The BBC attributes weblog’s existence to Jorn Barger, who was involved in "the ‘logging’ of interesting ‘web’ sites."  We wish Barger had thought of some combination that was a little more pleasant-sounding.  Still, the importance of weblogs is impossible to deny.

Think about it: they are the way in which some of the most powerful companies in the world communicate with the public.  Things also work in the other direction, with unknown people putting down their thoughts and getting noticed by international organizations.

Admittedly, those uses goes more into the substance of weblogs than the name, but, well, whatever.  The BBC adds, "Technorati, which keeps an eye on the blogosphere, estimates that there are now 120,000 new blogs being created every day.  Posts are being added to blogs at a rate of 17 per second – a total of 1.5 million per day, says the firm."

Ten years from now, perhaps we’ll be writing about the anniversary of "ogs" and be dealing with numbers in the billions.

Your Search Ad: No Search, But You Paid Google

“Google is billing advertisers for paid search clicks when, in fact, no searches have taken place,” Ball said in a blog post at the Apogee Weblog. “This is click fraud.”

Despite this straightforward accusation, and the details that followed in Richard’s post, Google has not responded to a request for comment about it. Perhaps the folks who could respond are too busy watching shares of GOOG nuzzle the underbelly of $700.

Richard’s post needs a little explaining, as the activity taking place is a little complex. Someone types in a domain into a browser address bar, iowagop.com in Richard’s test example, and ends up at a parked domain page.

That page contains a list of “hot links.” Clicking one of the list’s items, like Iowa Straw Poll, brings up another page titled, “Search results for: iowa straw poll.”

The ads on the page come from Google’s Ads for Domains program, via a company called DomainSponsor, owned by Oversee.net. For this example, there are links to Airline Tickets, Employment, and Car Insurance, among others.

Richard considers this ‘fake searches click fraud’:

When did a search occur? Is clicking on a link equivalent to typing keywords into a search box? No, this is a fake search. Google classifies these kinds of paid clicks as search clicks because they occur on a parked domain that has a search box on the site. That’s fraud – click fraud, distribution fraud, syndication fraud.

In a followup conversation with WebProNews, Richard said he thinks advertisers aren’t recognizing when this happens, because referring URLs for these ads are masked, by routing them through searchportal.information.com. Richard’s experiment yielded referrers ending with a string identified as a query.

These URLs, when clicked, go back to the parked domain. There is no search taking place, as Richard found.

Here’s how he did it. When buying AdWords keywords for the test campaign, he had the content network turned off. His ads should only show up on Google and on search network sites. They show up on a parked domain because those pages have search *boxes* on them.

Google isn’t hiding this; it’s in their AdWords help regarding ad targeting on the Google Network:

Depending on the design of the site, a parked domain site will be classified as either a search site or a content site. That means your ads may show on parked domain sites if your campaign is opted in to the search or content networks.

If Google says it’s part of the search network, the parked domain’s ad clicks become paid search clicks. A site publisher looking at Richard’s example likely won’t agree, as no search ever took place.

It’s confusing enough, and it even seems to have top search expert Danny Sullivan a little baffled, judging by his August 2007 comments on a Search Engine Land piece regarding the ability to opt out of AdSense For Domains completely:

It’s important to understand that some people think they’ve opted out of AdSense For Domains if they opt out of contextual ads altogether. Not so. Do that, and you’re opted out of paid links on parked domains that people browse and find, by clicking. But if someone does an actual search there (search boxes are almost always provided), then you’ll get traffic from parked domains that way, if you’re accepting traffic from the search network. It’s confusing and one reason why I’ve long wanted Google to make AdSense For Domains an entirely separate purchase.

As Richard demonstrated, searches aren’t triggering this traffic. It’s coming from a direct entry in an address bar, and clicking on predetermined links. No one’s entering a query in a search box.

There is one more thing that Richard thinks makes the whole process look bad. In the referring URL we discussed earlier, and the query at the end of it, the referrer shows the query as ‘Iowa Straw Poll’.

Someone might capitalize Iowa for their search, but Richard doesn’t believe anyone will bother capitalizing Straw or Poll when they type in this string.

“This is an artificial search – Google and DomainSponsor are making it look in server logs like a search is happening,” said Richard. ” But, clearly users are clicking on pre-defined links. That’s what’s bogus.”

]]> http://www.webpronews.com/your-search-ad-no-search-but-you-paid-google-2007-10/feed 1 http://www.webpronews.com/google-could-hurt-newspapers-websites-2007-10 http://www.webpronews.com/google-could-hurt-newspapers-websites-2007-10#comments Thu, 04 Oct 2007 17:24:37 +0000 Doug Caverly http://www.webpronews.com/?p=40864 More than a month has passed since Google struck a deal with the Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, the Press Association, and the Canadian Press, but an outcry has continued.  One onlooker believes newspapers’ sites will be hurt. ]]> More than a month has passed since Google struck a deal with the Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, the Press Association, and the Canadian Press, but an outcry has continued.  One onlooker believes newspapers’ sites will be hurt.

Google Could Hurt Newspapers’ Websites

Let’s be clear: Peter Bale, the executive producer of MSN.co.uk, isn’t well-positioned to be an impartial onlooker.  He is positioned to be a well-informed one, though, and actually used to work as an editor of The Times.

So when Bale warned an audience at the Association of Online Publishers conference about the deal’s potential effects, people listened.  “[T]he agencies will consider it as welcome news,” Bale admitted, but according to The Editors Weblog, he continued, “publishers, the likes of the Guardian, Times and Sun, need to be aware of a bump down in traffic from that.”

Because, if you’ll recall, Google News has stopped linking to the same news articles at multiple sources.  Articles from the AP are now available through the AP, or, at most, one other party.  This change made for some much cleaner search results, but only by cutting out a lot of sites.

Google couldn’t admit to hurting anyone, of course.  “While publishers that use the newswires’ articles may see less traffic to their newswire articles coming from Google News, this change will allow for more room on Google News for their most highly valued content – original content,” the search giant stated.

And after all, it’s not like Google is bound to link to anything.  Also, people will still be free to seek out their news at any site they please.

Bale’s conclusion still seems accurate, however, and conflict between search engines (especially Google) and newspapers is likely to continue for as long as any of us are alive.  This is assuming that the much-discussed “death of print” doesn’t occur, but in that fight, Google’s deal with the AP and its pals probably won’t be the deathblow.

He’s absolutely right! (I’ve been saying that a lot today — I’m in a very agreeable mood).

The thing is I’ve been keeping my own “A list.” I judge 772 feeds (which represents thousands of blogs since some of my feeds, like Microsoft’s feed, has more than 3,000 bloggers on one feed).

I judged 35,609 items in the past 30 days, according to Google Reader. Out of all those items I shared 1,094 items with you.

To get onto my feed reader you’ve gotta do something better than the average blog. You’ve gotta bring the best of tech through my feed reader. If you don’t I unsubscribe and I go somewhere else.

Out of all those feeds Google Reader keeps track of the top 35 feeds. This is the new A list and DARE IS ON IT.

See, he better watch attacking the A list tech bloggers because he now is one.

I think that’s called a “looping flame.” Where you intended damage to happen somewhere else but it came back to focus on you. Ouch.

1. Mashable

2. Read/Write Web

3. TechCrunch

4. Media 2.0 Workgroup

5. digg

6. Sun bloggers

7. Gizmodo

8. ZDNet blogs

9. Planet Intertwingly (a bunch of bloggers show up here, including Dare).

10. All Facebook

11. MSDN Blogs

12. digg/Technology

13. The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

14. RSS Feed for Lifehacker

15. GigaOM Network

16. VentureBeat

17. Chuqui 3.0

18. VentureBeat Wire

19. Y Combinator Startup News

20. Engadget

21. TechNet Blogs

22. Digital Backcountry – Ryan Stewart’s Flash Platform Blog

23. JD on EP

24. Google Operating System

25. A Welsh View

26. dzone.com: latest front page

27. All Things Digital

28. Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life

29. Valleywag

30. Googlified

31. Ryan’s shared items in Google Reader

32. rexblog: Rex Hammock’s Weblog

33. Metaversed – Business and Technology News from the Metaverse

34. Business 2.0 Beta Blogs

35. CrunchGear

Anyway, I threw an answer to Dare up on my Kyte.tv channel as well.

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A deal with Internet Broadcasting coincided with that first announcement; no obvious changes occurred as a result.  Yet this new development has seen a Topix box get prominent placement on the main CNN page – it’s not at the top, but it’s still above the “More News” section.

As “amy” puts it on the Topix.net Weblog, “To see this in action, just swing by their homepage and scroll down to the ‘Local News’ widget and input your ZIP.  Voila!  Local headlines at your service.”

While describing the overall arrangement, “amy” continues, “CNN.com’s local news headlines are now powered by Topix . . . .  We’re proud of this partnership, because it showcases our ability to localize news for ZIP codes across the country.”

Still, not everything’s perfect at the “leading news community”; while covering the development with CNN, Greg Sterling notes, “Despite the fact that Topix is owned by newspapers they have yet to leverage all its capabilities on their own sites.  There’s much to learn and borrow from the site, yet no newspaper site is really doing that fully more than two years after the Topix acquisition.”

People do read what you say, and they form an opinion of the company you work for, or even just you when they read your weblog/blog or other communications. If you are corporate blogging you are the window to the world, you are a direct representative of that company when you blog.

In that mind set, its important to understand the purpose of your weblog/blog and read or at least get an idea of what the rules and guidelines are.

Probably the best weblog manifesto out there. It can be found in its entirety with commentary at http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2003/02/26.html if you are interested in reading the article directly.

1) Tell the truth. The whole truth. Nothing but the truth. If your competitor has a product that’s better than yours, link to it. You might as well. We’ll find it anyway.

2) Post fast on good news or bad. Someone say something bad about your product? Link to it — before the second or third site does — and answer its claims as best you can. Same if something good comes out about you. It’s all about building long-term trust. The trick to building trust is to show up! If people are saying things about your product and you don’t answer them, that distrust builds. Plus, if people are saying good things about your product, why not help Google find those pages as well?

3) Use a human voice. Don’t get corporate lawyers and PR professionals to cleanse your speech. We can tell, believe me. Plus, you’ll be too slow. If you’re the last one to post, the joke is on you!

4) Make sure you support the latest software/web/human standards. If you don’t know what the W3C is, find out. If you don’t know what RSS feeds are, find out. If you don’t know what weblogs.com is, find out. If you don’t know how Google works, find out.

5) Have a thick skin. Even if you have Bill Gates’ favorite product people will say bad things about it. That’s part of the process. Don’t try to write a corporate weblog unless you can answer all questions — good and bad — professionally, quickly, and nicely.

6) Don’t ignore Slashdot.

7) Talk to the grassroots first. Why? Because the main-stream press is cruising weblogs looking for stories and looking for people to use in quotes. If a mainstream reporter can’t find anyone who knows anything about a story, he/she will write a story that looks like a press release instead of something trustworthy. People trust stories that have quotes from many sources. They don’t trust press releases.

If you screw up, acknowledge it. Fast. And give us a plan for how you’ll unscrew things. Then deliver on your promises.

9) Underpromise and over deliver. If you’re going to ship on March 1, say you won’t ship until March 15. Folks will start to trust you if you behave this way. Look at Disneyland. When you’re standing in line you trust their signs. Why? Because the line always goes faster than its says it will (their signs are engineered to say that a line will take about 15% longer than it really will).

10) If Doc Searls says it or writes it, believe it. Live it. Enough said.

11) Know the information gatekeepers. If you don’t realize that Sue Mosher reaches more Outlook users than nearly everyone else, you shouldn’t be on the PR team for Outlook. If you don’t know all of her phone numbers and IM addresses, you should be fired. If you can’t call on the gatekeepers during a crisis, you shouldn’t try to keep a corporate weblog (oh, and they better know how to get ahold of you since they know when you’re under attack before you do — for instance, why hasn’t anyone from the Hotmail team called me yet to tell me what’s going on with Hotmail and why it’s unreachable as I write this?).

12) Never change the URL of your weblog. I’ve done it once and I lost much of my readership and it took several months to build up the same reader patterns and trust.

13) If your life is in turmoil and/or you’re unhappy, don’t write. When I was going through my divorce, it affected my writing in subtle ways. Lately I’ve been feeling a lot better, and I notice my writing and readership quality has been going up too.

14) If you don’t have the answers, say so. Not having the answers is human. But, get them and exceed expectations. If you say you’ll know by tomorrow afternoon, make sure you know in the morning.

15) Never lie. You’ll get caught and you’ll lose credibility that you’ll never get back.

16) Never hide information. Just like the space shuttle engineers, your information will get out and then you’ll lose credibility.

17) If you have information that might get you in a lawsuit, see a lawyer before posting, but do it fast. Speed is key here. If it takes you two weeks to answer what’s going on in the marketplace because you’re scared of what your legal hit will be, then you’re screwed anyway. Your competitors will figure it out and outmaneuver you.

18) Link to your competitors and say nice things about them. Remember, you’re part of an industry and if the entire industry gets bigger, you’ll probably win more than your fair share of business and you’ll get bigger too. Be better than your competitors — people remember that. I remember sending lots of customers over to the camera shop that competed with me and many of those folks came back to me and said "I’d rather buy it from you, can you get me that?" Remember how Bill Gates got DOS? He sent IBM to get it from DRI Research. They weren’t all that helpful, so IBM said "hey, why don’t you get us an OS?"

19) BOGU. This means "Bend Over and Grease Up." I believe the term originated at Microsoft. It means that when a big fish comes over (like IBM, or Bill Gates) you do whatever you have to do to keep him happy. Personally, I believe in BOGU’ing for EVERYONE, not just the big fish. You never know when the janitor will go to school, get an MBA, and start a company. I’ve seen it happen. Translation for weblog world: treat Gnome-Girl as good as you’d treat Dave Winer or Glenn Reynolds. You never know who’ll get promoted. I’ve learned this lesson the hard way over the years.

20) Be the authority on your product/company. You should know more about your product than anyone else alive, if you’re writing a weblog about it. If there’s someone alive who knows more, you damn well better have links to them (and you should send some goodies to them to thank them for being such great advocates).

Source: Robert Scoble

Commentary: we all do our best to be the "local expert" in what ever it is we are writing about, but the odds are that at some point you are going to be wrong, or what you say is not what is really happening.

I focus a lot on information security management, dysfunctional companies, and some technology that surrounds the always controversial DRM and how it works, or fails to work, or is hacked within weeks of being released. We all do our best to be the local expert, those people that people come back to and want to read. We also are going to be wrong, and following these guidelines really makes it easier in the longer run to have a good professional and purposeful blog.

Sometimes I get it wrong, some times I get it right, and there is one of the best quotes out there that pretty sums up the whole idea of blogging and corporate blogging:

If you are not getting your hand slapped at least twice a year, then you are not pushing the envelope hard enough. Anon-Unknown

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Users can 3D map a 2D image and assign metadata to a given face using a browser extension, and developers can use an API to incorporate said data into their photo sites.

While inevitable, this all gets scary in a panopticon kind of way. I’d expect the killer app to be a persistent feed on your boyfriend to see what party pics he ends up in. But get used to it. In the short future, if you go outside, you are liable to be on the web.

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Ross Mayfield is CEO and co-founder of Socialtext, an emerging provider of Enterprise Social Software that dramatically increases group productivity and develops a group memory.

He also writes Ross Mayfield’s Weblog which focuses on markets, technology and musings.

Just last week, I added a disclosures page on Marketing Pilgrim, so there would always be a place where you could view my relationships with any company discussed (in case I forgot). With pay per review becoming a hot option for bloggers, it seems that if you want to blog with integrity, you should disclose who you’re in bed with.

So, what do you do on your blog? Do you have a disclosure policy? Do you keep partnership details a secret? What should be included in a good disclosure policy?

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Andy Beal is an internet marketing consultant and considered one of the world’s most respected and interactive search engine marketing experts. Andy has worked with many Fortune 1000 companies such as Motorola, CitiFinancial, Lowes, Alaska Air, DeWALT, NBC and Experian.

You can read his internet marketing blog at Marketing Pilgrim and reach him at andy.beal@gmail.com.

On my way here, I used it by clicking on the Unplug icon, downloading a collection of wiki pages, got on a plane and edited them offline. Landed, connected and synched up changes. While supporting the occasionally connected user is important (we already support the continually connected user with Miki the mobile wiki), how we do it may be just as much of interest.

The blue Unplugged icon is similar to an RSS icon, which signals to a user there is a different way to use the content outside the browser. In this case, to use the content offline.

Socialtext Unplugged is collaboratively developed with Jeremy Ruston of Osmosoft, the creator of TiddlyWiki. Socialtext Unplugged is an application within a single HTML file, which also means it is cross-platform. It downloads as a Zip file, but synching is through Socialtext’s Wiki Web Services. TiddlyWiki is a personal non-linear notebook with a Both TiddlyWiki and Socialtext are Open Source.

Try it now at the Socialtext Customer Exchange or Open Source Wiki.

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Ross Mayfield is CEO and co-founder of Socialtext, an emerging provider of Enterprise Social Software that dramatically increases group productivity and develops a group memory.

He also writes Ross Mayfield’s Weblog which focuses on markets, technology and musings.

What I learned from watching is I say ‘right,” “let’s put it this way” and ‘the interesting thing is” way too much. Heck, you could create a drinking game around it.

But mostly this was sitting down and having a conversation with a friend.

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Ross Mayfield is CEO and co-founder of Socialtext, an emerging provider of Enterprise Social Software that dramatically increases group productivity and develops a group memory.

He also writes Ross Mayfield’s Weblog which focuses on markets, technology and musings.