Written By Noah Mallin | July 3, 2008 | Share This |

Firecracker

Thank you Thomas Jefferson for winning us Americans the freedom to do our weekly wrap-up posts a day early. That’s what it’s all about isn’t it? Oh yeah and blowing off your pinkie with a firecracker – what, just me? So here’s your big ground meat patty full of search goodness hot off the grill:

Google and Family Guy Creator Sign Pact – One Participant Away From Being Described as an Axis of “Something”

Dirty purveyor of snigger-inducing non-sequitors and Seth MacFarlane joined forces this week to deliver ads in what was described in some quarters as a leveraging of Google’s ad network into a broadcast medium. Ahem. Really it’s more like when Ridley Scott is hired to bring some Hollywood cachet to the latest deodorant ad. Also, it’s old news repackaged, kind of like MacFarlane’s act of self-plagiarism American Dad.

Learning to Crawl: Google and Yahoo Finally Get Under Flash-ers Virtual Trenchcoats

GooHoo and Adobe created their own axis this week, an axis of good! Flash has long been the bane of existence for website designers – it helped them create supercool designs and animations but rendered their client’s website content invisible to the search robots. Now, like Dustin Diamond post-skin flick, those sites have a profile again – use your newfound visibility wisely.

Long Tail My Patoot

Anita Elberse on behalf of the elites at the Harvard Business School published an article that calls the Long Tail theory popularized by Wired bigwig Chris Anderson bunkum, and furthermore booshwah. Anderson responds by saying “You totally don’t get it” but with fancier words. Our official SearchViews policy is to side with Anderson on this one because that’s the Revenge of the Nerds, nerds vs. elites, Wired vs. Harvard kind of storyline we thrive on. Elberse doesn’t get that there is always a head attached to the tail, and online the head grows bigger as the tail lengthens until it’s a big bulbous thrashing head with a whipping, flagellating mile-long tail fertilizing the gigantic stellar egg of consumerism. Or, uh, something to that effect.

So, That Whole GooHoo Thing?

Johnny Fed wants a word with Steve Yang and the Google gang over their ad deal. Might there be something a mite anti-competitive afoot? Also, ValleyWag wonders if Yang zigged when he should have zagged, clinging to search when the ad deal will make that element redundant. Meanwhile, rumors abound that Yahoo and Microsoft are still talking unless of course they aren’t talking at all.

One Nation, Under Google Trends

Monica Hesse in the Washington Post explores the dismissal of the great Google Porn Search Case of ’08 from a Florida courtroom, and what it might mean about Our Privacy and who we are. Whoa, this is getting way too deep for me.

Finally, we’d be remiss if we didn’t wish Bartle Bogle Hegarty headman Steve Harty a happy Fourth of July weekend. Of course our intelligence suggests strongly that the man may be British. In that case he will most likely spend the weekend in his pith helmet behind mosquito netting mourning the loss of Empire.