The Chamber of Commerce is fighting to stop piracy online. The Senate’s PROTECT IP Act and the House’s Stop Online Piracy Act are huge parts of this fight, and thanks in large part to the Chamber’s support, the bills have gained support among politicians. Google doesn’t like this, so they’re thinking of leaving the organization. Yahoo didn’t like this, so they already left. The bills (pushed by obvious spam targets Rosetta Stone and Viagra-producing Pfizer) target advertising, the bread and butter of both companies’ bottom line, on so-called rogue sites. It could lead to tons of extra regulation that they aren’t usually used to. And let’s face it, any attempt at regulation of the Internet just doesn’t go over well with a lot of people. Is Google making the right move?
How does Occupy Wall St. stack up against the tea party on Google?
Google Politics tell all from its informative political blog. Let’s compare, using the chart above and other data collected by Google:
- Occupy Wall St. has generated far more searches since its inception than the tea party ever has at any given moment.
- Despite that search edge, Occupy Wall Street “is almost in a dead heat with the Tea Party for the volume of news coverage… between October 7 and last week, Occupy Wall Street only barely bests the Tea Party when we examine the number of news pieces covering each movement: 29,000 to 22,000.
- One bit of trivia: Which states have had the highest search traffic for Occupy Wall St.? New York is number three - can you guess the intervening two? (Hint: Think crunchy. Real crunchy.)
- When does tea party surge as a search term? In April, just before Americans file their federal income taxes.
How do you get your Occupy Wall St. News? If you’re in Tumblr…
- Follow various Tumblr tags relating to the news - “Occupy Oakland” and “Occupy Wall St.” are particularly vibrant.
- Check out the “We are the 99%” Tumblr and its competitor, the “We Are the 53%” Tumblr.
- If not, read “The Occupied Wall Street Journal,” a publication of the protesters in New York.
Google Ripples: Concentrated awesome. This is the future of analytics right here. You can get as broad or as granular as you want, and in a completely non-linear way. Imagine if Tumblr did this — a map of your reblogs. That would be some bad-assery right there. But Google got there first, and so they get the high-fives.
As one plus rises, another plus disappears: Google just ticked off their power searchers by quietly removing a feature that they’ve had since 1997 — the + search modifier, which forces a certain phrase to show up in a search. As heavy users of Google ourselves, this missing + is pretty annoying. Instead, we’ll have to force it by putting quotes around an item. Bet you can’t guess why they’re replacing it. We’ll give you a hint: Google Plus. Meanwhile, we’re gonna cry about our missing +Plus search.
San Francisco’s mayor gets uh, diverse support: M.C. Hammer’s music isn’t exactly setting the charts ablaze anymore (he’s moved on to search engines), but it works well in political ads, apparently, as this bizarre concoction above proves. Ed Lee, the current mayor of the city, was appointed after Gavin Newsom took over as California’s lieutenant governor, but the tech-friendly Lee hopes to get a full term. So do all the folks in this clip, ranging from top brass at Google to Twitter co-founders to insane pitcher Brian Wilson to M.C. FREAKING HAMMER, donning the parachute pants again to offer his support to the mayor. Gotta give the funders of this ad (tech entrepreneurs Ron Conway and Justin Timberlake Sean Parker) credit — it’s 2 Legit 2 Quit. source
I don’t want your money. If you offer me $5 billion, I won’t want it. I’ve got plenty of money. I want you to stop using our ideas in Android, that’s all I want.Steve Jobs • In an excerpt from Walter Isaacson’s biography of the Apple leader, which comes out next week. He’s talking about Android, which he considers a technology Google effectively stole from Apple, and the idea of settling with Google. It’s a sore subject for him. “I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong,” he said. “I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go thermonuclear war on this.”
fearandwar asks: What good are backlinks? Like, how do spammers use them?
» SFB says: Backlinks, essentially, give certain sites an advantage by building up content, raising a site’s Google ranking by increasing the number of places it’s linked. There are two types of SEO: white-hat (produced by good design and good practices) and black-hat (not approved or intended by search engines). Creating a bunch of backlinks through unrelated Web sites (like what’s happening on Tumblr) or through sites with little content is one example of black-hat SEO. And, despite the name, even big companies use black-hat techniques. JC Penney, for example, got nailed by the New York Times earlier this year for their sketchy backlinking techniques. — Ernie @ SFB
Yahoo wants to buy Hulu now too. They’re going on an “I...
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OMG. I got so...
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Tumblr this morning. [h/t anne]
#@#$%!.tumblr.com
Here’s a hidden feature that shipped in...
In a few weeks we’ll shut down Google Buzz and the Buzz API, and focus instead on Google+. While people obviously won’t be able to create new posts after that, they will be able to view their existing content on their Google Profile, and download it using Google Takeout.
Let’s face it, it was time. Google Buzz had long been a wasteland of RSS feeds and awkwardly-shared Google Reader content, and Google+, despite the engineering department’s criticism of the product, has been gaining some needed … uh, buzz, with 40 million users and counting. And the fact of the matter is, we still use it every day. With Buzz, we were gone within a few weeks. So were a lot of people. Noted techie Leo Laporte, for example, noted that Buzz was basically a wasteland back in August … of 2010 (it launched in February of that year). So if anything, this was overdue.
Google marks what would have been stop-motion clay animation pioneer Art Cloakey’s 90th birthday.
And it’s fully interactive, of course.
Somehow cooler than the Muppet one. Surprisingly.
It may be too early now to talk about the Law of Unintended Consequences, but years from now, we may owe a debt to reforms like Dodd-Frank for finally weaning us off the physical wallet and encouraging us to experiment with the new technologies helping to create the Digital Wallet.The Washington Post’s Dominic Basulto • Arguing that Dodd-Frank’s side effects — such as Bank of America’s decision to start charging people for the right to use a debit card — will be great in the long run, because it will push consumers and businesses to stop relying on banks for these sorts of services, instead going for phone-based options, provided by companies such as Google or Square, instead. Basuito compares Bank of America’s controversial move to Netflix’s price-raising scheme, and suggests it will hurt them long-term. source (via • follow)
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