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 spoke up. It wrote in general terms about its Content ID system, which allows copyright holders to request immediate takedowns based on their own standards.

We’ve got some analysis below, as well as two very meta Hitler parodies.

Parody-Makers Can Restore Their Videos

The disputes will likely stick, because it’s easy to argue that the Downfall videos fall into the parody category, and parodies are fair use of copyrighted content in the applicable laws. Some of the videos that were taken down have already been restored, including the “Hitler Orders DMCA Takedown” video (embedded below) — that’s the one YouTube linked in its blog post.

Embracing Free Publicity

Some, however, know that viral videos can be a form of flattery and free publicity. When asked about parodies users have made of his company’s own content, Nike VP of Digital Sport Stefan Olander told the YouTube Biz Blog: “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. We love when people engage and participate in the storytelling.” Even Downfall director Oliver Hirschbiegel told New York Magazine, “You couldn’t get a better compliment as a director.”

Oh, and there’s one more interesting tidbit: The Downfall takedowns took place on what would have been Hitler’s 121st birthday.

Hitler Orders DMCA Takedown

Hitler Reacts to Downfall Parody Removals

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, then Google accounted for 10.0 billion searches, followed by Yahoo! (2.6 billion), Microsoft (1.8 billion), Ask (593 million) and AOL (380 million).

Get it? Got it? Good.

But if you look at “expanded searches,” then you get a very different picture of the search market.

What is an expanded search? It is a search on the top properties where search activity is observed. What are these top properties? Oh, YouTube, craigslist, eBay, Facebook.com, MapQuest, MySpace, and Amazon.

If you look at these top properties, Americans conducted 23.9 billion search queries in March 2010. That’s right. About 8.5 billion searches were conduct that month on properties that generally aren’t considered “search engines.”

And 3.7 billion of these expanded searches were conducted on YouTube, which is less than the 10.5 billion expanded searches conducted on Google, but more than the 2.7 billion expanded searches conducted on Yahoo!, or the 1.6 billion expanded searches conducted on Bing.

And the 664 million expanded searches conducted on craiglist, 659 million conducted on eBay, and 647 million conducted on Facebook.com are more than the 594 conducted on AOL.

So, definitions matter. Since YouTube, craigslist, eBay, Facebook.com, MapQuest, MySpace, and Amazon don’t crawl you website, who is in charge of digital asset optimization for these top properties?

Ask your SEO specialist or webmaster that question at your next marketing meeting. And if they tell you it’s not their job, then tell them that you’re thinking of taking some of their budget so that you can create a new position.

Let me know what happens next.

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. Your second line can be an 800 number, if you wish, or you can transfer an existing number.

To that end, Toktumi offers, on its Web site, a raft of Google Voice-ish features that are intended to help a small businesses look bigger: call screening, Do Not Disturb hours and voice mail messages sent to you as e-mail. You can create an “automated attendant” —“Press 1 for sales,” “Press 2 for accounting,” and so on — that routes incoming calls to other phone numbers. Or, if you’re pretending to be a bigger business than you are, route them all to yourself.

The Line2 app is a carbon copy, a visual clone, of the iPhone’s own phone software. The dialing pad, your iPhone Contacts list, your recent calls list and visual voice mail all look just like the iPhone’s.

(Let’s pause for a moment here to blink, dumbfounded, at that point. Apple’s rules prohibit App Store programs that look or work too much like the iPhone’s own built-in apps. For example, Apple rejected the Google Voice app because, as Apple explained to the Federal Communications Commission, it works “by replacing the iPhone’s core mobile telephone functionality and Apple user interface with its own user interface for telephone calls.” That is exactly what Line2 does. Oh well—the Jobs works in mysterious ways.)

So you have a second line on your iPhone. But that’s not the best part.

Line2 also turns the iPhone into a dual-mode phone. That is, it can make and receive calls either using either the AT&T airwaves as usual, or — now this is the best part — over the Internet. Any time you’re in a wireless hot spot, Line2 places its calls over Wi-Fi instead of AT&T’s network.

That’s a game-changer. Where, after all, is cellphone reception generally the worst? Right — indoors. In your house or your office building, precisely where you have Wi-Fi. Line2 in Wi-Fi means rock-solid, confident reception indoors.

Line2 also runs on the iPod Touch. When you’re in a Wi-Fi hot spot, your Touch is now a full-blown cellphone, and you don’t owe AT&T a penny.

But wait, there’s more.

Turns out Wi-Fi calls don’t use up any AT&T minutes. You can talk all day long, without ever worrying about going over your monthly allotment of minutes. Wi-Fi calls are free forever.

Well, not quite free; Line2 service costs $15 a month (after a 30-day free trial).

But here’s one of those cases where spending more could save you money. If you’re in a Wi-Fi hot spot most of the time (at work, for example), that’s an awful lot of calling you can do in Wi-Fi — probably enough to downgrade your AT&T plan to one that gives you fewer minutes. If you’re on the 900-minute or unlimited plan ($90 or $100 a month), for example, you might be able to get away with the 450-minute plan ($70). Even with Line2’s fee, you’re saving $5 or $15 a month.

Line2 also lets you call overseas phone numbers for Skype-like rates: 2 to 5 cents a minute to most countries. (A full table of rates is available at toktumi.com.) As a handy globetrotters’ bonus, calls home to numbers in the United States from overseas hot spots are free.

All of these benefits come to you when you’re in a Wi-Fi hot spot, because your calls are carried by the Internet instead of by AT&T. Interestingly enough, though, Line2 can also make Internet calls even when you’re not in a hot spot.

It can, at your option, place calls over AT&T’s 3G data network, where it’s available. Every iPhone plan includes unlimited use of this 3G network — it’s how your iPhone sends e-mail and surfs the Web. So once again, Line2 calls don’t use up any of your monthly voice minutes.

Unfortunately, voice connections on the 3G network aren’t as strong and reliable as the voice or Wi-Fi methods. Cellular data networks aren’t made for seamless handoffs from cell tower to tower as you drive, for example — there’s not much need for it if you’re just doing e-mail and Web — so dropped calls are more likely. Fortunately, if you’re on a 3G data-network call and you walk into a hot spot, Line2 switches to the more reliable Wi-Fi network seamlessly, in midcall.

Whenever you do have an Internet connection — either Wi-Fi or a strong 3G area —you’re in for a startling treat. If you and your calling partner are both Line2 subscribers, Line2 kicks you into superhigh audio-quality mode (16-bit mode, as the techies call it).

Your calling partners sound as if they’re speaking right into the mike at an FM radio station. It’s almost too clear; you hear the other person’s breathing, lip smacks, clothing rustling and so on. After years of suffering through awful cellphone audio, it’s quite a revelation to hear what you’ve been missing.

Now, this all sounds wonderful, and Line2 generally is wonderful. But there’s room for improvement.

First, as you’ve no doubt already concluded, understanding Line2 is complicated. You have three different ways to make calls, each with pros and cons.

You miss a certain degree of refinement, too. The dialing pad doesn’t make touch-tone sounds as you tap the keys. There’s no Favorites list within the Line2 app. You can’t get or send text messages on your Line2 line. (The company says it will fix all this soon.)

There’s a faint hiss on Line2 calls, as if you’re on a long-distance call in 1970. The company says that it deliberately introduces this “comfort noise” to reassure you that you’re still connected, but it’s unnecessary. And sometimes there’s a voice delay of a half-second or so (of course, you sometimes get that on regular cellphone calls, too).

Finally, a note about incoming calls. If the Line2 app is open at the time, you’re connected via Wi-Fi, if available. If it’s not running, the call comes in through AT&T, so you lose the benefits of Wi-Fi calling. In short, until Apple blesses the iPhone with multitasking software, you have to leave Line2 open whenever you put the phone to sleep. That’s awkward.

Still, Line2 is the first app that can receive incoming calls via either Wi-Fi or cellular voice, so you get the call even if the app isn’t running. That’s one of several advantages that distinguish it from other voice-over-Internet apps like Skype and TruPhone.

Another example: If you’re on a Wi-Fi call using those other programs, and someone calls your regular iPhone number, your first call is unceremoniously disconnected. Line2, on the other hand, offers you the chance to decline the incoming call without losing your Wi-Fi call.

Those rival apps also lack Line2’s call-management features, visual voice mail and conference calling with up to 20 other people. And Line2 is the only app that gives you a choice of call methods for incoming and outgoing calls.

All of this should rattle cell industry executives, because let’s face it: the Internet tends to make things free. Cell carriers go through life hoping nobody notices the cellephant in the room: that once everybody starts making free calls over the Internet, it’s Game Over for the dollars-for-minutes model.

Line2, however, brings us one big step closer to that very future. It’s going to be a wild ride.

Gaming developer Storm8 has been sued for allegedly collecting phone numbers of iPhone users who downloaded the company’s popular games from the iTunes app store.

“The wireless telephone numbers of users’ phones are not used or necessary to play any of Storm8’s games, yet Storm8 has written the software for all its games in such a way that it automatically accesses, collects, and transmits the wireless telephone number of each iPhone user who downloads any Storm8 game,” states the lawsuit, filed on behalf of Lynwood, Wash. resident Michael Turner.

Turner alleges that Storm8’s surreptitious data collection violates the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, as well as California state laws. He is seeking class-action status.

In late August, news reports surfaced alleging that Storm8’s apps for the iPhone had a “phone home” feature that transmitted users’ wireless numbers to the company. Storm8 offers games like “Vampires Live,” “Zombies Live” and “Rockstars Live” through Apple’s iTunes apps store. The company responded to the reports by saying its system had a “bug,” but that it had since been fixed.

Turner alleges in his lawsuit that he downloaded Storm8’s games in July and August, after which the company “harvested his wireless telephone number without notifying him or obtaining his consent.”

Storm8 didn’t respond to Online Media Daily’s request for comment.

Turner’s lawyer, Michael Aschenbrener of KamberEdelson, says his client’s main objective is to ensure that Storm8 is barred from collecting private data in the future. Storm8 says that it no longer gathers wireless numbers, but Aschenbrener argues that promise isn’t sufficient to protect consumers. “A public admission is not the same as a legal representation or legal injunction,” he says.

One potential hurdle for Turner is that the section of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act that he alleges was violated appears to require proof not only that computers were unlawfully accessed, but also that they were damaged. Aschenbrener says that Storm8 caused damage because it “impaired the integrity of the data stored on a protected computer.”

But some legal experts are not convinced. Venkat Balasubramani of Seattle says that while Storm8 allegedly engaged in some questionable practices, there might not be a legal remedy — especially because the data collected isn’t as sensitive as other types of information, like social security numbers or bank accounts. “iPhone numbers are not necessarily confidential,” he says. “Many people just give them out.”

Plus, there’s more: Publishers installing Facebook share buttons can also get data back related to how many times that link has been shared, how many users have hit the thumbs-up “like” button or commented on shared versions of the story on Facebook, and how many people have clicked back to it through Facebook.

These Facebook “share” buttons had existed before, and the company said that more than 2 billion pieces of content are shared per week. But this is the first time that the counter and analytics have been available.

A post on the Facebook developer blog explains: “Anyone can add the Share button to their website with little to no technical experience, and style the button from a variety of options.” Accessing the analytics however, requires a bit more coding know-how.

This could spell bad news for Digg, as Facebook’s significantly bigger and more mainstream audience could make it a far more appealing choice for site owners that would prefer to display one prominent sharing button rather than two. As for Twitter, it doesn’t actually own the app that powers the “retweet” buttons. A move like this from Facebook, however, could push it to think a bit harder about a partnership or acquisition–or hasten progress on that “retweet API” it has in the works.

Related speculation: When are we going to see a “most-shared” ranking from Facebook? That’s when Digg’s execs would really have to start sweating.

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 with smaller groups of people we are close to such as family and friends,” Brøndmo said in a blog post on Friday. “It fills the need need [sic] for ‘private’ sharing and conversations.”

With Facebook presently leading the way, the future of mobile social network looks bright. This past year alone, Facebook’s mobile users tripled to 65 million worldwide. That means that about a quarter of its 250 million monthly users are now accessing the site through mobile devices.

Anxious to capture a share of that market, Nokia recently introduced a “Lifecasting” service that integrates its phones with Facebook. Added Brøndmo: “We can’t talk about what we will be doing as a part of Nokia yet … Rest assured that Plum Groups continues to operate unchanged.”

The privately held Plum presently employs about 10 people between its offices in Boston and San Francisco.

A native of Norway and an MIT graduate, Brøndmo has now successfully sold three startups he helped create. Prior to Plum, he sold an email marketing software-as-a-service company named Post Communications to Netcentives in 2000. Previously, Avid Technology acquired Brøndmo’s consumer-focused digital video editing service DiVA in 1993.

Plum is backed by Vulcan Capital and Levensohn Venture Partners.

The merger would give fourth-ranked carrier T-Mobile and third-largest Sprint a combined 78 million U.S. mobile customers and position the new entity as a more formidable competitor to Verizon Wireless and AT&T. At least one analyst welcomed the deal as beneficial to the entire wireless industry because it would mean less price competition.

“There’s just too many cooks in the kitchen in the U.S. wireless market right now, and the logical route to consolidation is a combination of Sprint and T-Mobile,” Craig Moffett, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. told Bloomberg. “This is an industry that is calling out for consolidation.”

But news of a possible T-Mobile-Sprint merger comes at a time when the government is looking broadly into competition in the wireless industry. The Federal Communications Commission last month began a formal inquiry into areas such as exclusive deals between handset makers and carriers, wireless billing practices and whether current conditions in the wireless market allow for new entrants.

The major carriers have opposed increased regulation in large part on the grounds that there’s already robust competition in the wireless market, with consumers have a choice of four or five providers in a given market. But the merger of two of the four biggest U.S. carriers would undercut that argument, leaving only three national operators.

Given the heightened scrutiny the wireless industry is already under in Washington, it doesn’t seem regulators or Congress would look favorably on such a deal that would further limit competition. So even if Wall Street is cheering the proposed match, don’t expect the deal to get a warm welcome in the capital if it comes to that.

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, then assemble what we mine into the search engine,” said Raghavan in an interview with Reuters on Friday.

I find this very interesting, specifically because of the Yahoo & Microsoft deal that happened last week and the fact that Microsoft’s Bing does a lot with Twitter on several fronts.

A WebmasterWorld thread has some strong feedback from members of the thread. One even took the time to list eight reasons why Yahoo should not do this:

1. Bing already offers live related twitter messages on some serps.
2. Don’t base your companies future on the success of another, as twitter goes so will Yahoo!
3. Using Twitter as a source of quality information?!? Run for the hills!
4. Google already does it better, I’ve had articles fully indexed in under 30 seconds (might have been faster, that’s the time it took me to check when I got immediate traffic while making an edit)
5. Did I mention Twitter is 99% spam? Seriously, no.
6. It didn’t work when RSS was all the rage either. The immediacy is not the message and neither is the medium in this case.
7. Any system that allows everyone to dump comments into one local area can match the speed of twitter, build that instead and add a little QC… now that I would back in a heartbeat. I searched for a keyword on Twitter tonight and you don’t want to know how low the quality of the results were.
8. People like Twitter because it gets their message out there fast and that quality doesn’t carry over to search. Honestly I prefer quality in my search results, not speed. Speed is pointless if I don’t perform a search at the moment it’s indexed anyway. Quality, please!

I agree that this is a space that Yahoo shouldn’t get into when they are out of the search business.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Worse yet, due to the anonymous nature of the web (and other automated technologies), we are bombarded with every type of spam imaginable (auto-dial telemarketing, fakevertising, reverse billing fraud, phishing, bait & switch marketing, etc etc etc) and the people who have distribution are gaining a predisposition that if you contact them out of the blue with anything commercial you are a spammer. Further tools like Twitter pull links off the web graph and make conversations more shallow, limiting the discussion of many complex topics.

Affiliate programs are great for distribution (and whoring fake reviews), but most good affiliates typically target brands that already have their own gravity around them.

Even if you make someone millions of dollars they typically don’t want to give a testimonial because they are afraid of creating competition for themselves.

Companies worth over $100 billion dollars – like Google – still need to buy ads and bribe customers for testimonials:

The site has a range of options for letting your company or organization know that you want it to “Go Google,” including things like fliers and pre-populated emails to send out.

And Google is also promising to give away “goodies” each week in August to users who have Gone Google and fill out a Google Doc describing their experience.

Eventually the goal of many forms of marketing is to create something that has enough targeted awareness that it begins to market itself. To become synonymous with a field. Kleenex & Xerox are great examples. But you have to use push marketing, begging, bribery, ass kissing, capital, sweat, blood, luck, and a bit talent to get in that type of position.

You can’t be a successful market maker without first being a market manipulator. And even when you get to the top of a market you still have to try to control market perceptions. To get a refund for an Apple iPod that literally blows up you need to sign a confidentiality agreement:

The letter also stated that, in accepting the money, Mr Stanborough was to “agree that you will keep the terms and existence of this settlement agreement completely confidential”, and that any breach of confidentiality “may result in Apple seeking injunctive relief, damages and legal costs against the defaulting persons or parties”.

In spite of their strong market positions, Apple and Google are still heavily focused on manipulating public opinion of their products.

And Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt sat on Apple’s board to avail himself of key information. He sat on that board as Google attempted to clone the iPhone with Gphone, and stayed on it until his company pushed the FCC to go after Apple for blocking the Google Voice app: “Google brought down the disapproving scrutiny of the FCC onto Apple on Friday night, and on Monday morning Schmidt resigned. It is difficult not to make a connection between these two events.”

And while Google paints the media as trustworthy, it rarely is. The news corporations do business deals to engage in cross-censorship in an attempt to increase short term corporate profits:

GE is using its control of NBC and MSNBC to ensure that there is no more reporting by Fox of its business activities in Iran or other embarrassing corporate activities, while News Corp. is ensuring that the lies spewed regularly by its top-rated commodity on Fox News are no longer reported by MSNBC. You don’t have to agree with the reader’s view of the value of this reporting to be highly disturbed that it is being censored.

One of the biggest flaws with the field of SEO is the presumption some people have that there is only 1 right way to do things, everything should be free, marketing should be entirely organic, you have to keep it all above board or you risk losing everything, and other BS pitched by companies trying to minimize and regulate the field.

The bigger risk for most businesses is being too conservative and thus remaining obscure, unknown, and unprofitable.

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 treats the symptoms of the problem. It’s not a cure.

While other companies see tarnished brand issues as more of a public relations issue, it’s important to understand that sometimes it’s the PR firm that is at the root of the problem. Look no further than the Edelman and Walmarting across America situation for an example of that.

Negative search results are not limited to standard search engines either. Blog search engines, video sites like YouTube, social news such as Digg and news search can be affected as well. See Google Blog Search for examples of the recent comments about Microsoft from former employee Robert Scoble.

Negative commentary can have a significant impact on brnads that companies have spent years and immense resources to build. It pays to protect those brands where ever consumers can interact with them.

No company wants to experience a situation like Kryptonite locks so what can businesses do? Here are three fundamental concepts to master when dealing with search engine reputation management: Monitor, Optimize and Engage.

What to monitor?

• Brands
• Products
• Company
• Key Executives

Include modifiers: “sucks” “scam” “kudos”

Types of content to monitor include: News Search, Social Media/Tags, Standard Search Results, Blogs and Forums.

Where to Monitor

• Google Alerts – google.com/alerts
• Yahoo Alerts – alerts.yahoo.com
• RSS feed subscriptions to search results Technorati, Feedster, Yahoo & Google News, BlogPulse
• Social Media via tags: tagbulb.com, tagfetch.com, keotag.com

Optimizing is most effective as a preventive measure rather than a reactive measure. However, reactive optimization for displacing negative search results is what most online reputation management services focus on. It leaves the company chasing after the various dissenters and does not put the brand in a position of control.

Treat the Symptoms

Companies that want to protect their brand visibility on the web would do well to make optimizing their brand content a best practice. Optimizing all digital communications including: PR, marketing, SEO, HR, investor relations and related electronic content that is publicly available on the web as well as social media: text, images, audio, video will produce more branded content in the SERPs. Doing so doesn’t necessarily put the brand in control, but it’s a much better situation than scrambling after the fact.

Engage – Address the Cause

Once a negative mention has been identified, here are a few basic steps in dealing with it:

• Research the situation – is there merit?
• If not, provide the facts and ask for corrections
• If yes, then offer to discuss
• Be ready to respond with your own blog
• Be honest, be transparent and LISTEN

Results can be a anything from a positive turn around to a loyal brand evangelist.

Implementing a proactive monitoring campaign provides insight into the kinds of content interactions audiences are having with your brand. When identified and qualified, situations need to be addressed directly. At the same time, “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”, and companies need to implement holistic brand content optimization as a best practice. The more branded content in the search results, the more diluted any negative brand content will be.

What kinds of search engine brand protection situations have you encountered? I’d be curious to hear what tactics others have used and what kinds of turn around situations have resulted.