Barry Schwartz spotted something new on Google Trends. His Search Engine Land post picked up on the new Hot Trends section, recently added by Google’s mad scientists to the service.

“I was told to think of it as Google noticing a “sudden rise” in a query phrase, that is not in the norm for that query,” Barry said in his post. “The higher the rise, the hotter the query is. Google has a “hotness level” score for these queries, the hottest is ‘volcanic’, followed by ‘on fire,’ ‘spicy,’ ‘medium’ and ‘mild.’”

It sounds more like the lineup at Buffalo Wild Wings than a technology product, and who knows, maybe Google brainstormed this update over wings and beer. There is more to Hot Trends than just some flavorful names.

The top ten hot trends appear on the Trends home page. A link to more hot trends shows the top 100 as currently determined by Google. At press time, searches related to the final episode of ‘The Bachelor’ dominated the top ten.

Links to each hot item lead to a profile for it. The hotness scale appears there, along with a graph of its search volume, and a note as to when searches peaked for the term. Related news articles, blog posts, and web results will appear on the page, though right now only the blog posts feature seems to be working.

It’s fun to look at, and we expect Google to flesh it out more over time; how about image links for starters?

MSNBC, ABC, and FOX.  Newsday, the Chicago Sun Times, and the New York Times.  Even sources in Australia, Britain, and Italy have reported on the outcome.  If anyone still had doubts about how well-known Google’s pet project has become, let those lists erase their misgivings.

On to the winners, then.  OK Go won for “Most Creative” – you can click here to watch the musicians do their thing on some exercise equipment.  “Smosh Short 2: Stranded,” which was awarded the title of “Best Comedy,” provides a humorous update to the “this is your brain on drugs” line of thinking.

“Hotness Prevails” (which features a half-naked fellow, and is completely work-safe) nabbed the “Best Commentary” award; honors for “Best Series” go to the “Ask a Ninja” string of videos; the "Free Hugs Campaign" was dubbed "Most Inspirational."  And a straightforward clip from Terra Naomi titled “Say It’s Possible” was labeled “Best Music Video.”

“Kiwi!” gives viewers a lot more to look at compared to Naomi’s creation – as well it should, considering its creator, Dony Permedi, used “Kiwi!” as his master’s thesis animation.  YouTube rewarded his work with the award for “Most Adorable.”

All in all, the group of winners is more than a little eclectic.  But if you don’t like ‘em, you have only yourself – and every other YouTube user – to blame.  “After five days of fervent ranking, the YouTube community selected these seven videos as the champions,” the official announcement reported.  “Congratulations to all the winners.”

Hotness basically uses the social activity around the photos on their site, "votes, views, and more," to share with members of the JPG community some of the best shots being uploaded per an "algorithm" that they created.

Which I think is friggin’ *awesome*. I love the fact that members of the JPG community can have their votes and other activity used to show me even more interesting photos on their site. I love JPG magazine and think it is one of the cooolest sites on the internet today.

We have actually built something similar in Zooomr Mark III that we will release shortly called awesomeness.

The problem?

Well Yahoo would like every site on the internet everywhere to not be allowed to aggregate their user data this way. I’ve blogged about this before. Yahoo has filed an application for a patent on their concept of "Interestingness." To read more negative responses to this BS patent feel free to check out these articles by Boing Boing and Slashdot on the situation.

From Yahoo’s BS patent application:

"Media objects, such as images or soundtracks, may be ranked according to a new class of metrics known as "interestingness." These rankings may be based at least in part on the quantity of user-entered metadata concerning the media object, the number of users who have assigned metadata to the media object, access patterns related to the media object, and/or a lapse of time related to the media object." You can read more details on this patent here.

Hmmmm… lets see.

Is JPG serving up "media objects such as images?"

Yes.

Is JPG using "at least in part the quantity of user-entered metadata concerning the media object"?

Well, Yes.

So then I guess Yahoo can sue them. Sure digg, reddit, YouTube and many other sites also do the same thing — and prior art does exist before Yahoo decided to own all social activity on every web site in the world. But, hey, why not try to screw over the rest of the Web 2.0 community and try to play God with how social media can be arranged outside your own domain.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Yahoo’s bogus attempt to patent the concept of ranking social media is simply ludicrous. They should rescend the patent application for Interesetingness and publicly state that the ranking of media doesn’t belong to anyone. Instead they silently "carry on" proving to the small companies everywhere that all the Kumbayas in the world from Flickr won’t change the fact that bottom line Yahoo is about screwing over any other social networks who dare to compete with them in the glorious pursuit of the almighty dollar.

I don’t mind Flickr patenting their specific mixture and formula for ranking their photos, but when they try to patent all ranking formulas everywhere they cross a line that they shouldn’t.

I’d be interested if anyone has an update on the status of this patent application or knows how to track these kinds of things. I seriously hope it is not approved by the US Patent office. Otherwise sites like JPG may quickly find their "hottness" getting them into "hot water," when Yahoo sues their ass.

Comments

Delicious founder Joshua Schachter recently announced an update to his popular bookmarking service, now owned by Yahoo. The new feature, private saving, has been rolled out in beta for testing by the user community.

Even though the whole point of Delicious has been sharing, users requested this feature in sufficient numbers to prompt Schachter and company to implement it.

A sharing service without sharing? Scott Karp, Publishing 2.0′s erudite blogger, called this “completely antithetical to the whole concept” and speculated it could be part of a larger trend:

Recently, Google managed to defeat what it considered an overarching subpoena from the Department of Justice for access to Google’s database. Google enjoyed considerable support from the online community, and the Wall Street Journal weighed in with its support in an editorial the day after Google’s court victory on the case and its impact on Google and search rivals Yahoo and MSN:

Privacy is not an outdated concept, Scott McNealy’s famed statement to the contrary. While sites like Isolatr and Snubster have recently launched as humorous responses to the social media focus of numerous Internet startups, perhaps the next splashy startup will be a service that emphasizes privacy as a selling point.

Schachter encouraged the “anti-social types” to give private saving on Delicious a try. There may be a larger market of those people than he imagined.

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

The debut of CoComment and the subsequent buzz about the service highlights what could be the next wave of user-created media.

Call it the coming of the commenters. What CoComment will eventually do once it opens for public use is permit the tracking of what one says on blogs. The site explains more about the concept:

I actually had a blog entry from Valleywag in the back of my mind when I suggested to my fellow writers the next big thing in consumer-generated media would not be a blogger, but a sort-of meta-commenter.

“What’s the business model for that?” one of them sneered. And then I remembered the CoComment chatter.

To use a boxing term, some people are counterpunchers. Throw the straight right and the counterpuncher slips it and delivers a crushing left hook to the body. Without the first punch, the response doesn’t have an opening. But with an opening, watch out.

For many people, writing works the same way, much like the old BASF commercials that said how they didn’t make the product, they made it better. Comedian Bob Zany gets a lot of mileage out of his Fix The Joke feature, where people can look at jokes he’s written and suggest improvements, with the best ones getting a moment of fame and some nice parting gifts from Zany and the Bob and Tom radio program.

Will bloggers, particularly the so-called “A-list,” approve of such a model? There shouldn’t be a problem with that, as many sites support TrackBacks today. Functionally, trackbacks and comments are pretty similar; their main difference comes from trackbacks being generated by a blog entry in response to a post on another blog.

CoComment and whatever competitors follow should look better than a trackback on a blog. They will have to, in order to develop a following. Maybe the next A-lister will be a comment ninja, slipping into and out of blog quickly and quietly while laying the groundwork for someone to follow him or her back to the meta-comment site and the revenue opportunities posted there.

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News engines can be good news for your business online. How have you made press releases part of your online strategy? Where have you seen your press releases appear online? Post some details about it on WebProWorld.

Yesterday, our Jason Lee Miller reported from SES Chicago that getting on page one of the search rankings, especially Google’s, makes an enormous difference in traffic to one’s site. Today he attended a session on News Search SEO, a potential avenue to get a site in front of news viewers.

SEO-PR president Greg Jarboe said in the session that affiliate marketers have started optimizing press releases for news engines. As many people turn first to the Internet for news, this could make press releases the hot category for 2006.

Thinking about tagging press releases with metadata isn’t the solution, though some in PR may think it is. Instead, Jarboe noted the “magic formula” would be to focus less on outputs and more on outcomes, as this list of approaches and desired goals demonstrated:

Getting high ranking helps, if searchers read your release.
Having searchers read your release helps, if it enhances your brand awareness.
Enhancing your brand awareness helps if it drives traffic to your site.
Driving traffic to your sit helps if it helps generate leads.
Generating leads helps, if they convert into sales.

Press release optimization being done today largely takes place in-house, with only about 28 percent performed by an agency. Wherever the optimization takes place, publishers need to do it right with the proper metrics.

“This is not about hiring an agency or doing it in-house to solve your problemsit’s about doing this right with the proper metrics. 44% use site traffic and 41% uses press mentions as success metrics, and that’s ok, but people should be measure end-to-end tracking-how people found it, got to the site, and brought in revenue,” said Jarboe

Optimization starts with the headline. Jason said: “some prima-donna clients don’t like headlines changed, but it is necessary for good ranking.”

Blogs can be another route into the news engines. Nan Dawkins noted how blogs make it into Google News. Also, Yahoo has been including blogs alongside news search results, while MSN gets them via the news feeds it receives from the Moreover service.

“I don’t make any distinction between citizen journalists and traditional journalists,” Dawkins said. She recommended a few tips on working with bloggers:

Establish a blog outreach program.
Make contact/develop relationships just as you would with a journalist.
Send your release to trusted bloggers prior to releasing it through a wire service.

Also, Dawkins suggested paying attention to images – you may get a pick up because your image is terrific and fits the style of the blog.

Expansion Plus president Sally Falkow made the point that a mention in the media has more perceived value than a press release. “The whole premise behind public relations is building trust, building credibility,” she said. This makes getting into news engines important.

She also thinks the opportunities to get the message into places have grown, as 72,000 journalists have lost jobs over the last five years. That would indicate a need for quality content to replace those producers.

Falkow suggested finding the best head and long tail words as part of the keyword strategy, and writing a newsworthy, optimized article based on them. Placing press releases in RSS feeds can help marketers get into Google Blogsearch, she said: “Google’s definition of a blog is a webpage with an RSS feed on it.”

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

Jim Townsend of Classified Intelligence reported from the Suburban Newspapers Association that Donato, of online classifieds site Oodle delivered a righteous sermon to classifieds managers in attendance.

Papers need an online self-service ad system, and they need to embrace that technology immediately. Competition from the likes of Craigslist and Google Base makes that even more critical Advertisers want to get placement, and will pay to do so.

Those self-serve ads and their supporting technology work best when the human element has an influence. Donato cited the “self-policing community” of Craigslist that combats spam; Digg would be another example of that principle.

Donato also made the point that a basic ad unit will become free; he called the shift “Classifieds 2.0.” The opportunity for newspapers will come from upselling beyond the basic placement, and possibly do the extra work of getting an advertiser into Base or Craigslist. Print becomes an upgrade option instead of the primary ad focus.

Mechanisms like search, affiliate programs, and content syndication gain importance in Donato’s scenario. Each offers an opportunity to deliver ads to readers. They all offer papers a chance to profit from the shift to online readership by the target audience.

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