Redskins Betting On Another High Profile Free Agent In Haynesworth
Albert Haynesworth was the biggest name in the free agent pool this year and the Washington Redskins have a history of late of signing those type free agents. So once again the ’skins are betting on money to bail them out.
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Pennsylvania Leading The Way With Problem Gambling Treatment
The state of Pennsylvania is expanding their casino gambling options but they are also doing something other states are not. They are expanding their treatment for problem gambling as well.
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Atlantic City Casinos Forced To Show Comps On Website
Atlantic City casinos in the past have only had to file quarterly reports on their promotional spending but now gaming regulators will insist on monthly reports.
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Google Feels Lucky with Twitter
Google has decided to start a Twitter account. It’s attached to a random Googler and holds the bio "News and updates from Google."
The first tweet came sometime around 7pm EST last night, and Google already has nearly 12,000 followers. It is following 37. Among those being followed by Google? A bunch of Googlers, and Google product accounts. Danny Sullivan, and John Battelle are also in the mix. And of course Biz Stone and Evan Williams.
The Google Twitter account is long overdue, but very appreciated as the number of followers clearly illustrates. For one, this adds to Google’s extensive list of sources for distributing updates about the company, also containing quite a few blogs.
The list of followers is a useful guide to other Googlers to follow. The product-specific accounts aren’t just spewing out links to the blog posts either. For those wanting to keep up with every facet of what Google is doing, this is a treasure trove.
Google’s initial tweet read:
"I’m 01100110 01100101 01100101 01101100 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01101100 01110101 01100011 01101011 01111001 00001010"
Admittedly, I don’t read binary code, but sources indicate that this translates to "I’m Feeling Lucky." The addition of this account can only help Google’s quest for transparency. It’ll be interesting to see how actively they respond to other Twitterers in conversation. Here’s one Googler’s thoughts on why Twitter matters.
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Companies Collaborate to Define Clicks
The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has announced the release of Click Measurement Guidelines, a document establishing parameters for buying and selling cost-per-click (CPC) advertising.
Among the organizations participating in the project to come up with the guidelines were Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Advertising.com, AOL, Business.com, Click Forensics, CBS Ineractive, Compete, Disney Interaactive Media, Looksmart, Omniture, PricewaterhouseCoopers, SEMPO, WebTrends, and many more. The guidelines are designed to:
- Provide a detailed definition of a “click” and outline standard methodologies by which clicks should be measured and counted, including the identification of invalid and/or fraudulent clicks.
- Define standard terms to aid in the streamlining of buying and selling of click-based media.
- Increase transparency and consistency in click measurements for media companies, ad-serving organizations, advertisers, and third-party click auditors.
"Helping the interactive industry define a click and the standard for measuring one has been an extraordinary effort on the part of the IAB and its members," said Shuman Ghosemajumder, Business Product Manager for Trust & Safety for Google. "It is an important step that continues to reinforce interactive media’s role as the most accountable and measurable form of advertising."
The document (pdf) is lengthy, but one that advertisers should take the time to read. They are offering a chance for ad agencies, advertisers, publishers, and vendors to provide feedback on the guidelines, so you might be able to get your two cents included too if something of value has not been referenced.
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Does Recession Equal Less Whoopie?
Despite Hitwise’s Heather Hopkin’s proximity to prolific pregnancy, searches for “pregnancy” are down 37 percent over last year, and searches for “maternity clothes” are down 74 percent.
Baby names, too—searches for those are down 40 percent.
Indeed, about this time last year my wife delivered the news (well, I sort of walked in on her while she was still mouth-agape in shock), and Yahoo confirmed pregnancy-related searches had spiked just after New Year’s, just as they had done the year before. My colleague Mike Sachoff reported “pregnancy” was still the number one searched health condition in early April—just after Spring Break.
Yes, I am insinuating something.
Hopkins found that, historically, between December and January traffic to baby-related sites surge. But not this year. This year they’re down 15 percent, and since January 2006 have actually plummeted by 30 percent. It wasn’t long after that that whispers of a real estate bubble started—the FBI was apparently aware of it in 2004.
But the news didn’t really hit home until former President Bush marched out to a podium flanked by the two most powerful financial men on the planet and said everybody’s screwed already.
So maybe we just stopped.
You know, the one time I ever went to a cattle auction, they shooed all these cows (I don’t know, maybe 20 or 30?) into the auction area and a man I couldn’t understand at all began speaking rapidly as men and women raised their hands. In the midst of the excitement and overcrowding, one bull, either out of nervousness or because he’d gone mad with instinct (everycow’s death was pending after all), did, well, what comes naturally to a bull.
And somehow that made a lot of sense to me.
When in doubt, procreate.
But Hopkins speculates that a bleak financial future caused everyone to tighten their belts, so to speak. That makes interest in pregnancy and baby-related information and goods an economic indicator. She provides other theories: aging population, housing prices (which started dropping in 2006).
I think that could be partly true. Plus, all those happy accidents from the year before, shock and awe at the pregnant “man,” and the phenomenon of the Octomom might have just soured us on the whole thing—at least for now.
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Ads Now on Google News Search Results
Google is now showing ads on Google News search results pages in the U.S. Basically, you’ll just be seeing AdWords off to the right when you enter queries, just as you would with a regular Google Search.
Not all queries will bring up ads. Searches for " Google " or " Yahoo " won’t (at least for me), but a search for " Microsoft " or " Adobe " or " Kindle " will all bring up sponsored text ads.
"In recent months we’ve been experimenting with a variety of different formats, like overlay ads on embedded videos from partners like the AP," says Business Product Manager Josh Cohen on the Google News Blog. "We’ve always said that we’d unveil these changes when we could offer a good experience for our users, publishers and advertisers alike, and we’ll continue to look at ways to deliver ads that are relevant for users and good for publishers, too."
Frankly, I’m surprised Google News has not been showing AdWords ads for ages now. The announcement about the ads makes no mention of similar plans for other countries.
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Zuckerberg Lays Down Facebook’s Magna Carta
When a change to a website’s terms of service sparks such a revolt that it ends up on NBC Nightly News, then you know there’s a problem. In a conference call with reporters this afternoon, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced new “foundational policies” applied to users, developers, and advertisers that will give them more say in how things are done on Facebook.
When it became clear to users that Facebook’s new terms of service—the legality of changing a contract with millions without notice is another subject—would allow Facebook to lay exclusive claim to all content on the site forever, users protested with far greater force than when they realized Beacon was telling their friends what movies they rented.
Why is that considered prime time national news, you ask? Well, with 175 million people, that’s like Brazil waking up to find their constitution’s been rewritten. Perhaps that’s why Zuckerberg differentiated between the “contract” of the past and his new initiative, which he says is more of a foundational policy document for Facebook “governance.”
Facebook will be posting a draft of Principles and Statement of Rights and Responsibilities for user review, commentary, and, ultimately, a vote. Voting opened yesterday, and if enough Facebookers like it (see bold print below), it becomes the law of the land by which they and Facebook are to abide. In terms of national documents, that makes it like England’s Magna Carta, which in 1215 required King John to respect certain rights of the people and bound him and future kings to certain laws.
“This is an unprecedented action. No other company has made such a bold move towards transparency and democratization,” said Simon Davies, Director, Privacy International, who also acknowledged the devil would be in the details.
Echoing lofty goals espoused by collegiate-born Google and its indexing the world’s information mantra, Zuckerberg said the purpose of Facebook was to make the world more open and transparent.
“As people share more information on services like Facebook, a new relationship is created between Internet companies and the people they serve," said Zuckerberg. “The past week reminded us that users feel a real sense of ownership over Facebook itself, not just the information they share."
“Companies like ours need to develop new models of governance. Rather than simply reissue a new Terms of Use, the changes we’re announcing today are designed to open up Facebook so that users can participate meaningfully in our policies and our future.”
The new Principles and Statement of Rights and Responsibilities will be on display for review and comment, and then will be voted upon by users. The documents shave the original 40 pages of legal jargon to just five. If passed by users, those wishing to participate will be notified of future changes, and the policy will go through a similar process via “virtual town halls.”
It’s not a complete democracy, however. Users will have no prior input on feature changes, and no vote may be taken at all if there is not enough interest in the issue to warrant one.
But here’s the real kicker and definition of "enough interest": the voting results will be made public and binding only if over 30 percent of all registered users vote. If Facebook reaches 200 million users this year as expected, that’s a shade under 70 million people—just slightly fewer than the number of people voting in the 1972 Presidential election, when the US had about 200 million citizens. As of today, 30 percent is about 52 million, give or take.
Nevertheless, "the idea that a major company like Facebook would give it’s users a vote in how the service is governed is remarkable," said Julius Harper, a Facebook user and a co-founding administrator of the People Against the new Terms of Service group on Facebook. "This decision should go far in restoring people’s trust, and I hope it sets a precedent for other online services to follow."
As for previous, infamous, and sudden usurpations of user content? Zuckerberg said the controversial terms of service were similar to other websites’ terms, but apologized and said Facebook never intended to give the impression it owned user data.
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Is Brand the Key to Ranking on Google?
A recent SEOBook article highlights a good deal of evidence that Google is placing more emphasis on brands than ever before. Author Aaron Wall takes an in depth look at how Google’s algorithm has evolved over his own SEO career, and points out some hints Google has provided in the media as to where its headed before answering a few questions from me for this article.
He cites Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s comments about branding being the cure to cleaning up the "Internet Cesspool" and a quote of his from the company’s most recent earnings call in which he said, "Wouldn’t it be nice if Google understood the meaning of your phrase rather than just the words that are in that phrase? We have a lot of discoveries in that area that [we] are going to roll out in the next little while."
Here is the text of my discussion with Aaron Wall:
Chris Crum: With Google giving big brands so much attention, how does the little guy stand a chance?
Aaron Wall: They will always have some balance to the search results, but part of the longterm search game is going to come down to building a brand. Keep in mind the current brand changes are mostly happening for core industry keywords, and smaller websites will still be able to get decent exposure by working longtail keywords.
CC: You say the January 18th Google Update was bigger than Florida, but few people noticed it. Why do you think that is?
AW: Well the Florida update was a big update with a more violent change in the overall rankings, but it just required a few more technical hoops to jump through. Building a brand is time consuming and difficult…it is much more difficult than jumping through a few more algorithmic hoops. If Google expands on this front many people who have a mechanical approach to SEO and online marketing will be looking for a new job in the not too distant future. 
I think few people noticed this update because there was a smaller change in rankings, and many of the search results are relevant sites that are logical to rank…whereas with the Florida update some of the sites that were ranking were quite off topic, or only near matches.
CC: I’m intrigued by the other point you pulled from Schmidt’s earnings call about Google understanding the meaning of your phrases rather than just the words. Clearly this would greatly increase relevancy on a lot of searches if they are able to get it right. How close do you think they are to being able to pull this off?
AW: They still have a long way to go to get where they want to be with relevancy, but some of the issue of search is simply creating the incentive to make people want to create the content that really answers search queries well in a good format. Sometimes I see Matt Cutts post great how to posts about how do different things in Ubuntu. I believe he does that in part to feed answers into the search engine, especially if/when it did not provide an answer that was as good as he would like.
Another big issue is information accuracy…which is yet another reason they might want to put a lot of weight on brand.
Sidenote (CC): With regards to relevancy and branding, there are some interesting possibilties on the way as ICANN begins accepting more new generic Top-Level Domains. This is discussed in the following exclusive WPN interview between SEOMoz’s Sarah Bird and Clarke Walton of Walton Law Firm:
CC: Do you think this (Google recognizing meaning over words) is something the majority of searchers want to see happen or do you think they would prefer to have to specify their own searches further?
AW: We like to feel like we are in control, but we under-estimate our own laziness. People prefer Google to be sophisticated under the hood rather than having to re-query again.
Thanks to Aaron for talking with me. Read his article "Google’s New Search Engine Rankings Place Heavy Emphasis on Branding". It’s full of illustrated examples, and I think you’ll find it quite interesting.
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Yahoo Monkeys Around with Facebook
Facebook features have been added to Yahoo’s list of SearchMonkey apps that the search engine has turned on by default. The others that are available include (via Matt McGee):
- Yahoo Local
- Wikipedia
- Cityseach
- Yelp
- Zagat
So how is Facebook integrated into Yahoo Search Results?
You can now add people as friends, give them a poke, send them a message, or view their friends directly from the Yahoo SERP. You can see how it looks here:
Don’t be fooled though, the Chris Crum in the above image is not me. I do not rank for my own Facebook profile. Although the other results below it are all me.
"We care about privacy as much as you do, so you’ll only see results for Facebook users who have enabled their profiles to be publicly searched and viewed," notes a post from the SearchMonkey Team.
There are plenty of other social SearchMonkey apps for you to integrate at your own discretion. You can use apps for StumbleUpon, Delicious, Flickr, etc. Find all he apps here. On the topic of Facebook, find our coverage of their press conference from today here.
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