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Walmart has sent a DMCA notice to TechCrunch and SearchAllDeals.com, a shopping search engine and deals aggregator. (Think of it as the Techmeme for deals on the web, with a Google custom search engine to boot.)

Both sites posted some information about “Black Friday” sales for discount giant Wal-mart. But Wal-mart is claiming copyright infringement. It’s also saying the info wasn’t supposed to be out before November 24th.

The problem is SearchAllDeals doesn’t host content. It simply links to it. This amounts to free advertising for Wal-mart.

And since TechCrunch also has the info, then Wal-mart has a leak problem, which is neither TechCrunch or SearchAllDeal’s problem.

If I were a competitor such as Target or K-mart, I’d be stepping up to the plate and making the most of this “controversy” by freely offering up my own deals.

h/t TechDirt

Related Reading:
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Google Talks On Its Approach To Content & Copyright

Google CEO Eric Schmidt must love controversy. In a speech to magazine executives Wednesday he called the internet “a cesspool”, AdAge reported.

I don’t know if that makes Google a sewerage company, but I think Schmidt should realize that many look at Google as their filter to the web. Employees like Matt Cutts spend all their time working on ‘purifying’ the results, to expect publishers to be the answer may not be the right approach.

Criticizing opponents to the Yahoo-Google ad deal may not be a smart move given the recent drop in value of the once “golden child” of the web. Schmidt challenged “if you are going to criticize us, criticize us properly.” Claiming ad prices would not increase under the Google Yahoo ad deal.

Schmidt displayed a certain amount of callous aloofness when he avoided questions about how publishers could improve their ranking with Google.

“”We don’t actually want you to be successful,” he said. The company’s algorithms are trying to find the most relevant search results, after all, not the sites that best game the system. “The fundamental way to increase your rank is to increase your relevance,” he added” AdAge reported.

If you call the web a cesspool but do not offer insights to quality content providers who pay money to provide professional journalism I don’t think you are serious about cleaning it up, so much as taunting an economically challenged industry.

Bidding on trademarked kewyords may bring big conversions, but the strategy is often perceived to carry a grand amount of legal trouble with it. In today’s SEM Crossfire column, “Trademarked Terms: Guaranteed Conversions, Guaranteed Controversy,” Frank Watson explores whether or not bidding on competitors trademarks is a worthy strategy.

» Full story

While the announcement of the Seth “Family Guy” McFarlane link to Google was not new, the way Google has announced it will distribute and monetize reflects a deeper reach for the online media behemoth. Google is going in to the content production space.

The caveat about this is the actual information given for advertisers about publishers and their audience.

As NYT reports: “The innovative part involves the distribution plan. Google will syndicate the program using its AdSense advertising system to thousands of Web sites that are predetermined to be gathering spots for Mr. MacFarlane’s target audience, typically young men.”

The question is how are they determining the target audience? Topic based decision or cookie based?

Is Google making an across the board push to present as many of the new methods that they want to use to track, distribute and develop traffic? Are they headed for a period of controversy and legal challenges?

Hey they have weathered them so far in numerous continents, so maybe they have it written into their growth program.

The creation of an online only broadcast of popular content is interesting for the US where over the air television goes digital early next year. The use of the Family Guy creator popular with a large number of internet users and online spenders is a smart move, if when the smoke clears they can monetize it in acceptable ways.

I am waiting for the day when Google and Yahoo are bidding for online presentation of the Olympics. Right now it seems NBC is starting their Olympic online connection.

Bob Costas was pushing people off the TV and on to the NBC Olympics sites to follow the rest of the Swimming Olympic Sunday night. His closing was ” Bob Costas telling people to turn of tv and watch online live Olympic trials. “if you are not online already online, fire up those computers and start watching”.

In the mean time, I look forward to the new characters from McFarlane.

“User 927” - subtitled “U are what U Seek” - is the first drama inspired by search engine keywords such as Mange, human mold, and white camellia. Not to mention the bizarre combination of “dying Elmo.” First noted in the blog Consumerist back in April, User 917 is a thriller about cyberstalking, search engines, and the way information is obtained, manipulated, and released in our wired world

The Associated Press published an interesting article today about a theatre production based on AOL keywords that were released inadvertently by AOL and posted on the Internet. In the play, the keywords are clues to finding a missing person.

“User 927″ is a new production in Philadelphia that combines fact with fiction to tell the story of a disappearance from a small Midwestern town. It’s the story of a mother and her teenage daughter who move from Brooklyn, N.Y., to fictional Osterville, Ind., in search of a simpler life. The story’s central clue is the real-life online search log of an AOL subscriber — identified only as User 927 — that was released to the public two years ago in a well-publicized privacy faux pas.

Brat Production also produced “A Very Merry Unauthorized Children’s Scientology Pagaent” - unrelated to the ongoing Google-YouTube controversy pitting Anonymous versus Scientologists.

AOL released some 19 million search requests made during a a three month period by more than 650,000 subscribers. The logs were intended to help academic researchers, but they were posted on a public site.

User 927 has never been identified publicly. Not surprisingly, no one has claimed credit for being User 927.

There have been much discussion recently about using the “nofollow” attribute to sculpt a website’s PageRank for ranking purposes, a practice commonly known as PR Sculpting. If you are not sure what I am talking about or you want a visual description to help you understand, then I recommended you take the time to read the bucket post (even though it ignores PR flowing back in the opposite direction, but that is a post for another day).

PR Sculpting has been the focus of much controversy in the SEO space; most SEO professionals are either against or do not think that there is any value in PR Sculpting. Some have come to the conclusion that PR sculpting is bad for a website. Their reasoning: only SEO people know about PR Sculpting, so if a page is sculpted, SEO pros must have worked on the site. According to Eric Lander from Search Engine Journal, if you PR Sculpt, “you might as well alert the engines that you not only aware of optimization, but you’re willing to go out of your way to protect your site.”

Somehow, just knowing/doing SEO is enough to raise a red flag with Google. In other words, optimization is by its nature blackhat.

Of course, that’s a patently ridiculous thing to say. Matt Cutts from Google even went out of his way at the Web 2.0 conference to state very clearly SEO is neither Spam nor bad. Matt even addressed the PR Sculpting issue in a linking Q&A: “In general, worry more about the high quality of your site. After you’ve taken care of it, then think about sculpting.” Cutts sees nothing wrong with PR Sculpting on its own, but does qualify his statement with the coda that “Google is against abusive manipulation.” As we’ll see (and is often the case with SEO) the key word here is “abusive”.

The only post to date, backed by actual data, that I have seen that comes close to showing that PR Sculpting could hurt a site is from Branko Rihtman from 10s Search Marketing here in Jerusalem. His post is about Google penalties and how they may be keyword- and destination-specific. His client did some PR Sculpting and Branko concluded that the client was penalized due to “a combination of the implementation of nofollow and a significant difference between the on-page and off-page optimization.” Branko finds that the nofollow by itself wasn’t what “caused the penalty in this case,” rather “it was a combination of signals that caused the infamous red flag to be risen above the customer’s site.”

What Branko fails to mention in the post is how much PR Sculpting the client actually did. In the comments, when asked about the quantity of sculpting, he answered, “I would say that the percentage of followed pages was much smaller than the nofollowed ones.” That sounds like more than just some PR Sculpting; it sounds like abusive sculpting. (Branko also thought that the abruptness with which he did the nofollowing might have been abusive, although we’ve seen speed to be much less of an issue than quantity.) And as Matt Cutts emphasized, doing anything abusive in SEO will raise a red flag, whether with keyword stuffing, link stuffing or PR Sculpting.

So there is really no data to support the fact that properly-executed PR Sculpting will hurt a site. Google is already aware that SEOs exists, and—as Matt Cutts stated—has no problem with them as long as they are not “abusive” in their SEO practices. Cutts also said that after you work on the overall quality of your site, it makes sense to “think about sculpting.” It doesn’t seem like a practice to which Google objects, as long you do it with the same care as other SEO tasks. In fact, we’ve seen some great results from PR Sculpting—but that will have to wait until the next blog post.

Kalman Labovitz, Senior Account Manager at RankAbove, co-wrote this post.

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Despite all the controversy over Microsoft using Silverlight to take over the rich internet market from Adobe Flash, the software giant seems to be not even trying. In fact, even most Microsoft web sites are using Flash instead of Silverlight.

A quick check through Microsoft properties reveals that only the Microsoft Home Page and the Microsoft Developer Network use Silverlight; MSN Video, Zune.net and the new WWTelescope all use Flash.

Microsoft even appears to be on par with Adobe when it comes to platforms outside of Windows. Silverlight works on Safari for Mac or PC, as well as on Firefox and other Mozilla-based browsers. Silverlight even seems to work “unofficially” on Opera (as long you pretend you’re not running Opera).

Silverlight isn’t supported in Linux, but as an avid Ubuntu fan, I can tell you that Flash does not work well in Linux either. A host of open-source alternatives, like Gnash, have mostly solved that issue. Former Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen’s fears of Microsoft favoring Windows seem incredibly unfounded.

But if Microsoft is playing nice for a change, why are they afraid of promoting their product — and why are they afraid of even using it? Maybe “nice” is too novel a strategy for Redmond. It may take some getting used to — for everyone.

If the popularity of Facebook fansites was an indicator of how Londoners will vote on May 1st then Boris would be a clear winner with 7466 supporters whilst Ken and Brian trail behind with 2152 and 2130 respectively. Thankfully it seems that Londoners will vote with their feet rather than faces but latest results from a social media study reveal that online PR strategies could count for something in the electoral race.

Nielsen Online revealed today that London Mayoral candidates Ken and Boris are top of the blogs, dominating 80% of the social media conversation. Liberal Democratic candidate Brian Paddick is third with 9% of comments, followed by the Green Party’s Sian Berry with just under 4% and the BNP’s Richard Barnbrook with 2%.

According to Alex Burmaster, Internet Analyst from Nielsen Online, Londoners penchant for social networking continues to thrive and users are taking their opinions mainly to non-political forums, blogs & message boards including those of national newspapers and sites like Twitter and Facebook.

“Ken and Boris are the two leading candidates, neck and neck in the polls and the levels of conversation in the social media space utterly reflect this. If conversation levels were a guide, Ken would narrowly pip Boris to win. However, it’s when we look at the sentiment of these conversations that a far more interesting and revealing picture emerges.”

Controversy, positivity, negativity: sentiment towards the five leading candidates in social media

• Controversy: Boris is the ‘marmite’ candidate – being the most likely of the top five to generate some form of opinion either way. Only 30% of posts relating to him were of ‘no opinion’

The Green Party’s Sian Berry generates the least controversy / most apathy – having the highest percentage (54%) of ‘no opinion’ posts

• Positivity: Whilst Boris is most likely to generate positive sentiment, 29% of posts being ‘positive’ – Sian Berry had the highest overall ‘net’ positive score of 15% (positive sentiment % minus negative sentiment %). Brian Paddick is the only other candidate to come out with a ‘net’ positive score (11%)

• Negativity: Richard Barnbrook is most likely to generate negative sentiment, 38% of posts being ‘negative’. He also had the lowest overall ‘net’ positive score of -19%

Indeed Nielsen’s results seem to suggest that, shock horror, actually participating in blogs, forums and social media is effective in helping other people to form opinions on issues that affect them. The most active candidates online garnered a net positive score in total comments posted on social media sites. Brian Paddick employed a web ace, signed up to twitter, where he hosted a policy debate and also broadcasted himself via uStream.tv.

“Of the three leading candidates in the polls it’s not surprising that Brian Paddick is the only one to have an overall positive sentiment score in social media. His campaign, involving a US web strategist firm, has focused the most heavily on social media including a pioneering British political use of sites like Twitter, Facebook and UStream.TV – and it certainly seems to have paid dividends.

However, judging from the sheer levels of social media conversation on the election, it may not be enough to grab victory over Boris or Ken. If social media were a crystal ball it might tell us Boris is likely to get more votes than Ken. However, positive comments on Boris more often centre on personality rather than policies and only time will tell if this is a strong enough factor for voters when faced with putting the cross in his box to change the status quo.”

So, positivity is not the cure for apathy and clearly Londoners like myself, vis-a-vis this post, whether online or on the underground, don’t know what we really really want but we sure do love a good rant!