First up were the Democrats, and now it's the Republicans' turn. Tonight marks the much-anticipated CNN/YouTube Republican Debate, in which the 8 GOP candidates on our You Choose '08 platform will descend on St. Petersburg, Florida to answer video questions submitted via YouTube. The two-hour debate will be aired live on CNN at 8 PM ET, and all the clips will be hosted soon after on YouTube.People submitted almost 5,000 questions (4,927, to be exact) to the GOP hopefuls right on YouTube -- 2,000 more than the Democrats got on July 23. In true YouTube style, some of the questions are creative, but most are compelling -- and demonstrate the concerns of voters trying to differentiate between the candidates in a crowded primary field.
Back in July, we broke new ground in presidential debates with our first-ever CNN/YouTube Debate. Thirty-nine questions were posed to the Democratic candidates, and when Stephen Sixta asked a question about whether or not the presidential contenders would speak directly to foreign dictators, a conflict broke out between Senators Obama and Clinton that has matured into the defining difference between these two front-runners in this campaign.The core concept behind these debates is to let real questions from real people drive the dialogue. The power of YouTube is that it lowers the barrier to entry to engage in the political process, and levels the platform for political discussion. It used to be that a voter had to live in Iowa, New Hampshire, or Florida to engage with the candidates at this stage of the campaign, but YouTube has broken down those barriers, and has brought more transparency and access to the political dialogue than ever before. We think that politics will never be the same (thankfully).
The CNN/YouTube Republican Debate
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Upcomming My Space News Feed
The new product, to be called “Friends Updates,” will begin to roll out to users this Thursday, says MySpace. Users from New Zealand and Ireland, where Friends Updates is being beta tested, can already use it.
The new product will give users a steady stream of event information from their friends. Profile updates, blog posts and photo/video uploads are all noted. See screenshot to right (click for larger view) for a visual.
MySpace VP Products Steve Pearman told me that the product that launches on Thursday is just the first iteration; they have additional features slated for release over the next 18 months.
There are a number of key differences between Facebook News Feeds and MySpace Friends Updates. A key focus of the product appears to be not pissing off users. Other differences allow more granular control of news distribution.
MySpace will only begin gathering information about a user once they’ve logged in and have viewed an interstitial page that notifies them of the change - until they see and click on that interstitial page, no information is gathered for the Friends Updates. Users are also given a link to a setting area where default options can be changed, or opted out entirely. This will hopefully help MySpace avoid the user backlash that Facebook faced shortly after launching News Feeds.
Users are also given much more granular control over who can see data. Specific friends can be selected to not receive updates. Pearman gave an example of not necessarily wanting your girlfriend to know when you change your status to “single” (although a quick look at the profile would let her know anyway). Users can also select from one or more categories of information to share.
The process distills down to a requiring a double positive - you must agree to share with specific friends, and they must agree to subscribe. Without both sides agreeing, the information doesn’t appear.
Web eXperts SEO Tip of The day
No matter what industry you're in, build relationships. I'm referring to real, honest, longstanding relationships built on a foundation oftrust. Surround yourself with the very best in your industry. No one can be the "best" at everything. No one can know everything.But with these relationships, you can pool your resources and keepYourselves informed in your own circle of power. Everyone has their own strengths and weaknesses, but someone else is there with their strengths to offset your weaknesses. But be sure to build these relationships honestly and makeabsolutely sure that they're real. Otherwise, there will be no foundation at all if they aren't.
Google-DoubleClick Deal Delayed in Europe
Google’s big move into display advertising is going to be delayed, maybe until April, if it gets approved at all. The European Commission is holding up Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick on antitrust concerns, fearing that Google’s current dominance of search advertising, combined with DoubleClick’s leading position in display advertising will create an unstoppable force.
Truth be told, that is precisely what Google is hoping for, although it must say the exact opposite to try to get the deal past regulators. Google CEO Eric Schmidt is crying that all of his rivals’ advertising deals (Microsoft-aQuantive, Yahoo-Right Media/BlueLithium, AOL-Tacoda/Quigo) have already been approved or face no similar scrutiny. But that misses the whole point of an antitrust review: to prevent the concentration of too much market power in any one company.
Those other deals don’t threaten to cement any one company’s market dominance, as the DoubleClick deal arguably does. (This must be the only time Steve Balmer is tickled that Google is being treated like the new Microsoft). There are also related privacy concerns, as tracking consumers across sites with ad cookies becomes the industry norm, but that is beyond the official purview of the European Commission.
In the U.S., the Federal Trade Commission has yet to approve the deal as well. But historically, it has been the European Commission that has always been tougher in approving big mergers because it doesn’t have as much enforcement teeth after a deal is already consummated. Its biggest influence (in terms of being able to squash a deal) is always at the initial approval stage, when it has to basically guess what the future may hold. In a sense, it is a futile exercise.
While search and display advertising may make up the bulk of online advertising today (40 percent and 22 percent, respectively, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau), who is to say that social ads or some other as-yet-to-be invented form of digital advertising won’t sweep the world and make the DoubleClick deal irrelevant? In all likelihood, the deal will go through with the European Commission demanding a set of tough, but ultimately misguided, concessions.
Are there concessions it should demand that would make sense and promote a more competitive digital advertising market? Or should it just stop holding Google back and let the market decide who to reward and who to punish? Comments are open.
Google Enters Mobile Phone Market
SAN FRANCISCO/NEW YORK (Reuters) - Google Inc said on Monday it would offer a software system to make the Internet work as smoothly on mobile phones as it does on computers, seeking to spur change in a tightly controlled industry.
In its long-rumored entry into the mobile phone market, the world's leading Internet company said it would start next week by allowing independent designers to tinker with its software, known as "Android." Google-based phones are due to appear in the latter half of next year.
According to my views it will be a great change for the people who are at web business to flurish there business thriugh Mobile phone marking.
Web eXperts will be taking this chance to be in there team.
Deutsche Telekom's T-Mobile will start selling Google software-based phones next year. China Mobile Ltd <0941.hk>, the world's largest mobile carrier, Japan's NTT DoCoMo <9437.t> and KDDI <9433.t> and European and Latin American operator Telefonica also said they were working with handset makers to develop Google-based phones.
Google, which has no immediate plans to make phones of its own, said it forged an alliance with 33 companies, including phone makers Motorola Inc Samsung Electronics Co Ltd <005930.ks> and High Tech Computer Corp <2498.tw>.
Google Announcements
Google has announced an open-development platform for mobile devices backed by industry heavyweights. Google on Monday announced a widely expected open-development platform for mobile devices backed by industry heavyweights like T-Mobile, HTC, Qualcomm and Motorola that could shake the wireless market to its core by simplifying and reducing the cost of developing mobile applications.The platform, called Android, has been developed by Google and others as part of the Open Handset Alliance, which has over 30 partners supporting it. The goal of this ambitious initiative is to spur innovation in the mobile space and accelerate improvements in how people use the Web via cell phones. (See PC World Editor in Chief Harry McCracken's live blog from Google's press conference Monday morning)As previously reported by IDG News Service, the open-source platform will have a complete set of components, including an operating system, middleware stack, customizable user interface and applications. The first Android-based phones should hit the market in the second half of 2008. The platform will be made available under an open-source license that will give a lot of flexibility to those who adopt it to modify its components and design services and products, Google said.The alliance will release an "early access" software development kit next week to provide developers with the tools necessary to create applications for the platform, Google said. "Our vision is that the powerful platform we're unveiling will power thousands of different phone models." Google Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt said in a statement. Other founding members of the alliance include Broadcom, eBay, China Mobile, Intel, LG Electronics, NTT DoCoMo, Nvidia, Samsung, Sprint Nextel, Telecom Italia, Telefonica, Texas Instruments and Wind River.Noticeably absent from the list is traditional Google ally Apple, whose popular iPhone might see its innovation lead cut sooner than expected no thanks to this Google effort.
Search Engine Algorithms Keep Evolving - Spam Mass
First there was PageRank, then TrustRank and now there is Spam Mass. Because today's algorithms rely more upon off-page factors such as back linking, spammers have taken advantage of this by putting up tens, hundreds and even thousands of spam site all aimed at delivering links back to a host site, improving its PageRank and its rankings in the SERP's.A paper out of Stanford University, authored by Zoltan Gyongyi, Pavel Berkhin, Hector Garcia-Molina, and Jan Pedersen suggest that a unique method called "Spam Mass" can help weed out websites that are profiting from having a large amount of spam sites link to them.Spam Mass can identify a major case of spamming by using two kinds of PageRank, regular PageRank and a biased version of PageRank based on reputable pages that link to a webpage (TrustRank). Where TrustRank tries to calculate the reputation of a particular webpage or website such as governmental pages and makes the assumption that reputable websites only link to other reputable websites, Spam Mass focuses on the untrustworthy sites and how these contribute to a designated host site or the recipient of the PageRank that is being passed along to increase that site's rankings.Spam Mass is another method that may be employed in future algorithm updates that will be useful in thwarting spammers who build bogus websites for the sole purpose of boosting their main website's rankings. The combination of PageRank, TrustRank (which may have just been deployed with the last Jagger updates) and future Spam Mass update will undoubtedly bury many spammers websites in the rankings, which in turn will mean more relevant results for visitors to the search engines.Here will be the new search engine tag line when this occurs: Better search with less than half the spam. Then again perhaps you can think of a better one?
Regards,
Muddabir
