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Liz Gannes / GigaOM : How Digg Found a Way to Make Money

Dave Heiner / Microsoft On The Issues : Competition Authorities and Search

It’s day 3 at the Online Marketing Summit here in Sunny San Diego and SES has joined the mix to put on the mornings keynote session. Here is a quick overview of this session. A look back 10 years ago. Google was hardly in the picture and was partnered with Yahoo! Very few web programming technologies were being used to make rich web experiences. No YouTube, Video and limited social capabilities. Kevin Ryan: 10 years ago SEMs had few tools to conduct and analyze our campaigns. Log files and rudimentary development tools like Dreamweaver 1.0, and Frontpage. Very few bid management tools were available until GoTo.com which was painstakingly difficult to manage.

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Online Marketing Summit - Search Past and Present.

Watching video clips is a very popular pastime in the US and the rest of the world. Hey, it sure beats getting outside and taking a walk in that nasty fresh air. As a result of our obsession with this media there is some opportunity to do some real harm to a reputation if a group decided to do so. One such instance has made the F.D.I.C (Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation) take action because they claim a video making the viral rounds is just plain false. Whether it is or not may not be enough to fix the damage. The New York Times reports All week long, officials at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation watched with growing dismay as a YouTube video ricocheted around the Internet. In 4 minutes 26 seconds, the clip asserted that the agency’s sale last year of the assets of the failed bank IndyMac to a group of private investors was a sweetheart deal. Finally, F.D.I.C. officials decided they had had enough. “It is unfortunate but necessary to respond to blatantly false claims in a Web video that is being circulated” about the creation of OneWest Bank out of the assets of IndyMac, the agency’s chief spokesman, Andrew Gray, said in a written statement late Friday. In the statement, he went on to say that the video “has no credibility” and was replete with “falsehoods.” The video has since been taken down but there is another version currently on YouTube . Now from an online reputation monitoring perspective these two videos seem rather innocuous.

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YouTube Video Makes FDIC Blink

The complaints pile up daily about the amount of spam and malware that proliferates the social media world. It even reaches the highest levels such as the recent takeover of the FCC chairman’s Facebook account that resulted in e-mails going out to all of his “friends” . While I know I shouldn’t, I have to laugh at that one. Maybe that’s part of the reason why the government is turning its attention to Facebook ? Who knows but it sure be inspiration to look a little closer. In an attempt to capitalize on this brave new world for spammers and hackers Websense is offering a new product called Defensio (how much time was spent on that name?). The Wall Street Journal’s Digits blog reports: Thursday tech-security company Websense will announce software called Defensio that allows Facebook users to better police the comments appearing on their wall and fan pages. In addition to detecting and blocking threats such as phishing and malicious Web sites, the software lets users restrict comments that include profanity or adult content. Social media security software sounds like a nice new marketing term for the future, which will likely continue to get worse with regard to these concerns. While one would hope that services like Facebook and Twitter would be doing everything they can to police their own side of the street it may be up to third party developers to really do the trick. The sites themselves are more concerned about those darn investors and their silly requests for revenue. Of course, the cat an mouse game of spammers and hackers and those who try to stop will always leave the protection lacking. But Websense still has a ways to go to catch up to the rapidly evolving cons on social-networking sites. One scam that has been rampant lately involves compromising a user’s account and using Facebook’s live chat in an attempt to defraud the user’s friends. Dan Hubbard, Websense’s chief technology officer, said the beta version of the software does not include a chat scanner but that Websense is looking at that possibility. Will your Facebook account ever be free of these threats? No.

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New Software for Facebook Pointed at Hackers and Spammers

Let me just declare to the world that I’m extremely proud to be employed by a fortune teller. I apparently can’t even read the expiration date on my cottage cheese, yet some people like Bruce can read trends and project them into the future. Tomorrow we’ll be publishing the SEONewsletter (sign up in the sidebar!). Being that it’s the first edition of the new year, Bruce has authored his annual predictions for the SEM industry in 2010. The article holds the promise of intelligence on which to build a strategy for the coming year. They always say hindsight is 20/20, so just imagine the accomplishments you could achieve with a clear map of the future in front of you? Sure, no one can actually tell the future, but there’s a definite advantage in having an idea of emerging technologies, of those search marketing services with high upcoming demand, and of how the economy will affect the industry. Don’t believe me? Check out how on-target Bruce was with his 10 major predictions for the search industry in 2009 . http://www.flickr.com/photos/71217725@N00/ CC BY 2.0 Prediction: “I predict that user behavior and related community tracking will be expanded (collectively “personalization”) and increasingly applied Web-wide to all search results, paid and organic, regardless of whether the user is signed in to Google or not. By looking at the user’s recent searches, visited sites, bookmarks, communities (common behavior groupings) and other online choices, the search engines adapt the results to what will be most relevant to that individual. […] Google understands what communities, loosely speaking, a searcher is part of.” Verdict: This prediction gives me goose bumps. In December, Google announced that personalization of search results was being rolled out to signed-out users through cookie technology. Also, in October, the search engine announced a Google Labs experiment called Social Search . In its Social Search announcement Google explained: “The way we do it is by building a social circle of your friends and contacts using the connections linked from your public Google profile, such as the people you’re following on Twitter or FriendFeed. The results are specific to you, so you need to be signed in to your Google Account to use Social Search. If you use Gmail, we’ll also include your chat buddies and contacts in your friends, family, and coworkers groups. And if you use Google Reader, we’ll include some websites from your subscriptions as part of your social search results.” Prediction: “As companies have their Yellow Page ads expiring, a fair share of companies will opt for smaller ads and will switch spending to online.” Verdict: All available evidence points to this being true. In 2009, two major yellow-pages publishers, Idearc and R.H. Donnelley , filed for bankruptcy.

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Keeping Score: 10 Predictions for 2009 — How’d Bruce Do?

Kim Zetter / Threat Level : TSA Withdraws Subpoenas Against Bloggers

As expected it looks like this week may be a bit light in the news department. That’s fine. Everyone needs a break from time to time. So as I am looking around this morning I come across an op-ed piece in the New York Times that is written by Adam Raff, a co-founder of Foundem, an Internet technology company. From what I can gather, Mr. Raff is upset that his site was banned from Google’s index. There is no explanation as to why this happened so I am not going to assume anything although an article from eConsultancy looks at his plight and we get some insight as to why Google is so ‘mean’ to him. As a result, Mr. Raff contends that Google simply is too powerful and that the government should be considering a ‘search neutrality’ platform that falls in line with the ‘net neutrality’ platform. Here is a bit of his concern: Today, search engines like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft’s new Bing have become the Internet’s gatekeepers, and the crucial role they play in directing users to Web sites means they are now as essential a component of its infrastructure as the physical network itself. The F.C.C. needs to look beyond network neutrality and include “search neutrality”: the principle that search engines should have no editorial policies other than that their results be comprehensive, impartial and based solely on relevance. I had to shake my head that this was actually put in print but I kept reading.

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Search Neutrality?

How to design schools and a new education system for the future ? Is it possible to extract only the positive aspects of the current education paradigm and create a brand new schooling model? Photo credit: Jose Manuel Gelpi Diaz Somehow we have to recognize what is it that schools do well, what functionality do schools serve for a society… but how can we do that without institutionalizing the experience. All of our society is structured to institutionalize our experiences. Work institutionalizes us . There is the odd person who can take what you have done and sort of make your own freedom and do your own work, but most people… we move into an institution for employment, we move into an institution for health-care need, we move into an institution for schooling needs… What happens is you cannot then just stop and break one part of your life apart and not institutionalize it. According to George Siemens , you and I are so used to living our lives in such kind of ” social installments ” that we do not even realize how everything we experience is compartmentalized. Parents go to work and kids go to school because they are supposed to. NOT because this is the best option they have. Sure, smart parents can homeschool their children. Parents do have this option (at least in some countries), but it does not mean this is an easy decision to make.

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How To Design Schools And A New Education System For The Future: A Video Interview With George Siemens

eMarketer is one of the most cited resources for internet marketing trends, so when I received some tasty predictions for 2010, I thought they were too useful to keep to myself. These insights include future monetization models, the effect of transparency on advertising, social and search, mobile, social commerce, public relations, social advertising, Twitter, video and mom/pop internet usage. Enjoy! Hybrid Plans that Combine Subscription Fees with Advertising More marketers will increasingly embrace online video advertising, supported by the twin boom of video streams and video ad networks. Further support for video ad growth will come from sites that offer a deeper catalog of professional video content—such as whole seasons of TV shows (both present and past), exclusives of entire sports events and other premium content. Such offerings will attract larger audiences. But in order to maintain the costs of deep-catalog video, the sites and their studio and TV network partners will need to introduce hybrid plans that combine subscription fees with advertising. More Transparency on Websites Could Undermine Online Ad Efforts Effective ad targeting depends on fresh and abundant data about Website visitors—what they’re doing, where they’ve been, where they go. However, both consumers and politicians are increasingly concerned about privacy issues. From consumers, that will mean greater use of ad-blocking software or browser add-ons and more deletion of cookies. Consumers will be most sensitive to data gathered on social network sites, because of their personal nature. From the government, that potentially means federal legislation limiting Website tracking. For publishers and search engines to get in front of these changes will require greater transparency than ever before, such as Google’s new Privacy Dashboard. In 2010, we will see more Websites let users know what data is being kept about them and give them options to remove data or prevent it from being accumulated. However, such transparency alone will undermine online advertising efforts. That means publishers will also increasingly need to make clear what the trade-offs are for accepting online advertising—the free content, the quality of the content, the basic value exchange. Social Plus Search Will Equal Better Results, More Ad Opportunities Search will get more social in several ways: by including real-time content in results (e.g., Twitter posts), adding information from social network friends to results, and using collective information from other Web users to hone search relevance. By using social data to filter search queries, search engines will hope to deliver even more relevant results and more effective advertising. These trends will yield new ad formats that may incorporate friends’ viewpoints or interactions directly into the ad—and will raise new red flags among privacy advocates. Those search and social sites that get ahead of the transparency curve will tend to gain more consumer mindshare than those who operate under a heavier cloak. Another key change to speed up in 2010 will be more video results as part of general search queries.

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eMarketer: 12 Digital Marketing Predictions for 2010