Almost a year after KinderStart sued Google for dropping it from the search engine’s index, the presiding judge has put an end to the case by siding with Google’s requests.

KinderStart Case Against Google Dismissed

"Over? Did you say ‘over’? Nothing is over until we decide it is!" — Bluto Blutarsky gives his memorable speech in Animal House

Even though it wasn’t over for the Deltas, it is over for KinderStart. Unless KinderStart wants to press the issue by appealing the decision, their lawsuit against Google has reached the finish line.

Matt Cutts, who provided a declaration for the case, posted a brief note along with a couple of excerpts from the decision by US District Court Judge Jeremy Fogel:

The judge in the KinderStart case granted Google’s motion to dismiss without leave to amend…I believe the judge also granted Google’s motion for sanctions against the plaintiff and the plaintiff’s attorney

Santa Clara University School of Law professor Eric Goldman agreed with Matt’s assessment:

Not only did Judge Fogel dismiss the complaint without leave to amend (meaning that the case is over unless KinderStart appeals to the Ninth Circuit), but he issued Rule 11 sanctions against KinderStart’s counsel Gregory Yu–meaning that Yu will have to pay some of Google’s legal fees (the amount will be determined later). The substantive result isn’t surprising given the complete lack of merit in the lawsuit from day 1, but the Rule 11 sanctions show, once again, that Google plays hardball against plaintiffs when threatened (it also shows that Judge Fogel doesn’t tolerate nonsense in his courtroom–good for him!).

KinderStart had accused Google of infringing free speech, antitrust activity, defamation, and other claims based on its site being dropped by Google to a PageRank of zero. This wiped out search-related traffic coming to the site from Google.

As Goldman noted in an earlier post about the case, "it’s precarious to build a business on free search engine traffic. My advice is to enjoy the ride so long as it lasts, but don’t plan on the good times lasting forever, and definitely don’t expect a ton of sympathy when the gravy train ends."

It does look like KinderStart and Yu should expect some mail from Google, bearing the words "Please Remit" on it.

KinderStart, Google, Lawsuit

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The essence of sites doing well with online news comes from embracing two concepts: participation, and community relevance.

Is Online News Living Your Experience?

Shifts in approaching the Internet by news sites need to take into account what their audiences want. Sounds fundamental, almost simplistic, but not real easy to pull off.

Kevin Anderson noted one incident in his discussion of ‘lived experience’ with news sites that really emphasized the need for such community focus. A December 2006 talk that mentioned a journalism project called MyMissourian.com showed how readers judge what is news far differently from professional editors:

I still remember last December when Clyde Bentley spoke about his MyMissourian.com project at a Journalism.co.uk event where I also spoke. Clyde said that his team had expected more discussion and stories about politics, especially during the US Midterms elections last year. As a matter of fact, he said:

You know what’s not popular? Politics. … Religion is far more popular than we predicted. And pictures of dogs, cats, even rats trump most copy.

That’s evocative of Hannibal Lecter’s line from The Silence of the Lambs: "We begin by coveting what we see every day." People want the familiar in their news.

Another quote comes to mind, this time from Terry Pratchett’s Patrician in The Truth: "In short, what people think they want is news, but what they really crave is olds."

(We managed to quote a serial killer and a dictator - both fictional of course - in relating the views of the typical Internet user to the news they seek. Let’s see the New York Times match that.)

Anderson made a good point about community in that thinking of it as hyper-local only works to a certain degree. It’s not just geography, but a locale of interests.

Locality in functions and in stories are ideas we’re trying to meld at WebProNews. If you’re a repeat visitor, it’s likely you have a persistent interest in search-related topics. That’s the locality of stories in play.

Functionally, you have seen a number of changes on WebProNews. The look and feel has changed a little, the addition of features has been greater. We’ve made video part of the weekday experience, and as conference season gets under way there will be coverage of events like Pubcon, SES, and Danny Sullivan’s events like SMX Advanced 2007:Search Marketing Expo.

It’s our way of focusing on the important issues ‘localized’ to your interests. We will continue to tweak things like the recently added comments feature below this story. Let us know what you think, and what you might want to see here.

Online, News

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David Sims writes a great piece on CDMA2000 1xEV-DO Revision A technology and it is faster as you would expect that traditional EVDO. Verizon and Lucent are trialing this new technology and I cant wait till it comes out. I cant tell you how many times this network has saved me in the last year or so since I have had it.

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When a bookseller chooses a name for his/her business, should they be concerned with the name they choose, or does it even matter?

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(RSDS)There is so much valuable data here. You can tell where people are buying, what they’re buying, and what they’re doing for business. You will know what every item sold for what each individual paid for each item. It is also a good idea to check the number of names on each individual list to see what the demand for that service or product is. Are you starting to see the value in these books?

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Another anonymous blogger is in the defamation hot seat after anonymous commentators labeled a local school board member a "bigot," an "anit-Semite," and even "ugly." The target of those words didn’t take kindly to them and is demanding that Google reveal both the identity of the blogger and the commentators.

Google Asked To Reveal Blogger Identity

And Google says they’ll do it, too, if the court says so, at a cost to the petitioner of $75 per hour. "Orthomom," the blogger in question, has until April 5 to file an objection.

The full details of this case are not so interesting – it’s a local school board cat fight. As the son of two public school teachers, I can speak from experience that these things, more often than not, devolve into bloodthirsty, political cheap shots. So I’ll spare you the background.

But the case again brings up the important question of what constitutes libel, the limits of free expression, and the right of anonymity. More specifically, it addresses these issues as they pertain to blogs, forums, social networks, and websites.

An important fact up front is that Orthomom made none of the questionable comments. Yet, Pamela Greenbaum, the offended school board member is seeking to have her identity revealed as well, in order to file a defamation lawsuit.

Greenbaum is petitioning Google to release data and/or printouts identifying the person responsible for the blog, including registration records, renewal, and IP addresses, and also data identifying the person(s) attributed to "Anonymous."  

On January 11, 2007, following a heated local debate involving public and private schools, some of the Long Island Orthodox Jewish community, 300,000 of which it is claimed follow Orthomom’s blog, began hurling insults directed at Greenbaum.

These insults included anonymous statements like:

_{Pam Greenbaum is a bigot and really should not be on the board.}

greenbaum is not to be believed

If history is a guide, She will make it a dirty campaign, so be prepared.

Pam Greenbaum, refusing to ever agree with an Orthodox Jew, now opposes protecting children.

Orthomom and her attorney have put forth a few arguments against Greenbaum’s demands, not the least of which is that Orthomom herself never made the comments, and that, as a provider of an online forum, she is protected from actionable third-party comments by the oft-cited Section 230 of the US Code.

In a subsequent blogpost, Orthomom defends herself this way:

The bottom line is that an anonymous commenter calling someone a "bigot’ in an an anonymous forum is simply not defamatory… The statement is clearly one of opinion, not fact, and it is further tempered by the fact that an anonymous commenter is not considered a credible source by the vast majority of readers.

In addition, the bar is even higher to prove a statement as defamatory when one takes into account that Ms. Greenbaum is a public official, as the commenter would have had to show malice - which is legally defined as "falsity or reckless disregard of the truth".

And it’s difficult to prove malice, if the statement is an opinion, which everyone, in the US at least, is entitled to. For precedent, let’s look at an opinion statement as it has been questioned in the past. There are a number of words to examine, like "ugly" or "racist," but the host of the blog Krum As A Bagel wins the prize for libel research with a legal explanation of "dumb ass":

A statement that the plaintiff is a "Dumb Ass," even first among "Dumb Asses," communicates no factual proposition susceptible of proof or refutation… depending on context, it may convey a lack less of objectively assayable mental function than of such imponderable and debatable virtues as judgment or wisdom.

Here defendant did not use "dumb" in isolation, but as part of the idiomatic phrase, "dumb ass." When applied to a whole human being, the term "ass" is a general expression of contempt essentially devoid of factual content. Adding the word "dumb" merely converts "contemptible person" to "contemptible fool."

Plaintiffs were justifiably insulted by this epithet, but they failed entirely to show how it could be found to convey a provable factual proposition. … If the meaning conveyed cannot by its nature be proved false, it cannot support a libel claim.

So yes, you can, legally call someone a dumb ass, or pretty much any other vague insult.

Paul Alan Levy, attorney for Orthomom, probably says it best though, as he pushes for dismissal (which most seem to think is likely):

The right to criticize anonymously on the Internet is a fundamental free speech right and an important tool for whistleblowers and consumers who speak out about the misconduct or corruption of big companies or public figures.

Those who want to intimidate their critics with the threat of identification, but who have no real basis for suing, should learn from this case that they cannot file suit and then expect to withdraw if the critics are ready to fight back. Companies and powerful individuals who try this trick should be prepared for the financial consequences.

Which, I take to mean, there will be a countersuit. Should be interesting to watch.

GooglelibellawPam GreenbaumOrthomomBlogspotfree speech

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When starting an online home business there is always the concern about how much it is going to cost before you start making money online.

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A few people have recently asked me why I think many of the big book sales are banning scanners and it has been a topic of discussion among many booksellers.

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When you set out to make money online, identity theft will probably not be top of your list of concerns but, if you want to hang on to the money you make, protecting your online passwords is vital.

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Getting an internet business off the ground can be expensive, but a good internet marketing program including free classified advertising may be of great value…at the lowest price possible!

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The Live Search product will no longer be living in the same house with all of the other Windows Live products. A new leader will take it over as Microsoft forms a new “beat Google” corporate group.

Live Search Sails With New Captain

The Search and Ad Platform puts Live Search and adCenter together to focus on the common enemy: anyone who is taking money in search advertising.

Google ranks first and foremost in that list. Figures from comScore for February’s US search engine rankings showed Google gobbling up more than 48 percent of the market. Microsoft sites dipped to 10.5 percent for the same month.

If Microsoft’s fortunes improve, Satya Nadella could be the guy steering the company’s search flagship to the big X on the treasure map. Reuters noted how Nadella, a long-time Microsoft veteran, had picked up the leadership position for the new group.

The change comes as former head of search Chris Payne announced a few weeks ago he planned to ditch Microsoft in favor of launching a non-search startup company. That’s not a good sign, when the person charged with taking on the competition gets a good look at the opponent’s ship of the line and decides he’s better off in a rowboat.

ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley wrote that Nadella had formerly led Microsoft’s Dynamics ERP software lines. Nadella’s gain in the reorganization is senior VP Steven Sinofsky’s loss, as Live Search formerly reported to him.

Moving search and ads together at Microsoft seems to make sense. Matt Rosoff, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft, said in Foley’s report, “I think it makes perfect sense to consolidate adCenter and Web search, and I’m only surprised it took Microsoft so long to do so.”

It could be that Microsoft wanted to find the right person for the task. Nadella has worked on a variety of technologies in Microsoft, but his listed experience won’t make anyone think he’s the search industry equivalent of Russell Crowe’s Lucky Jack when it comes to chasing down Google’s vessel of profits.

Microsoft, Live Search, Satya Nadella

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Travelocity’s chief marketing officer Jeffrey Glueck recently spilled out some ROI numbers on paid search that has the industry buzzing. Glueck said 96 percent of Travelocity’s conversions came from branded keywords used for paid search.

Travelocity: 96% Of ROI From Branded SEM

Travelocity’s numbers focus on the real ROI of search marketing, and build a convincing case for branded keywords against non-branded keywords, which converted into a booking just 4 percent of the time.

While the numbers are convincing, Glueck has not addressed in sufficient detail the idea that non-branded keywords are used mostly in the research phase of the search experience.

The ROI on that presence during research may not be directly measurable, as Glueck would like, but it stands to reason that it is important to have your brand present wherever it matters.

But for good measure, we’ll consider Glueck’s stats, as presented at the IAB’s Performance Marketing Forum:

• 2% of paid-search conversions originated from a searcher clicking on a non-branded term and then a branded term later
• According to 360i, branded keywords account for just 5% of search marketers’ total spend, but account for 80% of profits from paid search
• 65% of Travelocity paid-search visitors arrived via one ad from one keyword
• 27% of Travelocity paid-search visitors clicked ads multiple times via the same keyword repeatedly
• 8% used a variety of keywords
• Geo-targeting works: local flight information offered in ads converted 6 to 7 times better than ad banners

Glueck told AdAge, which has more stats, that it was a "profound mistake by all of us to think we’ve figured out how to measure ROI on search. We’re in stage one." 

TravelocitySEMBrandingKeywordsConversions

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Many people each day are searching the Internet for Internet marketing information, and even more are looking for business opportunities and how to make money online.I believe anyone that wants to run any type of business online, should first invest some time and money into their Internet marketing training. Learning how to market on the web through courses or coaching will help develop your business much faster than you would with out it.

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It is essential to devise a strategy for dealing with the time wasters in your business. This article provides practical advice on efficiently handling the various interruptions to your working day.

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What would you do with a 1 Mb/s always-on connection in your pocket, on your laptop, or any other device? Om and I talk discuss current offerings from major U.S. carriers as well as some of the applications that are already taking advantage of these new ubiquitous broadband connections.

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What do you know about your business?..If you are new to running a business, and have been working the 9-5 job grind, the thought of running a business can be overwhelming to think about. However, it doesn’t need not be a burden to a newbie who is trying to figure out where to start. Before you initiate any efforts to get started, know what is involved before you even start your business.

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Sprint will deploy WiMax on 2.5 Ghz spectrum covering 85% of the nations top 100 markets. West said Sprint also looked at Flarions Flash-OFDM technology (which we reviewed when Nextel tested it in North Carolina) and IPWireless UMTS-TDD technology, but neither were good fits

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World of Warcraft, Second Life, Final Fantasy Online, Everquest and a whole slew of other online environments are booming as broadband access has continued to proliferate throughout the United States and beyond.

Virtual Words Valued At A Billion

When one considers online profitability, the retail and advertising industries immediately spring to mind. Why shouldn’t they, after all?

Online retailers such as Amazon, as well as Google’s advertising network, rake in hefty quarterly margins that are sure to greatly please company stockholders. Online moneymaking, however, isn’t limited to just these two realms.

In fact, another rapidly growing presence in the eCommerce sector is coming from an unlikely source: online games.

With the success of its World of Warcraft MMO franchise, Blizzard practically has a license to print money these days.

The company boasts a subscription base of over eight million, and when you multiply that by $15 a month, you begin to see where all the money actually comes from.

An independent study conducted by Screen Digest values the worth of virtual worlds at more than $1 billion dollars, mostly based on the revenues generated from the commonly used subscription model.

According to a BBC article covering the report, “Revenues from subscriptions to MMOGs will hit $1.5bn by 2011” which may seem slow compared to the growth of other industries, but still reflects a steady increase in value over time.

The BBC goes on to quote Piers Harding-Rolls, author of the report, concerning his views on why the online gaming realm is growing so steadily:

"Over the last couple of years, certainly in Europe, the MMOG market has mushroomed partly due to the success of World of Warcraft. There are lots of things driving growth. There has been a shift from what were traditional, core games into a more casual space."

Online video is the hot topic these days, but the real dark horse player in Web 2.0 could perhaps be the revenue potential of these virtual words.

Tags: Virtual Worlds, Online Gaming, eCommerce, World of Warcraft

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When should you get out of being a subscriber to an internet marketing guru’s mailing list?

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The phrase internet marketing is one that is quite broad to say the least. The fact of the matter is that internet marketing may mean one thing to you, but to another it could paint a different picture entirely. But although you may see this as a problem, it is actually a good thing. This means that internet marketing is a vast industry that can be tackled in a number of different ways.

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Though Yahoo Finance has earned its place as the top online financial site, Google’s version has several positives going for it that may be overlooked.

Google Finance A Rewarding Experience

Yahoo Finance does something very well. It presents access to a lot of stock information that the reader won’t find outside of an online subscription to the Wall Street Journal. In recent months they have coupled that with regular contributions from prominent columnists like Ben Stein.

Manoj Jasra at Web Analytics World found a few reasons to enjoy the Google Finance experience. Google’s product suffered from jaded disappointment expressed by some notable blogger types at launch, but even then the site seemed to have promise.

Jasra has picked up on some of the things to recommend a trip to Google Finance. The ad-free interface comes first in his list. No ads for online brokerages or yummy Pillsbury cookies, as he observed at Yahoo.

That big Ajax powered chart appearing on stock pages, and the daily data about a stock’s price, draw the visitor’s attention. Jasra appreciated seeing the most important information presented this prominently.

The presentation Google Finance uses places everything it has about a stock on a single web page. All the financials, executive info, and other details are there waiting to be scrolled. Yahoo’s model links to much of those details; personal preference will determine which approach is better.

When it comes to search, Jasra made a nice point about each site. Yahoo Finance search is much less noticeable than Yahoo’s general web search. Google’s big search box can’t be missed at the top of the page.

It may have been fashionable to dismiss Google Finance at launch (a viewpoint we disagreed with at the time), but it presents a lot of details about a stock in one place. It’s a valuable starting point for researching stock details online.

Finance, Google, Yahoo

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Internet marketing strategies are important to implement in your websites in order for your business to survive. However, using the wrong strategies can you cost your business. These are some of the strategies that you should look out for.

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Judging by a patent application filed by Google for ranking blog search, one of the three things a blog should have is a blogroll, and being included in some high-quality ones will help too.

Google Loves A Tasty Blogroll

SEO by the Sea blogger Bill Slawski has made a practice of diving into the rough waters of patent language, and emerging with pearls of detailed, readable wisdom.

His recent blog post about a filing by Google for ranking blog search turned up several points that could help a blog show up in a search, or keep it from being a factor.

Slawski found that Google considers blogs to contain three content types:

• The content of recent posts,
• A blogroll, and;
• Blog metadata (author profile information and/or other information about the blog or its author).

While it’s likely Google is going to look at other factors in ranking blogs, the positives and negatives observed by Slawski show how the process resembles the fabled PageRank Google has used as part of its website rankings.

Positive factors for a blog include its popularity, inclusion in blogrolls (especially high-quality ones), and tagging of the blog. News aggregator subscriptions could imply high popularity. Google said that it could validate those against "subscriptions spam" by checking for unique subscriber IP addresses.

On the positive side of the calculation, Slawski suggested how Google might calculate another factor mentioned in the filing:

Implied popularity

Instead of explicit subscriptions, an “implied popularity” could be calculated from data collected from people searching on Blog Search, and examining the click stream of search results:

For example, if a certain blog document is clicked more than other blog documents when the blog document appears in result sets, this may be an indication that the blog document is popular and, thus, a positive indicator of the quality of the blog document.

Some negative factors could impact a blog. New posting frequency, especially at set intervals, could be a tipoff of a low quality, i.e. spam, blog. Post content and size might raise alarms in Google’s algorithm, and push the blog to a lower ranking.

Slawski offered a couple of points where such negative ranking could affect a blog that actually contains valid content. A blog about Nigerian spam emails, he noted, may not rank well by Google’s criteria.

Google could also divine some unsavory intent by the way links get sprinkled throughout a blog, by Slawski’s reckoning:

Link distribution of the blog document

It appears that under this quality scoring system, whom you are linking to is considered, too:

As disclosed above, some posts are created to increase the pagerank of a particular blog document. In some cases, a high percentage of all links from the posts or from the blog document all point to ether a single web page, or to a single external site. If the number of links to any single external site exceeds a threshold, this can be a negative indication of quality of the blog document.

At the end of January, Robert Scoble compared a handful of blog searches, including Google’s. Even though he quibbled with Google’s default presentation of relevance sorting, he liked it far more than Technorati.

Going by Slawski’s findings, that’s because Google has a lot going on in the engine room of its blog search service.

Google, Blog, Ranking, Patent

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Have you noticed it yet? Like the rising tide, it’s coming in almost unnoticed. Then suddenly, you’ll be washed away — unless you take decisive action, now!

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Read this in depth review on Keyword Elite and learn about its features. Discover if this is the research tool you have been looking for.

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How does a new or existing internet business opportunity seeker get visitors and traffic to find you amongst literally millions of other similar sites? It requires that you understand how and where to go. This article is intended to help you along the way in providing some insights to both of these.

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Establish an epresence is an important part of the modern business marketing plan today because it is more cost effective, more adaptable, and more specific than other forms of advertising and marketing available.

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If you’re interested in buying links from web directories so that your sites will rank with the search engines, there are a number of factors you will want to take into consideration. First, there are a large number of directories available on the web. While some of them are high in quality, many of them are not. As an online business person, you must maximize your available resources, and this means you can’t afford to waste even small amounts of money on a directory that do…

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Honest Internet Riches by Holly Mann is probably one of the most popular guides to the secrets of making money on the Internet. It provides advice to people new to Internet marketing as well as those with prior knowledge and the latest edition has just been updated for 2007. But is it for real ? Does it work ? Like many I saw Hollys ad page partly because of the reference to the Rich Jerk. I had bought his book and was quite impressed with it even if some of the techniqu…

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What’s been called an assault on click-fraud, or affiliate networks, or both, could also carry with it a little controversy. Google’s recent beta launch of pay-per-action AdSense, available only to US advertisers, was released overtop another new product: the text link format ad unit.

Google Sneaks Embedded Text Link Ads Into PPA

See, according to the conspiratorially minded, while everybody buzzed about PPA, they’d be less apt to notice the Snap-like or Intellitext-like advertising platform that allows publishers to embed ads in hyperlinks appearing within content.

Before, AdSense ads were confined to certain spaces, transparently. But there in Google’s PPA FAQ is this:

Text links are hyperlinked brief text descriptions that take on the characteristics of a publisher’s page. Publishers can place them in line with other text to better blend the ad and promote your product.

For example, you might see the following text link embedded in a publisher’s recommendatory text: “Widgets are fun! I encourage all my friends to Buy a high-quality widget today.” (Mousing over the link will display “Ads by Google” to identify these as pay-per-action ads).

"They’ve crossed a hazy ethical line here," writes TechCrunch blogger Michael Arrington. "If this product was announced on its own, it would be heavily debated by the blogs and press. But by burying it in other, bigger news, they’ve mostly avoided the critical analysis that this actually deserves."

What’s the big deal? Well, for the Google purists out there, sneaking in an advertisement rather than there being a clear demarcation between ads and content, is somewhat of a sin. Google seems to have realized this, but perhaps was hoping it was a small sin.

As for what the new model could do to affiliate networks, most outlooks are bleak.

"Commission Junction and LinkShare are screwed," comments Arrington.

Greg Sterling, blogging for Search Engine Journal, disagrees.

"I think that we’ll have to see how widely embraced Google’s program is and what the empirical fallout is accordingly. I’m not ready to proclaim the death of these networks. I think that marketers want alternatives to Google and I’m sure some of these programs are working quite well for them."

GooglePPACPACPCText LinkAdSense

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