Readers of Google’s Health Advertising Blog awoke this morning to a post that has stirred up both confusion and controversy. Lauren Turner, Account Planner for Google Health, has boldly gone where no Google blog has gone before by putting on some movie critic shoes and attacking Michael Moore’s “Sicko.” Several Google Blogoscoped readers were shocked by Turner’s blog post – to the point that some of them became suspicious that the po

With a nation-wide Federal election coming up this year, we thought we’d track Australian Prime Minister John Howard’s online reputation and find out what’s being said about him online. We tracked online references of both Howard and the opposition leader, Kevin Rudd, over a three week period, and the results are not looking so good for the PM. Though most of online references come from news sites, and are mostly neutral, the more freely

Are Google and Wikipedia breaking up? Google Docs to Offer Free Encyclopedia Britannica? - New Google plans discovered
Google Universal Search and Ask 3D both have video search results; Search Engine Watch helps you get there: Video Search Optimization Tech Tips – Knowing the 4 P’s
A novelty: Profitable Web 2.0? That’s Probably Worth $5.35 Million
A little nepotism never hurt anybody. Mrs. Murdoch To Take Over At Chief of Strategy At MySp

Okay, maybe not really, but this week not once but twice I’ve been thinking about a topic and then within minutes come across something Lorelle VanFossen of Lorelle on WordPress has said or written about the topic.
Case One: (Hobby) Blog Monetization
Now, let me say that I totally think business blogs, quality blogs about making money online, and business models based around blogs are valid and can be monetized effectively. But as a someo

After four months of work and cryptic blog posting, The Economist Group’s small development team have announced their latest project a socially motivated social networking site. Now known as “Lughenjo” the group have been working on a project who’s aim is to harness the knowledge and skills of The Economist’s readers to help NGOs, Charities & other organizations. Lughenjo users will be able to answer questions that are posed b

Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology conducted a study in which they gave participants identical search results, but wrapped in the brands of Google, Yahoo, Windows Live Search and generic in-house search engine. Not surprisingly, participants favored the results that appeared to be from Google and Yahoo.
Then the identical search results were shown to 32 study participants who were asked to evaluate the engines’ perfor

Sotheby’s held an auction in New York for more than 218 domain names, selling them for a combined $10.8 million!
Many clocked six-figure price tags, far exceeding the industry average of $2,000 to $3,500, according to Matt Bentley, chief strategy officer for Sedo.com, a domain brokerage firm. Two broke the $1 million mark: Creditcheck.com fetched $3 million and Seniors.com nabbed $1.8 million. Forbes explains how type-in traffic, Goog

The supposed YouTube challenger being built by NBC and News Corp has yet to be named, it has however named a CEO.  Jason Kilar, a former Amazon.com exec, has been tapped for the role.
Kilar, 36, was key executive at Amazon.com for nearly a decade until leaving the online retailer last year, NBC Universal and News Corp. said in a statement.
“We are very pleased to have an executive of Jason’s caliber take the reins of our groundb

CNET recaps a presentation given by blog research Paul Gillin where he shared some interesting blog stats but always suggested that blogging is not always a numbers game.
Despite some very successful blogs…
Phillip Lenssen’s Google Blogoscoped gets 8 million page views per month.
Adrants, a blog by former ad-agency employee Steve Hall that covers bad and good advertising, gets about 30,000 visits per day.
Drew Curtis’s Fark.com,

When Google first launched Google Maps I immediately fell in love with the whole “grab and move” concept of navigation - as opposed to the click “north” or “east” to see more approach.
Google’s upped the ante again with a new feature that lets you pick you start and end destination by simply clicking on the map. In addition, once your route is shown, you can drag and drop the “blue line” to sw

Today’s Supreme Court ruling allowing manufacturers to set minimum retail prices is a very big deal, and has huge ramifications for many internet retail businesses.
To understand what could happen as a result of this decision, you must first understand the impact that the Internet has made on retail. In a nutshell, it has created a consumer-friendly environment in which both online and offline retailers engage in suicidal price-cutting war

When Yahoo Messenger went down Wednesday, it might have just been one of those little technology glitches that happen from time to time. And when some people started having problems with Gmail Thursday, well, it probably was because of some small gremlin in Google’s hamster wheel. Same with my …

It’s not what you think: today Forbes wrote about “negative SEO.” While we all know the benefits of “positive SEO,” Forbes interviews Brendon Scott to find out more about changing your competitors’ rankings (because, hey, if you can’t beat them, beat them up).
As Forbes puts it: But for the most morally flexible, there’s an even shorter path to edging out competitors online: a wide spectrum of sab

Google is reading my mind. On Wednesday morning during rush hour I was driving down to Santa Clara from San Francisco. Faithfully following the directions of several online maps, I found myself on Highway 101 but wishing I was on the more scenic, less congested and slightly out-of-the-way Interstate 280, …

It looks like eMarketer is afraid of the impending UGC creator shortage. That, or they’re crying wolf. And they’d never do something like that. Why, the very idea!
Anyway, eMarketer starts off by asking the all-important UGC question, “Are enough people recording their cats?” Their answer is, “Apparently not,” because UGC users outnumber creators. With 69.1 million users last year in the US and 128 million

Yesterday, Ars Technica (man, I love cool Latin blog names!) covered a report on Net Neutrality by the Federal Trade Commission’s Internet Access Task Force. The report, “Broadband Connectivity Competition Policy,” minimizes the debate, noting that there are few current problems in the area.
In a statement, FTC Chairman Deborah Platt Majoras said: This report recommends that policy makers proceed with caution in the evolving, dyna

Here are some facts about the use of user reviews that come from a presentation I heard recently from Patti Evans of JupiterResearch.
1) Customers are about twice as likely to write user reviews about good shopping experiences than bad ones. Likewise they are twice as likely to write user reviews about products they like than products they do not like. This is good news for retailers and should help alleviate fears about user reviewers hurting s

Ah, yes. Pilgrim’s Picks for when you find a news story that you can’t quite figure out how to expand it to 300 words. Here’s the “almost made it” list for this morning: Mashable is impressed with Digg co-founder’s new project Pownce. It’s a mixture of Twitter, chat and file sharing. An invite would be welcomed. Remember Feedster? Of course you do, the site that once was the go to place for blog news.

With 16 months until the 2008 Presidential election, we thought it would be interesting to conduct a study of the search engine reputation of current candidates. We examined the first 20 results on Google and Yahoo for the ten Republicans and eight Democrats to see who had the best and worst online reputation.
The results were startling, with only three candidates fully in control of their search engine reputation. Who were they? How did Hillary

One of the hottest marketing trends of late is to get your customers to create your next ad campaign for you. It worked for Doritos and their Super Bowl ad contest, but sometimes it can backfire, as Chevy can attest to.
Malibu Caribbean Rum is the latest big brand to get its reputation slightly singed when their YouTube video contest backfired. Malibu asked for video entries, offered a $25k prize and even had Efren Ramirez of “Napoleon Dyna

It looks like Google’s found an interesting way to get the world to work for them, without having to figure out where they’d site and who’d they report to. A new initiative called Google Gadget Ventures has launched to provide “grants” and “seed investments” to developers of gadget-related services.
Google’s Marissa Mayer announced the new project at this week’s Searchnomics conference and we

A former Googler who returned to Microsoft after a start up he left the software giant to launch was acquired by Google has some not so positive insights to share about what it’s really like to work at the Googleplex. Behind the lava lamps, organic dinners and free shuttle …

That’s right everybody, the word is just in: the Internet is cool! Aren’t you excited?
Edison Media Research finally revisited a 2002 study that left the Internet as the “least essential” medium after newspapers, television and radio, and the second coolest after television. In the “Internet and Multimedia 2007” study, the Internet gets a definite boost. Medium
Coolness 2002
Coolness 2007
Most essential 20

It seems like its been planned for a best part of a decade but today finally saw Tony Blair hand over the keys to Ten Downing Street to Gordon Brown. This of course gives us the perfect opportunity to have a quick look into how well Brown and his spin doctors are getting on in the social media space.
Youtube – not surprisingly there are plenty of clips of the new PM delivering speeches on the video sharing site. Most tend to be straight forward

The New York Times reports that MySpace will launch its alternative to YouTube, MySpace TV, tomorrow. The article calls this a “refurbishment” of MySpace’s branded video channels, announced last month.
The Times cites comScore stats that say that 50.2 million online video viewers used MySpace in April—not too far behind YouTube’s 57.9 million viewers. However, YouTube still serves a wider geographical audience and far

It seems like every time a company does something really innovative (or just gets a lot of press), someone somewhere suggests they’re doing this because they’re planning on going public soon. The rumors—and actual IPOs—are flying thick and fast around the Internet these days. Just this week, we’ve heard the results of comScore’s IPO and rumors of IPOs for LinkedIn and MySQL.
comScore’s IPO results
comScore̵

A few months ago, JimmyR-dot-com (aka Jimmy Ruska) posted a YouTube video that showed users how to conduct a Google search for free, unprotected music files. Essentially, by modifying search terms with a few extra key words, a user can limit results to underlying directory pages rather than user-facing Web …

No. 2 overall & onlineNo. 3 overall
More advertising dollars are flowing to the Internet, in a trend that started years ago. Adage.com has come out with its annual look at the United States top 100 advertising spenders. There are few surprises, but it’s confirmation of what …

I see questions pop up in the forums every once in awhile with people asking if images that are linked to a website count as links. A link is a link so the answer would be yes. But what about images that are not surrounded by link (a href) tags. Can an image on it’s own count as a link? Well according to Yahoo Site Explorer they do.
I was reading a magazine the other day when I came across an article on JangoMail. Liking what I read I went

Google News is offering a new Image View that displays photos linked to news items with scrolling headlines in a column on the right. “In looking at how people use Google News and based on feedback we’ve received, we’ve found that many people prefer to read the news …

Galleries of images set off against a black background have become common as software and Web sites try to help people show off their photos better. Cooliris’ PicLens offers a clever way to do set up such galleries from many Web sites on the fly.a view of PicLens in …

Here’s what’s left of this morning’s news. Be sure to check back throughout the day for more breaking marketing news. Google’s sold more than 9,000 of its Search Appliance boxes and has now announced a distribution partnership with Ingram Micro.
A judge has told Google she’s happy to let the DOJ investigate Windows Vista’s desktop search, adding Google “is not a party to the case.”
Marchex is revam

How about some salary negotiation brinkmanship to start off your day? Better yet, how would you like the idea of getting paid $12.5 million a year?
That’s the amount that MySpace co-founders Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson are asking from Rupert Murdoch and corporate parent News Corp. According to Deadline Hollywood Daily, the social network creators have asked for a combined $50 million over 2-years, which would make them the highest paid

Google’s made some upgrades to Google Docs and Spreadsheets today, including the addition of folders.
Almost from the day we launched people have been clamoring for folders. They’re here! Other new additions include new icons, more controls and search that dynamically filters results as you type.
Yeah, so what about folders in Gmail? Many more people have been asking for folders in Gmail and yet we still don’t have that, do we?

Google has posted a beginners guide to why they bought DoubleClick. The posts covers the background of both company’s ad platform and is a good summary for those looking to get caught up.
Here’s the handy-dandy summary they used to explain the purchase and future plans… DoubleClick’s products and technology are complementary to our search and and content-based text advertising business, and give us new opportunities to im

Some more news links to keep you up to date on all the goings on of the Internet marketing world: SERoundtable asks Is Google Universal Search Harder Than One Box Results For SEOs
Not to be outdone, Flickr Images Added to Yahoo! Image Search from Conversion Rater
As Andy mentioned in the video stream today, Aaron Wall is Closing Threadwatch This Friday
Search Engine Journal reports Google News Image Version Launches with Ajax Scrolling
E-Commer

Yesterday we covered some recent studies to help those of you marketing to teenagers online. Today we have one more:
AdAge wrote up a survey by Alloy Media + Marketing that found that 96% of teenagers with Internet access use social networking sites at least weekly. Actually, it’s more than just teenagers: even children (okay, “tweens”) as young as nine use social networks with that frequency. Better yet, “nearly half e

If you’re like me, you long ago abandoned your antiquated landline and are exclusively using your mobile for telephone calls. Apparently we’re not alone. According to findings released today by Ingenio, Inc. (”voice commerce solutions” provider) and conducted by Harris Interactive® nearly 85% of people surveyed admitted to having a mobile compared to only 71% admitting to having a land line. When you dig a little deep

In case you missed today’s Marketing Pilgrim Live video stream, you’ll find the archived version below.
In this week’s show, I discuss… Google Asks Dell to Build Search Appliance Hardware
Business.com Now Worth $400 Million?
BlogStorm - Bloggers Criticized for Microsoft “Spokesblogging” Ads
German Gmail Users, Achtung!
Calling Out eBay?s “Experiment” with Google AdWords
Four Things You Should Know

Editor’s note: This story was updated at 10:38 a.m. PST WASHINGTON–A federal judge refused on Tuesday to rule on a last-minute Google antitrust complaint about Windows Vista’s desktop search, saying she trusted government attorneys who said they were already satisfied with Microsoft’s planned changes. U….

At an event in Google’s New York offices on Tuesday, the company unveiled a new initiative to make its Google Earth geography software a more accessible tool for nonprofit organizations. “We’re now officially launching a program called Google Earth Outreach,” said John Hanke, director of Google Earth and …

Here’s your morning slice of marketing news goodness… Online advertising grew 42% in the UK since Q1 of 2006.
AOL News has relaunched and now looks a little more “bloggy.”
Time Warner’s signed up Quigo to provide advertising for its web properties. WebmasterWorld’s Brett Tabke has an exclusive interview with Quigo CEO.
Maybe Friendster’s not quite so dead in the water. The site grew 40% in May.
Web

A court ruling against TorrentSpy could create a dangerous precedent that would require other search engines and ISPs to create and store user data.
With privacy advocates already concerned that Google’s keeping data for 18 months, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is pressing a California court to overturn a ruling that would make it a requirement for internet companies keep sensitive data and hand it over in a civil lawsu

Long time readers will know too well that I hate any attempts to try and mold the blogosphere into a controlled medium with strict rules and regulations. It’s for that reason that I join Michael Arrington in being somewhat annoyed (if we weren’t PG13, I might have used other language) at Charles Cooper’s attempt to create a meme that bloggers should have a “church and state” attitude when it comes to editorial and a

M:Metrics - consumer consumption yardstick - has released the April 2007 rankings (based on Percentage of Active Reach) of the top mobile Web destinations (aggregated across company owned domains) among Smartphone users in the US… Google (62.48 percent)
Yahoo (33.54 percent)
Microsoft (33.36 percent)
AT&T* (21.22 percent)
Time Warner (19.06 percent)
Disney (17.00 percent)
MySpace/FOX - News Corp (15.54 percent)
Sprint Nextel* (15.29 pe

Today across the Internet, many net radio sites are participating in a day of silence to protest an impending rate hike of royalties fees that goes into effect on July 15. The rate increase, according to SaveNetRadio.org, is retroactive to January 1, 2006, meaning net radio stations will immediately owe over 18 months of back royalty fees.
The Copyright Royalty Board was created in 2005 to establish royalty rates for broadcast material. Congress

Google is in talks to buy GrandCentral, which offers a way to merge all phone calls into one number, according to TechCrunch. “We have a high degree of confidence that the deal has actually been closed. We are trying to nail down the acquisition price,” writes TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington, …

We’ve already mentioned Matt Cutts’s thoughts on humans’ role in enhancing search engine results today. A New York Times article, “The Human Touch That May Loosen Google’s Grip,” yesterday prompted Matt’s (and several others’, including Search Engine Watch and Search Engine Land) response(s) today.
The NY Times article details Google’s dominance of the search market (Google earns more in a si

Google on Monday said it’s still not convinced that Microsoft’s planned tweaks to Windows Vista go far enough to head off its antitrust concerns. “It appears that more may need to be done to provide a truly unbiased choice of desktop search products in Vista and achieve compliance …

At Internet Retailer 2007, I was impressed with a presentation presented by Geoffrey Robertson, VP of eCommerce at JC Whitney. JC Whitney is the largest direct marketer of automotive aftermarket parts in the world, and is also one of the largest e-tailers.
Robertson discussed the recent addition of user reviews to their site and gave great information about the impact on sales. Here are the highlights:
1) User reviews have a huge impact on sale