Two days ago, several of the popular Hitler Downfall parody videos were pulled from YouTube because owner Constantin Films claimed they infringed on the copyright. YouTube indirectly responded on its blog today by encouraging its users to dispute the takedowns through a process it already has in place for situations like this.
YouTube’s only direct reference to the Hitler parodies was a hyperlink from the word “parody” in the blog post, but it’s clear given the timing that the Downfall takedowns were the reason YouTube …

According to comScore qSearch, Americans conducted 15.4 billion “core searches” in March 2010, with Google accounting for 65.1 percent search market share.
What is a core search? It is search on one of the five major search engines, including partner searches and cross-channel searches. Searches for mapping, local directory, and user-generated video sites that are not on the core domain of the five search engines are not included in the core search numbers.
Why is this significant?
If you look at core searches in March, …

It can save you money. It can make calls where AT&T’s signal is weak, like indoors. It can turn an iPod Touch into a full-blown cellphone.
And it can ruin the sleep of cellphone executives everywhere.
Line2 gives your iPhone a second phone number — a second phone line, complete with its own contacts list, voice mail, and so on. The company behind it, Toktumi (get it?), imagines that you’ll distribute the Line2 number to business contacts, and your regular iPhone number to friends and family. …

Nokia on Friday said it acquired “certain assets” of “micro-social networking” start-up Plum Networks. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The acquired Plum assets will become part of Nokia’s Services unit, according to the phone maker. “Plum will complement Nokia’s Social Location services,” a Nokia spokesperson said. Co-founded several years ago by serial entrepreneur Hans Peter Brøndmo and engineer Margaret Olsen as a social-bookmarking site, Plum has since sought to carve out a niche for itself in the saturated social networking market.

“Plum Groups is a service for those of us that want to share the more private parts of our lives

A Reuters article reports Yahoo is still going to invest in search, at least until the Microsoft deal is done. Specifically, in real-time search by “mining” Twitter data. Let me quote a piece of this article:
Yahoo’s Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo Labs, said that the company could potentially “mine” messages from Twitter, the popular microblogging service, to offer Web surfers search results beyond those offered by Microsoft’s Bing.”I’ve always held that the interesting thing of Tweets is not necessarily searching them but mining them. So we could real-time mine them, …

Well they got that link because they were the best site out there. That was organic. It is a naive view of marketing to assume that if you are the best people will notice you and people will care. It is not enough to be the best…you need others to say that you are. If anything the web is making most people more driven by self interest – rather than lending a helping hand.
Worse yet, due to the anonymous nature of the web (and other automated technologies), we are bombarded …

As much time and effort that marketers put into improving visibility within search results, not all search engine ranking pages (SERPs) are good. Increasing numbers of companies are experiencing the sharp edge of the sword from disgruntled employees or customers taking advantage of the amazingly simplistic process of publishing content to the web.
You may recall such situations as “Dell Hell” or Googlebombing “miserable failure” for examples.
Because these references occur within the search results, many companies percieve search engine reputation management as a SEO problem. But displacing negative search results only …