When you consider that Google’s net income in 2006 was well over $3 billion, it becomes apparent that individual customers don’t matter much to the company’s overall business. Google may be trying to change that, however: yesterday and today, it’s holding a special sales meeting with “nearly 200 federal contractors, engineers and uniformed military members.”

It’s been nothing but up for YouTube lately, a hill steep enough to send a few key competitors tumbling backwards. MySpace added a video component? Wouldn’t know it by recent stats. Viacom copyright lawyers strip-searching everybody? So, what? Traffic’s never been better.

According to Compete.com, YouTube controls a 43.3 share of the online video market in January, up from 41.1 percent in December. That translates to 31.7 million unique visitors, up two million in one month. Meanwhile, MySpace Video is down by nearly the same amounts.

They may not be all the way there yet, but at least HarperCollins and Random House — both ultimately owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. — are trying to bring books into the Web era with their new “browsing” widgets.

StatCounter has made yet another addition to their web analytics framework by adding the ability to label IP addresses that visit your site.

Here’s the offical post from the StatCounter Forum:

How this gives value to users:

- Help you identify click fraudsters

When it comes to licensing your Windows 2003 Terminal server environment most people can never remember what is needed and the Microsoft documentation seems to go on a bit:) Here I try to make it simple for you…

 9 times out of 10 it’s just a matter of the following: 

I don’t want to sound like an old, crotchety, cynical, email-will-never-overtake-fax-machine dinosaur but I don’t think podcasts or video blogs are all they’re cracked up to be.

I’m the first to admit that I may be way off the mark here, because this is a somewhat counter-intuitive argument. The newer media of internet videos and podcasts seem like the next logical evolution of the written word, but think again. For the near future at least text-based information still has distinct advantages over video and voice.

Just once, I’d like to see somebody launch something cool from the Heartland out, instead of the other way around. Whatever it is, big cities get it first, worry about the red states later. Because if you want to take advantage of Google Maps’ new real-time traffic reporting, you’ll have to not live in Lexington, Kentucky.

I had coffee with a potential partner and our conversation ebbed to a discussion about marketing philosophy.  He said something like, "I think companies [like yours] just give away many of their trade secrets on their website. 

They provide too much information.  If I wanted to compete with you… all I would need to do is read your website or blog.  The purpose of a website is to solicit interest… you’ve got to get people to respond… to generate leads."

My response…

It’s no secret that Google is the top dog in the realm of search. Perched atop the mountain, the company has yet to be knocked off of its perch, or even face any serious threat to its dominance in the industry. According to January’s figure, don’t look for that trend to change anytime soon.

Here is the first of my interviews that I promised in my last post Interview With Web Analysts

What is your current position and the name of the company you work for?

I am currently employed as a Web Analytics Specialist/Consultant at OX2, in Brussels, Belgium.

How long have you been working in this field?

A little over 5 years now

In a new nationwide online survey done by market researcher Synovate for ClipBlast, an Internet video search platform, finds that Americans are experiencing difficulty when it comes to searching for specific online video. Forty percent said that they found searching for video online to be “frustrating” or “inconsistent.”

This year’s Academy Awards were particularly sweet for director Martin Scorsese, who received his first Oscar in five nominations for his behind the camera work in The Departed, which was also awarded the Oscar for Best Picture.

Unfortunately for Scorsese, he won’t be able to relive the moment on YouTube or any other video sharing site anytime soon.

You have four seconds to get your site loaded and about one-twentieth of a second to impress the visitor before she flits on like an attention-deficient hummingbird. But before that, you have about one second, in the search results, to get her attention in the first place. And just like the tentative beginnings of most romances, it’s all about what you say, how you look, and where you live.

User-generated ranking systems are increasingly important these days. Would you buy something on eBay without checking the seller’s feedback rating?

A new survey from Harris Interactive shows that US mobile phone users are concerned about privacy when it comes to location-based services and presence technology. These services, some of which are available, can tell where a person is physically located, what communication device they are using and how they can be reached.

Fox Interactive Media now has the tools in place to start relying less on third-party ad placement systems and more on what they can sell based on the data they have, like all of those MySpace profiles just hanging around the social networking site.

Creative Commons, the non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative work available for others legally to build upon and share, has launched version 3.0 of their copyright licenses.

In one of its most ambitious projects ever, Google has set a goal to digitize all book content that is public domain, and also snippets from other copyrighted words in order to provide users with the most comprehensive book search function ever conceived.

Several prominent libraries have already signed up to be a part of the Google Book Project, but the online search giant’s ambitions have some publishers turning up their nose in disapproval.

There are a couple of ways to play the keyword match system in Yahoo’s search advertising system. Michael Mattis of Yahoo reminds ad clients why they are important.

Paul Slogan from Business 2.0 recently wrote a great article on the quest for the perfect online ad.

He discusses how although Google is the king of search, users only spend 5% of their time searching. With users spending 95% of their time on the Internet engaged in non-search related activities, how can you target them? I don’t think there is an answer, but here is how I would go about creating the perfect ad.

A bit of a good thing for AdSense publishers: If you see a video AdSense ad appearing on your website, you can feel free to play it.

Do you worry about the danger of giving a 3rd party service control over the most important part of your blogging business – your subscribers?

The photo community site has a party planned for Saturday, March 3rd, in San Francisco to celebrate Flickr’s third birthday.

Comedy Central is trying something different. The cable channel is going against the grain by taking original broadband programming from comedycentral.com and offering it to late night television viewers in its new series “Web Shows”. The weekly half hour series will air at 2 a.m. ET/PT and debut on Monday.