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Philipp Lenssen over at Blogscoped has a detailed article about Google’s browser project including a link to a great cartoon. Apparently the rumors were true and the former Mozilla employees have been busy.

comScore has acquired mobile measurement company M:Metrics. The acquisition will include three measurement products:

MobiLens is a syndicated monthly online survey that captures overall mobile phone usage of a representative sample of more than 40,000 mobile device users.

MeterDirect is an on-device meter that passively measures the mobile Internet behavior and media consumption of more than 4,000 existing Smartphone panelists on more than 280 device models.

M:Ad is a mobile ad tracking service that continuously monitors clickable display advertising.

“With the substantial growth of 3G devices and Internet friendly handsets, we believe we are now at an inflection point in Internet usage on mobile devices,” said Dr. Magid Abraham, comScore’s president and chief executive officer. “Our acquisition of M:Metrics makes comScore an immediate market leader in this space and positions comScore to deliver significant shareholder value as wireless carriers, telecom equipment providers, media companies, advertising agencies, online publishers, and marketers extend their reach into the mobile Internet world.”

Related Reading:
ComScore Launches Search Marketing Intelligence Service
New Research Product Tracks from Search to Sale

A Guide to Contact Lenses Posted By : Kausik Dutta: Contact lenses a.k.a contacts are typically use.. http://tinyurl.com/3ojeum #
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New Article - Affiliate Marketing Explained For The Layman Posted By : Angela Tay: Clu.. http://tinyurl.com/4vg4be #
New Blog Post [...]

A Guide to Contact Lenses Posted By : Kausik Dutta: Contact lenses a.k.a contacts are typically use.. http://tinyurl.com/3ojeum #
A Guide to Contact Lenses Posted By : Kausik Dutta: Contact lenses a.k.a contacts are typically use.. http://tinyurl.com/5lshx9 #
New Article - Affiliate Marketing Explained For The Layman Posted By : Angela Tay: Clu.. http://tinyurl.com/4vg4be #
New Blog Post [...]

Updates to the Google Quality Rater guidelines have popped up, and Brian Ussery has written up a nice summary of the revised standards.

There’s good news for those who have embraced social media. It seems Google feels that the elements on blogs and social network sites like MySpace should be ranked as relevant. The language of this particular guideline is geared more towards individuals, though companies can encourage their employees to utilize sites like LinkedIn to gain further visibility in search results. This may also help with online reputation management if it pushes third party sites and reviews down further in the results.

E-tailers will also want to take note of guidelines for how raters consider commerce sites. Shopping carts, return policies, shipping calculators, and gift registries are among the features raters should look for when rating a site as relevant. This is to distinguish e-commerce from “thin affiliates.”

Thin affiliates are considered to be sites that offer no value to visitors. They simply contain links to merchants where they can then purchase a product advertised by the thin affiliate. This is deemed spam in the rater’s guidelines. However, affiliate sites that offer reviews, price comparisons or some other value-add to featured products or services are ok.

Though, Philipp Lenssen points out parked domains are met with a bit of “do as I say and not as I do” philosophy. While the guidelines mark parked domains as spam, Google maintains its DomainPark program, which allows domain owners to slap a page full of Adsense on their sites.

The updated version of the standards was released in April 2007, which preceded a heightened effort by Google to crack down on paid links.

The ongoing discussion of the ways you can stop search engines from indexing specified pages and the use of the noindex meta tag was the topic of Matt Cutts blog the other day. Matt started a poll of what people would like the noindex tag to do: A: Don’t show the page at all; B. Find some middle ground; or C:Show a link to the page.

The results have been massively in favor of not showing the page at all, 617 to 61 and 53.

Interestingly Matt argued that Google needs some discretion of what pages the noindex tag stops from being listed in the search results. He uses a couple of instances of governemnt essential sites that have been dropped because they mistakenly used that tag.

“The vast majority of webmasters who use NOINDEX do so deliberately and use the meta tag correctly (e.g. for parked domains that they don’t want to show up in Google). Users are most discouraged when they search for a well-known site and can’t find it. What if Google treated NOINDEX differently if the site was well-known? For example, if the site was in the Open Directory, then show a reference to the page even if the site used the NOINDEX meta tag. Otherwise, don’t show the site at all. The majority of webmasters could remove their site from Google, but Google would still return higher-profile sites when users searched for them,” Matt blogged.

The post lays out the difficulties Google encounters when errors by site owners use the tags incorrectly and stop peopple from accessing information that should be available to the web.

The comments have a solid cross section of well known marketers from our industry and present some good insights.

Joost de Volk, search strategist for Onetomarket notes “The fact that some websites get the noindex wrong by accident is a problem, I can understand, but you don’t solve a problem a minority of websites has by forcing a majority of people to change their ways. You solve that problem by educating the people maintaining those website.”

Philipp Lenssen of Blogscoped added: “I think it’s a pretty clear-defined case: webmasters put “noindex” in their page because they don’t want the page indexed or shown. As you can’t know whether a webmaster perhaps accidentally put the noindex there, you have to err on the safe side and do what you’re told. Or how would you feel if people started to interpret Google terms of services in terms of, “oh maybe their lawyers just misspelled this and really mean something else, I’ll ignore it.”

Also, please do not try to push webmasters to always use a Google tool — like a URL removal tool — to do stuff; while Google search is close to a monopoly there are still other engines out there, and webmasters have better things to do than toggle a dozen tool’s configurations.”

Yahoo, in desperate need of good buzz these days, today launched Yahoo! Buzz, promising to uncover and deliver the most interesting and relevant content from Web sites across the Internet to the Yahoo homepage.

Sounds like a search engine! Social search anyone?

The only problem: Y Live! redux. This was the message on Yodel Anecdotal, Yahoo’s official corporate blog:

“Not Found … Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn’t here. How did I get here?”

I know how I got there, Yahoo. The question is, How did you get here?

We saw your new Y! buzz logo on TechCrunch but not on Yahoo!

Still in beta, the new Yahoo! Buzz allows consumers to vote (Digg) and even submit to Digg and other social media sites.Yahoo! Buzz also uses search patterns to identify stories and videos from news sources and blogs.

The prize? Editorial consideration for feature placement on Yahoo.com.

The audience? More than 500 million users. The final judge? Human editors.

Yahoo! Buzz ranks the most popular content using what Yahoo terms “a unique approach that combines consumer votes with search popularity” to give a story a Buzz Score. The Yahoo initiative creates a lens (Squidoo!) on what people are most interested in to enhance relevance on Yahoo.com, and help publishers deliver content to a wider Yahoo audience.

The goal? To make Yahoo the gateway to the Internet again. The world’s home page.

In its beta phase, Yahoo Buzz has content from nearly 100 publishers, ranging from large online publishing brands to small, influential blogs. It will open up to all publishers interested in having their content included in Yahoo! Buzz.

Participating publishers are given an online ‘badge’ enabling their readers to vote and submit stories to Buzz in real-time. Stories with the highest Buzz Scores will be highlighted via direct links to the publishers’ sites from http://buzz.yahoo.com and submitted to Yahoo.com’s editors for possible coverage on the Yahoo! homepage.

Yahoo “allows” users to submit Buzz stories to social news sites including delicious, Digg, Facebook, Propeller, Reddit and Stumbleupon.

We’d like to see Yahoo try to stop ‘em!

Yahoo Buzz promises to form the basis for an open ecosystem of publishers, advertisers and consumers.

Coming soon: new syndication and monetization tools that enable publishers to share relevant content, connect to more advertisers and reach a broader audience. For example, a Yahoo! Buzz API will enable publishers to add customized Yahoo! Buzz modules or shortcuts to their sites to showcase their own most buzzed items or other popular stories on relevant topics.

Over time, Yahoo expects this to extend into a powerful content exchange that connects owners of content with distributors of traffic.

Adsdaq anyone?

So who were the mystery beta testers? The proponents of the “Free-conomics.” Find out what Yahoo and fire hoses have in common after the jump.

Click to read the rest of this post…

How did Craig become craig of craigslist fame? At Pubcon, Craig Newmark told the audience how he and Craigslist became famous enough to get tips on how to flush out Al Qaeda. In 1994, while still working as a web developer at Charles Schwab, he began using computer network communications systems such as Usenet, a [...]

Craig Newmark is famous for more than Craigslist. I first heard him speak at Brad Inman’s real estate conference in New York the year Zillow launched.
He promised the audience he wouldn’t sell out or sell Craigslist. Recently, Rajan Sodhi of the big marketing for small business blog heard him make the same promise.
So [...]

Baseball’s $30 Million Man on Squidoo
Cool squidoo page about New York Yankees.
(tags: squidoo new-york-yankees ny-yankees yankees ny-yankees-videos squidoo-lens)

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