Marketing Pilgrim

A few more end-of-the-month links to round out your August!

• Lots of people use Google: but lots use more than one search engine. And they’re very loyal to it? Them? Huh?
• Google announced a message center in Webmaster Central just six weeks ago, but now they’re Emailing Penalized Webmasters Again
• Who’s afraid of Google? Economist.com, apparently.
• Here today, gone tomorrow, back again: Google AdSense Enables “Allowed Sites” Feature After Quick Roll Back
• Yahoo! PPC adds Enhanced Tools and New Options for improving your quality score and writing better ads.

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Claiming they’re unable to come to an agreement on pricing, NBC Universal has declined to renew their contract with iTunes to sell downloads of their television shows. The New York Times reports today that NBC, which has provided 40% of iTunes’ video downloads, “is also seeking better piracy controls and wants Apple to allow it to bundle videos to increase revenue.”

Riiiight. Pricing. I totally buy that reasoning, and so does Mike Arrington—NOT. NBC’s crazily-named video site, Hulu.com, launches in private beta in October. I wonder how long it’ll be before they start selling their licensed content there.

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We wanted to let you know about a few housekeeping items.

First up, there’s now an official Marketing Pilgrim Facebook group. What is it good for? Not sure yet, but we’ll likely use it for some contests or scoops, so you might want to join it.

Next, after “testing” Digg for almost a year, I’ve now decided to start a new profile with my real name! You can follow my submissions here. I have no intention of submitting posts from Marketing Pilgrim–but that doesn’t stop you.

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It’s the end of the week and the end of the month! Does that make today a BOGO?

Here’s some interesting news from today’s feeds.

• Questions are being asked about whether Google’s loose T&C means it owns your content or not.
• Fifth Network tries pricing ads based on page view duration.
• Oodle adds Oodle Insights to let you know if you’re getting a good deal on that used pair of underpants (ok, just checking to see if you’re awake).
• Piper Jaffray believes that Google is building a mobile operating system not an actual Gphone.

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It appears Viacom hasn’t learned its lesson after its last abuse of the DMCA takedown notice. It’s now targeting a YouTube video that includes a clip of a VH1 show, which includes the unauthorized use of video created by the person who uploaded the YouTube clip.

Confused? This should help:

1. Chris Knight creates a funny video as part of his campaign Rockingham County Board of Education.
2. Viacom’s VH1 takes the clip from YouTube and uses it in a VH1 segment, without Knight’s permission.
3. Knight’s flattered and uploads the VH1 clip to YouTube.

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According to a study conducted by email marketing experts Lyris, there is “an increasing reliance on the Sender Policy Framework (SPF) authentication method” to determine the legitimacy of inbound mail.

SPF is an open standard method to prevent sender address forgery. The solution to combat fake email works via a delivery policy specified in the domain’s DNS zone records. The receiving server can check whether a message has complied with the domain’s stated policy before conducting further checks.

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Forgive the title pun - CNet reports that Yahoo! are currently working on a concept social networking service called - you guessed it - KickStart. A LinkedIn style job network to connect college students with potential employers.

The features you see in screenshots, like the one above, may never materialise - but if this concept were to get the Sunnyvale green light, never will there have been a truer statement than “it’s who you know, not what you know” — to get an “in” to the company of your dreams you will need an invite from an employee who was also a previous alumnus of your college.

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eBay is launching its own mobile re-bidding service in the UK, France and Belgium, following a successful test period in Spain - rolled out last September. The service, being delivered by mBlox and Dynetic, will allow users to monitor auctions while on the move and has been designed to scale across all European markets.

Although there are similar, partner services, this official solution will be integrated and will be offered to users as an option during the online bidding process. The service will help users to track higher bids through SMS alerts, so they can react from their handset if they need to increase a bid.

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We just received an email–from what appears to be a reliable source–with an exclusive photo of what could be the new Google GPhone.

Eric Dytzel says, “Source in Tawain close to GPhoneLife.com has leaked a prototype of the rumored GPhone. Definitely a mobile version and appears to have all the bells and whistles.”

We’re not even sure if we can display the image, so you’ll have to check it out here.

When you’re done, leave a comment and let us know if you think it’s legit.

It’s that time of the month where we give thanks to the advertisers that help keep Marketing Pilgrim going.

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The BBC reports today that Google’s free blogging software, Blogger, is under attack from malicious spammers. According to the report, legitimate blogs are being hacked, with fake entries being added.

These fake entries feature links to “booby-trapped downloads that could infect a Windows PC.” The links may be disguised as links to greeting cards or YouTube videos. Infected computers are being mind for “saleable data” or being leveraged to commit further attacks.

“The criminals responsible for this spam campaign are experts at exploiting social engineering to propagate their botnets,” said Bradley Anstis from security firm Marshal.

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If you could influence or manipulate your search ranking, would you? Of course you would. That’s our main goal as search marketers. Sproose, a search engine that allows users to vote and rank the listings in their index, has just launched their voting technology for their video search.

Sproose delivers a “human popularity voting” model where each user may influence the ranking of the index creating improved search results. The more users that vote a site the further up in the ranking it moves. The same voting technology is now being applied to the Sproose video search index.

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