Category: Archive

Update: Murdok received a call from David Swain, Communications for  Facebook Platform, who wanted to give the company’s side of this story. Basically, he says that they view the move as actually maintaining developers’ business models (rather than threatening them), so that advertising can continue to be successful and users will actually trust it.

At a keynote at CTIA Wireless today, David Ko, SVP of Yahoo Mobile showcased the new Yahoo mobile homepage, which the company refers to as "the world’s most advanced mobile homepage."

"The site simplifies and enhances the mobile Internet experience for people around the world by offering an open environment where consumers can bring together their favorite content and services from across the Internet," a spokesperson for Yahoo tells Murdok.

Google announced the launch of a new dataset for Google Maps, which opens up a lot more scenery. Now Google is able to provide better imagery and maps for things like parks, college campuses, and hiking trails.

YouTube has announced several new partnerships with broadcast video delivery and management companies – Harmonic, Telestream, and Digital Rapids. YouTube says these partnerships will make it possible for many media companies to provide them with reference files for their content at about the same time it is being produced.

Deloitte, Beeline Labs and the Society for New Communications Research have released findings from a study of companies sponsoring online communities. The study found that enterprises are continuing to invest in social media tools and online communities.

At Search Marketing Expo East in New York, where Murdok is on location, Michael Martin of Internet Marketing Inc. delivered a presentation about the growing Android market. He spoke about how Android is becoming an increasingly important mobile platform for marketers to keep in mind. In other words, it’s not just about the iPhone.

Back in 2007, Microsoft acquired Tellme Networks, the company that provides the Tellme service, which is a technology that allows mobile users to "get what they want" on their phones with their voice.

A Social Media Survey conducted on behalf of PRWeek and MS&L by PRWeek and CA Walker found that marketers don’t make changes to their products based on customer feedback, despite monitoring feedback being one of the most common business uses of social media in the first place.

The survey found that 70% of marketers say they’ve never made a change to a product or marketing efforts based on feedback from consumers on social media sites.

Matt Cutts has appeared in yet another Google Webmaster Video, and this time he has a whiteboard with him so he can illustrate what he’s talking about. What he’s talking about this time are uncrawled URLs in search results.

Cutts says Google gets a lot of complaints from webmasters who say the search engine is violating their robots.txt files, with which they intend to keep Google from crawling certain pages. Sometimes those URLs still end up in search results.

Leave it to Google to (try to) plug an odd little knowledge gap.  Even as people can’t find Iraq on a map and push the limits of irony by misspelling "embarrassed," the search company has, for some reason, created a site to teach what a Web browser is.
WhatBrowser.org is a very simple site that is able to tell visitors what browser they’re using.  A 69-second video also defines the term, while other sections talk about useful tweaks and offer speed tests.