Marketing Pilgrim

It appears the Federal Trade Commission is continuing its sloth-like race to enact new standards for bloggers that don’t currently disclose compensated endorsements.

The AP does its best to make bloggers out to be "quite different" from the "journalists" that work for mainstream media–and therefore must all be on the up-and-up, right? So, I’ll spare you the fluff and cut to the chase:

New guidelines, expected to be approved late this summer with possible modifications, would clarify that the agency can go after bloggers — as well as the companies that compensate them — for any false claims or failure to disclose conflicts of interest.

Almost 3 years after Italian authorities investigated two Google Italy employees–as part of an inquiry into how a violent video appeared on Google Video–criminal charges have now been brought against four Google executives.

According to the Financial Times, Italian prosecutor Francesco Cajani has brought criminal charges against four Google executives directly.

…David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer, and Peter Fleischer, its top privacy executive, after footage of a disabled boy being bullied by other boys was broadcast on Google Video…George Reyes, former chief financial officer, has since retired from Google. The fourth is Arvind Desikan, a senior product marketing manager.

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Google announced today that they have improved their flash indexing capabilities. Last year they announced an update to their flash indexing, and let’s just say it wasn’t well received. This time around, Google claims to be able to index external flash resources. For those non-Flash experts out there, SWF files use an external file to load content. This content can be in the form of HTML, XML  or even another SWF file. Google’s update analyzes and extracts the content in that file, and then they index it.

My initial reaction (which was confirmed by the screenshot they provided) was this will be horrible from a user’s perspective. Depending on what type of content lives in that external file, what Google extracts from it could look like jibberish. Here is the example screenshot they provided of a search result that utilizes this update:

Okay, no, not really—but the encyclopedia anyone can edit is looking to add video to its offerings, according to Technology Review (via RWW).

To launch in the next 2-3 months (by the end of the summer), Wikipedia’s new system will allow users to contribute and even edit clips for articles, posting the entire clip or only portions. Wikipedia itself will only allow videos from the Internet Archive, Metavid and Wikimedia Commons.

No video editing software is necessary to post full or partial clips, but “One of the requirements for any video added to the site is that it be based on open-source formats.”

Were you on Twitter last night? I was—it’s about the only thing I can do while watching my favorite summer show. And Burn Notice was one of the trending topics—among other . . . “less savory” terms. Some of my friends complained about the offensive trending topics; I minimized the list.

But it appears Twitter didn’t just let things stand. Read Write Web reports:

Within minutes (as far as we could tell), both terms were removed from the list on the web interface at Twitter.com. However, they still showed up on third party services such as TwitScoop and Hashtags.org.

RWW’s Julie O’Dell asks whether it was the over sexual nature of the offending tags that made the difference here, since the Trending Topics list is often plagued with the “asinine, spammy, emo, and pointless.”