Google Sky was released yesterday which mean you can now view a large part of the stars via your web browser! The solar system is very well defined and viewable on the web at sky.google.com.

You can find the official Google announcements here at the official google blog and here at the Google earth and maps blog.

Google Sky used many of the same features that Google Earth uses.

• Search planets and galaxies
• Browse through space like on google maps
• Change the video between infrared, microwave, ultraviolet, or x-ray
• Telescope galleries from Hubble and others
• Up-to-date planet positions and constellations
• Lots of custom KML content
• And the podcasts gallery

Here is a youtube made by the google team about google sky:

The is a continuation of an earlier post I made that introduces the new Yahoo! Open Search system.

Yesterday, the Yahoo Blog was updated with some more info on how the Yahoo! Open Search system works with a nice example to illustrate what they mean.

Amit Kumar, Director of Product Management at Yahoo! Search published a nice article showing how Yahoo! can bring much more relevancy to the search user with an example relating to his LinkedIn profile. Have a look at what the new Yahoo! listing of Amit’s LinkedIn listing will look like once Yahoo! releases their open search platform:

Pretty nifty hey!? This is a very simple example of course of how Yahoo!’s open search approach will work but it demonstrates an important point: That the listing’s will be filled with very relevant data directly from the LinkedIn database! (and not from what the yahoo’s algorithm thinks needs to be there … which is the difference with Google Links seen on the google search engine for very few sites and only really in the top number one listing position).

The system is supported by a number of semantic web standards. By supporting semantic web standards, Yahoo! Search and site owners can bring a far richer and more useful search experience to consumers.

Quote from Yahoo! Blog:

In the coming weeks, we’ll be releasing more detailed specifications that will describe our support of semantic web standards. Initially, we plan to support a number of microformats, including hCard, hCalendar, hReview, hAtom, and XFN. Yahoo! Search will work with the web community to evolve the vocabulary framework for embedding structured data. For starters, we plan to support vocabulary components from Dublin Core, Creative Commons, FOAF, GeoRSS, MediaRSS, and others based on feedback. And, we will support RDFa and eRDF markup to embed these into existing HTML pages. Finally, we are announcing support for the OpenSearch specification, with extensions for structured queries to deep web data sources.

Read the full Yahoo! post here.

This acquisition was not expected and came out of nowhere. You can read the full story over at NYTimes

Bebo has a reported 40 million worldwide users and AOL said in its press release earlier today:

“Together with its AIM and ICQ personal communications network, the acquisition will give AOL a premier position in the fast growing world of social media with a network of approximately 80 million unique users.”

Text below is directly from the  NYTimes.com

NEW YORK (AP) — AOL, the Internet arm of Time Warner Inc., said Thursday it will pay $850 million in cash to acquire social media network Bebo, which has total global membership of more than 40 million.

Bebo is one of the largest social networks in Britain, and is ranked number one in Ireland and New Zealand and number three in the U.S, according to AOL. Bebo has about 100 employees operating in offices in the U.K., San Francisco and Austin, Texas.

As social networks such as Bebo have grown in popularity, so has their value to media companies as potential goldmines for online advertising dollars. News Corp., which also owns the Fox television and movie studios in addition to its newspaper and Internet holdings, bought MySpace for $580 million in 2005, but has estimated the network is now worth more than $15 billion.

Facebook Inc., which owns the Internet’s second-largest social network behind MySpace, now arguably has a $15 billion market value, based on Microsoft’s purchase late last year of a 1.6 percent stake for $240 million.

”Bebo is the perfect complement to AOL’s personal communications network and puts us in a leading position in social media,” said Randy Falco, chairman and chief executive of AOL.

AOL said current Bebo president Joanna Shields will continue to run the company, reporting to AOL President and Chief Operating Officer Ron Grant.

The acquisition is part of AOL’s shift from a subscription-driven business to becoming a public Web site that generates income from building traffic and selling advertising, similar to rivals Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp.’s MSN. AOL, which has launched 17 international Web sites over the last year and has plans to expand to 30 countries outside the U.S. by the end of 2008, said Bebo plans to launch in five countries this year, and will be ”featured prominently” in AOL’s international expansion efforts after the deal is closed.

AOL was advised by Banc of America Securities LLC and Deutsche Bank Securities Inc. Bebo was advised by Allen & Co.

Google just announced the launch of Google Ad Manager, which is a FREE ad management tool with all the built in optimization and tracking functions you need in an ad server. This is a HUGE step from Google as they are offering an ad management and serving platform free of charge, which is at the moment a very hot product to offer.

Google Ad Manager allows you to sell ads directly to advertisers, and you can even default to adsense if you do not have an advertiser for a particular niche or domain. So you are now in control over what ads are displayed on your sites.

I have been using the OpenAds ad serving platform for some time now, which is a free open source development project. It is quite good but pretty cumbersome to use. But does server its purpose well. There are many other paid alternatives of course, but these could be at risk now that Google is offering it for free!

It is a very smart move from Google. Not only will they grab a lot of the ad serving market share, but they will have in depth access into all the statistics which they can then use to spy on the advertising industry for their own benefit. After their recent acquisition of DoubleClick, which served about 60% of all ads displayed on Internet, Google will now have a pretty scary monopoly on the online ad serving market (also affiliate and private labeled ads).

It will be interesting to see if the advertising industry is willing to share this data with Google.

Edit: Shoemoney made a great post also on this topic worth the read.

I was quite amazed to read that the US Air force actually banned all websites with the word ‘blog’ in the URL!

Wired has published the whole story here :

“Air Force has imposed bans on all sites with “blog” in their URLs, thus cutting off any sites hosted by Blogspot. The idea isn’t to keep airmen in the dark — they can still access news sources that are “primary, official-use sources.”

So if the web address of your blog contains the term “blog” (like blog.yourdomain.com or anything.blogspot.com), men and women working for the United States Air Force will not be able to view your blogs.

As you can see from the quote above, the official reason is that blogs aren’t legitimate media sources and therefore, shouldn’t be read at work.

Blogspot (owned by Google) will probably be the worst affected blog network. Wordpress, luckily, should not be affected.

I hope search engines do not implement such restrictions in the future!?

Click fraud is at an all time high in India. This is because of an industry which exists in India of “work from home” individuals who can generate “easy earnings” by clicking Google AdSense ads.To the left, you will see a newspaper clipping which shows an ad to recruit these types of networks. How does this work? A new member would create a simple templated website and get a small amount of content on the website and then get accepted into the Google AdSense program. Once he or she is an AdSense publisher,  they join any of these “click my ads” AdSense network and are introduced to other members who are doing the same as you are. So it like a reciprocal behavior - you click my ads and I will click yours.

Google now has ways of quickly identifying this type of click fraud and would quickly ban the AdSense accounts of these poor unfortunate souls who probably work for weeks to earn a few dollars, resulting in all click fraud earnings being refunded to their respective advertisers. But nevertheless, the fraudulent clicks have been generated and added to the global “Click Fraud Index”. And due to India’s activity with these Adsense click programs, India is on top of the list for click fraud activity.

Original story (with interpretation) and images were obtained from Digital Inspiration over at www.labnol.org with explicit permission.

Recently, Google ventured into TV advertising with Google TV Ads. This allows Adwords advertisers to distribute a TV advertisement across various US TV networks using the traditional Google AdWords bidding system. Google TV Ads are still in beta, and users can sign up here to get involved.

Since Google recently entered into the radio and print advertising marketplace, TV adverising seems like the next logical step. Google TV Ads allows advertisers to create a 15-60 second video advertisement which can be distributed on participating US television networks during certain programs or times of the day.

Interestingly, Google offers a TV ad creation program where advertisers can post their TV ad requirements and have a professional video advertisement agencies designed a custom video ad for them.

Distributing the videos ads works just like a traditional AdWords campaign, with advertisers bidding for placement using a CPM model. Advertisers can also select what networks their ads should display on and the time for each campaign to be run.

Once the ad has been run, advertisers are able to view statistics on how the ad campaign performed, including the number of impressions served, the percentage of viewers who watched the entire ad and even when viewers changed channels.

It is interesting to see that Google is aggressively expanding their ad serving to offline media platforms. I doubt this will have any significnt impact outside of the US, although I do remeber seeing such an ad on my TV here in Holland about 6 months ago which mentioned that Google ads would soon show on my channels. But I never heard or noticed anything since then.

Google will need to keep a close eye on video quality to ensure high quality TV ads are being displayed; otherwise the value of the network could quickly diminish.

Maybe you have noticed the new Google secondary search box on organic search result pages already? This search box is meant to appear for websites where Google has noted that users frequently refined their searches for that particular website.
This is from the Google blog:

“Through experimentation, we found that presenting users with a search box as part of the result increases their likelihood of finding the exact page they are looking for. So over the past few days we have been testing, and today we have fully rolled out, a search box that appears within some of the search results themselves. This feature will now occur when we detect a high probability that a user wants more refined search results within a specific site. Like the rest of our snippets, the sites that display the site search box are chosen algorithmically based on metrics that measure how useful the search box is to users.”

Actually, I found this quite useful today when I was searching for a specific youtube video, so I did a search as I normally do for ‘Youtube’ and the number one listing was of course youtube. But under the listing, there was a “search YouTube” search box and I immediately typed in the youtube video title and immediately was taken to the relevant video….really nice!

The Firefox browser if fast becoming the most popular internet browser and rapidly gaining market share from Internet Explorer. This is mainly due to the endless useful plugin extensions that can be installed into firefox, which extends the browsers functionality in ways we never imagined.

Here are some must have SEO plugins for firefox!

Apple announced today that over 100,000 iPhone developers have already downloaded the iPhone beta Software Development Kit (SDK) in the first four days since its launch on March 6.  iPhone SDK gives developers the chance to access the rich API tools (Application Programming Interfaces) that Apple uses to create its applications for the iPhone and the iPod touch. Click here to read the full story.

I mention this because I feel the iPhone is the first advanced product in a new development line that is going to revolutionize the mobile comunication industry.  I just purchasethe new MacBook Air of which I will review on my website soon! It is simply amazing! It was my first experience of a mac product and I love it. Everything is thought out and works. I will never go bac to a PC. Mac is simply superior in many ways. Also I do use ‘Fusion’ to sometimes toggle back to by dual boot system so I can access windows when needed for some small internet application that do not yet have a mac version….more on my mac experiences later.

For you investors out there, Apple is a winner the coming years ;)