There are many potential business opportunities that you can launch with public domain works. Religion/Philosophy, The Arts, and Music are some of the popular categories where the public domain is very strong, where you can find your own niche within and build a thriving money-making business out of it.

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The way searchers behave on search engines provides a lot of insight into what companies can do to improve their search services. A SES San Jose panel covered some recent enlightenment on searcher behavior research.

SES: Searcher? Oh, Behave!

(Our on-scene WebProNews staff has passed along this latest news from SES San Jose 2007. If you can’t be there, you need to be here with WebProNews this week, for videos and reports.)

Pavan Lee of Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions has a lot of respect for soccer moms. Microsoft has measured and explored their Net usage to determine the role of search in their buying habits.

It’s fertile ground for exploration. Lee said their findings showed their soccer moms possessed considerable Net and search savvy. They also have tremendous influence on household purchases.

Nine out of ten of them use the Net a couple of times a day, and when they surf they are looking for deals. Lee noted that 80 percent of the moms look for something in the consumer-packaged goods category at least once a day.

ComScore senior VP James Lamberti said these packaged goods searches bode well as a preview of the “digital shelf,” where Net users can browse just as they do in a brick and mortar marketplace.

As e-commerce entrepreneurs reach for customers, Lamberti suggested they market to the consumer’s motivation. Examples of motivation would be one’s lifestyle, like active or laid-back, or lifestage, such as college student or married parent.

Citing Kellogg’s Organic Cereals as an example, Lamberti said an opportunity had been missed. They built a brand through much work, but neglected to consider search, as demonstrated by this query.

Oliver Deighton, a Google product marketing manager, talked about brand advertising. He said brand fixation behaviors occur in the URL and the title of a listing, not in its description.

As a best practice, one should place the brand in the URL, title, and as close to the start of the description as possible.

(Editor’s note: Deighton also recommended buying brand keywords for advertising. It just happens we posted an opposing viewpoint to consider. Briefly, if a brand already ranks highly in organic search, paid search could be an inefficient use of one’s marketing budget. - David)

SES San Jose, Search, Behavior

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Search sites measured by comScore under their new qScore 2.0 methodology will benefit from the hosted and affiliated search traffic they send back to the main search engine. It’s a scenario that offers Google a heaping helping of share by comScore’s reckoning.

ComScore qScore Tallies Well For Google

A couple of significant changes by comScore will alter the landscape of how they assess search engines.

Steve Dennen, senior director of product management at comScore, said in a presentation today how qSearch 2.0 will expand the collection of search data in existing, and to new, markets. They will extend the search universe beyond core engines, accounting for the rise of sites like Wikipedia.

But when it comes to those core search sites, Google wins a nice increase in the figures comScore now calculates for the qScore. ComScore will treat multi-tab searches for the same query as distinct searches, rather than as one search with multiple page results.

Google really gets a boost from the addition of hosted and affiliate site searches to the core numbers. Between its search boxes on numerous websites and the acquisition of YouTube and its traffic, Google’s share of search under the qScore 2.0 calculation gave it 54.9 percent market share for June 2007, and 55.2 percent for July.

Dennen acknowledged the changes would benefit Google disproportionately, as qScore 2.0 includes these chief contributors. YouTube essentially added about 20 percent to Google’s market share by comScore’s figures.

The order of the top five search engines didn’t change with the new methodology. Yahoo, Microsoft, Ask.com, and Time Warner sites including AOL rounded out the group. Only Ask and AOL look like they will jostle for the four and five spots unless one of them can make some dramatic inroads on the share owned by the top three.

comScore, qScore, Search Engine, Market Share

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Public Domain materials can be used to solve problems for your subscribers and customers. Which public domain products could you use?

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There are many potential business opportunities that you can launch with public domain works. History is one of the popular categories where the public domain is very strong, where you can find your own niche within and build a thriving money-making business out of it.

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Google VP of Search Products & User Experience, Marissa Mayer, handled the morning keynote for SES San Jose and revealed her love for a certain social networking service.

SES San Jose: Marissa Mayer Speaks

(Our on-scene WebProNews staff has passed along this latest news from SES San Jose 2007. If you can’t be there, you need to be here with WebProNews this week, for videos and reports.)

Marissa Mayer needs no introduction for the search marketing crowd. Google’s most visible person this side of Matt Cutts ranged across a variety of topics with Danny Sullivan for SES San Jose attendees.

She mentioned the shift to universal search, and how it represented a big change for Google. It’s still a work in progress.

Even after it is complete, it may be a while before search performs the way she expects to see it. In ten or fifteen years, Mayer thinks search will know searchers better by looking at additional information sources, like address books.

She even believes search engines will ask and learn from those who use them.

(Editor’s note - Ten or fifteen years? I’m thinking this is a feint. Remember, Google has always been interested in artificial intelligence and working on it. I don’t believe they are that far away from enhancing their personalization. - David)

Mayer mentioned some shifts made with the Street View feature now available on Google Maps. It’s supposed to be a fun and useful service, but controversial images and privacy complaints have led them to start blurring faces and license plates.

(Editor’s note - Our Jason Lee Miller spotted a Google car taking Street View pictures in town this week. He may have been photographed by one, which should make everyone glad Marissa announced the blurring-faces thing for Street View. - David)

Through all of Google’s work, Mayer said the company wants to make better and richer answers available to the search engine’s users. Their efforts will continue to focus on function before form.

One form that appeals to the Google VP comes in the form of Facebook, which Mayer loves. She is impressed by the intelligence and structure of the site.

Perhaps Google’s engineers, or the mergers & acquisitions department, will work on giving Mayer something to love in-house?

SES San Jose, Marissa Mayer, Google

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Find out why video is the next syndication craze and how you can get more traffic with video syndication.

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Thanks to the abundance of online scams such as the get-rich-quick schemes prevalent on the Internet, people seem to have forgotten that while there may be a thousand and one ways to make money, there are always a few core principles that invariably apply whenever youre talking about building a business or an alternate income stream.

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For anyone who operates a blog or a website, they can benefit greatly from learning HOW and WHY the top search listings got to the top in the first place. Here is a non-technical guide to understanding Google’s system for rating the value a website, the PageRank system.

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The art of putting together a best selling eBay listing.

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One thing you can count on in a user-generated world is passion, and threats to leave because of changes. Another thing you can count on is that they probably don’t mean it, and there’s a good chance their anger’s misplaced.

YouTubers Threaten Revolt! (Again)

Not that there’s not a place for righteous anger – there is – and Video Egg’s dejection over YouTube’s introduction of video ad overlays may land square in that territory. Based on patent applications, Video Egg indeed may have thought of it first, even if it seems largely inspired by TV "snipes" (thanks to Om Malik for updating my terminology). Video Egg is getting some collateral publicity, though, so not all is lost.

But anyone who’s followed Web 2.0 developments over the past couple of years could have done a count down to how long it would take YouTubers to revolt over the new ad placements with as much accuracy as they might have predicted that it had to happen eventually.

Google paid $1.65 billion for YouTube, which at the time was clocking a million-dollar-per-month bandwidth bill, plus legal expenses, that may prove fruitless in the end, to fend off another billion-dollar demand from Viacom, among others in line to sue.

So, yes, monetization is a high priority. 

One also might have predicted the small uprising getting some coverage, as YouTube was the new MySpace last year, even if this year’s YouTube is Facebook. Ahem. So CNet’s round up of dissent, even if seemingly failing to explain to the subject(s) interviewed that the ads are intended for media partners only and not for user-submitted videos, is therefore gratuitous, as is ComputerWorld’s assertion that YouTube may need to rethink their advertising model.

After all, the same commentators from the YouTube blog that CNet cited are threatening to leave en masse. "Yuck" seems to be the most popular comment, as quoted several times throughout the blogosphere.

But the righteous "keep my YouTube pure" crowd seems to have missed the point that their own videos won’t be affected, at least not yet. One such misunderstanding, echoed by many, is illustrated by YouTube blog commentator "lonelybloggers":

I find it alarming that you won’t be sharing "in-video" advertising with the people that actually own the content….if YouTube is going to profit from "in-video/intrusive" ads, you should be kicking some of that revenue back to the owners of the content. Without content YouTube would not exist, so why not reward the people that spend the time and money to produce video that you profit from? In the end what choice do we have? I hope the Google/YouTube team considers it’s options very carefully here, because people will simply stop posting here and find other places to post their video content.…If you want to profit from my content, pay me too for allowing you the right to feature the content I paid to create.

lonelybloggers, paradoxically, brings up one good point while missing another. The truth is, at least by what was announced, that YouTube is sharing revenue with media partners, just not with users. This guards against unauthorized uploads that violate copyrights or terms of service having advertising appearing within, thus bolstering Viacom-esque complaints that YouTube is profiting from copyrighted material. "Select" media partners split the revenues generated by the videos by charging $20 per 1000 views.

But the interesting issue brought up in the above comment was the concept of reward (other than exposure) for user uploads, which with copyrights is tricky. But users forfeit the rights to their content when uploading their videos, allowing, ironically, Viacom’s VH1 to use them on the show "Web Junk." The CW’s upcoming primetime show  "Online Nation" will also feature YouTube videos, and users see nothing but, well, more exposure.

That leads one to think that eventually, YouTube may need to think of some sort of distribution rights for its users, especially if they start leaving for lack of them.

But will they leave like they’ve threatened? Well, if history’s any guide, no. When Yahoo bought Flickr, users freaked. When News Corp. bought MySpace, users wailed about censorship and advertising. When YouTube gave Paris Hilton her own channel, again, commentators threatened revolt.

But one thing has remained constant: they have not revolted, only grown in numbers.  

YouTubeGooglevideo advertisingVideo EggWeb 2.0monetizationuser-generated content

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Public Domain works cannot be used up like a regular resource, such as oil or coal. So, if one entrepreneur (or infopreneur) taps up a public domain work on making more money or public speaking, nothing is stopping you from using the same resource for your own business venture.

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The public domain is a very powerful resource. Since everyone can essentially use the same information, you can have a situation in which the same knowledge, packaged in more or less the same formats, is saturating the market.

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There are several public domain websites on the Internet that offer nothing else except public domain works.

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There was a time, and it wasn’t that long ago really, where one could go to a show like SES and come away thinking that there just weren’t many women in the industry at all. Rebecca Lieb once joked to me that there was never any lines for the women’s restrooms at search conferences.I […]

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For many different niches you can find at least a dozen, profitable business ideas by searching through public domain materials. And with the public domain, it becomes a snap to take the information you require, re-package it, edit it if necessary and voila you have built the backbone of your online business (content) in no time at all.

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If you run an e-commerce site, you want visitors to become buyers. Panelists at SES San Jose suggested making those visitors feel secure while you make your call to action.

SES: The Almighty Conversion

(Our on-scene WebProNews staff has passed along this latest news from SES San Jose 2007. If you can’t be there, you need to be here with WebProNews this week, for videos and reports.)

Potential online customers have seen the numerous stories about online break-ins and identity theft in the news. It’s created wariness in many who could be served well by an e-commerce site with products those shoppers would normally wish to buy.

ScanAlert’s Nigel Ravenhill said this lack of consumer confidence restricts e-commerce growth. His firm tested this in 2005 on an e-commerce site where consumers would either see or not see ScanAlert’s ‘Hacker Safe’ image.

As might be expected, this A/B split test showed better conversions with the ‘Hacker Safe’ displays. Cautious shoppers want reassurance that their transactions will stay secure. Listing contact information and hours where customer service will be available for questions helps with this.

Ravenhill also noted that extending a cookie to a 30-day life, to allow people to come back to their shopping carts, gives the site a second chance to gain a shopper’s business. If the person leaves and comes back, and doesn’t have to shop a second time, that could lead to a sale.

Bryan Eisenberg talked about his concepts for calling shoppers to action. He listed a hierarchy of optimization as rules of thumb for the e-commerce webmaster:

1. Functional - does it do what I need?
2. Accessible - can everyone access it?
3. Usable - is it user-friendly
4. Intuitive - does it feel natural and doesn’t make me think?
5. Persuasive - about people and motivation

Different types of people shop in different ways. Eisenberg listed four personality types, which usually reflects the way they will act when browsing a site. Spontaneous types seek top sellers and new releases, while humanistics care about reviews.

Methodical types search by genre, or classes of items available from a seller. Competitive types search by actor, title, brand name, etc, when pursuing what they want. E-commerce sites can appeal to these types with a persuasive architecture, by recognizing these consumer types and focusing on what the site can offer versus the ways these people will shop.

SES San Jose, Shopping, E-commerce, Conversions

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Believe it or not, theres actually some method to the search madness when looking for public domain materials to use in your business. The search engines have a hard time trying to organize the information precisely because the Internet is so decentralized and vast. In this scenario, the expert searcher does not rely on Google; he relies on specific search strategies.

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It is a well-known and widely accepted fact that we live in Internet age. Earlier it simply meant that if you are not online, you don’t exist. But in the present scenario it means if you are not listed in the first one or two pages of a search engine, you will not survive for long. Everybody is trying out different techniques to optimize their search engine rankings, some succeeding and many others failing in achieving this goal.

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The rise of blogging coupled with a growing distrust of traditional media may be causing palpitations in the hearts of journalism’s ivory tower university dwellers.

The Latest In Fear: Journalism Professors

It’s not easy watching one’s fiefdom being broken into shards by uncontrollable forces. Dr. Norm Matloff at UC Davis has written frequently about outsourcing’s effect on technology, and the impact it has had on computer science departments.

Fewer students means less clout in the labyrinthine power structures of higher education. It’s happened with computer science, and maybe it’s happening with journalism programs as well.

Recently, Elon University journalism professor Michael Skube, a Pulitzer Prize winner for Criticism, brought his view of blogs to the Los Angeles Times. He argues that bloggers aren’t journalists, no matter what legal protections or press credentials have been bestowed upon those who don’t work directly for a traditional media organization.

While it’s true many bloggers don’t plumb the depths of stories they cover, many have figured in greater stories. Skube gives bloggers credit for bringing abuses at Walter Reed Medical to public attention, but reserves deeper praise for the deserving investigative reporters who covered it in depth.

Fair enough. But why the attack on bloggers? We can’t help but feel that The Fear may be slipping into campuses, sliding up ivy-covered walls and into the minds of young, inquisitive students. Why sit through semester after semester of lectures and tests when you can dive in and make a journalistic splash?

The problems with blogging that Skube lamented ended up having a minor role in the piece he contributed to the Times, a long-time name in professional journalism. Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo didn’t care for being lumped in with hobbyist bloggers, and called Skube out on his assertion.

One problem: Skube didn’t put Marshall’s name in the op-ed piece. The bastion of "thorough fact-checking and verification and, most of all, perseverance," the LA Times, did:

So against my better judgment, I sent Skube an email telling him that I found it hard to believe he was very familiar with TPM if he was including us as examples in a column about the dearth of original reporting in the blogosphere.

Now, I get criticized plenty. And that’s fair since I do plenty of criticizing. And I wouldn’t raise any of this here if it weren’t for what came up in Skube’s response.

Not long after I wrote I got a reply: "I didn’t put your name into the piece and haven’t spent any time on your site. So to that extent I’m happy to give you benefit of the doubt …"

This seemed more than a little odd since, as I said, he certainly does use me as an example — along with Sullivan, Matt Yglesias and Kos. So I followed up noting my surprise that he didn’t seem to remember what he’d written in his own opinion column on the very day it appeared and that in any case it cut against his credibility somewhat that he wrote about sites he admits he’d never read.

To which I got this response: "I said I did not refer to you in the original. Your name was inserted late by an editor who perhaps thought I needed to cite more examples … "

And this is from someone who teaches journalism?

One would expect someone who argues so passionately in favor of rigorous, professional journalism would go the extra step of making sure his words were not being altered. It’s a sterling example of why people view journalists of all stripes with varying measures of distrust.

In many ways, just as shown here, that distrust has been earned. All a blogger like Marshall has to do is be transparent with sources and reporting for people to perceive value in blogging.

If enough future journalists embrace that perception, they may be more likely to spend their college tuition on a laptop, a video phone, and a fast Internet connection, rather than four years of education for an uncertain future in traditional media. If that happens, will universities start trimming their journalism programs?

It’s enough to make a professor mad at the blogosphere, isn’t it?

Journalism, Blogging, LA Times, Talking Points Memo, Michael Skube, Josh Marshall

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Whenever you want to use a public domain work in your business, you should consider getting the work certified by the copyright office. The next question, then, is whether you should hire a lawyer to do so..

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There are many potential business opportunities that you can launch with public domain works. Self improvement is one of the popular categories where the public domain is very strong, where you can find your own niche within and build a thriving money-making business out of it.

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While you should attempt to maximize the potential of each business, you should start by spreading your income base quickly by setting up 4-5 small online businesses and focus on maximizing them later. With public domain, this approach is quite easy and is very successful.

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A general rule for determining whether a public domain book is in the public domain is to check if it is published.

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An otherwise mild write-up of how Google sends checks to AdSense publishers for their earnings has a strange twist that hints at a relationship with Citibank that defies common banking practices.

AdSense Blog Reveals Odd Banking Policy

Though it has been nearly 20 years since my first real post-college job as a bank teller, I’m pretty surprised to learn just what has changed over that time.

Google’s Vineesha Malkani posted at the AdSense blog some routine advice about AdSense. It almost sounds oriented toward international AdSense publishers, and I’d accept it as that were it not for a strange incident that happened in the US.

Back in July, Mobilejones blogger Debi Jones experienced some unpleasantness in getting some issues with her AdSense account sorted out. It took the intervention of Matt Cutts to get Jones her AdSense check.

But when she traveled to the bank to cash the check, she was told it could not be cashed due to insufficient funds. That statement by the bank sounded strange at the time, as Google certainly employs an accounting department. Why would Google not have enough funds to cash Jones’ AdSense check? It didn’t make sense.

It now sounds like the bank gave Jones incorrect information, based on Malkani’s line in the AdSense blog post about checks and AdSense:

Checks from AdSense are for deposit only; they are not able to be cashed.

  A valid check has some common features: routing and accounting numbers, a bank transit number, and a payee line with the text "Pay to the order of" at the start. These have been in place for years, as any checkbook owner can see.

If a customer comes into a branch with a check drawn on a customer account (this used to be called an ‘on-us check’), the check can be cashed if funds are available. Banks usually require an ID like a driver’s license, while some go farther and ask for thumbprints and even fees to cash an on-us check for a non-account holder.

Google simply cannot tell someone they can’t cash a valid check drawn on their account at Citibank. It sounds more like Google, certainly a large account holder, secured an agreement with Citibank not to honor a check at the teller line.

The insufficient funds line always sounded like bull droppings, and with this latest post from Google I’m convinced. We can’t wait to see the spin on this story.

Google, AdSense, Banking

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There are many potential business opportunities that you can launch with public domain works. Government publications are one of the popular categories where the public domain is very strong, where you can find your own niche within and build a thriving money-making business out of it.

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When determining whether a document is in the public domain, should you pay for the copyright search or should you do it yourself? This is a good question, and the answer lies, as usual, in the method.

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If youve been trying to build a business online for awhile, you probably have at least a dozen business ideas storming in your head. Lets discuss how to use those ideas and combine them with the public domain to create instant products and in the end, instant businesses.

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Two cases — copyright renewal and unpublished works present challenges for public domain users because this is the most difficult task in the public domain business verifying that a creative work can be used as public domain or not.

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There are countless ways that you can make money with public domain works.

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