Weekly Search Roundup: This Week’s Search Stories Slapped on Their Sunburned Shoulders for Your Amusement
|
Written By Noah Mallin | August 15, 2008 | Share This
|
|
Olympics fever continued to lay much of the nation low as the dog days of Summer stagger through mid-August. Will tomorrow’s children ask about 9-year old Chinese girls competing in gymnastics, or Russian tanks rolling into Georgia, or that election stuff with that old guy and that celebrity guy when they look back at this week in their history Kindles? I think it’s more likely they’ll want to know where Grandma was when Gmail and Netflix were down. To the ticker!
Ad Planner Favors Google? Gambling in Casablanca? Shocked I tell you…
John Battelle decided to see what would happen when he replaced users regular coffee with Folger’s. Oh I’m sorry, I mean Comscore’s monetized reporting with Google’s Ad Planner free product. The result? Ad Planner had a tendency to favor sites that served Google AdSense. Hard to believe…
I Spy With My Little I…SP
The farce that is the Congressional fishing expedition into online traffic monitoring continued this week. Silicon Alley Insider gives us a handy cheat sheet as to how everyone has responded to the inquiry so far. Use this to play at home. Meanwhile…
Brave AT&T Attempts to Throw Google Under a Bus
AT&T’s response letter to Congress goes to great lengths to equate ISP-level tracking with what Google does, making themselves look candid by comparison, and trying to put that whole letting-the-governement-listen-in-on-our-customers thing behind them. An artful letter indeed. Colonel Sherman Potter used to call this kind of stuff “Horse hockey.”
Attack of Das Clones
Just like in Boys From Brazil a bunch of Germans have cooked up an evil cloning scheme. Unlike that film: no Gregory Peck. Facebook is dealing with the inevitable fame fallout of being imitated. But is imitation the sincerest form of flattery or just rip-offery? The courts will have to decide as Facebook is suing German site StudiVZ – short for the German term for Student Directory. Facebook says that the Deutche developers copied Facebook’s design and functionality.
Fail Whale Asks Who’s Failing Now? Gmail Outage Vented on Twitter
Google’s Gmail free e-mail system recently experienced an embarrassing outage that sent users to Twitter to tweet about how they can’t communicate and see contextual ads at the same time. Irony anyone? Gmail’s outage was a prelude to another ugly incident – Netflix’s shipping system went AWOL for 2 days this week, leading to more panicked tweets from folks waiting for Disc Two of the MacGuyver: Season One boxset.
Whale Forces Diet on Users
In an effort to appease the angry fail whale goddess, Twitter users are being forced to cap the number of people they follow.
The Night the Lights Went out in Georgia
The recent unpleasantness between Russia and Georgia was accompanied by the kind of cyberwar that you might have seen in Live Free or Die Hard had Netfilx been working. Meanwhile erroneous claims were made that Google had wiped Georgian landmarks off of Google maps to appease Russia. Google says they just have lame-o info for the region but then how come Microsoft’s Live Maps has very detailed stuff?
Topics: Advertising: Contextual, Advertising: Online, ECommerce, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Search: News, Social Media, Week in Review |