The Billboard Chart App features 15 charts from the Hot 100 and Billboard 200, along with genre rankings and ringtones.

Users can view 60 years of chart history, search by artist, album, song, view ranking details, listen to 30 seconds of music and make purchases via iTunes.

“Our charts are already a huge draw on Billboard.com, whether for music discovery or as a measure of popularity, so it makes sense to apply them to the easy navigation of the iPhone, where users can access them on-the-go," said Editorial Director Bill Werde.

The Billboard Chart App is updated weekly with Billboard’s traditional chart release schedule and features each ranking’s previous week’s position, number of weeks on the chart, and peak chart position.

Ten of the charts are available for free, with access to the top 10 positions of those charts, going back three months. These charts include: Hot 100, Billboard 200, Digital Songs, Radio Songs, Dance/Club Play Songs, Latin Albums, Christian Songs, Tastemaker Albums, R&B/Hip-Hop Albums and ringtones.

The Social 50 chart will track artists’ popularity using a formula blending weekly additions of friends/fans/followers along with weekly artist page views and song plays on MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and iLike. Data from these sites is gathered and provided to Billboard by social music tracking service Next Big Sound.  

"The Social 50 provides a weekly snapshot of the artists that music fans engage with the most in the social arena, which in today’s world is a significant validation of their investment in an act," says Billboard Chart Director, Silvio Pietroluongo.

The Social 50 will focus on friends/fans behavior over other activities, followed by artist page views and song plays. The final ranking also measures the ratio of page views to fans.

The Social 50 will appear alongside other charts on Billboard.com and Billboard.biz every Thursday, and in Billboard magazine every week.

Cook’s "The Time of My Life," has been downloaded 236,000 times, reaching the number 1 spot on Billboard’s Hot Digital Songs chart and reaching the number three position on the Billboard Hot 100.

Cook has 14 songs from the "American Idol" season on Hot Digital Songs, with "Dream Big" at number 7 with 110,000 downloads and his cover of U2′s "I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For" at number 9 with 98,000 downloads. All together Cook sold 888,000 downloads of his songs in a single week.

"I loved my time on the show, but I’ve been looking forward to just being able to get back to the creative process of writing and recording," Cook told Reuters. "It’s going to be interesting to be able to play a song and not have to wonder where ‘camera A’ is."

Cook will rehearse most of June for the upcoming American Idols Live tour, which includes the top 10 finalists and lasts for close to three months. The tour kicks off July 1 in Glendale, Arizona, and ends September 13 in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

"It’s going to be more of a mini-concert for everybody," he says. "There will be some group numbers (and) some duets, but for the most part I think everybody gets to do at least three songs. I’ve always loved the idea of waking up in a different city every day, so to be able to do that on this kind of scale is going to be an experience."

Cook is slated to release his debut recording on the RCA label in the fall. "I don’t see myself straying too far from what I was doing before, which is kind of a rock vibe with some catchy pop choruses," said Cook.
 

Except, of course, that its business model depends on the concept.  So the AP notes, “Google Inc. feeds advertising services to hordes of other businesses while skimping on its own marketing.”

Sure, we’ve seen the odd billboard here and there.  Google’s roaming Street View cars also serve as reminders of its presence (to those of us who can identify them, at least).  But the company’s mind – and time and money – seem to be directed elsewhere.

“While major rivals such as Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo pour more than 20 percent of their annual revenue into sales and marketing, Google devoted 8 percent of its revenue to the category in 2006, spending a total of $849.5 million,” according to the AP article.  Also, “On advertising and promotions alone, Google spent $188 million in 2006 – roughly the same amount Microsoft spends every two months.”

So is that the key to online success: a sort of “build it and they will come” philosophy?  Well, maybe, but don’t blame me if it doesn’t work for you.  Google just seems to have struck upon some strange combination of luck and skill that led to its current popularity and dominance.

No one’s really sure how or why this happened – perhaps Google’s accountants simply decided that there was too much cash floating around.  Or maybe it’s a graduation present of sorts – GOOG-411 was brought out of Google Labs earlier this week.

In an article for Search Engine Land, Greg Sterling presented a more likely idea, however.  “[P]eople will see this when they’re driving in their cars, which is one of the expected use cases,” he wrote.  As for the billboard’s middle-of-(scenic)-nowhere location, Sterling speculated, “[P]erhaps that’s also quite intentional, to test a campaign and see if it drives traffic, so to speak.”

In any case, credit goes to Mike Blumenthal for first spotting the GOOG-411 billboard and documenting its existence.  Assuming this test – if it is a test – goes well, keep an eye out for Google billboards where you live, as well.

The Billboard chart will now include weekly data from AOL Music and Yahoo Music. Digital delivery began playing a role in the chart’s composition in February of 2005, when Billboard took into account the sale of digital tracks measured by Nielsen SoundScan from a panel of online merchants.

Billboard associate director of charts Silvio Pietroluongo, who manages the chart introduced the new formula.

"The introduction of digital sales to the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 2005 was exactly the jolt the chart needed at the time," said Pietroluongo. "With the addition of AOL Music and Yahoo! Music, Billboard continues to keep stride with today’s digital trends while maintaining the chart’s traditional balance."

The new Billboard formula will include the radio audience, which will make up 55 percent of the chart’s total points. Digital sales will account for about 40 percent and streaming media will make up 5 percent.  Physical sales of singles will account for less than 1 percent of the chart’s new formula.

“Ask.com Billboard Brings Up Unabomber”

The last phrase to turn heads was “The Algorithm Constantly Finds Jesus.”  As our Jason Lee Miller noted (twice), religious matters can be a bit of a hotspot, and Ask has now moved on.  To terrorism.

“The Unabomber Hates The Algorithm,” proclaims the latest billboard.  (Valleywag has a pic if you feel the need to see it.)  And, well, it seems that the public hates the campaign.

“Is Ask.com drunk, do they misunderstand a good portion of their audience, or are they just that desperate for attention?” asks Jeff Jockisch (AKA “Jozian”) on the Cre8asite Forums.  Others have been more critical, and some have been less so, but it definitely seems as if Ask is losing fans.

To be fair, some vocal few have spoken up in the search engine’s defense.  “Shorebreak,” a longtime users at Threadwatch.org, writes, “Give in to the borg if you [sic] cojones fail you, but **give the folks at Ask some freakin’ respect for an ad campaign that everyone’s talking about!**”

Well, yes, everyone’s talking about it.  Back at the Cre8asite Forums, Barry Schwartz (“rustybrick”) notes, “It has been a while since I seen so much discussion in this forum.”  Yet everyone would talk about our theoretical burning man, as well, and I’d guess that things wouldn’t turn out too well for him.

Just like many websites that try to monetize to early, Microsoft has already placed test billboard images on top of buildings in the beta launch of their product.

By Microsoft placing the billboards in their images they change the focus of what people talk about from the quality of the product to the stupid billboards. If they have no users the billboards do not matter, and what is the point of going to that much effort to gather the data if you are going to put fake billboards on it right out of the gate?

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Aaron Wall is the author of SEO Book, an ebook offering the latest
search engine optimization tips and strategies. From SEOBook.com Aaron
gives away free advice and search engine optimization tools. He is a
regular conference speaker, partner in Clientside SEM, and runs the
Threadwatch community.

Overture and AdWords foreshadow a revolution in media buying globally.

One example is physical billboards, many of which could be changed to all-digital (admittedly more costly) formats, which could be activated and controlled via online platforms open to advertisers and managed by a broker.

I mean just imagine how inefficient this must be – a company trying to sell remnant billboard space through Craigslist.

Someone will buy, and money will change hands. But when you look at the potential for larger and mid-sized advertisers to incorporate offline media buys into an integrated bidding platform, the potential efficiencies — and benefits to the sellers of ads — are staggering. On efficient pricing alone, a widespread auction with many participants would leapfrog over an old economy method where someone tries to sell a remnant ad unit, sets an arbitrary price at $550/mo., and winds up haggling and wasting time, eventually selling it for less than it’s worth.

To extend the argument a bit farther, there are a lot of other goods and services that are being bought and sold “online,” (scare quotes added for emphasis) that really are still changing hands in an outmoded way. As fun and lively as Craigslist is, it’s a pretty primitive technology; a version of a flat classified section in a print publication, or the “swap shop” shows on public access cable.

Quite a bit of office space changes hands on Craigslist — all the high-touch stuff involving sublets and workspace sharing that sometimes seem like half business transaction, and half personal ad. But outside of those odds and ends, a massive trade in office leasing is still highly chaotic, with disparate brokers and such mocking up different listings sites to generate leads. Here, imagine the headaches landlords could save by participating in a more rational lead generation system. What if they had an intelligent way of targeting their best prospects, and vice versa? Maybe you wouldn’t see those big ugly FOR LEASE, 555-343-3300 banners on beautiful art deco buildings quite as often.

Buyers and sellers are still having too much trouble finding one another in too many markets. Moreover, the average buyer does not know about the best new platforms for tapping into new-economy models. Someone might tell you about a great way to find a golf buddy or cheaper tee time through a meta-tool or vertical portal that just got released, but how often do we remember to try the tool? Adoption comes slowly, but it comes. Cultural change is very slow in some businesses. Take golf, since I just did. How about those online tee time bookers? If you’ve ever tried one, chances are it’s a second-class citizen in how the course actually takes bookings, so they might lose or mess up your reservation. Or, if you look at available tee times online and then immediately phone, often you’ll find that more tee times are in fact available than they online system indicated. So… you stop using the online tool. Not only isn’t it better, it’s actually worse. And $2 off a round as an incentive to use it isn’t enough. Online, you expect to achieve more dramatic savings (even if it’s finding a cheaper available round at a nearby course).

We’ve come a long way, baby… but there’s still a long way to go.

Andrew Goodman is Principal of Page Zero Media, a marketing consultancy which focuses on maximizing clients’ paid search marketing campaigns.

In 1999 Andrew co-founded Traffick.com, an acclaimed “guide to portals” which foresaw the rise of trends such as paid search and semantic analysis.

If it gets played on Sirius Hits – 1, it will affect the weekly Mainstream Top 40 chart. Sirius announced in a release yesterday its addition to the existing 116 radio stations whose airplay affects the chart.

Billboard’s Radio Monitor, a weekly publication of its airplay charts, will begin to include pop songs played on Sirius Hits – 1 on August 19th. Sirius notes the channel is available to its subscribers and in over 8 million Dish Network households. The same channel will be available to Sprint mobile phone users soon.

“We are excited that airplay on our flagship pop music channel, Sirius Hits – 1, will be reflected in Billboard’s national airplay charts and look forward to having airplay on other Sirius channels included in their respective charts in the near future,” said Steve Blatter, Sirius Senior Vice President, Music Programming in the statement.

Sirius needs to make an impression with more potential listeners in order to bolster its subscriber numbers. The company has an exclusive deal with the NFL to provide game coverage and other content. In January, it will begin to broadcast Howard Stern’s program daily.

Both the NFL and Mr. Stern command high fees for their content. With many of its channels commercial-free, Sirius needs to offset those fees with greater subscriber revenue. The company offers over 120 entertainment channels of music, sports, news, and other entertainment programming, but requires the purchase of special hardware to receive its broadcasts.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.