Google has added a new feature to Google Maps called MyMaps, which makes it possible, with no programming experience, to create a map with detail. You can place pushpins by just right-clicking on the map, write descriptions on them, even add HTML to include pictures, and save the whole thing to send to a friend. It even had drawing tools for drawing lines or complex areas. I did a simple mashup, listing some favorite places in New York, in a

Pingdom has done an accounting of the uptime of the top 20 websites on the internet (according to Alexa). Their results show that Google has suffered a mere 7 minutes of downtime thus far in 2007, or 0.00540123332% downtime, and can thus boast uptime of an impressive 99.9945988%.
Of course, that isn’t the best uptime in the biz. Google, with the second biggest single website on the internet, had more downtime than #1 website Yahoo, which

It’s probably not coincidence that Bambi Francisco has resigned her position at MarketWatch to pursue her new start-up Vator.tv. After CNET’s expose, and what I feel was an attempt to embarrass a competitor, Dow Jones and Francisco probably realized the suggested conflicts of interest didn’t look good for either of them, despite her getting pre-approval.
We wish her the best of luck!

Google has officially changed the look of AdSense ads and the most prominent type of AdWords ad, and the change isn’t going to be perfect for everyone.
First, Google has initiated the change in AdSense it has been working on for a while, removing the “Advertise on this site” link, moving “Ads by Google” to the bottom right-hand corner, and giving it a nicer graphical look. Here’s an example of the new look, v

Yeah, it’s probably a copyright violation on some level, but here’s a song called “Just Google”, to the tune of Michael Jackson’s Beat It: Funny stuff.
This isn’t the first Google song. Check out “Talking About Google” and Saturday Night Live’s “Goo Goo Googling Him”.
(via Amit Agarwal)
Also, take a look at this April Fools announcement from Ask.com CEO Jim Lanzone regarding A

How sad, on Maundy Thursday, too—all manner of failures: Second Life marketing = failure: GigaOM outlines 3 Reasons Why Marketing in Second Life Doesn’t Work. Oh, good. Now that he’s taken care of that fad, I can go back to bashing covering mobile marketing. Johnson & Johnson’s Ortho Evra: The patch itself has been quite effective at preventing pregnancy, but the company is embroiled with lawsuits over the accompanying

Blogger has added integration of the AJAX news bar and YouTube/Google Video bar as an easy drag and drop addition to your template. The bars are available for every website, as well as blog and web search bars, but Blogger’s addition makes it easy for less advanced users to configure and just drop in.
Also, Anothr is making it easy to receive RSS feed updates in Google Talk. Read more at Download Squad. Finally, Google released today a

Here are some quick news items for Thursday… If you want something picked apart, Andy Beard is your man. He takes a look at the new features at Blogcatalog and reveals just how close they are to those of MyBlogLog.
Ask.com appears to be fending off a small backlash to their UK anti-Google campaign.
I’ve noticed a lot of new Christian verticals starting-up recently. TechCrunch points to a YouTube clone for Christians called GodTu

Randy answered a meme called “Why I blog”, and unfortunately he tagged me, so here goes:
Why do I blog? Well, I can’t answer that without saying why I started blogging. Almost three years ago, I felt like I needed a way to keep track of this great Google company, and I was just barely into LiveJournal communities at the time, so I figured I would start a Google community, convince others to contribute, and sit back and read

Since we’re on a Spanish kick this week, I thought I’d give this a mention: We have yet another SEO contest upon us. HazRuido.com (’make noise’) launched a contest on Monday for the term ‘habitaquo.’ Rather than an ongoing contest like many English language SEO contests, this Spanish language contest is set up to be a one-time thing. The judgment day is set for May 23. The #1 Google result for habitaquo w

Here are some other news items worthy of your consideration today… Pronet takes a look at the new StumbleUpon homepage design and compares to Digg.
Speaking of Pronet, their excellent CrazyEgg heatmaps tool has a new competitor in ClickTale.
Business Week suggests Google TV won’t revolutionize television ads.
Should PR professionals fear search marketers? This whitepaper promises to answer that question (I’ve not read it yet, s

According to eMarketer, new studies suggest that major Australian advertisers plan to allocate as much as 22% of their total marketing budgets to online advertising.
Strangely, eMarketer doesn’t actually show any charts to confirm this - so we’ll have to take their word for it - but they do demonstrate that search marketing is making a comeback, after dropping from its highest share in 2004. Here’s a puzzling snippet for you&#

Nathan Weinberg is out today. He’ll be back tomorrow night. Till then, here’s a post he wrote yesterday. Yay…
Saw an ad on YouTube for this contest by Clean & Clear (some face cleanser company [what, I’m supposed to know makeup?]) asking YouTube users (girls only) to send in footage of their “wackiest wakeup”. Pretty much just post 15 seconds of a real or “recreated” memorable waking up mo

R/WW takes a look at Compete’s attempt to track the engagement level of web sites by looking at more than just visitors and page views.
With increasing use of Flash and Ajax, using page views as a measure of a site’s popularity becomes more redundant (since only one page actually loads). To help marketers better research the popularity of web sites, they’ve introduced two new metrics: Attention: The total time spent on a s

Here are three quick items for your consideration: Is there a race to discover a solution for search spam, and will it be sold to the highest bidder?
Google is starting to show book cover images at the top of relevant searches. Check out my podcast interview with GoodROI aka Greg Niland. Pilgrim Partners: 3FN Marketing - our AdSense alternative pays publishers up to 80% of each click!

Quisieramos dar la más cordial bienvenida a los lectores del resumen de las mejores noticias de mercadeo por internet de Marketing Pilgrim en Español. Como nos encontramos en etapa de prueba, nos encantaría escuchar sus comentarios y en especial que nos indiquen si encuentran valor en él. Muchas gracias.
(For our non-Spanish speaking readers, the following is a recap of the top marketing stories from last week, translated - using humans, not

BusinessWeek is running a cover story this week with the line, “Who’s Afraid Of Google?”. The story details Google’s rising market cap, cash reserves, new market entries, and the fear every other media/technology company is feeling as a result. It’s a pretty interesting article that, even if it doesn’t cover much new ground, does let you know what the competition (and even partners) is willing to say publicl

YouTube’s labs test site, called TestTube, has added two new features to the service.
The first, called AudioSwap, lets you replace the audio in your video with audio provided by YouTube. The audio on your video will be complete replaced by the new audio, so this is really designed for audio-free videos, like photo slideshows, nature video, or screencasts. There’s a lot of music there, most of which I’ve never heard of, but s

Oh, god, another April Fools Day! Yikes, you won’t believe how many websites are running pranks today already… Google has launched “Gmail Paper“, a new service that will print out any email from Gmail, including text attachments, and mail you the printouts, completely for free. The service is monetized by giant text ads on the backs of the paper, written in bold, red, 36-point Helvetica. “You click. We stack.

Valleywag writes about a billboard on California’s Highway 101, that reads:
THE ALGORITHM KILLED JEEVES
The reference is about Ask.com, but the question is: Who bought it? Sure, Google is the likely culprit, perhaps as a response to Ask’s “Information Revolution” campaign, but evidence is pointing in the direction of Ask buying it themselves. The evidence: A later billboard apparently reads:
THE ALGORITHM IS FROM JERSE

iMedia Connection has two useful articles in as many days. I like to read their articles, but I seldom feel prompted to link to them. But these might be helpful. Check them out: The Best Website Metrics Are…: If you don’t already know it, your website should be measurable. It should be giving you lots of beautiful data. (I love data. That’s why I love web analytics.) Even if you already have well established web analytics

Despite support from some adult sites and anti-porn activists, the ICM Registry’s proposal for a .xxx top-level domain was rejected by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers in a 9-5 vote. ICANN states that a .xxx TLD would be difficult to enforce worldwide as well as create “public policy concerns.”
From CNET: “ICM’s response does not address (the ICANN Government Advisory Committee’s) conce

Google is coming under criticism for rolling back satellite imagery of New Orleans, replacing the images of post-Katrina New Orleans with older, pre-hurricane photos that show the city in a much cleaner condition than is the reality. In this article by The Age, Google says it is only offering the best images it has, and that there are many factors that went into the change:
Chikai Ohazama, a Google product manager for satellite imagery, said th

Google Managing Counsel Michael Kwun has a letter to the editor in today’s Washington Post, an on-the-mark rebuttal of a Viacom op-ed from last weekend. Google paints Viacom as an author of the DMCA who is no longer satisfied with the law it had pushed, and defends the DMCA as the only legitimate way to protect copyright on sites like YouTube.
Google’s best point: If Viacom screwed up in figuring out which videos YouTube needed to

Ionut Alex has a look at the newest revision to Google Notebook, Google’s oft-overlooked note-taking product, which has just left beta and gotten some improved design and AJAX features. He’s detailed a lot of changes, including the easy click to add a new note, auto-saving, and other things. The coolest new thing has to be the ability to create a Google Maps noting all sorts of cool places, like this one. This is a feature native

ComputerWorld has an article about trouble some users and organizations had accessing their Google Apps services recently. According to the article, this was the third time this month the service suffered downtime, this time on Tuesday of this week from 10:00 am to about 4 pm. There was a previous outage on March 12 for about two hours, and another on March 1 for at least 8 hours. Paid users of the Premier tier of service received an extra 15

It seems like every tradeshow, expo and seminar has to have at least one session on the future of its industry. Generally, the predictions are . . . general. The industry will grow beyond our wildest imaginations, something completely different will come along, things we have no control over will change everything, etc.
But what if we made more concrete predictions for the future of our industry? That’s what Manoj Jasra of Web Analytics

Two years ago this Sunday, Google introduced two gigabytes of email storage for Gmail, with the amount of storage ticking up slowly, what they called their “Infinity + 1″ system. The idea was that since the counter went up continuously, you really had near-infinite storage. It was a great idea, except for one thing: Infinity + 1 implies better than inifinity, but it’s not.
See, Yahoo has announced that, as of this May, Yahoo

Rich Skrenta is running a series on his blog called How To Beat Google, detailing the strategies needed to defeat Google in the marketplace, and consequently, showing exactly what Google’s competitors are doing wrong. The advice includes: Duplicating Google is uninteresting and will have no pull
You need to segment the market, create a new category of search
The innovation needs to be in the index, not the interface
Users will not do ext

Ionut Alex writes about Google’s newest release of their mobile search product. I tried it out, and it seems like a good improvement. Google’s added some formatting to the page, so it is more than just text on a blank screen, and they’re trying the same thing Yahoo OneSearch is trying, putting multiple search verticals on the same page, guessing based on your query what you might find helpful.
For example, I searched for R

Google is holding lectures giving tips to political and advocacy group consultants, showing them how to better use all of Google’s services in managing their messages. According to the Los Angeles Times, Google packed 80 consultants into a lecture hall earlier this month, and conducted an hourlong seminar showing: Which types of videos resonate on YouTube
How to improve search engine rankings
Use Google AdWords to reach an already intere

We are now under two weeks away from Search Engine Strategies New York, the premier search industry event in my backyard, and boy am I excited. Search Engine Roundtable is planning a huge amount of coverage, planning to liveblog about 80% of all sessions. I’ll probably do the same for a few interesting panels, and hopefully I’ll get to run into SER’s Weinberg blogger, Tamar Weinberg. Plus, I get to show off my new long hair!

Some Digger realized there was a significant enough number of bored people typing out “asdf” into Google, enough for Google Trends to record its popularity over the last three years. I’ve added three more terms you might type in while bored to illustrate mostly uniform levels of bored-itude over the maximum period of time: asdf qwerty i am bored kill me As you can see, uses of “asdf” enjoyed a major s

The results of community voting in the first ever YouTube Awards were announced Monday, and here the winners: Most Creative - OKGo - Here It Goes Again - a music video of the band moving in sync on treadmills
Best Comedy - Smosh - Smosh Short 2: Stranded - a man falls into despair at his situation, trapped on a deserted island. The punchline is pretty damn good
Best Commentary - thewinekone - Hotness Prevails - commentary on how it’s too

Google Spreadsheets has been updated, a minor release bumping the version number to 1.2.0i. The update fixes these issues: spreadsheets not loading quick enough spreadsheets not loading disconnect error messages (and if you are disconnected, you will be reconnected automatically)
for IE users, if your spreadsheets aren’t loading, you’ll be prompted with instructions “press Ctrl + F5 on your keyboard”
Now supports Tab

The last time this happened, it was February: I’m finally sorta caught up. I still have 73 tabs of stuff to do, but at least I won’t be reading Bloglines 15 hours a day. Thank god.

Valleywag posted this screenshot of a version of the Google homepage that is currently in testing: Compare that with the current Google homepage, which, in an effort to appear spartan, has avoided redesign and resulted in inconsistent and confusing UI elements: I hope to god Google makes this the default UI for the page, because the current one has gone too far. They keep trying to jam new features in there, and it really isn’t working.

Two recent international Google Doodle logos courtesy of Zorgloob:
The first is easy, it’s the Persian New Year: Google’s done the Persian New Year thing before, in 2006: And 2005: The second one, according to the translation, is to celebrate the International Day of the Francophonie: What is the International Day of the Francophonie? No, it’s not a day for French people who are disingenuous, but rather a day to celebrate

Niall Kennedy did earlier this month an exhaustive analysis of Google Gadgets, coming out with a lot of graphs, facts and figures that would make your head spin. If you’re a geek for infoporn, you’ll love his post on it.
A taste: The average Gadget is 181 pixels
20 or so Gadgets require you to be using Firefox
Google’s 48 Gadgets account for 44% of all Gadget page views More stats at this post, too.
Alex Iskold did a look at

Research and Markets writes up eMarketer’s new report on the future of automotive marketing. They predict a $1.1 billion aggregate spend on search marketing (SEO and “paid ads”).
That’s a pretty big number—but I’m not impressed. Why not? Number one, the press release touting their new study starts off by noting that the automotive industry spends $21 billion in advertising. Granted, the automotive industry doe

You know, my Google Reader link blog would be even more useful, if I could add my thoughts to each added item. Instead, I’ll share some interesting news right here! If little Zimbra can figure out how to make web applications available offline, why the heck can’t Google?
Movie Marketing Madness reports the Federal Trade Commission is about to take another look at how well the movie industry polices its own advertising. Is it time for

Google AdSense has added a new referral product: Google Checkout. The way this one works is that if someone follows your referral ad/link and signs up for Checkout, and buys at least ten dollars within the next 90 days, you get a dollar.
Here are some of the ad formats (funny, no little buttons):
Text link:
Sign up for Google Checkout
Banners: Boxes: Leaderboards:

Did you enjoy the spring weather this weekend? If you were outside for most of the weekend, you likely missed the debate on the future of print news, started by a rumor from Tim O’Reilly.
I’m hearing rumors that the San Francisco Chronicle is in big trouble. Apparently, Phil Bronstein, the editor-in-chief, told staff in a recent “emergency meeting” that the news business “is broken, and no one knows how to fix it.

Michael Moritz, a Sequoia Capital general partner and Google board member since 1999, is leaving Google’s board by not seeking re-election on May 10, 2007. There are many reasons being passed around for why Moritz is leaving, including that he is being blamed for the “YouTube nightmare” (Sequoia was the lead investor in YouTube, and Mike may have been influential in the deal), that he has too much of a conflict of interest bet

I noticed this week that at some point Yahoo released a version of its Yahoo Go for Mobile 2.0 that works on my wife’s T-Mobile SDA phone (a version for my MDA is forthcoming, they tell me). Naturally, I downloaded it and checked it out, and I like what I see. First impressions: The interface is pretty smooth, with a scrolling icon bar along the bottom for various pages of features.
You can sign in to your Yahoo account, but if you don&

Today is the last day for you to vote in the 2006 YouTube Video Awards and pick the top videos of last year. Go to youtube.com/ytawards to make your picks. I’m going to list all the nominees, in order of how I liked them, so you can have some fun watching these videos. My advice: try the comedy category, where the best stuff is, followed by the Adorable stuff. The Commentary is the worst category, mostly idiots talking boringly at thei

Google bike Hosted on Zooomr
Google is running a program in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, giving free Google-branded bikes and bike helmets to over 2,000 permanent employees. Employees will be able to choose between several models, including a “cool cruiser” folding bike and hybrid road/mountain bikes.
I wonder what a Google-branded bike would look like…

It’s official, we are definitely in the middle of a massive multi-industry war on the level of the RIAA/filesharing and other major technology wars of recent memory. Today, the war entered its third major stage, with many of the opposition joining forces to announce a YouTube competitor, coming this summer.
The chronology:
Pre-war ops: Various companies and startups enter the video sharing arena. YouTube (2/15/2005), Revver (11/2005), Br