user voting— giving Fanpop the interactive push of Digg and Reddit.

For search fans, there’s the built-in “more on the web” option of out-bound searches keyword tied to the Fanpop title page you’re on, to Google, Delicious, Wikipedia, eBay, Amazon, Flickr, YouTube—probably a list that will grow.

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Compete says up, alongside conflicting data from Hitwise (reporting a fractionally smaller boost) and NetRatings, recording a slight slip down. By Hitwise’s measure, Google search share grew .4%, to 60.2%, in June. Neilsen-NetRatings shows a tiny dip of .2% in July. Tracking different metric sources, Compete reports that Google’s market share actually increased by .5% in July.

As mentioned earlier, Danny Sullivan is sharing some thoughts as he carefully picks through the details in a skeptical survey of all this. In response, ComScore wrote: “We agree with your assessment that a single-month decline does not constitute a trend. In fact, comScore also observed a similar seasonal decline for Google during the same period last year,” before ascribing it to seasonal fluctuation.

SalesForce for AdWords

Today Salesforce launched AdWords campaign management technology. The new service allows users to directly buy keywords, place ads, and create performance reports in realtime. link

Spreadsheets makes the cut

In the wake of Video’s upgraded status on Google’s search page, Spreadsheets beta becomes an option for services in Google Mail.

Music Trends in GTalk

Google is releasing new data on Talk users’ music listening tastes in the Labs. Within the Google Talk client, users can activate Google to mine and categorize their music habits. Other Talk upgrades, here.

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Finding pictures in Picasa

Google acquires Neven Vision, a mobile photo search company, to bolster Picasa. Though there aren’t any special features to show off yet, Google says “one day” image search could be “as complex as recognizing people, places, and objects.”



Blinkx becomes a studybuddy

Blinkx moves its business model towards direct-paid services. In a recent partnership with AOL, Blinkx will provide an education-focused subset of its index to StudyBuddy.com. Blinkx founder and CTO said, “You are going to see us do more of these kinds of deals where we power video search on other sites and either get paid for it or share in the ad revenue that’s generated by it.”

Blotter

Dapper unveils a new service that gauges blog popularity. Blotter graphs link stats over time based on Technorati data.

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Web 2.0 short doc

TechCrunch’s Arrington delivers a 24 min. documentary, asking Silicon Valley leaders and start-up founders to define and discuss Web 2.0–what is it, and for how long? link

Two blogs born per second

Technorati’s latest state of the blogosphere, from David Sifry. Today, the blogosphere is doubling in size every 200 days, or about once every 6 and a half months. link

Google…the musical

The Minnesota Fringe Festival is putting on an electronic musical about Google. A dark-comedic fable, the musical depicts what would happen if Google disappeared one day—after taking over the world, one thought at a time.” Philipp has a detailed synopsis and review. link

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As the search engine space grows and companies proliferate, bloggers within the engines are becoming an important human voice and point of contact for the public, competitors, and SEOs. At the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose this morning, Danny Sullivan hosted a panel with Matt Cutts from Google, Jeremy Zawodny from Yahoo!, Niall Kennedy from MSN, and Gary Price from Ask. Here are some of the views they shared on ‘Speaking unofficially as search engine bloggers’:

On keeping perspective:

Gary says he tries to walk the middle ground, blogging about MSN, Yahoo, and Google more than Ask—and the company encourages him to do so. All four say don’t let the PR department hinder them, though they sometimes give PR a heads-up. Also, though they write with independent voices, letting the company know a critical post is coming out will sometimes solicit more candid company updates. Gary says he tries to make Resource Shelf all things to all people—for the search companies, the SES crowd and library/reference professionals.

When company bloggers are the news:

Danny Sullivan asks if they avoid press coverage. Cutts says he just tries to be so monumentally boring and technical that the media won’t cover it, and says he’s been largely successful (though this editor disagrees that engagement quality is the cause). Zawodny says he keeps a news alert on his name, so he can sigh deeply every time a reporter attributes his comments in a Yahoo exposé. Kennedy says his blog has become one more end-point in a 72 million person company—helping people with specific needs connect with the company.

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Topix expands its News Search —providing access to article archives long past their expiration in Google or Yahoo news services. From a year of results, you can browse through a graphic timeline of stories relating to you search. Caps sensitive searches are also now a go, “for the true search geek” (very useful).