Australian YouTube Paid Search Unveiled

Today YouTube, the video sharing giant, introduced a new Australian feature called the Promoted Video’s service; which promises to allow potential advertisers to target keywords that are related to their video in a bid to get YouTube users to click on them.

The Promoted Video’s service is said to work the same way as Google AdWords, with users of the service “bidding” on keywords, with that bid being subtracted from their budget every time their ad is clicked.

The Promoted Videos are said to be placed with two appearing at the top of a search result, and eight appearing down the side.

This new service YouTube has enabled for Australian users has greatly enhanced YouTube’s ability to help users reach their target audience in a cost effective and efficient way.

Facebook forces privacy review

One of the internet’s largest social networking sites, Facebook, of which over 7.7 million Australians visit every month, is forcing all of their users to review their privacy settings.

The forced review is in the wake of a number of events that have called into question what Facebook intends to do with all of their users account data; the major incident causing this being an investigation by the Canadian Government’s Privacy commission.

The inquiry by the privacy commission resulted in several privacy violations; mostly to do with application developers’ "virtually unrestricted access to Facebook users' personal information."

According to Facebook, the features of the site that are set to see changes will be the explanations that users get as to why Facebook needs their information – for example, there’s no information given as to why the website needs to know your date of birth.

Applications will also be effected by these changes, instead of the simple “Allow” or “Cancel” choices you get when installing an application; there will be more detailed information that will specify exactly what information of yours the application will be accessing – and why.

The Canadian Privacy commission is happy with the proposed changes, and says that it will help protect Facebook user’s privacy globally. Facebook has said that the planned changes are to happen immediately, but won’t be completed for about a year.

Twitter to cash in on businesses

The incredibly popular micro blogging service Twitter, which has been unable to yet turn a profit, is planning to generate income from Twitter by the end of the year; says Biz Stone, who is Twitter’s co-founder.

There are a few ways that Twitter can start turning a profit, and they all involve charging businesses that use Twitter.

One method that Mr Stone has proposed is simply charging a fee to their business users; while another way of making money from Twitter is charging businesses for an optional premium service, which lets them view more detailed information about Twitter users.

The news of Twitters planned monetisation was coupled with the news that location based features will be added to the service, which will let Twitter users see where “tweets” are being sent from; and allow businesses and people to track “tweets” coming from specific cities and neighbourhoods.

Is Rupert Shooting Himself in the Foot?

Rupert Murdoch’s announcement that News Ltd will start charging consumers for online news is a bold strategy – but will it work? There is no doubting that the traditional media outlets are hurting, and they are hurting bad: profits falling, circulations falling and staff getting the chop. Things are so bad Fairfax Chief Executive Brian McCarthy has even floated the idea of holding talks with rivals News Ltd to “join forces” to charge for news online
(http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/business/story/0,28124,25975971-643,00.html).

The news organisations are partly to blame for this great calamity - years ago when the internet was in its infancy, the newspapers thought, hey! let’s start putting our content online for free, surely that would never affect our circulation.

So is charging users access to online news content the great saviour for the media outlets?

I think that there are three BIG problems that need to be solved here:

1. Users HATE paying for content that they can get for free elsewhere such as ABC Online.


2. As soon as they start charging for content, page impressions are going to fall, causing a drop in advertising.


3. When they start charging – will they still run advertisements?
   

So here are some of the solutions that I thought would be worth considering:

1. Offer a premium service for content, i.e. no ads, faster access, premium content such as video. The existing service stays, but with ads.


2. Data costs money, specifically if you are using a phone to access the site. Consider striking a deal with the major telco networks (such as Telstra), that will give paying users unlimited downloads from the news site. If you can convince users that they are already “paying” for accessing the site through download charges, and transfer this cost – the user won’t end up paying any more for it.


3. If they are still running a free service, consider some kind of user registration process (this may be basic). As part of this process, get some basic demographic details – details that will help advertisers target their audience more effectively (Facebook for example does this quite effectively). The current way banner advertising works is a very shotgun approach - advertisers can be charged more for less impressions if they know their ads are hitting their target audience.
   

This is BIG wakeup call for the rest of the media industry (especially the broadcast media) – so they should start making plans now, because the internet in 5-6 years is going to erode your market share.

New Opera browser in the works

The web browser Opera, which debuted in 1994 as a research project by a Norwegian telecom company, is set to release a new iteration of their popular browser: Opera 10 which is currently in the testing phase and is soon to be released.

Opera has some features that are unique to the browser, such as mouse gestures, which allow you to perform actions such as opening a new tab, by making a special movement with the mouse. Opera is also able to be controlled via voice commands.

There are also some new features that are to be implemented with Opera 10, with one of them being the much anticipated ‘Turbo’ mode, which is designed to speed up slow connections by compressing network traffic, a feature that could help many Australians still stuck on dialup internet.

From a web development perspective, Opera has always been a good choice for a browser, as it adheres strictly to the World Wide Web Consortium’s guidelines. Opera 10 promises to be even better, as it has many bug fixes, operates much faster than previous versions, and has many new web development tools.

Google unveils new search algorithm

The web giant Google revealed its new search algorithm on Monday, which is a next-generation architecture called ‘Caffeine’.

Caffeine, which the team at Google have been silently slaving away on for months, promises to increase the search engines indexing speed, indexing size and accuracy; which should mean better results in the long term for Google searches.

There have been suggestions that this release is due to pressure from new competitors in the search engine industry, which Google has dominated in recent years.
However, Google has denied these claims saying that the upgrade has been in the works for months.

It is interesting to note that when we performed some searches here at Trent Moffatt Designs on Google’s test site; such as ‘Web Development Gold Coast’ and ‘Gold Coast Web’ we have had very different search engine results compared to what we get on the current search engine at Google.com.

There is currently a sandbox for the new algorithm, which can be viewed and tested at: http://www2.sandbox.google.com/.

Twitter DDoS

Two days ago the social networking website, Twitter experienced a massive DDoS (denial of service) attack that took down the website and forced the millions of people that use the service unable to tweet.

A DDoS attack is a means of forcing a website down by delivering more traffic than they can handle, which disallows people who want to use the website for legitimate reasons to do so.
The DDoS attack that caused Twitter’s outage was traced back to a specific profile on Twitter; that of a Georgia supporter called ‘Cyxymu’, who was tweeting in support of Georgia in the Russia/Georgia conflict.

The attack was reportedly coming from computers around the globe, and not only hit Twitter but also other social networking websites such as Facebook and Livejournal, where ‘Cyxymu’ also had profiles, causing slowdown and issues.
Twitter is still battling the ongoing DDoS attack, which has led to them having to disable some parts of their API in defence, leaving some third party applications not working for the time being.

It is interesting to note that the profile has grown from 300 followers to about 3,000, a sign of the ‘Streisand effect’, which is where an attempt to censor or remove information from the web backfires and actually makes that information more exposed than it ever would have been if attempts to censor it had not have proceeded in the first place.

The Streisand effect was famously coined after singer Barbra Streisand sued Pictopia.com for $50 million in an attempt to get an aerial photo of her house removed from a freely viewable database of photos of the Californian coastline; which existed to document erosion of said coastline.
The court case backfired, and millions of people have now viewed the photo.

You can view the notorious Twitter profile here: http://twitter.com/cyxymu