Technics: Google: New feature -- 'Me on the Web"

Search Engine Watch (June16,2k11)

Google intros "Me on the Web' feature

an article by Thom Craver

Second-guesses the G factory's strategy (motive/s) in putting more info about you on the Web (well, puts the info in a display block on the Blogger dashboard.  Are you a blogger on Blogger?  No?  Too bad.

Yes?   Then, all's well, and obscure as to the reason/s why?  8--)

-- Technowlb

Technics: YouTube digital technology: More technics from Techknowlb: Future of the Internet: Common Pool

More from Technowlb's Internet surfing:



refWrite recommends: To archive messages on Google's Gmail you may want to try this method depicted in live screenshots of working the Google technique being tawt.

Very good first step with Google's Gmail online-message feature for the online video archive it hosts, online for your personal account too, I woud think. Try it out.  Cawt my eye. Check it out. No liability to refWrite is accepted or acknowledged in the use of this product. Caveat emptor!  Let the buyer beware!

Zounds! I need to learn how to sort and categorize my playlists on uYT2ube, so that looking at the archives is more convenient to new readers chancing in.

To archive messages is a fine end-user friendly digital technique-teaching short video, focussed directly on what to do when working with Gmail's range of features at present.

-- posted by Techknowlb for refWrite™ and uYT2ube™partnership channel,
uUT2ube partnering with refWrite to build a solid but idiosyncratic YouTube videos collection around diverse themes, including that of music videos, lectures, sermons, also looking for good comedy and satire, etc., mainly thru on-the-spot-selection process due to the ambling curiosity of the writer and free reign given the writer.   8-)

Technics: Internet: Trying to figure out Google's motive in rankings revision

Yeah, I'm as confused as 'ell about Google's revisionism of the alogrithm to determine where your website and blog entries appear in the list of locations dredged up in response to searches.  Whether you're a web-searcher or a website, you can be ranked way down, based on Google's presuppositions guiding its Panda Alogrithm formula.  SearchEngineWatch.com (Mar4,2k11) tells us Why Google's Panda Alogrithm Dropped Sites -- does that mean dropped listing them at all? or just dropped them way down on the list of thousands of search-items listed in response to the keyword entered for the search?  The link-article reporting on Google employees Matt Cutts and Amit Singhai revelations  about Panda also instructs us how to Make Google Trust Your Site, and discusses the label "Low Quality" that Google now deploys with mischievous results apparently to many of us (even those that use Google's own Blogger composition facility and its Blogspot output machine).

-- Technowlb

Technics: Big Net intern+cenes: Google and Facebook face-off

This page exhibits an excellent visual/digital interface with live-links (hopefully) -- and that's on the pre-textual levels only.  The the main textual level below is nooz story about the Big Net Superpowers, both Google and Facebook (two of m+ most favouriteds).

Google, Facebook wrangle

over Data Sharing 

Facebook engineer criticizes Google's decision to change the terms of service of its contact sharing API. 

By Alison Diana ,  InformationWeek 
November 10, 2010 11:40 AM

Slideshow: Top 15 Google Apps For Business

(click image for larger view and for full slideshow)

Google and Facebook continued to wage their public war of words over openness, as Facebook engineer Mike Vernal posted a blog comment responding to a work-around that makes it easier for Facebook users to avoid Google's recent move blocking Facebook from capturing information about users' contacts in Gmail.

-- posted by Technowlb
Click-up the t+mstamp to Read more ... 

Tech: Security Online: My Space webs+t sends your personal Identity Data when ads are clickd

I got the dope on MySpace from Wall Street Journal reporters Geoffrey Fowler and Emily Steel who did an investigation to find out what the hell is goin' on (WSJ, Oct23,2k10) "S+t sends personal IDs when ads are clicked" :

MySpace and some popular applications on the social-networking s+t have been transmitting data to outside advertising companies that could be used to identify users, a Wall Street Journal investigation has found.

The market for data about Web users is hot--and one of the methods used is "scraping," harvesting online conversations. In May, Nielsen scraped private forums where patients discuss illnesses. How can web users prevent their data from being scraped? Julia Angwin joins Digits to discuss.

The information was primarily sent by MySpace when users clicked on ads. The website had pledged to discontinue the practice of sending personal data when users click on ads after the Journal reported it in May.

A MySpace spokesman said the data identify the user profile being viewed but not necessarily the person who clicked on the ad. MySpace is owned by News Corp (shame!, let's see if Fox News will give noozcoverage to this WSJ report) -- WSJ is also owned by News Corp, which also owns The Wall Street Journal.

-- Technowlb

Click on the t+m-stamp below to Read more ... 

Technics: Internet Biz Transparency: Google explains and justifies itself on its transparency/privacy policies

It seems the sometimes glorious, sometimes nefarious Google has just set the standard for corporate accountablity in regard to transparency.

Google Explains Security Procedures
by Thomas Claburn,InformationWeek (Jun5,2k10)

In what it describes as a move toward greater transparency, Google has provided details about its security practices in a newly published paper.

In an effort to communicate its commitment to the security of its online services, Google on Friday published a paper that delves into its corporate security strategy. Eran Feigenbaum, director of security for Google's enterprise group, characterizes the paper as an attempt to be more transparent. It would also be fair to characterize the paper as an attempt to counter the perception that Google's online services are somehow less secure than traditional on-premises systems, a claim often made by Google's competitors.

More Security Insights

Whitepapers Panic slowly: integrated disaster response and built-in continuity

ForwardView: Four Areas of security vital to business health

Webcasts:

DNS DDOS Threats and Corresponding Mitigation Strategies

Spoofing Server2Server Communication: How You Can Prevent It

Analytics Breach, Diaries, Virtual Servers, Real Risks

Vids

Videos

Heartland Payment Systems suffered a major security breach at the hands of Russian Hackers. It sent shockwaves through the industry. We talked to CSO Kris Herrin about the attack and what's being done at Heartland and across the industry.

Feeling comfortable storing data in the cloud involves trusting a cloud services provider and the practices and policies they have in place," said Feigenbaum in a blog post. "In today's ultra-connected, Web-capable world, [and] understanding how data will be protected -- [this concept] is ultimately more meaningful than knowing it [your data, perhaps a company's worth of it] is physically located in one data center or another."

Google itself put that trust at risk earlier this year when it disclosed that "a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China, that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google."

China and Google

Part of Google's response to that incident -- said to be made possible as a result of a previously unrecognized flaw in Internet Explorer 6 -- has reportedly been phasing out the use of Microsoft's Windows operating system at the company, a move that may be motivated by marketing concerns in addition to worries about security.

But Google's work making potential customers feel comfortable in its cloud isn't done. In March, Yale delayed a planned move to Google Apps for Education over s e c u r i t y concerns. When the City of Los Angeles was considering abandoning its Novell e-mail system for Google Apps and Gmail, similar concerns were raised. The deal ultimately went through but such fears remain.

Technotes, by Sportikos

Google's paper, Security Whitepaper: Google Apps Messaging and Collaboration Products, should help allay those fears. It describes the company's

corporate security policies,
organizational and operational security,
asset classification and control
practices,
personnel,
physical, and environmental security,
access control,
systems development and maintenance, and
disaster recovery efforts.

It may not be quite as fun as, say, the comic book Google used to introduce its Chrome browser, but it's likely to help IT decision-makers render more informed judgments about Google's services.

Dark Reading's Vulnerability Management Tech Center is your portal to all the news, product information, best practices, reports, and other data related to detecting and remediating security vulnerabilities. Check it out now.

Tech: Google: Aims to add every d*** service to its apps

Oh yeah. "Google is going to make sure [that] users of its Apps productivity and collaboration software can tap all of the company's services, according to Dave Girouard, president of the company's enterprise group, in a colorful tweet on Twitter," says the subhead of a press release that was reported by Chris Kanaracus and Juan Carlos Perez a year ago (April 09,2009) on a website for professionals  CIO [for Chief Information Officer].  Since I use Google's Blogger a lot, I not only make a furtive effort to monitor the motherload from time to time, but also I want to celebrate the improvements Blogger has made since Google took it over, adding it to its ever-growing portfolio of web services.  On this blog, I also use Google Reader  as "Owlbird's eclectic reader" to make available a selection of posts by interesting others, curiosity-peaking/-piquing posts to other blogs; this retitled feature is located the sidebare on refWrite page 3.

On the "social networking" medium, Twitter, of all places!  Coud it be that Google now owns Twitter too?

Technotes, by Owlie Scowlie
today featuring our publisher as a guest blogger for this column

When I last culled thru my Google Reader RSS grabs from these other blogs on my RSS feeds to Google Reader, I found myself making making comments on those blog posts, as the Reader allows.  I hoped they woud appear on my grabs on rW page 3.  But that didn't wash out technically, or shoud I say?, the attempt was a washout.  I was hoping too that my posts on those other blogs coud be cross-referenced to my coComments facility (not a Google facility). My use of coComment was intended to collect all my comments on the blogs of others, collect them from their diaspora in one place moderated by me. (If you go to coComment's homepage, enter "Semaphore" in the upper r+ search slot to get to my stuff.  Semaphore is the refWrite secretary for coComments, so she's a kind of secretary of foreign affairs. And, thus, like the rest of the refWrite staff, she's fictional -- cofictional and cofactual.)

But that coComment wish too, like posting to Google Reader RSS blog-entries for my refWrite readers,  seems unfeasible technically, for one reason or another (like the fact that the other blogs have their own moderation of comments).  Sad fact is that my coComments usage has been moribund for sometime, yet I have carried it on refWrite page 2's sidebar in all its glaring moribunditty -- perhaps I was settling for the simple idea a hope that the techical breakthru coud eventually be realized in regard to my more scattered written comments in the broader blogosphere, yet tie them all back for those refWrite readers who wanted to avail themselves of such an opportunity.

Back to Google stuff: Additionally I have a Gmail account where I get daily posts from trade lists like TidBits, Web Standards Group (tho I don't shine in meeting accessibility goals, partly because I barely have a website presence on the Internet), and CSS Digest (Cascading Style Sheets, is it?  I want to learn how to create a website, and do so).  I use iGoogle as a news hub, as well as a Google Search site -- altho I have many news sources, or as I like to call them "newshorses" or you coud call them "newswhoreses" (many of them are secularistically unprincipled, so Christian news outlets have no monopoly on being unprincipial).

And there's more reliance on Google laying behind what refWrite publishes.  I don't consider BlogSpot, which is another Google facility related to Blogger, to be the publisher of refWrite. but I coud go with copulisher.  That, refWrite folks, is me.  I'm accompanied by a fictional staff.  Not wanting to be stingy with terms, I coud go with the idea that BlogSpot is my copulisher.  It too has seen fabulous improvements since Google became its owner.  One ngging technical problem I'm facing is the complex task of adding a "Read More..." structure to my template, so that a lengthy blog appears in full on the indivudual blog-entry page, but only an intro or start of an entry appears on the mainpage, one for each of the 4 refWrite pages, and refWrite refBloggers Insert (a kind of page 5) devoted to problems of censorship of blogs in the various countries and persecution of bloggers around the globe.  This latter page is decvoted to freedom of the press, the "blogging press."

So, thank you, Google and Blogger and BlogSpot, from all of us at refWrite.

Yours for the meanwhyled,

-- Albert Gedraitis, publisher

Tech: Google/Newspaper: If Google were a newspaper ...

An interesting tech question pops up at Wire Report which is dedicated to Canadian communications regulatory, policy & industry intelligence (May20,2k10):

If Google was a newspaper how would it operate? I don’t think Google wants to own a newspaper but a Google-y newspaper would see itself as a platform. And that is a platform for many things. It’s a platform to gather and share news, to report news, to sell ads, to distribute … In fact, Google already is that because you can use all the tools of Google to create the value of a newspaper today. You can use Blogger to publish, Adsense to make money, and you can put up maps and videos and all kinds of things. So in that sense Google already is that. It’s a platform.

Technotes, by Owlie Scowlie

refWrite uses Google alot, but far from exclusively to suggests longterm what a reformationally-committed somewhat-daily newspaper coud look like, rather. Serious model? -- perhaps if you don't leave out the the rampant tongue-in-cheek

Technics: Google wants to become a corporate Pontiff of Books

A projected "Book Rights Registry" (which seems more like a proprietary "Google Books registry") is being orchestrated to control the registration of books worldwide, the English-language books being my keenest zone of interest (even to the point of longterm interest in orthography, semiotics > calligraphy, text design, text/imagery interlacements, perhaps intertwined with English or another/s language, perhaps random or novel alphabets like the Owlbirdbet). I love homemade books deploying graphic-imagery skills and text, even on interpenetrating aesthetic levels, nuancing from level to level, row by row (the perichoretic aesthetics of Vollenhoven [see Kuyvenhoven on the role that a trinitarian aesthetics had in V's thawt, and, I would add, in Seerveld's).

It matters if Google even nominally controls the books registry.

Indeed, "a registry can tell you who owns the content you found," in the first place.

Indeed, the finder has feelings of aborginality in this matter: s/he found! It! Perhaps, a ramifying sense of almost-creation of the found something, even as intangible as an insite mayhaps it be. But in the coming computer-driven age (that age is still in its youth, I would say) everything becomes totally paperized digitally (to coin an oxymoronic expression of my own). The thawt I am embellishing, as it may be expressed more clearly by Chris Castle, in the UK tech mag The Register, traceable back to his original post in the Music and Media section, Dec31,2k8: Castle's report is well worth the delve.

"As such a dominant player in the online world, Google will now occupy a unique gateway position that, if abused, could easily create a de facto monopoly. A situation where competition is removed from the market place by placing the keys in the hands of one company cannot, ultimately, be good for the consumer. This is a bridge too far," the British Booksellers Association noted.

Technotes, by Technowlb

The Castle article, apparently quite a newsbreaking report, dissect the Gooogle project:

If a competitor tried building a competing book registry by negotiating licenses for in-copyright works, that competitor would have to bear the startup costs — and the cost of licensing. If the competitor is rewarded for respecting authors’ rights by obtaining favorable terms, that advantage can be taken away by Google. Why? Because one of Google’s goodies from its dominant position in the settlement negotiation is “most favored nations” price protection.

The registry is contractually required to offer Google any better terms it would give to anyone using any data or resources that Google provides the registry, or that is of the type that Google provides. So even if a competitor wants to build a parallel infrastructure from scratch, and wasn’t using any of Google’s data—any reward for their legitimacy would be trumped by Google’s MFN. There is no advantage in “doing it right” except a clear conscience—an MFN inhibits competition.

I love Google, I blog on Blogger--nowadays owned by Google. I avail myself of other Google services and features, free! But, dear Sirs and Madames, Messiers et Mesdames toutes che`res, please Google take a more neutral stance than "Most Favored Nation" (MFV).

There's a juridics angle too.

There's also the market pressures of competition. Castle asks rhetorically and then answers:

"How about Yahoo!’s Open Content Alliance? Google leads OCA in scanning [books, other textual materials], and then there’s Google’s MFN. Now that may be kind of interesting to regulators. As one commentator noted, "[a]s a condition of settlement approval, the Registry should be required to negotiate and sign an antitrust consent decree with the Department of Justice.” Since ASCAP and BMI each already operate under consent decrees, there is a predicate for Justice Department scrutiny and "rate court" oversight of the registry, particularly given Google's market domination. Why should societies have to suffer the rate court burden when Google does not?

For this blog-entry, we have to leave the matter somewhat dangling, as we watch for further developments.

Technics: Google launching personal-edit searches minus garbage subtopics

Google has outdone itself with the launch of the new Google SearchWiki. The idea is to allow a marginal unorganized set of users who intensely dislike wading thru the now-inevitable garbage that swells search results for a given keyword, allows users now to avoid that recurrent mishap by submitting a truer listing of results -- minus the garbage links. Not that this involves a separate search result in every case of WikiSearch editing by an individual wiki user for the purpose.

Rather, individual edits for a keyword are combined with the edits of others for the same word, and a composite result becomes available to all the marginals who use the Google SearchWiki to obtain hopefully cleaner results for the set. But one wonders whether a new censoriousness could set in.

Technotes, by Technowlb

I wouldn't mind seeing Philosophy the cosmetic line disappear from the wiki's search results for Philosophy; but would the various competing sects of view try to take out results giving links to competitor websites that define, say, the keyword Reformational other than as approved by various sites of the competition?

My rather arcane examples may or may not amuse you, dear reader, but I'm sure you can extrapolate to examples for poignant to your own interests and concerns to help make the point more clear for your own purposes.

Updates:
*Reports conflict over Microsoft buying Yahoo search (MarketWatch Nov30,2k8)
*Is Apple building a search engine? Does Apple plan to take on Google, Yahoo and Microsoft? (MacWorld [UK], Nov14,2k8)

Technics: Internet: MicroSoft, Yahoo to join in online search services, compete with Google

Bloomberg.com published with updates a report by Jonathan Thaw and Jason Kelly that relates to major changes coming to the battle of titans on the Internet, particularly the search services. Yahoo and Google are the major two, with Google far in the lead but not that far. "Microsoft, Yahoo May Partner to Challenge Google in Web Search" (May5,2k7).

MicroSoft has been unable to break effectively into the field, but wants part of the ad revenues that the search services routinely place on their pages. What is being presented to the public at the moment is called a "partnership," but the relation being explored seems to have in its background MS's intent to buy and swallow ("merge") Yahoo in six months time.

May 5 (Bloomberg) -- Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo! Inc. have held talks about a partnership designed to boost their share of the Web search and advertising market and catch up with Google Inc., people briefed on the discussions said.

The discussions are in the early stages and focus on a partnership rather than a merger, said one of the people, who asked to remain anonymous because the negotiations are private. Shares of Yahoo jumped the most in three years yesterday after the New York Post said Microsoft wants to buy the company.

Yahoo and Microsoft, the world's largest software maker, have struggled to dent Google's dominance in searching the Web and in the booming market for advertising spots next to search results. A combination would triple Microsoft's share of the U.S. search market to 38.4 percent, rivaling Google's 48.3 percent, according to ComScore Inc.

``It gets them enough economies of scale to be a viable force in search,'' said Walter Price, who oversees about $2 billion including Microsoft shares at RCM Capital Management in San Francisco. ``You have to ratchet up your capital expenditure to compete with Google.''

What this will mean for consumers (web users) hopefully will be more and better services, in the first instance, by Google. I could make some recommendations in that regard, as I don't think the ads I obstruded onto other's webpages when I search are sufficiently compensated by the time-consuming awkwardnesses I have to crawl thru when using Google. The Google ads on refWrite are not at all those I would select from their stable, tho usually they are tolerable, at other times downr+t obnoxious. But that's another story.

Technics: Intenet: Law suit by UK football club tries to stop circulation of video clips on YouTube/Google

Techdirt's Mike Masnick, "Premier League, Jealous Of Viacom, Sues YouTube As Well" (May5,2k7)

Nick writes in to let us know that the Premier League, in the UK (football/soccer, depending on where you are) has decided to sue Google/YouTube for copyright infringement. Nick has his own analysis, but there are a number of interesting (or silly, depending on your perspective) things about the case. First off, it was almost exactly two years ago that we were surprised to hear the Premier League suggest that it needed to sue fans who were streaming its games online (pre-YouTube days). Here were fans who were so interested in following what was going on that they'd watch games online and help promote it to others who had no way of watching the games, and the best the Premier League could do was threaten to sue? That seemed backwards. Last year, the Premier League popped up again, complaining about videos on YouTube. However, while again it seemed like bad marketing to go after fans who are promoting your sport, we figured it was at least a positive that the Premier League wasn't so silly as to blame YouTube for the actions of its users. Apparently, we spoke too soon.

Technotes, by Technowlb

If anything, this is probably a reaction to Viacom's $1 billion lawsuit against Google/YouTube. The Premier League figured it might get a piece of that, or at least hope that Google would be willing to settle. Of course, Google's defense should be the same as it was for Viacom. The Premier League makes one different argument -- which is that it tried to use the anti-piracy tools provided by Google, and they didn't work. It's hard to see how the fact that the tools don't work very well is illegal. There is no magic bullet that can stop unauthorized copies -- so every "anti-piracy" tool won't work entirely. That's hardly something to sue over. The other difference is that the Premier League is looking to have the case declared as a class action suit, so that all copyright holders can get at Google in one shot. If this succeeds, then it seems likely that it will shut down YouTube, destroying one of the most effective promotional vehicles the Premier League has had in years. It's hard to see how that's beneficial for anyone.

More need to be said here, but I'll say it tomorrow. G'nite!

Technics: Internet Web2.0: Google buys DoubleClick to continue lead in online advertizing

Read/WriteWeb email newsletter carries word of "Google to Acquire DoubleClick For $3.1 Billion In Cash." (Apr13,2k7)--also at R/WW website.

In a move predicted by R/WW's Sean Ammirati and New York Times a week or so ago, one of the big Internet companies has acquired online advertising system DoubleClick. And the buyer is none other than Web 2.0's big spender, Google! According to the press release just out:

"The acquisition will combine DoubleClick's expertise in ad management technology for media buyers and sellers with Google's leading advertising platform and publisher monetization services.

The combination of Google and DoubleClick will offer superior tools for targeting, serving and analyzing online ads of all types, significantly benefiting customers and consumers..."

This is a huge deal - because for DoubleClick, Google is paying nearly twice the amount it paid for YouTube late last year ($1.65B in that case).

The deal appears to have been hastened by DoubleClick's announcement earlier this month that it plans to launch an exchange for online advertisements. Sean analyzed this development on 4 April, noting that it may lead to more profitable monetization of online ads.

Technotes, by Technowlb

As if Google isn't profitable enough already in that department! One thing's for sure, this is a blow to Microsoft - whose AdCenter product was designed as a direct competitor to Google's Adsense/AdWords. But now Google has - yet again - trumped the competition (Microsoft and Yahoo) by taking its online advertising technology into new territory.

MarketWatch reporter Gabriel Madway takes up the optimatics aspect in monetary terms, "Google agrees to buy DoubleClick for $3.1 billion" (Apr13,2k7):

San Francisco (MarketWatch) -- Google Inc. (GOOG: GOOG466.29, -1.10, -0.2% ) said late Friday it has agreed to acquire digital marketing company DoubleClick Inc. for $3.1 billion in cash from private equity firms Hellman & Friedman and JMI Equity, and [Google] management. The deal is expected to close by the end of the year. DoubleClick is based in New York. "It has been our vision to make Internet advertising better - less intrusive, more effective, and more useful," said Sergey Brin, Google's co-founder, in a statement. "Together with DoubleClick, Google will make the Internet more efficient for end users, advertisers, and publishers."

Hopefully, the new DoubleClick-able Google will allow both websites and blogs to have greater control over their ads when dealing with Google's system.

I interviewed rW's General Editor, Owlb, on our advertizing perspective. He said: "I have been very sad about the lack of editorial fit between Google Adsense ads that we run on various pages of refWrite. I'm definitely looking for something competitive in regard to the possiblity of our choosing--say, from an Adsense massive list--a menu of advertizing that wholely fits with our editorial policy and regular-readers as our best-market niche. Adsense has an alogarithm by which to choose and place ads here, but often that mechanically-applied numeric formula is so skewed in its determination of the editorial slant of what should be the best ad-content for us, that Google's search for profits here is so mis-structured it seems to reduce itself to absurdity. Let refWrite choose which ads to place, as part of our own overall editorial/advertizing identity. We remain non-commercial, but we would prefer that our own selection of adverts (at least give us a veto power!) be given the first chance to make a marginal profit off our existence." That's our General Editor, Owlb.

As to my own view, I tow the line but still enjoy the suprizes we encounter strait from the Google mathemical ad-machine.