Yahoo Planning to Add 100 Web Sites for Entertainment – New York Times
Yahoo said Tuesday that it planned to build individual Web sites around 100 entertainment “brands” this year that would pull together content from Yahoo’s sprawling array of online properties.
The effort, called Brand Universe, is intended to create online destinations that will draw large audiences around individual movies, television shows, bands, celebrities, games and other types of entertainment.
Desktop Widgets 101
Tech Crunch found a good widget summary on the Yahoo Widgets Blog. Here’s some of Michael Arrington’s summary:
For those of you who don’t know the basics of widgets, or the difference between desktop and web widgets, check out this surprisingly unbiased overview post on the Yahoo Widgets blog where they talk about the pros and cons of the four major desktop widget platforms offered by Yahoo, Microsoft, Google and Apple.
Direct link to the Yahoo blog: http://widgets.yahoo.net/blog/?p=16#more-16
The new Office Online is supposed to very cool. Total overhaul for Word and Excel.
Media 2.0 Workgroup – Social, Democratic, Distributed
Extending the concept of the Web 2.0 Workgroup the Media 2.0 Workgroup will cover the transformation of the media business. Member Eric Olson described the group this way:
The group will include people from many different perspectives including the people fighting hard to bring large media companies into the future, people who work to build tools for new media, people who have built new media empires from the ground up and the list goes on from there.
They officially describe themselves as: “a group of industry commentators, agitators and innovators who believe that the phenomena of democratic participation will change the face of media creation, distribution and consumption.”
Should be pretty cool. Maybe one day I’ll get my blog into that group.
Verizon rejected Apple iPhone deal – USATODAY.com
Verizon Wireless, the No. 2 U.S. cellphone carrier, passed on the chance to be the exclusive distributor of the iPhone almost two years ago, balking at Apple’s rich financial terms and other demands.
Among other things, Apple wanted a percentage of the monthly cellphone fees, say over how and where iPhones could be sold and control of the relationship with iPhone customers, said Jim Gerace, a Verizon Wireless vice president. “We said no. We have nothing bad to say about the Apple iPhone. We just couldn’t reach a deal that was mutually beneficial.”
A heavily produced YouTube video from Mark Erickson at “Infinite Solutions” shows users how to get in on the super-secret (and non existent) Google TV beta. It involves sending yourself an email and then logging in and out of Gmail multiple times until a tv icon appears in the Gmail logo. In the comments to the video, some users have tried logging in and out of Gmail hundreds of times without it working.
These are pretty funny. It looks like all the videos are hoaxes. Mark Erickson, if that is his real name, just got himself a ton of buzz and traffic in one day.
See more from Infinite Solutions at Youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=infinitesolutions
Order now and you may have it by Tuesday.
BBC NEWS | Business | YouTubers to get ad money share
People who upload their own films to video-sharing website YouTube will soon get a share of the ad revenue.
YouTube founder Chad Hurley confirmed to the BBC that his team was working on a revenue-sharing mechanism that would “reward creativity”.
The system would be rolled out in a couple of months, he said, and use a mixture of adverts, including short clips shown ahead of the actual film.
China censorship damaged us, Google founders admit | Business | Guardian Unlimited Business
Google’s decision to censor its search engine in China was bad for the company, its founders admitted yesterday.
Google Kills Bush’s Miserable Failure Search & Other Google Bombs
Of course, it’s all done algorithmically. They claim no human filtering. While a regression analysis comparing the correlation of instances of “George W. Bush” and “miserable failure” outside of hyperlink text would probably work, all the press around the trick and Google Bombing in general would probably skew the results and make it hard to flag, at least in the famous Bush case. Maybe they just find patterns of multiple instances of unique phrases linking to a single URL, and compare the relationship of the phrase and URL outside of hyperlink text. Since Google Bombing is all about using the same phrase to link to a specific URL, the patterns should be easy to spot.
This is because the change is designed to stop the pranks from happening rather than legitimate commentary about such activities. Google isn’t saying exactly how this is being done. But Google says it’s done automatically, without any human intervention.
“It’s completely algorithmic,” said Google spam fighting czar Matt Cutts, adding “we’re not going to claim it’s 100 percent perfect.”
Spring Marketing Strategies is a marketing consulting firm focused on helping small business grow revenue, profit and valuation through effective online strategic marketing. Spring was founded by Eben Thurston in 2009.
Eben Thurston on the web:
