Organic SEO Blog

231-922-9460 • Contact UsFree SEO Site Audit

Wednesday, August 03, 2005

Yahoo Search Marketing to Launch Keyword Search Contextual Advertising Network to Rival Google AdSense

Yahoo is set to roll out a keyword search contextual advertising program - using an ad platform quite similar to the Google AdSense program. The new Yahoo search marketing company program oofers small-to-midsize web publishers, including blogs, an opportunity to increase revenues by extending distribution of the Yahoo sponsorsed search results.

Yahoo has been working for months on this contextual search advertising program customized to provide bloggers and other small online web publishers, thus encroaching on what has tradiionally Google's realm.

Yahoo and Google are already head to head rivals in serving major search-advertising partners, with Google nearly holding a monopoly on contextual text advertising for smaller sites, including blogs and forums. We suggest that any party interested in website optimization, or organic search engine optimization visit this new search engine optimization forum debeuted earlier this month.

Yahoo will now include smaller websites in the Yahoo Publisher Network and will roll out the beta program to 2,000 publishers, and plans to expand it by year-end. Yahoo's Content Match contextual listings will allow publishers to place contextually relevant text ads on their web pages and split with Yahoo the revenue generated from the links.

Yahoo Content Match will also allow publishers to distribute their content on Yahoo via RSS to drive traffic back to their sites. Content Match will let publishers customize the ads that appear on their sites as well as display ads that are "consistent with the look and feel of their site," said Yahoo spokesperson Guade Paez.

Tuesday, August 02, 2005

Court Prevents Google from Hiring Microsoft Search Engineer

A Federal judge stopped google from hiring an ex-Microsoft executive late last week.

A state judge temporarily blocked a former Microsoft search vice-president from heading up keyword search rival Google's new research center in China.

The court ruling marked a small victory for MSN in their escalating war with Google as Kai-Fu Lee was not allowedto move over to the Google search engine optimization company.

Microsoft sued Lee and Google, stating that the former head of its Beijing research and development center had violated his employment contract by agreeing to take a job at Google.
Microsoft and Google are directly competing in Web search and also have begun competing for talented people.

Google plans to open a new facility in China later this year to develop new technologies and attract computer science researchers. A final location has not yet been chosen.
The world's largest software maker claimed Lee was privy to propriety information regarding the company's search technologies and business strategies in China.

While at Microsoft, Lee, a former Carnegie Mellon University researcher who previously worked for Apple Computer Inc., managed groups developing speech recognition and other interactive technologies for computers.

In granting a temporary restraining order requested by Microsoft, Gonzalez forbade Lee from working on Google projects or research relating to search technologies, natural language processing or speech technologies, and business strategies that would be "competitive" with fields he studied while at Microsoft.

A trial is scheduled for January of 2006, although Google may contest the temporary restraining order in September 2005. Gonzalez also prohibited Lee from disclosing trade secrets or proprietary information learned while he was employed at Microsoft and it forbade Google from "attempting to induce" Microsoft employees to work for Google.

Brad Smith, Microsoft's general counsel, said his legal team was trying to enforce the terms of Lee's contract rather than stopping his employment at Google altogether. "In our industry, intellectual property rights need to be protected," Smith said after the ruling. Google, which had earlier called Microsoft's lawsuit "a shocking display of hubris," downplayed the importance of the ruling, calling it a "temporary measure to maintain the status quo."

"We're gratified that the judge recognized that all Google and Dr. Lee have to do is avoid having Dr. Lee do anything competitive with what he did at Microsoft," said Nicole Wong, Google's associate general counsel. "As we have said all along, we have no intention of having him do that."

Google had argued that Microsoft's lawsuit was an intimidation tactic designed to prevent employees from leaving Microsoft. The company separately has countersued Microsoft in California, asking a court to invalidate the Microsoft contract.

In a sworn declaration filed on Wednesday, Lee said that Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates told him during a meeting on July 15 that he would be sued, adding that the company needed "to stop Google." A Microsoft spokeswoman said she could not verify Gates' statement but said it would be "not surprising, given the fact that Google is a direct competitor. Dr. Lee is taking his knowledge of our search technology and China business strategies to work for them."

Thae ware between MSN and Google has only just begun.
Super Bowl 2006 - Michigan Internet Marketing Update: Detroit`The MotorCity`Ford Field Prepare For National TV Coverage

Detroit To Place Banner Advertisements on Run Down Abandoned Office buildings to portray Urban Renewal Theme on Fox Network Television Super Bowl Coverage.

What does Super Bowl On-Site Billboard Advertising and Television Coverage Have to Do with Internet Marketing or Organic Search Engine Optimization ?

Everything - Read On !

Detroit and many network TV advertisiers will throw away miillions of dollars in 'one time only' Network TV spots involving huge sums of advertising money that will do very little if anything at all to acutally 'move the needle' and impact market share.

Super Bowl Network TV Advertising Flights are Full of Waste - just ask the founders of godaddy.com that now admit that their one time only super bowl advertising investment of $2.4 million dollars last year led to little real business and had almost no impact on their bottom line.

This year the super bowl is being played in Peak Positions SEO former hometown of Detroit, Michigan and perparations are underway to get Detroit and Ford Field ready.

Also keep this in mind as you consider Detroit and Michigan's long heritage of producing the world's top technology leaders. All of the technology leaders listed below were born and raised in and around the motorcity and the state of Michigan:

Larry Page - Founder, Google
Steve Ballmer - President, Microsoft - (soooo Intense we love his Detroit eat or be eaten...Red Bull mindset!)
Scott McNeely: Chairman & CEO, Sun Microsystems
Peter Karmanos: Chairman & CEO, Compuware Corporation - Owner Carolina Hurricanes
Mark Woodward: Pesident & CEO, Serena Software
Richard Snyder: Former President & CEO, Gateway Computer
Jack Roberts: Vice President, Director of Client Services, Peak Positions SEO
Don Bice: Technology Manager, Peak Positions SEO
Brian Nelson, SEO Project Engineer, Peak Positions SEO

--

Here'a a recap of the super bowl preparations in Detroit Michigan:

Attention Advertisiers: spend your maketing dollars wisely, as it serves companies best to seek out advertising and marketing opportunities that have long-term impact, offering as little waste as possible, enter: organic website optimization the most effective form of advertising.

See ya at Ford Field....

Following the success of huge outside banners at the All-Star game in Detroit, and with Super Bowl XL coming to town in February, a growing chorus of building owners and advertising professionals hopes to loosen Detroit's restrictions on downtown advertising and make out-sized signage permanent, according to the The Detroit Free Press.

One idea, to wrap abandoned buildings with advertising to hide deterioration, was recently considered by the City Council and the debate continues. The City Council has approved the same or greater display of giant banners during the Super Bowl as during the All-Star Game.

All signs must be related to the Super Bowl itself, and each can contain only a small amount of corporate branding. The Host Committee wants to restrict banners to those of its official Super Bowl sponsors, such as Cadillac, Pepsi and Coors, and to bar those of "ambush marketers."
Google TV debuts

Earlier this week google TV finally made its long awaited debut on some fledging cable TV networks. Here is an overview of the new google video program it's still in beta but will soon become a major cable TV programming breakthrough

--- look out satellite radio your just too slow ---

Here is an overview of the google video program:

Google's mission is to organize the world's information, and that includes the thousands of programs that play on our TVs every day. Google Video enables you to search a growing archive of televised content – everything from sports to dinosaur documentaries to news shows.
Just type in your search term (for instance, ipod or Napa Valley) or do a more advanced video search (for instance, title:nightline) and Google Video will search the closed captioning and text descriptions of all the videos in our archive for relevant results. Click on a video title on your results page and you can view still images from the video and, where a transcript is available, short snippets of transcript text.

Some of the videos will allow you to play the video, and will feature a small triangle "play" icon next to the snippet. Try typing in the following search terms to watch free videos: gamespot, Greenpeace, AdWords, badminton, PS3, cattlemen, Hortus, sarong, breakdancing, capoeira. Check out some additional interesting videos.

Recent contributors to the Google Upload program include UNICEF, Employment & Career Channel, CNET, Greenpeace, P. Allen Smith, Global Village Stock Footage and many more.
For TV programs, visit the "About this show" side panel to learn when this show will air next.
How Google Search Works for programs from a variety of channels including:
ABC (KGO) *
NBC (KNTV) *
CNN
ABC News Now
The Weather Channel
C-SPAN
KQED *
Discovery Channel
C-SPAN2
KQED HD *
Discovery Health
PBS
KQED Encore *
The Learning Channel
HGTV
KQED Life *
Travel Channel
Food Network
KQED Kids *
Animal Planet
DIY
KQED World *
Fox News
Fine Living
KRON *
here!

* San Francisco Bay Area stations

Google's mission is to give viewers complete access to public affairs programming and they are committed to use new technologies to enhance the value of our services. This new video search program further demonstrates how new technologies will expand Google's audience and make it easier to optimize Google search content for information most relevant to Google video searchers.

Google video search coming to televisions screens worldwide - stay tuned as the world's information Library continues to extend their reach.

Friday, July 22, 2005

Google second quarter profit quadruples

Google's Second-Quarter Profit Quadruples

Google Inc.'s streak of stellar growth has spoiled investors so thoroughly that the online search engine leader may be punished because its second-quarter profit didn't surpass analyst expectations by a wide enough margin.

The Mountain View-based company set the stage for the harsh treatment Thursday with the release of a report that normally would be a cause for celebration. Google's earnings more than quadrupled during the three months ended in June, climbing to $342.8 million, or $1.19 per share, from $79.1 million, or 30 cents per share, at the same time last year.

If not for a slight charge to account for employee stock options issued before Google went public 11 months ago, the earnings would have ranged between $1.29 and $1.35 per share. That topped the mean estimate of $1.21 per share among analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial.

Revenue for the period totaled $1.38 billion, nearly doubling from $700.2 million last year. After subtracting the commissions that Google paid to other Web sites in its advertising network, the revenue stood at $890 million, beating the Wall Street estimate of $842 million, according to Thomson Financial.

Reflecting investor anticipation of a big quarter, Google's shares reached a new high of $317.80 on Nasdaq Stock Market Thursday before retreating slightly to finish at $313.94, up $1.94 for the day.

But then the shares dropped $17.95, or 5.7 percent, in extended trading. The negative reaction harkened back to a few years ago when companies routinely expected to deliver quarterly earnings aimed at a "whisper number" circulated among money managers and other elite investors. The whisper number invariably was above the estimates published by securities analysts.

Google's stock also had become overheated in anticipation of a blowout quarter, acording to many analysts. In an interview, Google's chief executive said he remained optimistic about the company's prospects. "Business is going quite well," CEO Eric Schmidt said. "Things aren't falling off a cliff."

In another development that may have troubled investors, Google's second-quarter revenue rose by 10 percent from the previous quarter. The sequential revenue growth had ranged between 15 percent and 28 percent in the previous three quarters that Google had reported as a publicly held company.

But the second quarter typically marks a financial slowdown for many Internet companies that rely on heavy traffic like Google, because more people are spending time away from their computers as the weather becomes warmer and the days grow longer. The same dynamic seemed to affect Google's second quarter results last year, when revenue increased just 7 percent from the preceding quarter.

Industry analysts believe the seasonal shift is one of the reasons that another Internet bellwether, Yahoo Inc., merely matched analysts' expectations in its second quarter, a performance that caused its stock to plummet earlier this week.

In a Thursday conference call with analysts, Google Chief Financial Officer George Reyes told analysts he expected it be even more difficult for the company to maintain its growth pace in the third quarter, and not just because people won't be in front of computers as much during the summer.

Google believes its results during last year's third quarter were boosted by the intense media coverage that surrounded its initial public offering of stock last August. The publicity drew more traffic to Google's Web site, helping the company make more money from the advertising links that it serves up with its search results.

That warning makes it unlikely analysts will raise their third quarter estimates for Google, creating another drag on the stock, Edwards said.

Estimates are that GOOG will move up to $350 a share in coming weeks.

Google is under immense pressure to produce extraordinary earnings growth because of how high its stock has climbed since the company's IPO at $85 per share. Although Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have stressed they aren't interested in meeting short-term expectations, the company still has surpassed analysts' estimates in each quarter since the IPO.

The stellar showing has propelled Google's market value to nearly $90 billion in less than seven years in business, turning hundreds of the company's 4,183 employees into millionaires.

Remember this broker and investment community only one yer ago were negative and bullish on Google's stock. Is Wall Street finally beginning to realize that Keyword Search quite possibly saved the Internet ?
Google seeks to stop Microsoft from suing new hire

Google asked a California judge to invalidate a non-compete agreement central to Microsoft Corp.'s lawsuit against a former vice president hired to head Google's new research center in China.

In a filing to the California Superior Court in Santa Clara County, Google (GOOG) claims that the non-compete emloyment provision signed by Kai-Fu Lee while he worked for Microsoft (MSFT) was "overreaching and unlawful".

Microsoft sued Lee earlier this week in its home state of Washington, alleging he violated his confidentiality and non-compete agreements by agreeing to take the job with Google.

Google, the No. 1 Web search provider, is a growing competitor to Microsoft, the world's biggest software maker.

At the same time, Microsoft is attacking Google in the Internet search arena.

Microsoft tapped Lee in 1998 to establish a research and development center in Beijing. He later moved to Microsoft's headquarters in Redmond, Washington, to become the company's vice president responsible for developing speech recognition and other interactive technologies for computers.

"It's about intimidation pure and simple. Their actions in trying to prevent Dr. Lee from joining Google is clearly an illegal restraint of trade," Nicole Wong, Google's associate general counsel told Reuters in a telephone interview.

The state of California, where Google has its headquarters, has a policy against non-compete contracts that seek to restrain employees from choosing where they want to work in California.

The Google vs. Microsoft War is Heating Up Early.

Can you imagine the legal rift awaiting two Direct Competitors when Google release the GBrowser!

Wednesday, July 20, 2005

Microsoft sues Google

Micorsoft sues Google as former MSN employee Kai-Fu Lee is hired away to lead Google's research and development drive in China.

Microsoft increased its war with Google earlier this month, when Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer filed a huge lawsuit of their own (does it pay to know the legal system?) against the world's most popular keyword search engine: Google.

Google has hired yet another key Microsoft employee and further infuriated Gates and Ballmer.
Microsoft in a legal complaint filed in Washington, Microsoft claims that Kai-Fu Lee (is not a free man), who hooked up with Goog a couple weeks back to lead an agressive research and development campaign in China. Micorsoft attorneys, looking tired and overworked, say the hiring of Kai-Fu Lee violates a strict noncompete agreement that Lee gleefully signed when he was first hired with an excessive compensation and salary package at Microsoft.

Lee was corporate vice president of Natural Interactive Services at Microsoft.
Microsoft attorneys urged the federal court in he ste of Washington with this request "We ask the Court to require Dr. Lee and Google to honor the confidentiality and non-competition agreements he signed when he began working for Microsoft," the Redmond, Washington-based company said in another litigation fueled press conference.

"Creating intellectual property is the essence of what we do at Microsoft, and we have a responsibility to our employees and our shareholders to protect our intellectual property. As a senior executive, Dr. Lee has direct knowledge of Microsoft’s trade secrets concerning search technologies and China business strategies. He has accepted a position focused on the same set of technologies and strategies for a direct competitor in egregious violation of his explicit contractual obligations."

In other words Dr. Lee packed his briefcase with internal documents and laid them on the conference table n Montain View and requested immediate stock option compensation from Google. The 10 shares of Goog stock transfered to Mr. Lee are projected to represent the value of five years of his former MSN salary.

Microsoft requested that the court prevent Lee and Google from undertaking any actions that are in violation of Lee's non-compete employment agreement with Microsoft. The lawsuit went onto request, as well as prevent Mr. Lee from "disclosing or misappropriating" any of Microsoft's established trade secrets or proprietary information, according to the legal complaint.

Microsoft also requested that the court prohibit Lee or any employee at Google from potentially luring other key Microsoft employees away from MSN, as well as from destroying key documents, in written or electronic format, that relate in any way to Microsoft's or Google's employment of Lee.

In a statement, Google executives said Microsoft's claims are "completely without merit" and that Google plans to fight the Microsoft Lawsuit. A google spokesperson made this comment:
"We're thrilled to have Dr. Lee on board at Google," and also went onto to add "Google will defend vigorously against these meritless claims from Microsoft and will fully support our new Google employee Dr. Lee."

Google and Microsoft have recently entered into a heated rivalry that involves advancements being implementd by Google that involve appilcations and areas long dominated by Microsoft.

Google and Microsoft are lining and drawing battle lines in the sand concerning email, desktop search, and most importantly control of the Browser. Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer (a Michigan native and University of Michigan graduate) has repeatedly expressed his intentions to dethrone Google as the king of keyword search. Google co-founder Larry Page (also a Michigan native and University of Michigan graduate) to date has basically ignored Ballmer's Battle crys.

However in Jnue of 2005 at the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit, Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates inferred that Google is this year's flash in the pan technology vendor.

Microsoft and Google both refuse to acknowledge that any party could create a free operating system (similar to Linux) or a free search engine (similar to Google). Heck weren't both Microsoft and Google simply stolen technology that had been acquired and enhanced to meet Google and Microsoft's needs.

Ask any of these most influential technology leaders over the last (20) years and they will inform the world "that the best things in life are free" and possibly stolen.

Paul Allen (Microsoft cofounder)
Mark Andreessen (Mosaic developer/Netscape founder)
Tim Berners-Lee (founder and creator of the World Wide Web)
Jeff Bezos (CEO of Amazon.com)
Steve Case (founder and CEO of AOL)
Vint Cert (coauthor of TCP/IP protocol and current chairman of ICANN
John Chambers (CEO of Cisco Systems)
Michael Dell (Dell Computer CEO and Founder)
Don Estridge (PC pioneeer)
Sean Fannings (Napster creator)
Bill Gross (Idealab founder)
Andrew Grove (CEO of Intel)
Jeff Hawkins (Handspring CEO, Palm Pilot Inventor)
Andrew Hejlsberg (Turbo Pascal - Delphi creator)
Steve Jobs (Apple Computer CEO and founder)
Philippe Kahn (Borland founder)
Gordon Moore (Intel cofounder)
Ray Ozzie (Lotus Notes creator and Groove guru)
John Scully (former Apple CEO)
Linus Torvalds (inventor and trademark holder of Linux)
Steve Wozniak (Apple cofounder).

It is apparent that technology companies that require employees to sign noncompete agreements and prevent them from working at any competing company or try to keep them from luring other key employees away from their previous employers are usually not able to get legal backing from the court system.

This is not the first time Microsoft has taken legal action with former Microsoft employees based on non such agreements. One highly publicized case in 2000 involved Microsoft suing former employees for violating non-compete agreements as they left to start CrossGain a new software company.

Microsoft's non-compete lawsuits have in many caes caused former Microsoft employees to stop working at their new companies for a short period of time until the non-compete agrements expired. Several senior technology managers ad developers at Microsoft have left in recent months to join Google.

The Google press release only states that Google views the acquistion of Mr. Lee critical o their artificial intelligence software developments and their agressive research and development causes in rapidly expanding China.

Google is on pace to open their China facility before the close of 2005.
Look for the war between Microsoft and Google to heat up much further in the coming months.

The GBrowser is about to change everything.

Monday, July 18, 2005

AOL Announces New Advertising Campaign

America Online reeling with market share losses has announced a new online advertising campaign set to launch in August of 2005.

AOL will pour another $50 million into advertising in the hopes of stemming the tide that has been on the decline for months.

AOL.com offering free content and features that were previously available only to subscribers.

The campaign includes paid search advertising, optimizing AOL properties for search engine crawlers (URGENT NEWS FLASH AOL THINKS ABOUT A SPIDER ???? what a concept ????? aol actually thinking about a crawler ?????). Google becomes one of the world's richest companies, AOL loses the most amount of money in corporate history, and 48 months is the first time AOL considers the impact of a crawler.

AOL will spend most of their new advertising budget online as it should as that is where the target lies. ...aol's executive vice president of the AOL Media Networks Kevin Conrol says : "We're really leaning into online because we believe in this medium to ... reach the audience we want to reach," he went onto say that "TV is really the smallest element of this and we'll be very selective about television." (finally)

Paid search will represent the single biggest chunk of media spend, followed by online branding efforts. We find this most interesting as keyword searchers prefer organic results 7 to 1 versus paid but if capturing less than 20% of a given keywor's search traffic is the goal aol looks to be successful with Pay Per Click.

Online impressions are expected to run on more than 200 news, entertainment, sports, and lifestyle sites, such as E! Online, CNN.com, Maxim, Oprah, and WebMD. Again these subscribers also actually use these sites for content and only click on labeled sponsered advertising links 15% of the time.

AOL's branding campaign urges users to experience AOL in real time, Conroy said.

--

Prediction AOL continues to struggle

Friday, July 15, 2005

Cookies Are Spyware

Friday, July 15, 2005

Cookies Are Spyware, According to The Wall Street Journal
This piece was first published by M Naples

A Recent Article By the Wall Street Journal States Cookies Are Spyware

So, be sure to disable your cookies, all you WSJ subscribers. That's clearly what the Wall Street Journal would have all of us do. Seriously? Well, maybe.

Walter Mossberg's essay - which ran on Thursday - contains so many inaccuracies that it reminds me of a ruse from a different industry a couple of decades ago. But, perhaps he has an agenda.

Remember the Bottle Bill? The Bottle Bill was created by urban environmentalists and nurtured by the plastics industry because it necessitated returning beverage containers to retailers. In states that passed Bottle Bills, everyone knew that glass and aluminum containers were going to be replaced by unbreakable, larger, easier to handle plastic ones and that more comprehensive recycling programs would suffer. The nine states that have bottle bills today don't have more comprehensive statewide programs since the whole packaging mix was subverted by the 2-liter plastic container.

Enough detail on that. Here's the connection: Almost every major paper in the United States supported Bottle Bills. Most major publishers lobbied hard for them state by state. Of course, this is because newspapers comprise maybe 30 percent of the waste stream while beverage containers comprise maybe 3 percent. Newspapers just wanted to take the spotlight off their own bad litter and waste story. In nine states, they succeeded. Do you know how much post-consumer content is in that copy of the WSJ you read this morning? Not a lot, especially when compared to those beverage containers.

Well, if you read the WSJ online, recycled content is obviously not a concern. But, subscriber dilution is a concern to its publishers. Newspapers as a whole are terribly worried about online, even those newspapers like The Wall Street Journal that have done great things to make money and protect their brand digitally. Talk to enough newspaper publishers about the relationship between their print and online assets and the word you will hear is "cannibalize," because they feel that online readership's erosion.

That's the first thing I thought of when I read Mossberg's piece. Obviously, The Wall Street Journal depends on the cookies it places on its subscribers' hard drives, just as every reputable media company does. Unfortunately, spyware companies can use cookies and IP targeting to locate and target users' hard drives too; so can companies that track users across multiple sites. While tracking users across sites (with full disclosure and without sharing their PII) is okay with me, these same users deserve to know that they're being tracked across media, just as they do in the non-digital world. The fact that they're afraid of it, is our fault as an industry, not theirs as consumers.
The point here is that what companies do with cookies is what we should be talking about, not the cookies themselves. Mossberg seems woefully misinformed - but it's not his fault. His is not the first anti-cookie piece I've seen in a major newspaper, although it's the worst-informed, and it appeared in the most influential outlet. What may be happening here is that newspapers are perhaps posturing toward a role that is somewhat similar to their role in the Bottle Bill debacle 20-some years ago.

Tired of bleeding money online, newspapers are buying marketing companies and many publishers are doing deals with Google, of all companies, to generate more page views and text links. Do you think that newspapers wouldn't rather be the ones managing their own optimization instead of farming it out to the new monolith, and subordinating their brands both nationally and locally?

Well, of course they would - only they haven't figured out how to do so yet. Mossberg wants cookies to be banned because if cookies are gone, all meaningful online measurement is thrown in the air and newspapers are at less of a disadvantage. Or, maybe he thinks - like many others in the print world - that fomenting fears of online media might bring newspapers readers back to traditional newspapers.

Understand that I'm ascribing to this subversive notion because I'm giving him credit for knowing his business. If this agenda were not his intention, then he's just plain wrong and the Journal's publishers should be embarrassed for editorially shooting themselves (and their advertisers) in the foot. Honestly, if this is not his agenda, then it's akin to a major sports league skipping a full season, essentially telling its consumers and sponsors to stick it. I mean, who would be so...so...dense?

What the Debate Should Properly Be About The Network Advertising Initiative (NAI) will be hosting a major industry retreat near its headquarters in York Harbor, Maine next week. From their invitation: "Since the debate over spyware has created such an urgent need for those of us in the online industry to identify and support best practices for adware and online advertising..." the best and brightest among our privacy officers and some c-level executives will gather for a two-day workshop to hammer out definitions of what is and is not spyware and adware.

As with any properly drafted restrictive regulation, please note that the NAI workshop will focus on best practices. Cookies aren't the villain here any more than the ads that support our salaries (including yours, Mossberg) or the text links in the galleys of our pages. However, what companies do with cookies, with what's lurking behind those text links can be villainous.
Remember, what users give up to cookies online - in terms of information on them or their behavior - is a small fraction of what they give up to credit card companies they do business with or when they subscribe to The Wall Street Journal newspaper.

What matters here is not the technology, but the behavior. It's no more or less true in online media than it is in traditional media. Next time the Journal's parent, Dow Jones, sells a subscriber db-segment to one of its direct mail partners, that behavior must be above-board. It will be enabled by technology not unlike cookies. Traditional media companies sell these records every day. What matters is how they sell them and to whom - the behavior, not the technology.
Let's face the fact that, as an industry, we've failed to make it clear to consumers that cookies are not the problem. Now - it seems - we can add newspapers themselves to our list of opponents, joining marketers of spyware removal products, who started this mess in the first place by identifying all cookies as spyware. I hope I'm wrong. But, as much as I trust the beleaguered cookies on my hard drive, these days I always suspect an agenda from anyone turning cookies into the villain.

The best chance this industry has for combating the sort of uniformed fears that Mossberg's piece will nurture gathers in York Harbor, Maine next week. If you're not familiar with what the NAI is up to, ask the top companies in our industry who participate. More importantly, ask the Congressional committees writing the laws we're all going to be following soon. When it comes to these matters, they look to the NAI too.


Cookies choke search engine spiders !
Cookies Are Spyware

Friday, July 15, 2005

Cookies Are Spyware, According to The Wall Street Journal
This piece was first published by M Naples

A Recent Article By the Wall Street Journal States Cookies Are Spyware

So, be sure to disable your cookies, all you WSJ subscribers. That's clearly what the Wall Street Journal would have all of us do. Seriously? Well, maybe.

Walter Mossberg's essay - which ran on Thursday - contains so many inaccuracies that it reminds me of a ruse from a different industry a couple of decades ago. But, perhaps he has an agenda.

Remember the Bottle Bill? The Bottle Bill was created by urban environmentalists and nurtured by the plastics industry because it necessitated returning beverage containers to retailers. In states that passed Bottle Bills, everyone knew that glass and aluminum containers were going to be replaced by unbreakable, larger, easier to handle plastic ones and that more comprehensive recycling programs would suffer. The nine states that have bottle bills today don't have more comprehensive statewide programs since the whole packaging mix was subverted by the 2-liter plastic container.

Enough detail on that. Here's the connection: Almost every major paper in the United States supported Bottle Bills. Most major publishers lobbied hard for them state by state. Of course, this is because newspapers comprise maybe 30 percent of the waste stream while beverage containers comprise maybe 3 percent. Newspapers just wanted to take the spotlight off their own bad litter and waste story. In nine states, they succeeded. Do you know how much post-consumer content is in that copy of the WSJ you read this morning? Not a lot, especially when compared to those beverage containers.

Well, if you read the WSJ online, recycled content is obviously not a concern. But, subscriber dilution is a concern to its publishers. Newspapers as a whole are terribly worried about online, even those newspapers like The Wall Street Journal that have done great things to make money and protect their brand digitally. Talk to enough newspaper publishers about the relationship between their print and online assets and the word you will hear is "cannibalize," because they feel that online readership's erosion of their traditional subscriptions is cannibalizing their share of the advertising market.

That's the first thing I thought of when I read Mossberg's piece. Obviously, The Wall Street Journal depends on the cookies it places on its subscribers' hard drives, just as every reputable media company does. Unfortunately, spyware companies can use cookies and IP targeting to locate and target users' hard drives too; so can companies that track users across multiple sites.

While tracking users across sites (with full disclosure and without sharing their PII) is okay with me, these same users deserve to know that they're being tracked across media, just as they do in the non-digital world. The fact that they're afraid of it, is our fault as an industry, not theirs as consumers.

The point here is that what companies do with cookies is what we should be talking about, not the cookies themselves. Mossberg seems woefully misinformed - but it's not his fault. His is not the first anti-cookie piece I've seen in a major newspaper, although it's the worst-informed, and it appeared in the most influential outlet. What may be happening here is that newspapers are perhaps posturing toward a role that is somewhat similar to their role in the Bottle Bill debacle 20-some years ago.

Tired of bleeding money online, newspapers are buying marketing companies and many publishers are doing deals with Google, of all companies, to generate more page views and text links. Do you think that newspapers wouldn't rather be the ones managing their own optimization instead of farming it out to the new monolith, and subordinating their brands both nationally and locally?

Well, of course they would - only they haven't figured out how to do so yet. Mossberg wants cookies to be banned because if cookies are gone, all meaningful online measurement is thrown in the air and newspapers are at less of a disadvantage. Or, maybe he thinks - like many others in the print world - that fomenting fears of online media might bring newspapers readers back to traditional newspapers.

Understand that I'm ascribing to this subversive notion because I'm giving him credit for knowing his business. If this agenda were not his intention, then he's just plain wrong and the Journal's publishers should be embarrassed for editorially shooting themselves (and their advertisers) in the foot. Honestly, if this is not his agenda, then it's akin to a major sports league skipping a full season, essentially telling its consumers and sponsors to stick it. I mean, who would be so...so...dense?

What the Debate Should Properly Be About The Network Advertising Initiative (NAI) will be hosting a major industry retreat near its headquarters in York Harbor, Maine next week. From their invitation: "Since the debate over spyware has created such an urgent need for those of us in the online industry to identify and support best practices for adware and online advertising..." the best and brightest among our privacy officers and some c-level executives will gather for a two-day workshop to hammer out definitions of what is and is not spyware and adware.

As with any properly drafted restrictive regulation, please note that the NAI workshop will focus on best practices. Cookies aren't the villain here any more than the ads that support our salaries (including yours, Mossberg) or the text links in the galleys of our pages. However, what companies do with cookies, with what's lurking behind those text links can be villainous.

Remember, what users give up to cookies online - in terms of information on them or their behavior - is a small fraction of what they give up to credit card companies they do business with or when they subscribe to The Wall Street Journal newspaper.

What matters here is not the technology, but the behavior. It's no more or less true in online media than it is in traditional media. Next time the Journal's parent, Dow Jones, sells a subscriber db-segment to one of its direct mail partners, that behavior must be above-board. It will be enabled by technology not unlike cookies. Traditional media companies sell these records every day. What matters is how they sell them and to whom - the behavior, not the technology.

Let's face the fact that, as an industry, we've failed to make it clear to consumers that cookies are not the problem. Now - it seems - we can add newspapers themselves to our list of opponents, joining marketers of spyware removal products, who started this mess in the first place by identifying all cookies as spyware. I hope I'm wrong. But, as much as I trust the beleaguered cookies on my hard drive, these days I always suspect an agenda from anyone turning cookies into the villain.

The best chance the

Thursday, June 30, 2005

Relevant Content The Key to Google System

Google Makes Further Conent Acquistion Advancements to Become the World's Library

Google Library Project

What is the Library Project?

Google Print makes offline information searchable. As part of this project, we're now working to index the book collections of several major research libraries and make this content searchable through Google Print alongside books provided by publishers through our Publisher Program.

What is the goal of Google Print for Libraries?

This project's aim is simple: make it easier to find relevant books.

We hope to guide more users to books – specifically books they might not be able to find any other way – all while carefully respecting authors' and publishers' copyrights. Our ultimate goal is to work with publishers and libraries to create a comprehensive, searchable, virtual card catalog of all books in all languages that helps users discover new books and publishers find new readers.

What will library books in Google look like?

If you are in the United States and you search for Books and Culture by Hamilton Wright Mabie, for instance, you'll be able to page through as much of it as you like, because its 1896 copyright means it's now in the public domain in the United States.

These public domain books look very similar to publisher-submitted books except you will be able to click through all the pages of the book. A book such as the 1924 True Stories of Pioneer Life by Mary C. Moulton, on the other hand, may still be in copyright in the United States, and we treat it as such.

So, when you preview it on Google Print, you'll only see snippets of text directly around your search term. This snippet view is designed to help users find the book in their search results and make a decision about whether to go find a physical copy of the book with just bibliographic information and a few short sentences around their search query.

Visiti The World's Most Content Relevant Library Here:

http://print.google.com/googleprint/library.html
Yahoo Socializes Search

Yahoo has introduced the My Web 2.0, a new "social search engine," based on a page-ranking technology that organizes pages based on a user's search patterns and "the shared knowledge of the people they trust," Yahoo states.

Rival search engine Google and their existing "Page Rank" technology, is based on the frequency with which results are linked to by the Net collectively.

Building on tagging networks like Flickr --which Yahoo recently acquired -- My Web 2.0 makes Web pages popular among a network accessible to everyone within that network.

The new Yahoo Social Search is now available in a limited beta on a first come, first serve basis at myweb2.search.yahoo.com.

The service also lets users create a personal online archive by saving desired Web pages, search results, and a search history to "My Web."

Using the Yahoo Social search beta version of "Save to My Web" button on the new Yahoo toolbar, internet users can save an existing Web page to their personal search archive, which can be retrieved at any time by searching "My Web." With the new Yahoo search engine optimization sharing feature, Yahoo searchers can also add notes to saved pages in order to personalize and organize the stored files. Users will be able to create files that are shared by a community; when updated by the user, everyone in the group will receive the update via RSS feed, said Tim Mayer, director of Yahoo Search.

Yahoo announced the beta release of an earlier version of their Social search service, My Web 1.0, at the end of April--almost exactly one week after Google released a test service called "My Search History," which tracks keyword searchers when they are signed on to the service, and allows them to search those pages at a later date.

"My Web is the next step in integrating Yahoo search and personal search with community by giving our searchers an easy way to have their own personal Web search experience--which incorporates what matters most to them on the Internet--and allowing them to share that experience," said Mayer upon the initial release of Yahoo social search.

Yahoo is offering an open API for the new application--which, enables developers to use Yahoo data to create new products. "My Web" can also be accessed via the new beta version of the Yahoo Toolbar.

Yahoo is expected to release an extension of its Search API offering with the availability of Yahoo Maps API at developer.yahoo.net/maps/.

Tuesday, June 28, 2005

Supremem Court New Media Ruling Update

This piece was just released from Tobi Elkin of MediaPost.

Media mogul Tom Rogers finally got what he wanted all along - to become head of TiVo. He's been vice chairman of the company for more than a year and successfully negotiated a deal with Comcast to integrate TiVo into the company's digital cable set-top boxes.

Rogers has been chomping at the bit to lead TiVo and now he's the top dog; he'll assume the role of president and CEO on July 1, succeeding Mike Ramsay, the company's founder, who announced he would step down in January as CEO. Now, it's up to Rogers, the ultimate dealmaker, to forge deeper connections with cable and satellite providers to distribute TiVo which, despite having only 3 million subscribers, is a force to be reckoned with.

It's not the company though so much as the technology that has taken the advertising and media worlds by storm. We will no doubt hear a sober forecast on advertising growth today from TNS Media Intelligence due, in part, to the advent of TiVo, which enables ad skipping. Of course there are many other factors at work and reasons why ad growth, at least in the TV segment, isn't as robust as it once was.

We expect estimates for online ad growth to be healthy.

TiVo's Rogers told CNBC yesterday that while cable distribution of TiVo is a cornerstone of the company's strategy, selling the standalone TiVo box at retail remains an important part of the overall plan as well. It's important, Rogers said, for people who don't have access to digital cable: "We have to find more creative ways to drive those standalone sales." TiVo, meanwhile, will also seek additional cable distribution deals.

Regarding yesterday's Supreme Court ruling on file-sharing and copyright protection, Rogers said the decision is significant "because content is critical to driving any of these new technologies. TiVo has always been respectful of copyright issues. ..We are very much believers that copyright protection is a very important principle that needs to be pursued." Copyright protection advocates have scrutinized TiVo's TiVoToGo product.

--

Ask our Peak Positions clients they'll tell you that search engine optimization is the most effective fom of online advertising and they are enjoying huge return on investment percentages.

The power of Organic search engine optimization is unmatched by all other media...that is exactly why online ad growth will continue to explode.
Google Unveils Video Player
GOOGLE RELEASED ITS OWN video playback feature, "Google Video Player," an open-source-based application for use with Google video search.

The Google video player allows searchers to stream video clips uploaded to Google's video search application by creators.

This move from Google is "probably the most significant play in the online-on-demand video market," said Jupiter Research analyst Gary Stein. "It cuts the distance between producer and consumer," he said, adding "that whole content distribution channel has been disintermediated."
A couple months back Google began soliciting uploads of video clips, which allows content producers--including consumers--to have their videos hosted on the Web. Google asked uploaders to label video clips with keywords and also issue a price per-view price tag on their ieo clips. Google takes a portion of the revenue, and in some cases, charges a small hosting fee for large or in - demand 'hot' videos.

Video clip owners were given the option to allow free downloads of their video content.
With the release of the Google Video Player, the video clips marked as free now can be streamed directly from Google's video search results pages.

The Google video player is based on the open-source videoLAN client media player. Google's decision to create its own open source video player allows Google to sidestep support of rival video players and also preserves the open flexibility to upgrade or extend the free software in the future.

Google's introduction of a free video search player is timely considering Google's recent announcement of Google Wallet, a new online bill payment service gearing up to provide users a choice other than Paypal.

Google's new video content player, Gmail, and Google Wallet are just the most recent examples of the search engines' determination to broaden their revenue models and user reach in advance of rolling out the GBrowser being developed to change the internet enterprise and take Google users far beyond keyword search.

Stay Tuned Redmond the Mountain View Boys are $300 a share for a reason !