Justin Mason lists the top Google results for single letter searches (for example, searching “K” gets you K-Mart). The list is almost 100% a case of good (albeit inadvertant) content SEO. Nearly every site is one that would be listed, for one reason or another, with a single letter seperate from the other (like I-Tunes, J-Lo, C-SPAN, McDonald’s and Y!M).
(Found on Findory)
JenSense writes about how Google got the currency conversions wrong for some AdSense publishers. Basically, they got it backwords, turning an (example) .884-to-1 conversion into a 1-to-.884. Whoops.
Some publishers are affected more than others in how the exchange rate was reversed. Canadians, for example, had theirs affected when AdSense calculated 0.884 CDN = 1 US instead of 1 CDN = 0.884 US. This would result in publishers receiving $88.40 CDN instead of the expected $112.70 CDN for every $100 earned, resulting in a loss of $24.30 CDN for each $100 US earned. In Sweden, the resulting exchange rate mixup resulted in publishers receiving only 2% of their earnings.
Gotta watch out on those exchange rates. Imagine if it was one of those 3,000,000,000-to-1 conversions!
Obviously, Google’s handling the problem, so nobody loses money.
IAC/InterActiveCorp reported earnings yesterday of $47.2 million, down 32% from the previous year. However, Ask.com contributed $117.6 million in revenue over the first three months of this year, representing operating income of $11.6 million. Revenue isn’t rising anywhere near as fast as Google, considering that over a year ago it pulled $86.1 million a quarter, but its search engine market share is getting better.
Today’s Quest is an Observation Challenge.
You’ll need to watch a Google Video and then answer three questions. As always, entering the bolded words into Google Video pulls up the video.
For question one, look for the painting…
For question two, what word is both spoken by the character in the video and in the name of the game?
For question three, just watch and count. And no, he isn’t wearing them when he chokes Tom Hanks.
Miel’s quit YouTube. Considering he introduced me to the service, which I began to love, contribute to, and trumpet as the next great success story, you’d think I’d be surprised. Not even a little.
See, I got kicked off YouTube over two months ago. The reason? Contributing to the success of their service. I uploaded a good number of videos to YouTube, almost none of which I owned the copyright to, all of which I got from other sources on the internet. My first video, the “banned” Xbox 360 ad, was for a time the second most watched video on YouTube, with close to two million viewings.
On February 24, I received two emails, detailing how a video I had posted, a Saturday Night Live sketch in which President Bush asks a Santa Dick Cheney for an Xbox 360, had been rejected due to a third party notification of infringement. It included this warning:
Please Note: Repeat incidents of infringement will result in the deletion of your account and all videos uploaded to that account. In order to avoid future strikes against your account, please delete any videos that you do not own the rights to and refrain from uploading additional videos that infringe on the copyrights of others.
Four days later, I received another notice, regarding a commercial for Google that aired on Nova. While I doubted that anyone cared enough about the commercial to actually report it, I was more concerned by this:
Please be aware this is the second video rejection for your account. If you receive one more video rejection, your account will be permanently disabled and you will lose all your previously uploaded videos.
I emailed YouTube, explaining that if they were removing content and threating users without legal notice from the copyright holder, then they were making a mistake. The majority of YouTube’s content breaks the same rules mine broke, and they would be better off waiting until someone complained before removing anything. They disagreed.
I also objected to them sending me emails that essentially accused me of copyright violations, and called me a criminal and repeat offender. I believe that such cases occupy far more of a gray area, in which the sharing of other people’s content, in small amounts for no profit, constitutes promotion of the content, and should be considered permissable until such time as the copyright holder objects, at which point it should be immediately removed with complete understanding that both parties acted in good faith. Again, they disagreed.
On March 15, my account was deleted, and all my videos were removed. The reason? A minute-long clip from the show 24, taken poorly with a digital camera, showing that Google Earth was being used in the show. If that doesn’t constitute fair use, I don’t know what is. YouTube deleted my account, because as a repeat offender, I clearly posed a danger to the world, and had to be stopped.
This included several videos I did own the copyright for, creating much problems for myself. I had to restore many of the embedded videos in my posts with Google Video versions.
Anyway, I’m done with YouTube, almost. It is clear they have no interest in preserving a digital archive of video content for the future, and that I cannot rely on them for posterity. I will continue to look for video sharing services, but it is clear YouTube has value merely as a bandwidth saver, not as an actual utility for web publishing. Any video I link to or embed can dissapear at a moments notice because of an unrelated and questionably legal video.
I do have one thing left to do: Ruin YouTube. Since it is so easy to get someone kicked from YouTube, I am going to launch an assault on the service. I am going to start with the most popular uploaders, and report every possibly copyright infringing video in their account. I won’t be breaking any rules, just robbing YouTube users of content they would have probably lost in the end anyway. I’d rather someone else become the video sharing site of choice (and no, not Google; they wouldn’t be any better), something those of us using video on the web can rely on and trust to stick to the letter of the law, not to the fears of lawyers.
Every day, I will destroy at least one account. I will only target those with copyright infringing content. When I am done, the only popular videos on YouTube will be those with zero commercial value. We will see how well the service does without the Daily Show and South Park entire episodes that are its real bread and butter.
Any objections?
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