If you’ve been playing with Google’s new Street View feature–that $25 billion time suck–you may well have wondered how the heck they took those 360-degree images while driving down the street. Well, wonder no more. Thanks to our good friend Xeni Jardin at Boing Boing, we now know …

On stage at D5, on what will later be known as Google Day, Walt Mossberg asked Google CEO Eric Schmidt about the the $1 billion Viacom lawsuit against YouTube. “It was probably just a mistake,” he said. Some mistake. Schmidt began his upcoming legal defense on the stage: “It’s …

YouTube, EMI and Apple are all over the news today, linked together in different stories. For your reading convenience, I’ll bring all those stories together.
YouTube + Apple = better Apple TV?
Google and Apple announced a deal yesterday to make YouTube clips available on Apple TV. Just yesterday, CNNMoney/Fortune magazine was taunting Apple TV’s failure. The YouTube deal called to mind one of the harshest indictments from CNNMoney

As we reported, Google Maps has enabled street-level views for certain cities, but are they invading your personal space?
Take a look… I’m sure privacy laws don’t apply to public places, but it’s still kind of big brotherish, don’t you think?
Thanks to Dan.
Pilgrim Partners: SEO Copywriters - offering well-researched, interesting and informative content for any business

If you happen to reside in the beautiful State of Hawaii, or just need an excuse to head that way, be sure to check out the seminar I’m giving on June 12th.
The seminar is called “Radical Marketing for an Online Hawaii” and I’ll be discussing search, blogs and social media, as well as taking your questions. It’s being held at the BYU-Hawaii campus on the north shore of Oahu.
Registration is free to current BYUH stud

By Paul Bennett
According to a study conducted in February 2007 by Arbitron/Telephia nearly 90% of mobile audio listeners think that advertising is “a fair price to pay” for free or subsidized content.
eMarketer has used the ‘Mobile Audio Media Study’ as part of a new report to investigate key questions like the potential size of the mobile music opportunity and the potential wild cards that marketers need to understa

One of the biggest problems with switching your life to Google’s suite of applications is that, the moment you go offline, you lose access to email, calendars, docs and your RSS feeds. Well, according to SEL, Google is finally ready to start solving that problem, with the release of Google Gears.
Google Reader is the first online application to offer “Gears-enabled offline capabilities,” Google told me. So you would load up Goo

One way to ensure your new human-powered search engine is a success is to give it a Hawaiian name. It worked for Jimmy Wales - Wikipedia is a huge success and “Wiki wiki” is Hawaiian for “quick” - and it could work for Jason Calacanis’ new search engine, Mahalo.com (Hawaiian for thank you).
The site has just launched in “alpha”, and Calacanis is quick to let us know what exactly that means…
Mahalo.

The recent concern surrounding privacy laws is now making waves in Australia. The European Union announced last week it was investigating whether Google has breached European privacy laws, and now the Australian privacy experts have added their opinion, as reported in the Australian Financial Review:
“Australians using US-based internet search engines are exposing themselves to privacy laws that are routinely bypassed by the US government and

Google has acquired Panoramio, a community Web site that allows people to “map” their photos on Google Earth. The technology links the exact geographical location of where the photos were taken with that location on the map. Users can also view the photos in Google Earth and search and browse …

As TechCrunch predicted (and we mentioned in passing earlier), eBay announced their acquisition of StumbleUpon today. eBay states that the “aggregate transaction value” was around $75M.
In the official announcement, eBay states that this deal “will provide eBay with in-depth exposure to a fast-growing community-based service with approximately 2.3 million users. StumbleUpon gives people a new way to discover relevant and entert

Plotting forest fire smoke(Credit: U.S. Forest Service, Google maps)
Nashville is hundreds of miles from the nearest forest fires. Recently smoke levels there were twenty times normal. Health officials in the southeastern U.S. can now look at maps showing where the smoke is, and where it’s going….

GoDaddy will inherit some 850,000 of the domains originally registered by RegisterFly according to this week’s ICANN agreement. RegisterFly has been struggling for some time. Last month, a federal judge issued an injunction enabling ICANN to terminate RegisterFly’s accreditation. This came after many different problems and customer complaints, not the least of which were fraud accusations. E-Commerce Times describes one of the fi

Still working on getting your blog readers to stick around? If you’re on WordPress, you’re in luck. Technosailor’s Aaron Brazell has compiled a list of plugins designed to help improve your blog’s stickiness. What do these plugins do? Greet visitors from search engines with a list of relevant posts. Enable visitors to subscribe to comments.
Display your most popular posts.
Easily interlink series of posts. ProBlogger

How many saw that headline and heaved a sigh of relief? “Oh good,” you thought, “one less thing on my to do list.”
Web Analytics World has 21 reasons that you do not need web analytics. Any of these sound like you or your clients? You don’t want to know where your visitors are coming from. You don’t care how much time visitors spend on your website. Most popular products? Who cares, you already know what your

Fox Interactive Media, parent company of MySpace, has finally confirmed their acquisitions of Photobucket and Flektor.
We were already pretty sure about the Photobucket deal. After the rumors began flying at the beginning of the month, ValleyWag & TechCrunch reported the deal was confirmed on May 8. Just a week later, we started afresh with the rumor that Flektor was next.
Today, CNET reports that Fox Interactive finally confirmed both deal

Yahoo’s Publisher Network has made the surprise step of introducing Paypal payments for those using their content network. Now as well as cheques, the publishers can have their ad earnings transferred directly into the eBay owned online money transfer service. This was also good news for smaller YPN users who are only monetising relatively low sums from their website, as the new electronic payment method will pay out at the lower $50 threshol

Episode 8 of The Marketing Pilgrim Podcast is now available. Here’s the info…
Subscribe to the podcast:
Subscribe via iTunes. Subscribe to the podcast RSS feed. Subscribe to Marketing Pilgrim’s main RSS feed. Episode: 8
Date: May 30th
Sponsored by: Linkworth.com
Program:
Items discussed this week include - New Technorati Really is the Google of Social Media
Newspapers Still Whining About Google News
What the Heck Is Google

When I heard about the new Street View feature Google Maps unveiled Tuesday, the first thing I thought–after I discovered that anyone in the world could see my car parked in my driveway–was that the next great craze would be people posting images from the service showing personal details from …

UK poker site VCPoker.com has recently gotten in a bit of trouble with Britain’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) for running ads which insinuated that playing poker can lead to success in the bedroom.
As reported by The Register “A complaint was levied at betting house Victor Chandler, which ran a VCPoker.com campaign featuring a scantily clad young lady with the strapline: “You love sex. She loves sex. You love money. She

It’s just five days until the start of Danny Sullivan’s first solo search marketing conference. SMX Advanced kicks-off in Seattle with a cocktail reception Sunday night, then two days of action packed sessions.
I’ll be there with video camera in hand. I want to interview as many people as possible, so if you see me, please stop me and I’ll put you on camera for at least 20 seconds! Leave a comment if you’re going

Here’s the remainder of today’s good stuff… Social networking sites are seeing great growth in the UK.
Google tests animated homepage in Korea. The interface is pretty slick, why can’t we have it as an option?
More confirmation that Apple’s iPhone will run Google Apps. Pilgrim Partners: Unlock the New Google Analytic Interface with ROI Revolution’s Google Analytics Training Series - Starts June 14th!

CNET is running opposite perspectives on social messaging service Twitter.
Caroline McCarthy is writing in favor of the service…
The beauty of Twitter is that, unlike a full-out blog, there’s no obligation to be philosophical, thought-provoking or grammatically sound. Because it doesn’t require that kind of extra effort, it’s great for people like me who want to jump on the social-media bandwagon but don’t have the

Speaking at the Seoul Digital Forum today, Google CEO Eric Schmidt told reporters that he fully expects the DoubleClick deal to pass the scrutiny of an FTC investigation.
“We are quite convinced that the proposed merger meets all appropriate U.S. laws,” he said. (Side note - notice the use of “merger” and not “acquisition”. Maybe that is less threatening language for the benefit of the FTC)
Schmidt also confi

By Brittany Thompson
Modern technology appears to be taking the world’s leading search engine in a new direction that might allow Google to recognize facial features in images. Google Blogoscoped reported Monday that Google Images has added a few new features, which are only available by appending URL variables of current image searches. Such variables allow searchers to narrow searches to images of faces (people) or news-related images. For

After a few weeks of acquisitions in the online advertising space, attention returns to social networks, with CBS announcing the acquisition of music site Last.fm.
CBS is paying a reported $280 million to acquire Last.fm and its 15 million users, with performance incentives on top of that. It seems CBS is fully committed to a new internet strategy, with Last.fm just one of many deals by the traditional broadcasting company.
“We s

eMarketer reports that online advertising spending is on the rise in China and Russia.
China
Last year, online advertising generated over $500 million in revenues, up 54% over 2005’s revenues. With news like that, you’d think online adveritising would have a corner on the market, but television advertising spending was still 56 times that of online ad spending, for at least five months of last year. eMarketer says that this growth

Google Maps has launched street-level maps for several major US cities today. Currently available only for New York, Denver, San Francisco, Las Vegas and Miami, the new features enable you to get a street-level view of the city. According to CNET, on this street level view you can even zoom in to see street signs and bus stops.
According to the unofficial GEarthBlog, these views come from actual street level photographs. They also link to a vi

Imagine if you will a room full of several hundred developers, journalists, and curious onlookers sitting together listening to the sounds of monkeys. That was the scene here at Where 2.0 during a demo for Wild Sanctuary, a project that presents sound clips of nature as a layer on …

Google’s new street-level map view will be very helpful for car owners in densely populated San Francisco, where parking spots are few and far between. The feature allows users to zoom in close enough to read street signs. Residents who don’t have the luxury of an off-street parking …

In a conversation with Internet Retailer, CEO Mark Vadon claims that Blue Nile could hit $1 billion in annual internet sales within seven years. Blue Nile had just over $250 million in sales during 2006.
The secret to Blue Nile’s success is pretty simple. They have a very specific niche and they do what they do very, very well. Blue Nile’s niche is men looking for expensive jewelry–especially engagement rings. The average sh

By Roderick Ioerger
Technology is constantly advancing, yet efficient and effective protection from e-mail spammers and phishers is still a challenging problem for many individuals and organizations. In 2005 Yahoo, Cisco, and a number of other major corporations worked together to develop DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM). DKIM is a validation method that allows an e-mail message to be identified by the actual domain from which the e-mail was

It’s been a while, but it seems Yahoo have finally got round to launching their new advertising platform in Great Britain. It’s been with our American cousins since Feb but it’s taken a while to migrate across the Atlantic. At the moment it’s still in testing with selected partners but it shouldn’t be long before it’s available to all. For those of us using Yahoo for PPC in the UK it’s good news, the old system was getting prett

Government officials in Hong Kong have recently enacted tough new anti-spam legislation. According to a Yahoo News article the new law will “regulate all messages sent by electronic means that advertise or promote goods or services, including faxes, emails, SMS text and pre-recorded voice messages”.
Penalties for violating the new anti-spam legislation include fines up to $128,000 and jail time for up to 5 years. This new legislatio

Google’s purchase of GreenBorder Technologies–a browser virtualization software company that creates a sandboxed environment for your existing Firefox or Internet Explorer browse–follows on the heels of Google announcing a blog from its nascent anti-malware team. With rumors of a possible forthcoming antivirus acquisition, the Mountain View search giant …

By Paul Bennett
Despite a recent warning by mobile phone operators about the difficulty of establishing mobile advertising whilst in the shadow of other successful content services, ranging from music downloads to lottery tickets, world-wide mobile ad spend is still expected to increase nine fold by 2011 - reaching US$19 billion (Source: ABI Research).
Global brand managers tend to agree, recognizing the challenge that mobile advertising represen

I hope you’re keeping up with all of today’s news. I thought perhaps we would ease back into the work week, after the Memorial weekend, but I guess I was wrong!
Here’s the rest of today’s breaking news… Gaming search engine Wazap is launching in the US. TechCrunch says that it’s entering a market dominated by IGN, Yahoo and Google. Did I miss Google’s entry into the gaming vertical??
Google and South Kor

Oh boy, with the buzz MyLiveSpace is getting today, expect to see the company snapped up by Google, Yahoo or Microsoft in the next few months. Why?
MyLiveSearch claims to have finally figured out how to tap into the “hidden web” - all the stuff that is too fresh or too deeply stored for other search engines to discover.
It works through a small browser plug-in. The search terms are put through Google, or other indexed search database

I always thought it a little strange that Google launched Google Pack, a selection of software for enhancing your web experience. Well, let me clarify. Google Pack itself is a great idea for Google, but I always wondered why it would launch a suite of software that included products from third-party companies. Now I think I have the answer. Mashable is reporting Google has acquired GreenBorder, a virus protection software maker which provides a

The Federal Trade Commission has decided to investigate whether Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick opens up any antitrust issues, according to the NYT.
The inquiry began at the end of last week…[t]his step, known as a “second request” for information, can suggest that a proposed acquisition raises more serious antitrust issues. But legal experts said the request is mainly a sign that the agency is closely scrutinizing the

What would happen to your business if you suddenly died in an accident? Would if fall apart or run smoothly in another persons hands? Being Memorial Day I was thinking about our troops when it it dawned on me that out of the thousands of reservists who are now active duty, many own their own businesses and some probably owned online businesses. What did they do when called up? Whether it’s in relation to death or just incapacity to overse

In honor of those that died while serving our country… USS Arizona Memorial
Pilgrim Partners: Buy Text Links - Buy text links and increase your site’s traffic!

We’re taking things a little easier today, but that doesn’t mean we’ve not filtered all the best internet marketing news for you.
Here’s what’s on the link blog…

YouTube tests a new version of its player that will improve the way you interact with videos and will create a cinematic experience.The player will add a feature that was already available in Google Video: jump to any part of the video even if the video isn’t fully downloaded.For each video, you’ll be able to see around ten related videos. You don’t have to wait until the video ends to play a new one because they’re available as thumbnails if you

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Google Image Search has a new feature that lets you restrict the results to some general categories. For the moment, the only categories that are available seem to be faces and news-related images, but other categories should follow.The image results for Paris are pretty diverse, but most of them are about the French city and Paris Hilton. Now let’s restrict the images to faces by adding &imgtype=face at the end of the URL: we get all kinds of im

Yesterday Google registered several variations of the domain “googlestreetview.com” — normally I would think the feature would be months away, but given Where 2.0 starts on Tuesday, it will likely be available (or at least announced) by the end of the month. This functionality is likely in addition to the 3D buildings they are [...]

Miami will held the second edition of SES Latino next month. This is the only SEM conference targeting US Hispanics and latin america audiences and companies. The event is increasing its popularity among brazilian professionals, and all top SEM agencies …

A few days ago someone posted a nice shot of a horse and buggy at the Google Earth Community. The poster, called ‘bellenarcissa’, said there are Amish living in this area of Indiana - who still use this for their primary transportation. Then, other GEC members found several other horse and carriages around the area. One of the posters discovered a large store with numerous horse and carriages parked outside. Turning on the GEC Community la

Google Chris Wetherell posted about the birth of Google Reader…
At Google one day, like every day, I was really busy.
Turns out that with Jason Shellen that wasn’t really much of a deterrent. “Why don’t you make an Atom parser in Javascript?”, he asked.
Which, for the non-geeks, is his asking me to make something that turns something into something else which could be used to represent data that was basically about