Every branding professional you’ll meet will tell you that you never ever refer to your brand as a verb. Phrases like “I Googled that” or “I Xeroxed this” are poison to the ears of those who understand trademark law.

Without getting into the intricacies of trademark law (which I don’t fully understand anyways), the short explanation is that you should only reference your trademark as an adjective. An example of a properly used trademark would be “Google™ Search Engine”.

With this in mind, I was a little surprised recently when going through my iPhone to find Google business partner Apple using Google as a verb.

Let me explain. The iPhone has a keyboard which pops up every time you position your cursor in a field which allows you to enter text. This includes your browser address bar, web forms, search fields, emails, etc.

Wow, where did January go? It’ll be Spring before you know it!

In the meantime, enjoy these picks:

• Just what the blogosphere needed, yet another way to measure who has the biggest audience.
• VentureBeat has a summary of online advertising trends discussed at the recent AlwaysOn OnMedia NYC conference.
• Web-based chat service Meebo has announced a new API and an ad network.
• Search Engine Watch looks at how to use SEO for online reputation management. Important advice includes the need to build links to positive content.
• Congrats to Dan London who’s heading up self-publishing company Lulu efforts to bring search marketing to authors.

Over the last month I and others have written quite a bit about domain tasting and how registrars are taking advantage of the policy, allowing them to capture potential domain names that their customers are searching for.

ICANN describes domain tasting as “the use of the Add Grace Period to test the profitability of a domain name registration. The AGP is a five-day period following the initial registration of a domain name when the registration may be deleted and a credit can be issued to a registrar.”

The Washington Post has written an article discussing ICANN’s most recent proposal to curb domain tasting and eliminate the practice. By no longer refunding the fee that ICANN imposes on each domain transaction ICANN believes this will eliminate the process of domain tasting, at least in large quantities.

This Linky Goodness is near and dear to my heart, most especially because . . . it’s Wednesday.

• New York is at it again: NY Legislature Considers Law Aimed At Keeping Sex Offenders Off Social Networking Sites
• Are we really headed into a recession? Perhaps, though it’s not officially a “recession” until things have been bad for six months. But Wired thinks Google Looks Recession-Proof
• Debunking SEO Mythology. Nothing new here, except for maybe their take on paid links: “If you want to buy a link from a site, only do it if you believe the link itself will be a good source of traffic (in other words, only do it for legitimate advertising purposes). Do not do it if your purpose is for that link to transfer page rank or increase your ranking, as it likely will not.”