2009 February (10)

By Guest on February 13, 2009

Monetising Content Online

by Matt Rebeiro

I was tickled this week to read the news that Google has set up shop (okay, a data centre) at an old paper mill in Finland. They paid a lot of money for the mill and much has been and will be made of this.

This purchase struck me as symbolic for another reason: paper is how we traditionally get our news (in that the new is—duh—printed on paper), yet these days more and more of our [news] media is consumed online and is discovered using—you guessed it—Google. So, as Google supersedes print journalism it also buys out from under it the very means of creating print journalism!

By Andy Beal on February 13, 2009

Twitter Study: 20% of Young Americans Online Have Tweeted

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Speaking of gold mines, Twitter is sitting on a huge one–if it could just figure out how to refine it into something we’d buy.

New stats from Pew Internet suggest that 20% of 25 to 34 year olds online have used Twitter, with those 18 to 24 only 1 point behind (19%). While that number drops off to just 2% by the time you get to adults over 65, 11% of the total US online US population have used the micro-blogging service.

Other interesting stats:

27% of bloggers use Twitter
35% of city-dwellers use Twitter
76% of Twitter users use the internet wirelessly
Only 10% of those earning more than $75,000 use Twitter, while 17% of those making less than $30k use the service.

By Andy Beal on February 13, 2009

Google Kills the Radio Star

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Well, Mr. Reed called it! Back in July of last year, he wrote a post about the future of radio not being via the airwaves, but instead the internet.

Yesterday, Google agreed–shutting down Google Audio Ads and announcing plans to sell the Google Radio Automation software behind it.

Advertisers will continue to be able to use Google Audio Ads until May 31 and broadcasters will be able to publish inventory to Google until that date as well. We will work with partners to make sure that there is as little disruption to their business as possible and will work to find a buyer for the Google Radio Automation business…we expect that up to 40 people may not be able to find other roles at Google.

By Jordan McCollum on February 13, 2009

On-Site Duplicate Content No More: Canonical URL Tag

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Think your site is affected by a duplicate content penalty? The big three have good news for you: Google, Yahoo and MSN announced a new tag this week to specify the canonical URL for each page on your site.

Duplicate content has long been an issue for search engines and marketers alike. Search engines want to avoid cluttering results with copies of the same text while marketers and website owners often need (or create, whether or not they need them) several copies of the same text with different URLs on their sites for usability or other purposes.

The new tag allows webmasters to specify what URL the search engines should use for the content, regardless of what session id, link parameter, sort parameter, parameter order or other variable has been appended to the end of the URL in a link. The new tag goes in the <head> section of a page:

By Jordan McCollum on February 12, 2009

Google Penalizes Google Japan for Paid Links

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gjsad We all know that Google is against using paid links to promote your site in search engine results. But apparently they didn’t exactly put that on the internal memo, because Google Japan took a major PR hit for doing just that.

Google Blogoscoped covers the background on exactly how Google Japan was paying for links:

Akky Akimoto at the Asiajin blog recently reported that Google Japan was paying bloggers to review a new Google widget. Using pay-per-post service CyberBuzz, blog posts like the following popped up, strangely resembling each other, as Asiajin reports

Naturally, this news is a bit of a shock to people in the US after the similar stateside PayPerPost service received some pretty harsh treatment from Google (see Matt Cutts’s take from Dec 2007).

By Taylor Pratt on February 12, 2009

FTC Gives its Final Warning to Ad Industry

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The FTC has had enough. They have issued their “final warning” to the ad industry regarding behavioral targeting. They are demanding that the ad industry implement stronger privacy protections or they’ll do it for them. They created a sample of what they expect to see in the privacy protection guidelines in their 48-page PDF, Staff Report on Behavioral Advertising.

In the PDF they outline four revised principles which as of right now are non-binding. With help from paidContent.org I’ll do my best to explain these principles to you:

Transparency and Consumer Control

The FTC wants you to fully disclose how your site is using behavioral targeting and make it easy for visitors to opt out.

Reasonable Security, and Limited Data Retention, for Consumer Data