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This Saturday, YouTube will be hosting its first ever live streaming event. The broadcast will feature a music and variety show being held at Fort Mason Center’s Herbst Pavilion in San Francisco.

The event begins at 8pm EST and will feature Soulja Boy Tellam, Will.i.am, Tay Zonday of Chocolate Rain fame and a bunch of “talent” from the YouTube community.

Thankfully, Ask a Ninja will be there. He’s one of my favorite YouTube sensations of all time.

Most importantly, there will be dance. But will it top Justin Timberlake as Beyonce’s backup dancer on that other live variety show that airs on Saturdays last weekend? Me thinks not. (Dangit. NBC has still NOT posted that skit on Hulu.com. Really, NBC?)

Related Reading:
YouTube Rolls Out Sponsored Videos
YouTube Adds Search to Embeddable Videos
Yellowbook and YouTube Enter Content Distribution Partnership

The G1, a new mobile device from HTC available and featuring Google’s brand spankin’ new mobile platform Android, is now officially available at T-mobile.

But should you ditch your Blackberry, Palm, iPhone, etc to get one?

The G1 has a touch screen, similar to the iPhone, but it doesn’t have multitouch. It has a mobile application version of the Amazon mp3 store, which I love and use all the time for DRM-free music.

Unfortunately, you’ll need an adapter for that headphone jack to listen to all that music. Plus, you’ll have to purchase a memory card to store your music, and you can only do so up to 8GB.

The G1 does have a slider keypad, which I would love. I’ve had my iPhone for months, but typing on it is still a pain. Prior to that, I had the Samsung Glyde for a couple of weeks and loved the slider keypad. (It was just everything else that was a pain.)

So, should you or shouldn’t you? Here’s what the reviewers who have are saying:

Gizmodo

The G1 phone and the Android operating system are not finished products. There are only three working Google Apps here—Gmail, Maps and Calendar—while Google Docs, Google News, Google Reader, Google Shopping, Google Images, Google Video, Blogger and Picasa are nowhere to be found. What’s the deal?

We have high hopes for third-party coders to fill in gaps Google intentionally or unintentionally left in this OS. There’s already a video player, and we’re sure VLC will try and port some kind of version over. But your question is not whether the phone will be great down the line, it’s whether or not it’s good enough for you to buy it now.

The answer depends most on who you are. Despite all the UI quirks and bad design decisions, it’s still better than other smartphone OSes out there. It’s not perfect, but for people who like tinkering, its cons are outweighed by its pros such as Gmail and the Marketplace. Hopefully Android updates and more ports of Google apps will augment not just future phones but this one too. This isn’t something you’re going to give your mom for Christmas, but if you’re an adventuresome gadget guy with some money to spend ($179) on a totally new, pretty exciting venture, then why not?

CrunchGear

If you’ve been waiting for Android then I suggest you keep waiting. The overall OS seems to be held together by duct tape and needs a lot of work. Apple focuses on the minute details to enrich the overall experience for iPhone users and Android could learn a lesson or ten from it. The hardware design is dated and while the touch-screen and keyboard are great you can’t just forget about the wretched battery life, horrible GPS and the overall ergonomics of it. I wish the G1 were better in every respect because I don’t think the iPhone is that great, but I find myself wishing it were more like it. It’s the best alternative to the iPhone, but it’s just not there yet.

CNET

While we’re not in love with the design and would have liked some additional features, the real beauty of the T-Mobile G1 is the Google Android platform, as it has the potential to make smartphones more personal and powerful. That said, it’s not quite there yet, so for now, the G1 is best suited for early adopters and gadget hounds, rather than consumers and business users.

Engadget

When you put the G1 up against, say, a Sidekick LX, it seems like a no-brainer for T-Mobile customers looking for a powerful QWERTY device — especially at $20 less. You don’t need to be a cutting-edge mobile geek or a pundit to do that math. When facing off with platforms like the iPhone and Windows Mobile devices, it holds its own, but has a lot of ground to cover before it’s really making the competition sweat. Still, if you’re just excited to be a part of a platform that’s likely going to be around for a very, very long time, the G1’s a totally reasonable day-to-day device to make it happen, and we expect some pretty great things from this corner of the market down the road.

Walt Mossberg at All Things Digital

Overall, the G1 is a very good first effort, and a godsend for people who prefer physical keyboards or T-Mobile but want to be part of the new world of powerful pocket computers.

YouTube has begun placing click-to-buy links beneath videos. This is the beginning of a greater plan to offer YouTube as an e-commerce platform to interested companies.

Amazon, iTunes, EMI Music and Electronic Arts are among the first to get a crack at the new feature, which is currently only available in the United States.

Memo to Viacom: Instead of suing Google and YouTube, which is costing you undoubtedly large sums of money in legal fees, you might try advertising on the wildly popular online video network instead.

Microsoft is today launching a new incentive program for Live Search. The program is called SearchPerks, and it works very much like a credit card reward program.

Every time you search, you earn tickets. You can earn up to 25 tickets a day. Tickets can later be redeemed for all sorts of rewards including music downloads (5 for 525 points) and airline miles (1000 miles for 1800 tickets).

Here’s how it works. Sign up for the program, and download a simple piece of code. That will give you a Perk Counter for your desktop.

You can begin earning tickets today, October 1, all the way through April 15th of next year. You can begin claiming your rewards on April 16. However, you can only sign up for the program through December 31, 2008 and the program is capped at 250,000 people.

Microsoft will be evaluating the program and could possible expand it if all goes well.

Microsoft’s Frederick Savoye, senior director at Live Search, assured me that this is an incentive program that fits into their three overall pillars of search:

• Delivering the best search results
• Simplifying key tasks such as booking airline, travel, shopping, finding user opinions, etc.
• Innovating the business model

So while programs like SearchPerks and Cashback may seem like Microsoft is just trying to pay people off to use Live Search, the team remains strongly devoted to improving technology and the user experience.

What do you think of this program? Will you sign up? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Semantic search engine hakia is calling for librarians to contribute credible web sources. They’ve done this in the past in the health industry. One of the reasons behind the request is that popular websites aren’t always credible and vice versa.

It’s also clearly a strategic alternative to Google, which bases rankings largely on popularity via links.

“By having information experts suggest sites to hakia, we can guide searchers to relevant and credible information on the Web. As a search engine, we will rely on information professionals’ collective knowledge to add a dimension to search: credibility,” said Melek Pulatkonak, President and Chief Operating Officer of hakia, at the Web Search University event in Washington DC.

“The campaign that hakia is starting is a great way to leverage the never-ending knowledge and information analysis skills of the information professional in building a Web database full of the web resources that are most useful, and most importantly, have the most credibility,” said Gary Price, Editor, ResourceShelf.com. “This is a new chapter for library collection development. I hope this is only the beginning.”

Librarians can find out more or contribute here.

Related Reading:
hakia Comments on Leveraging Yahoo’s BOSS
Semantic Search Engine hakia Launches Syndication Web Services
Hakia Holds Concert To Launch Music Search

Yahoo is planning an overhaul of their homepage design, and will open up to third party developers. The design will incorporate widgets, and Yahoo Music will open up to iTunes and Amazon.

This continues a pattern of Yahoo opening up various products and services to third party developers. Earlier this year, Yahoo launched SearchMonkey, which lets developers manipulate how search results are displayed within Yahoo and later BOSS (Build your Own Search Service), which allows people to use Yahoo technology to fuel custom search sites.

The news wasn’t enough to impress Wall Street analysts. Jeffries & Co. lowered their target stock price for Yahoo to $26 from $28. The stock was at $19.07 at the time of this post.

Video search has been a key topic at the TechCrunch50 show in San Francisco. Lots of newly launched companies presented (kind of like DEMO minus the payola). In a “rich media” grouping of companies, the proverbial challenge of making images and video searchable kept coming up.

Presenting companies were
• VideoSurf: video search
• GazoPa: image search
• Fotonauts: image search
• Bojam: online music collaboration (like garage band in the cloud)

On the panel of judges was Bradley Horowitz who was a key part of Yahoo’s acquisition of Flickr back in 2005. Now he in charge of Google Gadgets and recently oversaw the integration of facial recognition software in Picassa.

“For a number of years I worked at MIT on image recognition technology and the first time I saw Flickr, I wanted to rip up my diploma,” he said from the stage. “It turns out humans are very good at this. You don’t need a hyper-technical solution. It can sometimes be the activity around the video, not the content in the video that defines relevance.

This point underscores many of the companies walking different lines between algorithmic solutions and user interaction/tagging in order to solve this longstanding indexing issue.

For the sake brevity, I’ll just talk about the best one I saw — San Mateo, Calif based video search engine VideoSurf. CEO Lior Delgo agrees that users should be brought into the mix but asserts that relying on this alone is flawed.

The company still got Horowitz’ vote for its underlying technology, which includes a great deal of intellectual property around visual recognition. This is paired with some social features that together make it a viable choice for video search over and above existing engines like Truveo and Blinkx.

The technology essentially goes beyond the voice recognition, meta data, and surrounding content that many existing sites rely on, and instead tags each frame with more granular information. This includes character names in popular shows and other things that are more contextually relevant and likely as search terms. Relevancy is weighed on frequency of these keywords, click throughs and a few other factors.

This could also be the right time for this technology, given the expanding corpus of video being brought online. This isn’t just the long tail YouTube ranks but head content that will get more search queries such as network shows on sites like Hulu. Lots more to the nuts and bolts, and it’s clear video search will continue to be a tough nut to crack. But this will be one to watch.

I hope to dive deeper in a column later this month on this and the many other search related companies here — including a social network for bird watchers (seriously).

Video search was a key topic at the TechCrunch50 show in San Francisco this week. Lots of newly launched companies have presented (kind of like DEMO minus the payola). In a “rich media” grouping of companies, the proverbial challenge of making images and video searchable kept coming up.

Presenting companies were
• VideoSurf: video search
• GazoPa: image search
• Fotonauts: image search
• Bojam: online music collaboration (like garage band in the cloud)

On the panel of judges was Bradley Horowitz who was a key part of Yahoo’s acquisition of Flickr back in 2005. Now he in charge of Google Gadgets and recently oversaw the integration of facial recognition software in Picassa.

“For a number of years I worked at MIT on image recognition technology and the first time I saw Flickr, I wanted to rip up my diploma,” he said from the stage. “It turns out humans are very good at this. You don’t need a hyper-technical solution. It can sometimes be the activity around the video, not the content in the video that defines relevance.

This point underscores many of the companies walking different lines between algorithmic solutions and user interaction/tagging in order to solve this longstanding indexing issue.

For the sake brevity, I’ll just talk about the best one I saw — San Mateo, Calif based video search engine VideoSurf. CEO Lior Delgo agrees that users should be brought into the mix but asserts that relying on this alone is flawed.

The company still got Horowitz’ vote for its underlying technology, which includes a great deal of intellectual property around visual recognition. This is paired with some social features that together make it a viable choice for video search over and above existing engines like Truveo and Blinkx.

The technology essentially goes beyond the voice recognition, meta data, and surrounding content that many existing sites rely on, and instead tags each frame with more granular information. This includes character names in popular shows and other things that are more contextually relevant and likely as search terms. Relevancy is weighed on frequency of these keywords, click throughs and a few other factors.

This could also be the right time for this technology, given the expanding corpus of video being brought online. This isn’t just the long tail YouTube ranks but head content that will get more search queries such as network shows on sites like Hulu. Lots more to the nuts and bolts, and it’s clear video search will continue to be a tough nut to crack. But this will be one to watch.

I hope to dive deeper in a column later this month on this and the many other search related companies at the show — including a social network for bird watchers (seriously).

Earlier this week, I listed the “Top 10 Videos on YouTube from SES San Jose 2008.” Well, the WebProNews Video Blog has some top-rated videos from last month’s SES conference that you won’t find on YouTube – at least not yet.

Here are three of them:

SES: The Power of Thumbnails and Images

According to Rebecca Lieb of the ClickZ Network, recent surveys show that video has a greater chance of being clicked if it has a thumbnail or image. These results are evident in the popularity of universal search. Rebecca advises marketers to take these statistics seriously and recommends posting related videos with each new video just as I suggested in my interview with WebProNews, which appears below.

Website Optimizer Activates Pruning, Modifies Reports, and More

As you can tell by the title, Google’s Website Optimizer department has been busy. Tom Leung gives WebProNews the scoop on all their new features. First, through experiment pruning, users can disable any page that’s not doing as well as was hoped for. They’ve also enhanced their reports with a new color coded system, made it easier to validate tags on pages, and submitted several new demonstration videos to YouTube.

SES: Improving Conversion Rates

Landing pages can make or break a site, and no one wants that second situation to occur. In this interview with Mike McDonald, Frans Keylard, the director of optimization at Widemile, shares some tips that should help improve conversion rates.

There are a lot more interviews on the WebProNews Video Blog from SES San Jose 2008. That includes the five below with members of the Search Engine Watch staff.

SES San Jose: Kevin Ryan

WebProNews spoke with Kevin Ryan, the VP and Global Content Director of Search Engine Strategies and Search Engine Watch, at SES San Jose 2008!

SES: Focus On Call To Action

After going to all the trouble of getting users to your site, you don’t want your landing page to turn them away. According to Tim Ash, a Search Engine Watch Expert Columnist, clutter is the most common problem with landing pages. Tim explains how you have to give users breathing space so they can focus on their main purpose for coming to the site.

SES: The Blessing and Curse of Conversions

Did you ever think of conversions as a blessing and a curse? As Sage Lewis, another Search Engine Watch Expert Columnist, tells WebProNews, everything is trackable online. In most cases, this is a blessing. But for those marketing efforts which do not convert, it can be a curse.

SES: Being Careful With Blogs

Blogs are powerful communication tools, and companies should embrace them. Yet there are things to watch out for, and Search Engine Watch Guest Blogger Amanda Watlington explores some potential pitfalls in this interview with Mike McDonald.

SES: Get on Top of Video Distribution

After listening to a spirited musical intro from a certain Search Engine Watch Blog Correspondent, WebProNews got me to tell my secret to video distribution. I explain how video optimization on your own website was enough in years past, but now in order to succeed you must distribute your optimized videos to sites like YouTube, Yahoo Video, and more.

Okay, taunting Buckeyes from The Ohio State University by having a Wolverine sing the University of Michigan fight song may seem like an odd way to open an interview, but it was payback for the interview below that I conducted earlier this year.

Mike McDonald of WebProNews, Web Video Guru, at SES NY 2008

Mike McDonald talks about the humble beginnings of e-business internet video channel WebProNews and some of its funnier moments of adolescence, like forgetting to hit record. Stay tuned ’til the end to see and hear the University of Kentucky Wildcats cheer!

Get it? Got it? Good.

Recently, SEW Expert Erik Qualman examined Google Insights for search trends related to newly announced Republican Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin. Like Barack Obama, being unknown sends people a-searching on the internet.

Google Trends and Insights gets a lot of attention when it comes to measuring searches, and so does measurement firm comScore.

But the number 2 and 3 search engines also provide insight into hot searches. So, let’s take a look at Microsoft’s xRank and Yahoo’s Buzz Index to see what’s hot in their user searches this week too.

Microsoft’s xRank sorts hot searches by categories. The current categories are Celebrities, Musicians, Politicians, Blogger and Olympics.

Here’s a screenshot of the Politicians page for this week:

The Yahoo Buzz Index has categories, but not one for politics. Here’s a general look at the top searches:

What do you think of xRank and Buzz Index? Let us know in the comments.