Legal Issues
Social Media: FTC Blogger Rules Foster Double Standard
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Written By Noah Mallin | October 6, 2009 | Share This
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I’m a freak for car magazines. I read the British monthly Car (at 10 bucks a pop no less), Automobile, even Motor Trend - a title that never fails to raise a giggle from my wife for it’s retro specificity. They all feature monthly road tests of cars, all of which are provided for testing gratis by the manufacturers.
In fact, Car used to have a wonderful columnist named George Bishop (who is sadly now in the great beyond) who would fill his column with the intimate behind the scenes details of the lavish car launch junkets manufacturers would throw for journalists - often involving trips to exotic locales, free lodging and meals, and copious behind the wheel boozing. All the other journalists were taking part in the fun too, it’s just that Bishop saw fit to weave the freebies into his articles.
While these events have been toned-down considerably for the auto industry some version of these launch junkets still exist in other industries and free samples or products are a matter of course for any company seeking to see their product in print.
It’s interesting then that the FTC has decided to clamp down on bloggers who review products for money in a way that seems to be more onerous than the standard that journalists are held to.
Make no mistake, the meat of the ruling codifies the best practices I tell our clients about every day: transparency and authenticity. Paying bloggers for coverage should always merit disclosure.
Blogging: CNN and Larry King Caught Stealing Blog Content - UPDATE
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Written By Noah Mallin | May 11, 2009 | Share This
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Accusing Larry King and CNN of content theft on Larry King’s blog may seem pretty brazen but it has and continues to happen. It’s interesting that the AP and several major media organizations including Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal have been huffing and puffing lately over news aggregators who link to their content. At least when that happens, the aggregators (like Google News and Huffington Post) give attribution and send visitors who want more info to the main story.
Search 3.0: The Dark Side of Search 3.0
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Written By Noah Mallin | April 14, 2009 | Share This
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For every day there is a night, for every Two-face a Harvey Dent, for every Abbott a Costello. We have been talking about Search 3.0 for a while now – the convergence of social media and search that is happening as we speak (or blog, or tweet, or however you are reaching this post). Search 3.0 is neither good nor bad, it simply is. However there is a dark side to it that can have consequences for brands large and small.
Publishing: Thoughts on Associated Press - Raiders of the Lost Click or Temple of Doom?
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Written By Noah Mallin | April 7, 2009 | Share This
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The AP seems to be grasping at straws in an effort to be viable in the face of a newspaper industry in decline. More importantly it’s an industry less inclined to pay AP’s syndication fees. After successfully getting Google to cough up some dough to show AP stories in Google News, they now seem to want to pass the hat around to aggregators like Huffington Post. In the meantime, Rupert Murdoch seems to feel the WSJ should be entitled to whatever coin the AP is getting from Google and others. In the immortal words of Fred Flintstone, “Oh brother.”
Search News: Utah Goes Back to the Keyword Regulation Well
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Written By Noah Mallin | March 5, 2009 | Share This
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Eric Goldman reports in his blog today that the state of Utah just can’t seem to get it’s legislative nose out of the keyword kitchen. For the third time, the legislature is taking a shot at regulating keywords. So, what’s the big deal?
As Goldman points out, they’ve done a lousy job in their first two times at bat, and the third time seems to merely be a codification of already existing search engine policies.
However he does spy the hand of a specific Utah company, 1-800-Contacts, as being behind the legislative effort. 1-800-Contacts doesn’t see eye-to-eye with the idea of its competitors being able to buy their trademarked keywords in order to skim traffic that might otherwise come their way. Keep in mind that in most cases the ad copy won’t actually include trademark terms due to engine restrictions.
The Year in Search and Social: How Did We Do? Rating Last Year’s Predictions
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Written By Noah Mallin | December 22, 2008 | Share This
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This is the time of year when we at SearchViews like to gather our best minds together to prognosticate on what the next year will bring us in the world of search engines and social media. Before we whip out the Ouija Board to contact Dionne Warwick, celebrity psychic Sylvia Browne, Ms. Cleo, and TV’s Patricia Arquette from Medium, we wanted to look back and see how accurate our last round of predictions were. Or, “Were our predicts totally redic?”, as the kids might say.
So here are our top 3 bullseyes and top 3 fails from last year:
Search News: Black Friday Promotions Not All Black and White
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Written By Noah Mallin | November 18, 2008 | Share This
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When Black Friday comes
I’ll stand down by the door
And catch the grey men when they
Dive from the fourteenth floor
When Black Friday comes
I’ll collect everything I’m owed
And before my friends find out
I’ll be on the road
When Black Friday falls you know it’s got to be
Don’t let it fall on me – Steely Dan
Sorry to hit you all up with the Dan first thing, I know they aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, but I felt the lyrics are appropriate for what is shaping up to be a challenging (ie lousy) retail season.Still for all that more people than ever are expected to search online for bargains this year.
Social Media: Content Burglars Punished With Advertising – Making Crime Pay for the Victim
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Written By Noah Mallin | November 5, 2008 | Share This
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Media companies have been spending much time, effort, and money on stopping online piracy at sites like YouTube and MySpace through expensive lawsuits and vigilance. In essence they end up playing a game of global whack-a-mole – shutting down sites or suppressing content only to have their copyrighted material pop up somewhere else overnight.
So if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.
That seems to be the impetus behind YouTube and MySpace’s recent forays into a new form of advertising – video ads on pirated copyrighted content. YouTube uses the same technology that allowed content owners to pull down videos, VideoID, to help media companies identify targets to monetize.
Online Reputation Management: United Misses the Flight on SEO and Paid Search
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Written By Noah Mallin | September 11, 2008 | Share This
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Yesterday I blogged about some of the big themes around the recent United Airlines stock selloff and the old bankruptcy news article that sparked it, all while working in a charming Western-themed metaphor. Today, I want to touch on just the reputation management aspect of the story through paid search and SEO which I think remains unexplored – until now.
Just to recap briefly, early in the week the Florida Sun Sentinel’s website belched a 2002 story about United Airlines declaring bankruptcy onto its most viewed page when some sort of lonely bankruptcy buff clicked on it at a low-traffic time. The Googlebot scraped the story and in part because of the Sun Sentinel’s bad SEO sent it along to Google News as fresh where it proceeded to wend its way to Wall Street via Bloomberg where it tanked United’s stock 75% before trading was halted.
Search News: United Airlines Story Shows That the Internet Wild West is Now Settled Territory
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Written By Noah Mallin | September 10, 2008 | Share This
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For a good chunk of the 90s and even the 00s people have referred to the wide-open constantly evolving online world as akin to the “Wild West” – lawless and wild with plenty of things happening away from the prying eyes of strangers. Well that’s been dead for quite some time now and yet companies and individuals persist in acting as if it’s still true.
The recent unpleasantness caused by an archived article on the Florida Sun Sentinel’s website is a good example. It seems that over the weekend a story from 2002 about United Airlines entering bankruptcy appeared on the Most Popular page of the Florida Sun Sentinel’s website. Along came the Googlebot which could only find the date that the story went hot, thus making it look like news rather than archival. The erroneous story then traveled a path that led it to Bloomberg News where investor’s saw it, panicked, and began dumping United stock. This was magnified by electronic trading which kicked in to dump even more shares once the selloff began.