All About Content

The first phase of registrations for the new Top Level web Domain .eu began on December 7, 2005. This marked the start of a 4-month ’sunrise’ period during which only the holders of existing trademarks or other prior rights may register. Registrations for .eu will be fully open to the public from the beginning of April 2006. Eurid is the independent organization selected by the European Commission to operate the new registry for .eu. Pre-registering a domain name within the .eu TLD is not possible.

Dates applications will be accepted:

For trademark holders and public bodies: December 7, 2005 to April 6, 2006.

For holders of “other prior rights”: February 7 to April 6, 2006.

For the general public: from April 7, 2006.

In defending his company’s decision — a year in the making — to offer a censored version of its search services in China, Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt said the move would be a lesser evil than boycotting business in the country altogether:

We concluded that although we weren’t wild about the restrictions, it was even worse to not try to serve those users at all. We actually did an evil scale and decided not to serve at all was worse evil.

An “evil scale”? Is he serious? That doesn’t really work as well as a corporate motto.

Wow, what a week.

Bloomberg News has declared that Yahoo! Inc. capitulated to Google in the battle for market dominance. The story quotes Yahoo CFO as saying, “We don’t think it’s reasonable to assume we’re going to gain a lot of share from Google. It’s not our goal to be No. 1 in Internet search. We would be very happy to maintain our market share.” But then Yahoo turned right back around and reaffirmed its “commitment to being the world’s best search engine.” It’s not terribly smart to tell your investors you’re happy with being #2.

Meanwhile, Google is fighting PR battles of its own. The #1 search engine is defending its cooperation with government censorship in China…

…but not government snooping into its data to figure out just how popular Internet porn is. (Duh — very!)

Google is resisting on the basis that complying with the DOJ request would put trade secrets at risk.

But Forbes has this take on it:

A public disclosure of exactly how much pornography is on the Internet and how often people look for it–the two data points that will result from fulfilling the government’s subpoena–could serve to make the Internet look bad. And Google, as its leading search engine, could look the worst.

Nielsen/NetRatings says that porn sites attracted 38 million unique viewers in December–or a quarter of all Internet surfers.

Google and its competitors all benefit from porn sites, which help generate search queries and page views. But Google is the only portal company that makes nearly all of its revenue from click-through advertising. Restricting porn and porn advertising–the likely aim of COPA’s sponsors–could hurt Google disproportionately.

And filtering in general would also hurt Google more than its competitors. The Google brand is built on the notion that the engine gives users the clearest picture of the Web, without playing favorites. Restricting content in any way could hurt Google’s carefully burnished image, its 60% market share for search queries and its share price.

Fifty-six percent of Internet users said they do not want Google to turn over any information to the government, according to a poll conducted over the weekend by the Ponemon Institute. They are highly concerned about their privacy. But if my experience with surveys is any indication, most of those 56% aren’t actually part of the 60% that actually use Google, so they’re out of luck since competitors Yahoo, MSN and AOL (whose search results are powered by Google) have already complied with the government’s requests for the data.

Bob Evans, writing for Information Week, lambastes what he calls “so-called privacy critics” by saying (entirely without irony):

First of all, three cheers for Microsoft! The latest news has the company defending its decision to cooperate with the Justice Department in an anti-pornography effort.

The company said it limited the material it gave to Justice to “a random sample of pages from its search index and some aggregated query logs that listed queries and how often they occurred,” and that it was careful to avoid passing along any information that could possibly be tied to either an individual human or an individual machine or an individual IP address.

Danny Sullivan was quoted on Nightline suggesting the government request shows something important: The government has no idea what it’s doing. “It’s overkill, the amount of data that they want. They’re literally going to get more than a billion searches in what they’re asking for.”

Sergey Brin said on ABC News, “The idea there could be such a large overreaching, in my mind, request, based on something so far off and not related to security or anything like that, I think that’s worrisome.”

Brin, and his fellow Google execs Schmidt and Page, are the lowest paid CEOs on earth — they make a dollar a year … if it weren’t for the fact that they have tons of Google stock, which has been mentioned in the same sentence as the phrase “$600 a share.”

Updated February 12:
My prediction that Google was going to lose its golden boy status is coming to pass much faster than expected; GOOG’s stock price is down to $360 a share. Still not bad for a stock that IPO’d at $85, but not good news for those who bought when GOOG was approaching $500 just last month.

You know when it’s time to give your in-house search marketers a big bonus when you want your customers to visit your website and you don’t have to give a URL, you just tell the audience to “Google us.” According to a The Search Insider article, a new 30-second TV spot produced by GM ends with this unusual call to action, and a screenshot of the Google interface with “Pontiac” typed in the search field.

The article goes on to explain:

GM’s campaign implies tremendous authority and trust in the Google brand. It’s almost as if Google is moving into the territory of J.D. Power & Associates as the ubiquitous barometer of customer satisfaction, so often plugged into automotive advertising. GM sales and marketing chief Mark LaNeve said in a recent Business Week article by David Kiley: “We’re touting Google, frankly, because it stands for credibility and consumer empowerment, and we like the association.”

… While association with Google’s credibility is understandable, no responsible brand manager would widely promote a search for his brand, without some degree of confidence that the results will support the brand objectives.

Tell me about it.

Update: Feb 1
I just saw the commercial. Slick.

If you are a frequent reader of popular blogs you might occasionally come across blog responses that say “I am a comment spammer.” You might ask yourself, “what kind of moron would post that?”

Let me tell you the story of how I become that kind of moron. A cautionary tale, if you will. [Ed. A tale totally worthy of digging. Dig it?]

Once Upon a Time…
A while ago, I signed up for an account on Engadget so I could leave comments. They were for the most part perfectly legitimate comments.

So far, so fine.

Then I thought I’d try my hand at some low-key, pretty innocuous comment spam tactics for a throwaway site I built. The idea was to test this tactic: to see how much you’d need to do to see any visible results and how long it takes.

Comment Spam 101
So, of course, I created a new account. I wouldn’t be so dumb as to use my primary account. Right? Right, except I wasn’t thinking like someone trying to think like a comment spammer.

Of course comment spammers are going to create multiple accounts; and of course (of course!) the people running hugely successful and popular web sites like Engadget know when someone is trying to subvert their system by creating fake accounts.

Anyway, I created a new account. So far, still fine.

But then I posted a comment with a link, which was identified as comment spam. Okay, no big loss, right?

Getting Caught
But wait!! They replaced my posting with a new message that read “I am a comment spammer” and then it listed my name and email address. And not the name and email address I used to create the fake account — no, they used my original (real) info. They did this by matching the IP addresses of the computer being used to create the accounts.

And there’s more. They didn’t just replace that one post. They replaced all my previous posts so that they now read “I am a comment spammer. Melanie Phung is a spammer” even though the original posts weren’t spammy.

There was one thread I had contributed several comments to, so this message appeared multiple times on that page. That was enough to make this particular page rank well for a query on the phrase “Melanie Phung.” For a very brief while the Engadget page actually ranked #1 for a search on my name in Google.

As an online marketer that’s not really good PR, so eventually I’m going to have to try and make that go away. In the mean time I could try to ask Engadget very nicely to remove the post [ed. because the same IP address is shared by my entire office; so I'm going to guess the same thing happens whenever someone else creates an account and posts from work.] But I’m actually going to just leave it alone for now; it serves as a nice reminder to myself not to make such rookie mistakes.

The Moral of the Story
To reiterate a theme I’ve promoted before: if you don’t know what you’re doing, stay away from dumb black hat tricks. I’m not saying it can’t work, but unless you already know a little something about how a site operates and who it shares info with, you could just end up looking like a moron.

p.s. Also be aware that many forums and blogs automatically apply the rel=nofollow tag to all comments, so the odds are slim that comment spamming on a popular blog is going to gain you any PageRank even if the post isn’t removed.

Second theme: Write good content and give people legitimate reasons to link to your site on their own. That way you won’t need to resort to comment spamming and you can save yourself this particular headache.

Digg it yet?

Since starting this site, I’ve never gone a whole week without updating it, but I got close this time. Until this. If this counts.

There’s a ton of stuff going on in search, so there’s no reason to write a bunch of fluff, but I’m shorter on time than content. And I feel a bit more pressure to write something good, now that I’ve been blogrolled.

Our friends over at SEO by the SEA have added All About Content to their list o’ blogs. Okay, okay it’s a very long list and I’m not sure how discriminating they are. But I like the blog — it’s one I read periodically. So I choose to be flattered. And it has a very similar style, so if you’ve been missing my updates, go check them out.

In the mean time:

• Google’s secret plan for world domination
• Court sidesteps issue of Yahoo free speech suit involving Nazi memorabilia
• Google takes more international market share
• Limit search by IP address
• IPR to digital rights management in question in lawsuit against Microsoft, Yahoo
• Google files patent for click-to-call
• List and ranking of blog networks
• Google launches mobile version of personalized homepage
• Snubbed by ommission - Chirac mentions Google and Yahoo as American tech giants, but not Microsoft
• SEs under pressure in Chinese free speech controversy
• Who’s more likely to flame someone - Cutts or Zawodny?
• The difference between Dave Shea and Dave Seah
• You’ve got 1/20 of a second to get my attention

It should have gone without saying, but the small edit I made to my job posting (titled: Marketing Writer) on Craig’s List appears to have improved the quality of the applications coming in. I added:

Tip for job applicants: This is a writing position. If you want to be considered, please provide evidence that you’re a good writer.

Maybe that was enough to act as a filter, or perhaps it’s just that the good writers needed more time to put together a thoughtful application. Either way, I’m regaining some hope. All four of the applications I received today actually had decent cover letters attached. Now before you accuse me of being old fashioned — remember that these are writing positions I’m talking about. So, no, I don’t think a cover letter is too much to ask for.

In the last two weeks, an interesting thing has happened with my vanity searches. A Google search on my name has been pulling image results. This confounds me, as most searches on proper names don’t pull images, for one. For two, why now? Three, why these particular pictures?

When you click on the “image results for melanie phung” link, it takes you to the same set of thumbnails that would have been displayed if you had conducted a Google Image search, and the first three thumbnails are the ones that were displayed on the standard search results page.

Update February 8, 2006:
The images are gone again.

Whoa, check out this piece by Declan McCullagh published on CNet.com today: Create an e-annoyance, go to jail

Last Thursday, President Bush signed into law a prohibition on posting annoying Web messages or sending annoying e-mail messages without disclosing your true identity…. This ridiculous prohibition, which would likely imperil much of Usenet, is buried in the so-called Violence Against Women and Department of Justice Reauthorization Act. Criminal penalties include stiff fines and two years in prison.

“The use of the word ‘annoy’ is particularly problematic,” says Marv Johnson, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. “What’s annoying to one person may not be annoying to someone else.”

Considering my very low tolerance for bad writing, about 99% of the content on the visible Web would be in violation of federal law if this provision passes. (Unless of course the annoying writing in question bears the author’s true name. In which case I can hunt them down and, using my real name, flame them.)

p.s. I came across this link on SprayOnSalt.com, that super-duper, extra-secret app I mentioned last month. It’s no longer a secret — in fact, it’s in public beta. So go check it out.