Bigmouthmedia Search Engine News: /online-pr/

Google explains real time Twitter search

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 09:24:00 GMT

Since reaching an agreement with microblogging site Twitter and introducing real time search functionality in December, Google fans have been keen to find out how the Mountain View giant has been indexing tweets from the popular site. Having updated and refined its methods recently, the search engine has decided to share them with everyone.

According to Google Fellow Amit Singhal, the relevance is determined similarly to how Google's PageRank function works: The search engine gauges a user and their tweets' importance by the link structure - in this case followers - and its quality.

"You earn reputation, and then you give reputation," Singhal said in an interview with MIT-based Technology Review. Through this, a relatively unknown user could achieve a higher ranking on Google just due to his or her connections in the Twitterverse.

"As high-quality pages link to another page on the Web, the quality of the linked-to page goes up. Likewise, in social media, as established users follow another user, the quality of the followed user goes up as well," Singhal said.

The web maestro also commented that the phenomenon of 'hashtags' could potentially detract from a tweet's ranking, as they have a tendency to attract spam, presenting an apparent paradox for web users. Whilst hashtags expose other Twitterers to related content and increase prominence in-site, they may not help rankings in the Google search.

Other factors that could affect Google's tweet search include stand-bys from basic web searching: Key words will continue to play a role, as well as links from sites other than Twitter, overall content and recency of the postings.

The two companies are collaborating closely to optimise this service, according to one expert.

In the TR article, product manager of real-time search Dylan Casey stated: "I talk with the guys at Twitter on a regular basis to learn where the feature is going. We get feedback from them, we give them feedback, and our engineers collaborate. It is truly symbiotic."

With the development and popularity of smart phones, they are working to incorporate geo-positioning into search relevance in the future.

Recently, Google has reached similar agreements to offer real-time searching of other prominent social media outlets Facebook and MySpace.

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NLA suspends link charges

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 08:24:00 GMT

The Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA) has met with opposition to its 2010 charging model from news aggregators such as NewsNow and the Norwegian Meltwater monitoring firm.

The NLA is co-owned by eight UK publishers and covers only content from those papers. It charges UK companies who link to newspaper websites as part of their paid-for services.

The agency targets clippings firms and news aggregators, but PR firms are also subject to the rules.

The NLA has paused its plans to begin charging for commercial use of links while a copyright tribunal discusses the case.

In a press release, managing director of the NLA David Pugh stated: "We are confident that the copyright tribunal will recognise our web licensing scheme is measured and reasonable. But we do not want any licensed users of newspaper web monitoring to be disadvantaged by Meltwater's action. Clients of all monitoring agencies should be on a level playing field. We have therefore decided not to invoice clients for their web licence until the copyright tribunal process is complete."

NewsNow responded to the NLA's action by dropping NLA sanctioned newspapers from its aggregator, while continuing to drive traffic and awareness to other trusted news sources.

In a statement issued last year, Struan Bartlett, MD of NewsNow, said: "Unfortunately, we have not been able to reach an agreement with the NLA. In spite of the NLA's claims to the contrary, we continue to maintain that what they are demanding of ourselves and our customers is unacceptable and of questionable legitimacy."

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Facebook acquires FriendFeed

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 01:25:00 GMT

Social networking power house Facebook has bought the social media darling Friendfeed for an undisclosed sum.

FriendFeed is a life streaming aggregator driven by some of the most brilliant minds ever to leave Google.

"Don't be evil", that famous motto from Google (but unofficial motto, as they like to stress these days) came from engineer Paul Buchheit. He left Google to join Friendfeed. Paul's also responsible for Gmail (Google Mail in the UK) and the early versions of AdSense. Paul was Google's 23rd employee. He and ex-Googlers Bret Taylor, Sanjeev Singh and Jim Norris are now senior members of Facebook's engineering team.

The press release issued from Facebook holds some clues as to why the social networking monster was willing to spend money to buy FriendFeed.

"'Facebook and FriendFeed share a common vision of giving people tools to share and connect with their friends,' said Bret Taylor, a FriendFeed co-founder and, previously, the group product manager who launched Google Maps."

Facebook's already decided to copy a number of FriendFeed's tactics and innovations. This purchase will ensure that Facebook stays ahead of the innovation curve.

The growth of Twitter is the reason behind the acquisition. The instant messaging features of Twitter, the ease of contact and the organically viral way in which conversations span across the web has left Facebook's previously walled garden features looking somewhat lacking. Facebook will be hoping that FriendFeed's life streaming features can counter Twitter.

FriendFeed provides a single channel for users to follow their friends online activities. Members can point FriendFeed to their blogs, to Twitter, to Facebook, to Flickr, to delicious and to countless other sites. Rather than hop around the internet or subscribing to dozens of RSS feeds users can simply monitor a single FriendFeed to stay abreast of what their friends are doing online. If friends aren't members of FriendFeed then "imaginary" accounts can be created by FriendFeed users so that their activities can still be easily followed.

Despite being composed of so many ex-Googlers FriendFeed still appears to be Google friendly. Google's Feedburner adds FriendFeed subscriptions onto their RSS user tracking. FriendFeed also makes use of the new PubSubHubbub protocol developed by Google Engineers as a way to make RSS feeds as quick as Twitter.

*Image by Thomas Hawk, published under Creative Commons at http://www.flickr.com / photos / 51035555243 @N01/3409151928/.

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Apple fights with review quality

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 00:48:00 GMT

Apple has changed its policy to ensure that reviews of iPhone Applications can only be written by users who have purchased the application in question. The change should make it harder for developers to negatively rate rival applications and manipulate star ratings.

User submitted reviews have become a cornerstone of the evolution of the internet. Increasingly, users expect to be able to comment on, compliment or criticise the services or products they've received. And it's a feature that has the ability to impact positively on a site's popularity. For example, in the travel market, sites like TripAdvisor have risen to prominence through their vast collection of reviews.

The early success of sites capitalising on user submitted reviews has been tempered with concerns over the integrity of the reviews themselves. In 2006 USA Today journalist Gene Sloan wrote of suspicions that hotel staff were reviewing their own hotels on TripAdivsor and highlighted the concern that hotels were offering cash in return for positive commentary.

The United Kingdom's Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations Act was updated in May 2008 to specifically make it illegal for companies to falsely represent themselves as a consumer. The law, however, places little emphasis on sites that allow reviews and the way that these reviews are policed to prevent infringement.

iPhone Application developer and news editor for Search Engine Land and Search Engine Roundtable, Barry Schwartz welcomed the new policy update from Apple on his blog. Mr Schwartz had experienced anti-Semitic comments on his popular Siddur & Zmanin iPhone application.

"I think this is a good first step in making the iTunes App Store review system more fair for both developers and users," Barry Schwartz told bigmouthmedia.

"To have people review an app without first trying it, well - that is like asking your brother for a letter of recommendation - it just is a skewed review. Outside of that, it adds a barrier to those who have anger towards an individual or group of people. It makes it one step harder for those types of people to leave racist or anti-semitic remarks."

"The best scenario would be to have Apple review reported reviews in a timely fashion, with this policy of having to buy or download the app, before reviewing. What is sad, is that anti-Semitic review is still in the App Store, after I know at least ten different people reported it to Apple over 15 days ago!"

Prolific tech blogger Christina Warren also welcomed the policy update on The Unofficial Apple Weblog noting that many people simply complained about the pricing of applications in the review section. "That isn't fair to developers, and it isn't fair to potential buyers", Warren wrote.

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Google Trends plots Xbox Live Troubles

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Xbox Live, the popular online gaming system from Microsoft, has been experiencing on-going technical issues this week and Google's Hot Trends has been catching the action in all its gory detail.

Xbox Live allows Xbox and Xbox 360 consoles to offer a number of games that allow users to play friends, rivals and strangers online. XboxLlive also permits users to download upgrades, new games, instant message, voice chat and even hire movies (delivered over the internet to the Xbox 360's hard drive).

Google's Hot Trends reveals the 100 most popular keyphrase searches in the US and updates daily - and its archives reveal that a certain gaming system has been featuring on the list of late.

According to Blake Grundman at Kombo, Microsoft claimed that there 'may be isolated issues' with the service yesterday. However, keyphrases such as [xbox live down] and [xbox live mtu failed] had surged into Google's hottest 100 keyphrase searches the day before.

The graph above plots the number of keyphrases containing [xbox] as they entered Google's hourly Hot Trend report over the last few days.

Xbox's Major Nelson twittered that the issues had been fixed. He noted, "The storm has passed" and "Back to Live you all go."
Whereas, over at Xbox360FanBoy Xav de Matos added a note of caution; "expect some rolling restarts as millions of gamers attempt to reconnect."

de Matos's warnings seem to have been well founded as a record number of [xbox] keyphrase terms have made Google's Hot Trends again today. [xbox live down again] entered the hot trend list at 8am GMT and was followed by [xbox live customer support number] and [xbox live customer support].

The speed at which Xbox keyphrases entered Google's Hot Trends is illustrative of just how quickly the digital generation will turn to the internet to resolve problems and the need for speedy communication from corporations today.

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The Kentucky List

Fri, 26 Sep 2008 08:37:00 GMT

Casinos and poker sites could have their domain names stripped from them as the State of Kentucky takes unilateral action against sites hosted outside Kentucky.

Steve Beshear, Governor of Kentucky, has won a Court Order to transfer 141 domain names to the Commonwealth of Kentucky.

Names on the list include FullTiltPoker.com, DoylesRoom.com and BodogLife.com. He described the online gaming sites as "leeches on our communities".

The online gaming industry has responded angrily. The Poker Players Alliance stated;"not only unduly restricts the freedom of Kentucky residents to play games of skill, such as poker, online, but sets a precedent for censorship of the internet by force."

Speaking at the popular online gaming conference CapEuro in Barcelona Pete Wilson from lawyers Blake Lapthorn gave the attendees a quick overview of the situation. It was noted that the law being enacted by Kentucky seemed only to refer to 'mechanical devices' although further legal study was needed.

In 2000 the domain registrar Network Solutions won a case against Umbro International in which the Virginia Supreme Court ruled that a domain name is a contract for services rather than a commodity. Wilson suggested, given the 2000 ruling, Beshear may find his court order impossible to enforce.

At the time of writing less than a dozen casino sites had come offline with hosts and registers such as GoDaddy yet to obey the Kentucky Court.

The court hearing in Kentucky to discuss the list has been delayed until Friday the 27th of September.

The Kentucky Derby, the famous horse racing event, is protected by US federal laws.

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Internet users reject obtrusive advertising

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 08:12:00 GMT

Independent research has shown that "intrusive and irrelevant" advertising is damaging brand perceptions and is a huge turn off for internet users. According to the recent study as many as 73% of web users have left a favourite website due to annoying advertising compared to 50% in 2007.

The findings, by Opinion Matters on behalf of www.howto.tv show that the worst offenders are certain adverts for gambling sites, financial services companies, car brands, household goods and beauty brands.

Major irritations for users were ads with loud noises, pop-ups that cover information and ads that were difficult to close.

The figures also show that 59% of users have stopped returning to a website because of problem advertising, with that figure rising to 70% for 25 to 34 year olds. That's an increase from just 16% and 14% respectively just one year ago.

Nearly all (97%) of users would be less likely to purchase from a brand if a pop-up unrelated to the subject of the website appeared on the page.

Pop-up ads have been around for years. The original method of creating a pop-up was to use code to open a new browser window containing just the advert. Browsers and browser toolbars eventually lowered the instances of this happening with so-called "pop-up blockers" but recently it has been more common to put a pop-up within the actual page, a box which often moves from one point on the page to another with "close" buttons that can be difficult to find. Whereas the old style pop-ups tended to be confined to lower end, more spammy websites, the new style has been increasingly used by big multinational companies on top-end websites.

The howto.tv survey of 1,046 adults over the age of sixteen also contained positive information for online advertisers. 56% of 16 to 24 year olds and 44% of 25 to 34 year olds said a video ad would make them more likely to purchase the brand. This figure was still substantial at 38% of 35 to 44 year olds and 29% of 45 to 54 year olds.

The survey in this case uses a small sample size and shouldn't be treated as gospel. A well designed pop-up needn't necessarily be intrusive to the user. What should be taken from this new research is that any innovative advertising should be user tested in advance of publication. After all, who wants to pay to have their brand sabotaged?

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Google blocks Yahoo's Pipes

Mon, 12 Nov 2007 02:36:00 GMT

The two leading search engines have reached a technical impasse over Google's news service and Yahoo's pipes product.

Pipes is a highly regarded product from Yahoo's Brickhouse team. Users are able to collect data from various sources around the internet, manipulate it, filter it, sort it and then deliver it in another format. For example, with Yahoo Pipes a brand team could monitor news aggregators and blog search engines around the web for mentions of their brand and then deliver this research in one single RSS feed. That's easy to read and easy to monitor.

In the past Google has been used by viruses to query the web looking for forum sites with known vulnerabilities or email addresses. Google's defence to this sort of virus attack is to block automated queries to the search engine and also to Google News.

Google's anti-automated query defense is now blocking the automated queries from Yahoo Pipes. Many of the published pipes in Yahoo's system are now showing as empty and blocked as Google News was an incredibly popular source of information.

Yahoo's Pipes requests for Google News URLs are being forwarded to Google's blocking page. Google is treating Pipes as a virus or other unwanted computer request.

Yahoo Pipes fail gracefully. Pipes constructed from various information sources continue to work and simply exclude the feeds taken from Google. One of the features that sets Yahoo Pipes aside is their unique visualisation of the information stream. Pipes sending data are highlighted in light blue whereas empty pipes, such as those now being blocked by Google, appear in dull grey.

Tim O'Reilly described Yahoo Pipes as a "milestone in the history of the internet" when it launched and Nic Cubrilovic of TechCrunch said, "...my mind is still buzzing thinking about all that can be done with Pipes."

It is within Google's ability to 'whitelist' Yahoo Pipes and allow the internet application to successfully auto-query the search engine, news and blog search. Until the impasse is resolved, however, Pipes may struggle to remain useful.

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Second Life or second home? Sony unveils new social media universe

Tue, 13 Mar 2007 07:25:00 GMT

Popular social sites such as MySpace, Digg, FaceBook and Flickr have been some of the biggest winners in the age of Web 2.0. Now, Sony are set to get in on the action with their forthcoming online network universe, "Home", which will be available as a free download for the PlayStation 3 in autumn 2007.

Described as a real time, networked 3D community, Home will build on the success of other virtual worlds and social networking sites, and incorporates elements of Second Life, YouTube and MySpace, which promote user generated content and allow web surfers to interact with each other online.

Gamers will be able to create a personal avatar, choosing from a wide range of body types, skin tones, ages, clothes and accessories. They will also be able to buy products from virtual shops and play online games. Users will be given a virtual living space in the form of a stylish modern apartment that can be customised with the users' own content. For example, you could hang your own personal photographs on your walls, have your MP3 collection playing on your apartment stereo or create a personal cinema for watching your movie downloads.

Communication between users will be facilitated through text, audio and video chat, and avatars will express their emotions through animations. Certain features of Home are expected to be available via the PlayStation Portable and on mobile phones; users will also be able to visit special paid-for events. It will even be possible to explore the Home world and meet other gamers in public spaces, but this will be controlled by Sony to ensure that the content remains suitable for minors.

Sony is expected to develop lucrative advertising deals with partners and businesses that will be able to incorporate commercials into the Home universe - for example, high definition movie trailers. Although it is expected that gaming companies will take up a large proportion of the available ad space, Sony hopes that businesses outside of the gaming world will also be attracted to the high exposure environment that Home hopes to provide.

Sony's move into the world of social networking marks the trend in user generated content and online communities. Phil Harrison, Sony's president of Worldwide Studios says that the company's vision of Home is to "create a rich layer that sits on top of the network platform... a rich three dimensional world where you can build community, you can customise and communicate - empowering audience with user content."

Compared to rival gaming systems Nintendo Wii and Microsoft Xbox, Sony's PS3 online functionality has been limited up to now. However PlayStation Home is expected to help the electronics giant's new PS3 gain a competitive edge in the software market, as well as increase Sony's online presence considerably.

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BBC in deal with Google-YouTube

Fri, 02 Mar 2007 05:12:00 GMT

The BBC has teamed up with YouTube in a deal which will see short clips of BBC content played on YouTube, the web's most popular video sharing website owned by Google. The aim of the deal for the BBC is to attract more web users to the BBC's website through site traffic from YouTube.

There will be three BBC channels on YouTube - one for news and two for entertainment:

BBC: this is one of two entertainment channels which will be a 'public service' with no advertising. This channel will show clips of programmes and trailers; for example, showing users around the Dr Who set to entice users to the BBC website, from where they can watch or download BBC programmes in full.

BBC Worldwide: this is the second entertainment channel that will play self-contained clips up to six minutes long from popular BBC programmes; for instance, clips from Top Gear and nature programmes by David Attenborough are expected to be included.

This channel will feature advertising; for example, banner ads and pre-roll adverts. BBC Worldwide said that this is not a new concept for them, as BBC magazines like Top Gear and channels like BBC World and UK Living already carry advertising.

The corporation will also get a share of the advertising revenue generated by traffic to the new YouTube channels.

BBC News: the news channel, which will be launched towards the end of 2007, will show about 30 news clips per day. It will be funded by advertising and similar to deals with Yahoo! USA and Real Networks. Controversially, because of advertising legislation, these clips can be seen outside the UK only. Any UK users clicking on a link to one of the news clips on YouTube will incur the message that they have no access to this clip.

The BBC's director general, Mark Thompson, said the deal was a "ground-breaking partnership" that would "engage new audiences in the UK and abroad".

The BBC's director of Future Media and Technology, Ashley Highfield, said the deal was "not about distributing content like full-length programmes; YouTube is a promotional vehicle for us".

TV networks in the US, including CBS, NBC and Fox, have already trialled this method of promotion and several television programmes experienced a huge increase in viewers after clips were made available on YouTube.

Other media companies have already accused the BBC of straying from its license-fee funded public service remit and moving too far into commercial web ventures.

YouTube enables members to watch, share videos and upload their own content. As a result, the site hosts a lot of pirated film and music clips uploaded by members who do not own the copyright. The media firm Viacom, for example, recently demanded that YouTube remove tens of thousands of clips from the site for which the firm owned the copyright.

The BBC said they would not be hunting down all BBC-copyrighted clips already uploaded by YouTube members. However, it said it would reserve the right to swap poor quality clips with the real thing or to have content removed that infringed other people's copyright, like sport, or that had been edited or altered in a way that would damage the BBC as a brand.

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