An unofficial source had this to explain:

“Migrating to localized domains will allow us to continue promoting free expression and responsible publishing while providing greater flexibility in complying with valid removal requests pursuant to local law. By utilizing ccTLDs, content removals can be managed on a per country basis, which will limit their impact to the smallest number of readers. Content removed due to a specific country’s law will only be removed from the relevant ccTLD.” That means [blogname].blogspot.com will continue to exist, but it’s not clear if the users from that specific country will still be able to access it. Blogger will start to use country-specific domains, just like many other Google services. If you’re in Australia and visit google.com, you’ll be redirected to google.com.au, but you can opt-out by clicking “Go to Google.com” or visiting google.com/ncr. The same option is available for Blogger: “Blog readers may request a specific country version of the blogspot content by entering a specially formatted NCR URL. NCR stands for ‘No Country Redirect’ and will always display [blogname].blogger.com in English, whether you’re in India, Brazil, Honduras, Germany, or anywhere. For example: http://[blogname].blogspot.com/ncr – always goes to the U.S. English blog.”

"In an effort to provide more relevant results and a high quality experience for our users, we’ve made the decision to disallow multiple display URL domains within a single ad group," explains Emel Mutlu of the Inside AdWords Crew.

The following are acceptable for an ad group:

- www.example.com
- www.widgets.example.com
-  www.example.com/widgets/redwidgets/
-  www.example.com/index.html

These ones are not:

- www.example.com
- www.example.widgets.com

"While we understand there are legitimate use-cases for multiple display URL domains within one ad group, we ask that you use separate ad groups for each domain," says Mutlu. "This will not only provide a better user experience for your potential customers, but will also allow you to better organize and track the various domains within your AdWords account."

The change to the policy applies to ALL advertisers. Google encourages users to make sure their groups are set up properly before the 24th comes, and notes that display URLs must match the URLs of their respective landing pages.

In the past, Google already offered (and continues to offer) what they call “unlisted” albums, but those were troubled with privacy issues from time to time. For instance, in the beginning you could simply try guessing the album title (say, a title like “Private”) to get to the unlisted album. Recently, Google fixed a vulnerability with how outgoing links were potentially passing on the unlisted album URL’s authentication key to third-party sites due to the referrer field. Also, sometimes sharing just a single photo caused you to potentially share access to the whole album. In fact, this issue remains even for “sign-in” albums: when you select “Share Photo" for a single photo in a sign-in album, the recipient will be able to view your full album.

In other news, Google Picasa software product manager Mike Horowitz has left Google to join Fetch Technologies.

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Unlike Twitter’s page, which only shows Tweets, FriendFeed’s “real time web” shows you everything that people are doing on the Web including, but not limited to, videos, photos, blogs, event calendar items, tweets, and other things.

This is wild. It’s like the web has been turned into a chat room.

What do you think? Keep in mind that unlike a chat room each item you are seeing here has its own URL, its own RSS feed, and its own place on the Web. Also, unlike a chat room each item here can be commented on live, or you can like it, which will push it to the top of the old fashioned FriendFeed page.

This is also functionality that Facebook or MySpace does not have.

UPDATE: you can also see other people’s views of FriendFeed this way. Here, you can view my feed (which only includes about 3,500 people): http://friendfeed.com/scobleizer/friends/realtime

You can also view rooms this way. For instance, if you want to watch just the political room tonight as the debates go on, visit here: http://friendfeed.com/rooms/2008-debates/realtime

First bit of feedback after watching for a few minutes. Now we REALLY need to be able to talk to the database! I’d love to be able to say “show me all items that have the word ‘obama’ in them, but also that have two or more likes.” Imagine if you could do that. Wow.

Analysis: I still like the old style of reading FriendFeed better. Why? Because each comment cluster is threaded together so you get the context. Things aren’t moving so reading is easier too.

Compare the real time pages above to these:

http://friendfeed.com/scobleizer (my FriendFeed account, which shows everything I’ve put into the system).
http://friendfeed.com/scobleizer/discussion (the page that shows everything I’ve liked and commented on).

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This new service will not be fully operational in the ‘preview’ version and will only be available in English. However, it will enable the users to:

1. Bookmark any URL on the web.
2. Apply tags.
3. Save the bookmarks in the ‘My Bookmarks Tool’.

Microsoft has enabled the bookmarks, bookmarkers and tags as links, hence making it easier for the users to ‘surf’ through them and discover new content and people. The Social Bookmarking Tool will also be embedded in user profiles, thus empowering the members of the community with new tools to increase their visibility, impact, and influence.

Here are the links for The Social Bookmarking Preview for MSDN, TechNet, and Expression. Hope you like it!

http://msdnbookmarks.com

http://technetbookmarks.com

http://expressionbookmarks.com

Microsoft has also started a forum for all users who may want to provide their valuable feedback to MSN regarding the new Social Bookmarking Service. Go and check it out!

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Here is an image of the ‘Old Layout’:

If you would look closely at the above image, you’ll find that the display URL for the advertisement is in coherence with the description. Also, there are four advertisements in the console.

Now take a look at the ‘Improved Layout’:

In this image you’ll notice the display URL has been moved underneath the description and also the console now only contains three advertisements.

There are several interesting posts at Search Engine Roundtable Forums. Here a few excerpts from that thread:

“Overnite, it looks like Yahoo has done another major change to their sponsored ads. On some of the keywords that I follow that normally show 4 ads above the organic results, it’s now only three – very consistently! Also, the ads look simultaneously more compact (closer together), and yet bigger (the URLs are now on a line by themselves). Looks like Yahoo may be finally able to more efficiently monetize, and can now afford to show fewer ads. Can others verify?”

“I see it now, blogging it up. Thanks!”

This new change is a classic example of Yahoo! following Google’s every move. Now, the way I see it, if this isn’t being a copycat, then I don’t know what is.

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G.cn takes users straight to Google.cn, where everything will perform just as it always has (or hasn’t).  For Google fans who are at a traditional keyboard, it’s a neat time-saving measure.  Where the search giant really hopes to succeed, though, is probably with users who prefer Baidu.

Confession time: I like the BBC far more than CNN – it tends to deliver real world news, as opposed to stories about American entertainers.  When I was much younger, though, I thought that typing out news.bbc.co.uk was the only way to reach the BBC news site, and so I’d often head to CNN instead.  (It was a happy day when I discovered that bbcnews.com took me where I wanted to go.)

If Chinese citizens succumb to the same laziness, Baidu.com could lose out in a big way to G.cn.  The likelihood of this happening – which is admittedly small – is compounded once you think about the booming mobile market in China; hitting fewer keys means a lot to people using tiny cell phones.

So what seems almost like a cheap trick is actually something of a brilliant move.  Kai-Fu Lee – or whoever thought of launching G.cn – deserves a big bonus.

Google explained like this :

"Publishers are not permitted to make prominent use of "Google Brand Features" on sites showing Google ads. Google Brand Features include Google logos, product screenshots, or other distinctive features. Additionally, publishers may not place Google ads on sites incorporating Google trademarks in the site URL or on sites that frame Google pages, including search results pages. Which means in your case that the word “google” in the URL is not okay for showing ads, hence we had to deactivate serving to the site."

But when you look at the trademark guidelines of Google it says that there is no problem in using the word "Google" in this manner. It explains: "distinguish the trademark from the surrounding text in some way. Capitalize the first letter, capitalize or italicize the entire mark, place the mark in quotes, use a different type style or font for the mark than for the generic name."

Its high time that Google should really make up their mind regarding what is allowed and what’s not. And moreover there should be a universal rule for each and every user.

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 An example: when you enter the query http://googlified.net, Google will return:

No results found for http://googlified.net.

However, there are results from websites with similar addresses:

Googlified
…
googlified.com/
…

At other times, mistyping a URL will return a normal spellchecking result. E.g. entering http://blogoscope.com into Google at this time returns “Did you mean: http://blogoscoped.com”, showing the snippet of blogoscoped.com below.

Ionut Alex. Chitu, who noticed this new behavior, comments on the reason why Google might have introduced this special result type:

Many people don’t know the difference between Google’s search box and the browser’s address bar. This confusion is accentuated by the fact that the address bar is also a search box in some cases and Google, like most search engines, steal the focus from the address bar.

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Search Update Rolling At Yahoo

Priyank Garg noted at the Yahoo Search blog the present update taking place. Webmasters will want to keep an eye on this, and see if their rankings have changed. Garg also reminded everyone this update would be the first to take place after their launch of Dynamic URL Rewriting in Site Explorer last month:

We’ve rolled out some changes to our index with fresh web data and updates to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the last few days. We expect the update will be completed very soon. Throughout this process you may see some changes in ranking as well as some shuffling of the pages in the index.

We’ve had millions of URLs rewritten based on your submissions and your sites should have seen smarter crawling from Yahoo! Slurp as a result.

An early report about this at Search Engine Land cited Aaron Wall on a couple of issues he noticed – botched 301 redirects, and Yahoo’s algorithm placing more weight on the words in a domain name for ranking purposes.