Marketing Pilgrim

One of my favorite tech blogs is Techdirt. Michael Masnick does a great job of mashing together technology and legal issues. I normally find at least one good story each day, but today I found three–so I thought I’d share them in a single legal round-up of sorts.

Up first:

Brazilian Court Says It’s Illegal To Distribute File Sharing Software If You Have Ads On Your Site

Next:

Canadian Appeals Court Says Linking To A Site Is Not Defamation

Lastly:

‘Free Credit Score’ Company Tries To Unmask Anonymous Blogger; Sues Wikipedia

That should keep you entertained while I rustle up the next story for you!

Who’s responsible for the recent turmoil at Yahoo?

Who’s responsible for Yahoo signing a deal with Bing?

Who’s responsible for its stagnant search share?

It’s You! It’s all you, baby!

OK, perhaps that won’t be the entire message in Yahoo’s new global marketing campaign, but the "It’s You" part will be in there.

According to the WSJ, Yahoo is launching a new mega-million dollar marketing blitz tomorrow, with the emphasis on letting the public know that Yahoo is all about your experience.

Buzz around the new campaign has been building since Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz disclosed it to investors this summer, and the company invited reporters to a press event in New York Tuesday. Bartz, who joined Yahoo in January, hasn’t been shy about saying that the company needs a fresh start…

We don’t often ask you to thank our awesome advertisers, but the next time you need help with your marketing, please consider these Marketing Pilgrim supporters.

• Text Link Brokers – increase your traffic and search engine rankings.
• WPromote – offers a wide range of professional search engine marketing services.
• Sponsored Reviews – bloggers earn cash for reviewing products and services. Advertisers build buzz and links for your web site.
• Vertical Leap – offers search engine optimization and PPC management services.
• SEM Vendor – looking for search marketing firm to help you with your campaign?
• Trackur – quite frankly the best social media monitoring tool!
• PRWeb – the next time you send a press release, try PRWeb–it’s the newswire I personally use.

Now that WordPress makes it a piece of cake to add new plugins, I’ve been busy this weekend.

Here’s what’s new on Marketing Pigrim:

• Ajax comments – for when you make a spelling mistake–or change you mind about dissing me!–you can now edit your comments for up to 5 minutes after you’ve posted them.
• Threaded comments – finger’s crossed this one works. I’ve tried countless times to add threaded comments, but I think I’ve found one that will actually work. No more @commentername–you can just reply directly to each commenter.
• Mobile version – if you access the site using a mobile browser, you’ll find it’s much cleaner and easier to read.

Here’s a little confession: I am a big fan of magic. I actually took lessons as a kid and continued it as a hobby through high school, and briefly considered it as a career in college. So it’s no surprise that I would be familiar with Steve Fearson. Fearson is one of the magicians that pioneered the downloadable magic business model. In essence Steve sells “information products” about different illusions on his web sites.

A few days ago Steve launched a new product called “Woofle Dust”. In short the illusion shows the magician snorting large amounts of a magic white powder that is supposed to give him new energy/powers. Shortly after sending a brief email out about this new product, Steve began to receive a barrage of criticism. Most accused Steve of promoting drug use to kids.

Two years ago, Yahoo heard requests from SMX Advanced attendees and added a Dynamic URL Rewriting feature to Yahoo Site Explorer, allowing webmasters to remove parameters from URLs, like session IDs, that might create duplicate content issues or otherwise confuse search engines. Now Google’s finally catching up. As Exoogler Vanessa Fox reports at search Engine Land, Google has added a feature to strip parameters from URLs to its Webmaster Tools.

With extra parameters, search engines can index the same content under multiple URLs, which may split link equity. Vanessa also mentions that indexing parameters can hurt crawl efficiency as well as display and branding.