Thursday Links - Quick Hits Edition
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Written By Reprise Media | February 23, 2006 | Share This
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In news that warmed our winter bones, pitchers and catchers reported to Spring training this week. While baseballers are getting ready to astound with a season of web gems, why not clean up with some headline gems from the interweb?
Yahoo! Calls Competitive Trademark Buyers Out Danny Sullivan at the Search Engine Watch Blog caught wind of a Yahoo! Search Marketing rule change on the SEW forums. Advertisers received notice that beginning March 1, Yahoo! will disallow “bidding on keywords containing competitor trademarks.” The move seems to target what we call “brand drafting,” i.e. buying a keyword containing a trademark owned by a competitor and using subsequent online ads to undermine a rival’s brand. For example, right now Ford can buy “Chevrolet” as a keyword, then run an ad with copy implying that Chevy’s cars aren’t as good as Ford’s - starting March 1, this would be a no-no.
However, the change doesn’t seem to put the kabosh on all purchases of trademarked keywords. Joe Schmoe can still buy a keyword like “used Chevys,” since he’s not butting heads with GM in the auto marketplace. Google has similar restrictions on its keyword purchasing policies. Says Sullivan, “Betcha I know what’s prompted the move. Yahoo has been doing more and more work to attract big brand advertisers to link non-search campaigns back to search” - and big dogs don’t like it when the competition is allowed to eat off their plate.
Google Page Creator Gets On Deck, Sent Back to the Dugout Google lit the fuse today on an easy-to-use web-based HTML editor that turned out to be a wet firecracker. About 9 hours after its beta debut (according to ResourceShelf), Google halted registrations for their new Page Creator application due to overwhelming demand…while receiving underwhelming reviews, and reminding many of us who track this sort of thing of Google’s ill fated Web Accelerator rollout.
While it lasted, Google Page Creator mostly failed to impress bloggers. Paul Kedrosky demands, “What am I missing? Visual page design, circa 1996?” And three others (Loren Baker, Lee Odden and Ken Wong of Google Blogoscoped) compared the product to GeoCities, the late ’90s web design/hosting system that launched untold thousands of personal sites packed with cheesy animated clip-art, grating midi music and pictures of your Aunt Minnie’s terriers. But we’re pretty sure Google didn’t have bloggers in mind when they set up Page Creator. If it ever gets back online, it’ll probably serve as an upgrade to GeoCities at the very least.
Rich Media Patent Ruling a Steal for Balthasar Online As in…who? Information Week reports that the father-son California Web design company suddenly appears to own the patent for virtually all rich media used on the internet. Broadly defined, rich media encompasses visual applications that use “dynamic movement” - everything from stock tickers to “hovering” advertisements to cartoons - and the equally broad ruling could mean that Balthasar can charge licensing fees to the tens of thousands of businesses that use rich media, including software developers and website owners. Neil Balthasar, who used to work for Macromedia (the company that developed the “Flash” rich media application), says he wants to sell the patent to one of tech’s “top-tier players.”
However, Marketing Shift thinks that the patent, applied for in 2001 and awarded on Valentine’s Day, might not stand up to much scrutiny: “The patent office has been known to slip up a time or two, and I’m sure that several companies will be contacting the Patent Office to show that they were using rich media applications before the patent was applied for.” That could lessen the patent ruling’s impact, if it doesn’t eliminate it altogether.
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