Search Engine Optimization News Blog

YouTube has today announced the launch of Reporters’ Center through which daily news and updates related to the news industry. This would be a service in which information on various journalists and experts of the industry and reports in the video form on how news reports are gathered, sorted and reported. Reporter’s Center would be the best place for journalism students to train themselves and can get trained the right way. It also covers a wide range of other related topics that would be of great help to the journalism students as it would discuss about facts on how one should attend and handle interviews and all other journalism ethics.

Talking about their latest specialty, Mr. Steve Grove, YouTube’s head of news and politics said, “For the first time on YouTube, veteran journalists are making themselves openly available to aspiring reporters around the world who want to report on the news and events happening around them,”. He added saying, “As current events demonstrate on a daily basis, citizen-reporting on YouTube is a critical part of today’s media landscape — and the YouTube Reporters’ Center will help foster an even more productive relationship between professionals and these aspiring reporters.”

It has been specified that the visitors who visit Reporter’s Center can browse through more than two dozen how-to videos and improve their skills about journalism and more. They have also mentioned that the visitors would also be able to create their own how-to videos based on the lessons they he or she has learnt and upload it.

As a part of the process, Google has invited all its (more than 25,000) news sources that are currently providing news for Google News to become official partners of YouTube at the occasion of the launch of Reporter’s Center.

In a blog post, the news manager of YouTube Ms. Olivia Ma has said, “The offering will help news sources more easily share your news videos on both YouTube and Google News”

They have mentioned that the visitors who join YouTube now would receive a ‘featured placement’. Another important aspect that has been announced is that the participants who post lessons and share their knowledge would be able to appear on Google News. However, the benefits that an official partner would get is really great. An official YouTube partner would be able to share the revenue shared through advertising programs in Google.

YouTube’s Reporter Center will also feature many other useful things like tips and advice in the form of instructional videos. Investigative reporting and conducting interviews are presented in videos from the tips of Bob Woodward and Katie Couric. It is expected to grow  faster and bigger very soon. Once it is completely done, the network would be huge and updated often.

China is really cracking down on Google and associates, period.

The Chinese government has apparently used the “Great Firewall” to block Google, YouTube and Gmail for a couple of days this week, according to a report from Fox News.

Access to Google both in English and Chinese was blocked for part of Wednesday and Thursday in parts of China. This is just another temporary ban in a long line of bans on Google and it’s affiliates out of China.

Fox News stated, “The outages occurred after China accused the Internet behemoth of spreading pornography among its citizens. Google was said to be investigating the service disruptions.”

China has its own internal search engines and the government has strict control. After months of concessions, back and forth wrangling and downright battles over what constitutes pornography, Google has acknowledged it is censoring search results in the country.

Again according to Fox News, Foreign Affairs Ministry spokesman, Qin Gang said Google China “is a company operating within China to provide Internet search services, and it should strictly abide by Chinese laws and regulations.”

Britain’s Telegraph also reported on the situation, saying that Google agreed to filter results demanded by the Chionese government based on government censorship restrictions and various content requirements  when they established the localized search engine Google.cn four years ago, but Chinese officials say that Google has circumvented the filter due to the presence of links to Google.com.

According to the U.K. Guardian, “Google China’s website has not installed filters to block pornography in accordance with the laws and regulations of our nation,” said the CIIRC – the China Internet Illegal Information Reporting Centre. “A lot of overseas Internet pornographic information has spread into our nation by way of this website.”

Google could be losing a major consumer market which is just now coming online (half the world population lives in China). Google had said they would address China’s requests but it may be too late with the Chinese governemnt apparently fairly happy to simply keep banning Google and with Baidu ready to fill the empty space.

According to a commenter on TechCrunch, “a person seemingly located in Xiamen, China” said “Google Books, Google Talk and Image Search have also been blocked in the comment section of this post. Other services like Blog Search, Translate, Maps and Analytics are reportedly blocked as well. YouTube has been blocked in the country for quite some time already”.

What will Google do to remedy their sad situation in China?

Amazon Associates who reside in North Carolina are having a bad week. Their accounts were officially closed yesterday pending the passage of a state budget that is expected to include a provision requiring companies with affiliate programs to pay an internet sales tax. Under this proposed proviso, affiliates are considered representatives of the organization whose products they sell, making said company have a physical presence in the state and thus liable for sales tax.

In anticipation of this possibility,  Amazon sent a warning to NC affiliates last week, stating that the accounts would be closed if the bill was passed. This follows teh pattern seen in new york when that state passed it’s ow internet sales law – over 200 retailers isimply stopped serving New York. Of course, the state ends up losing anyway – the retailers would have been subject to income tax on their earnings, but no such earniong wiol be coming from Amazon in North Carolina.

There have been major local efforts to stop the NC affiliate tax. individuals of all political persuasions have petitioned the General Assembly to stop the tax provision, and a signed petition was circulated online to present to NC’s governor.

It is to be expected that many companies will follow Amazon’s lead and simply stop their affiliate programs. The ramifications are dire – thousands of North Carolinians could lose their incomes and the state will in turn have less income tax revenues.

A separate tax provision for downloaded music, books, and software is also on the table, which would affect many other online businesses. State politicians North Carolina has until July 1 to pass a state budget, and it seems that at least the affiliate tax is a done deal.

After of two and a half yearsof dedicated research, project CHORUS concluded its work and presented at a conference in Brussels. The conference looked at the status and challenges of multi media search engine technology. The different challenges, gaps, commonalities, difficulties, targeted/expected impacts and success criteria related to search initiatives were also examined, and a summary givven of the Initiatives productivity.

CHORUS was a European Coordination Action with the goal of creating conditions of mutual information and cross fertilisation between the European projects. The focus was on dealing with Multimedia Content Search Engines. National and international initiatives were gradually included, and the initiative grew to encompass a diverse range of projects.

The conference was enhanced by the accompaniment of an animated stand exhibition of 11 research projects, which all participated in the CHORUS cluster, and an additional two external research projects. All projects were in the domain of multi media search engines.

This conference was attended by more than 120 people. They came from a wide range of professional backgrounds; both private and public research institutes were represented (including various universities, INRIA, IFAAR, IDIAP, CERTH, Fraunhofer),  as well as industry leasders in the field such as Nokia, Yahoo, Exalead, and Thomson. Major public bodies (The European Commission, German Ministry of Economy) and national initiatives such as THESEUS and QUAERO were also well represented.

The news about the sudden demise of Michael Jackson came out yesterday. Michael Jackson seems to have suffered a cardiac arrest that resulted in his death or at least that is what we are told by the media. It is also reported that the actual reason for the death of this legend is unclear and the world is waiting for the autopsy reports for the final word on his death. The sudden and unexpected death of this celebrity has thrown the world of music in to grief. It has also elicited a lot of suspicion.

All these have resulted in a heavy surge of traffic in search engines and in other content sites including Wikipedia. People have started searching for available information online frantically hoping to know the mystery behind their favorite pop star’s death. All the search engines including Google, Yahoo and MSN experienced a huge volume of traffic.

Other major content sites and social networking sites too faced heavy volume of traffic. No other event in recent history has experienced this high level of traffic including the latest American election.

Around 30% of tweets in Twitter.com yesterday were about Michael Jackson. There are number of reports that the sudden rise of traffic slowed down the search engines and the content sites. The latest Michael Jackson story was the most shared story yesterday in Facebook. The same applies to the other social media sites. Yahoo News recorded 16.4 million unique visitors. For the latest American election yahoo received only 15.1 million unique visitors. This may also be due to the fact that American election was mostly a topic of interest for the Americans whereas Michael Jackson is a global celebrity and his story received greatest global attention. We do not have any numbers from Google. However, Google just reported that its service had a great impact in the past 24 hours because of the traffic that was searching for Michael Jackson story.

The next report comes from Wikipedia. Normally Wikipedia’s page on Michael Jackson gets around 20000 visitors but yesterday Michael Jackson’s pages recorded 1.8 million unique visitors. There were also 650 edits on its pages where the articles were updated with the latest news about Michael Jackson.
We can find the same phenomenon in the other sites such as Digg as well whereby the internet community was sharing and discussing about the latest story on their favorite pop star. Some of them just wanting to know what happened to him while others searching for clues to his sudden suspicious death.
This shows that if we have stories that are powerful enough, we can indeed drive loads of traffic to our sites. However, it is doubtful whether we will be able to create stories that are as powerful as the demise of this legendary pop star.