Yahoo Games Popular In Japan
Japan’s online gaming population has increased 28 percent over the past year to 16.5 million visitors in July 2009, and reaching nearly one fourth of Japan’s online population, according to a new report from comScore.
"As a growing number of people turn to the Internet as an entertainment channel, many online gaming sites have seen their traffic levels swell to record numbers," said Maru Sato, managing director of comScore Japan.
Google Releases Latest Version of Chrome
Not too long after the first birthday of the Google Chrome browser, a new stable version has been released. The release includes:
Google Gives Webmaster Advice for User-Generated Content Sites
Google has made some recommendations for "best practices" for sites that allow users to create their own sites. They give the examples of their own Google Sites and Blogger. So in other words, if you run some type of site that allows users to make their own pages, you may want to pay attention.
Who Really Owns Your Tweets?
Twitter has made some revisions to its terms of service, to address issues like advertising, tweet ownership, APIs, and spam. There’s not as much news in this as one might expect, but there are some things worth noting, namely, Twitter’s stance on who owns tweets. Are your past tweets important to you? Tell us.
Don’t Lose Yahoo Traffic By Not Optimizing for Bing
As you’re probably aware, the plan for the deal between Microsoft and Yahoo that dominated many of the headlines this summer, is for Bing to take over Yahoo search, in terms of algorithmic ranking. Basically, Bing will handle the back-end, while Yahoo will handle the front-end design of the new Yahoo Search. That should be happening next year sometime.
Facebook Protects User’s Data In Civil Case
Privacy advocates who are in the habit of protesting Facebook’s policies may owe the social network an apology. When an airline subpoenaed a user’s data, and even after fines were later levied, Facebook refused to hand anything over.
Get Your Videos Indexed in Google Results
Google wants webmasters who offer video content to be able to get their videos displayed in search results more easily. The company has announced that that it now supports Facebook Share and Yahoo SearchMonkey RDFa, which are both markup formats that allow webmasters to specify information that is important to video indexing.
Journalism Online Signs Up 1000 Affiliates
Journalism Online, a venture aimed at generating revenue for news publishers by charging readers for online content, has announced it now has more than 1,000 affiliates who have signed on to its platform.
Journalism Online co-founder Steven Brill said that the results of a recent study released by the American Press Institute, found that nearly 60 percent of American newspapers are "actively considering" initiating some form of paid access for their online content.
Google Adding Some Visual Flare to News?
Update: Google’s Marissa Mayer has now announced the product officially, and named it Google Fast Flip.
Original Article: Google is reportedly launching a new lab in Google Labs called Flipper, which takes Google News to a much more visual place, by showing news stories as thumbnails of the actual pages they reside on.
Facebook Adds Tagging from the Status Update
Update: The feature is now appears to be live for many users.
Original Article: Facebook announced a new feature today, which allows users to tag their friends in their status updates and other posts from the publisher. Previously, you could only tag friends in photos, videos, and notes.