Google Defends Itself and YouTube on New Blog
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Search giant says it will use the blog to to address that and other public policy issues--and to try to enlist the aid of Internet users in its lobbying efforts.
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Microsoft's MSN Soapbox video-sharing site is unlikely to knock Google's (GOOG) YouTube off its pedestal anytime soon. Soapbox, which officially launched for public testing this month, has several interesting features and big brand backing.
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Search giant, which has endured past criticism from privacy advocates for its Web cookie policies, backs $5,000 prize for best YouTube video demystifying the tiny text files.
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Google makes it easier for bloggers to distract their users by allowing its
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InfoWorld - Google&#39;s Blogger team solved&#160;a technical problem with the blog publishing and hosting service&#160;this week and introduced a new feature that gives publishers the ability to upload videos to their sites.
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Refuses to say why After facing criticism for hosting a blog that advocated the killing of gays and lesbians, Google first defended the importance of free speech, then offered a banner warning the site may be offensive to the faint of heart, and then settled on removing the site altogether.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - Google's Blogger service has been generating a steady stream of complaints from users this year, including hours-long outages, feature malfunctions, and data loss. The problems are particularly frustrating to users who migrated to the service's new version and expected to benefit from its more solid platform. Users contacted in recent days via e-mail report a variety of problems, including the disappearance of blog entries, an inability to post comments, failed migrations to the new service, kinks with the RSS feature, and unresponsiveness by Google to support requests. For its part, Google says that most bugs are isolated incidents affecting relatively few people at a time and that Blogger's stability will improve as the migration to the new platform progresses. "We know how important a service Blogger is to our users, so the highest priority for the Blogger team right now is monitoring the migration to the new platform, listening to feedback from people who've migrated, and tackling as fast as we can the little bugs that inevitably pop up here and there in a new product," saidÂ  Courtney Hohne, a Google spokeswoman. This isn't good enough for Chuck Croll, an independent network and security consultant in northern California who hosts several blogs on Blogger, including a work-related one called PChuck's Network and another one that tracks Blogger issues. "We were promised a more stable environment with New Blogger. That hasn't been one of the features provided," Croll wrote. GoogleÂ began testing this significantly revamped version of the service in August of last year and removed the beta, or test, label from it in December. The "new" Blogger offers new and enhanced features, and Google says it is built on a more powerful IT platform. The "old" version suffered fromÂ serious performance and availability problems the last three months of last year. In September, Blogger, which is free, ranked as the leading blog hosting and authoring service in the U.S. with 21 million unique visitors, according to comScore Networks. Google is taking a phased approach to offering users the option to migrate to the new Blogger precisely to nip bugs at the bud and limit their impact, Hohne says. Yet the impact to some users has been significant. Kim Meyer, from Greensboro, North Carolina, is on the new version and is disappointed with a smattering of bugs that have affected her blog, like photos not loading and an inability by visitors to post comments. "Lately, I've been having more problems with the service that I don't think I should be having,"Â said Meyer, a blogger user for almost two years. Laurie Jackson, who is on the old version, suddenly had archived posts disappear from her blog. She has been trying to get help from Blogger via multiple postings on the Blogger help forum and e-mail messages to the support team. She has received two generic e-mails that repeat information available in the help section of the Blogger site. "The biggest problem with Blogger is their lack of technical support/user service. Bloggers are largely left to their own devices when it comes to solving some of the problems that crop up from time to time," said Jackson, a New Jersey resident, echoing a common complaint. "So right now, I am rather annoyed with Blogger for not caring about us." Michael Brooks, a historian and writer in Toledo, Ohio, publishes several blogs in Blogger and has had mixed success migrating them to the new service. Two attempts to migrate his main site, for example, have failed, resulting each time in an eight-hour outage. "I am leery of my next attempt," he said. "While Blogger is a free platform, it is prone to outages and frequent errors. Most frustrating is when the site goes down in the middle of publishing a lengthy post with the result that I have lost work on occasion that cannot be recovered. It is also difficult to get in touch with Blogger techs, and e-mails generally are met with silence," Brooks said. Mary Shelton, from Riverside, California, switched her blog to the new platform and is frustrated about the hours-long outages and availability problems she has experienced. "The timing of the outages has been unfortunate because they were times when that was my free time to add to my blog," she said. Problems reported on the new Blogger have some users feeling reluctant to migrate. "I am on the old version and am afraid to change due to the problems I have seen on the [Blogger] forum," said Jens Rosenkrantz Jr., who uses Blogger for his business's blog. Still, the switch to the new platform has been positive for others who last year were about to give up on Blogger. That is the case of Robert Brinkmann, chair of the Geography Department at the University of South Florida in Tampa, who hosts several personal and work-related blogs on Blogger, including this one. "Generally, it has been doing well.Â Iâve noticed that it goes through periods where it is a bit 'off,' but overall, it is fine," he said. Others are more tolerant of the bugs. Laurie Kelley of Forsyth, Montana, has encountered problems with photos and comments on her blog but characterizes them as "more frustrating than disruptive" and says Blogger has been working "fairly well" since she started using it in March of last year. Google is confident that as the migration advances and eventually ends, the incidence of bugs will diminish significantly, Hohne said. At this point, however, Google doesn't have a specific timetable for wrapping up the migration. It plans to continue doing it slowly and in relatively small groups, because that way, if an unforeseen bug emerges, it will only affect a limited number of users. Hohne declined to say what percentage of users are on the new platform now. Bugs related to the migration are probably one-time events that, once addressed and solved, will not recur, she said. Overall, the feedback Google has gathered on the new Blogger is overwhelmingly positive, she said. Â
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The media giant is a star on YouTube.
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US entertainment giant Viacom on Tuesday launched a billion-dollar lawsuit against Google and its affiliate YouTube, accusing the video-sharing website of &quot;massive&quot; copyright infringement.
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Google has a problem -- a good one.
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Google appears to be promoting itself more aggressively in advertisements alongside search results.
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Today's announcement from Facebook is the reason why Google announced OpenSocial last week. They must have gotten a leak from one of the companies that stood with Facebook, so they knew what was coming. They weren't scared of Facebook's technology, because they didn't respond with technology. They were scared because Facebook has a better advertising story than Google does. They are getting ready to offer some very premium web real estate that (pay attention now) Google can't compete with. And advertising is Google's bread and butter, advertising is to Google as operating systems are to Microsoft. They can't let somebody appear to be better than they are in advertising. Yet that's what Facebook is, better than Google in advertising. Here's what Facebook can do.  Let's say I bought a Wii and I like it. They can tell all my friends "Dave bought a Wii and he likes it." That's a lot more likely to result in a sale  than an intrusive ad like this one, that was displayed next to an email I sent to some friends about their New Networked Living Room. Google thinks I might want to buy Moroccan Lamps, or something called a Unique Shabby Chic (huh?) or Crate & Barrell bedroom furniture. Of course I tune that shit out, I don't even see it. It has zero impact.   Anyway, I was talking with Doc Searls a few minutes ago and he mentioned OpenSocial and I told him it was just a lot of noise meant to distract people from what Facebook was doing in advertising. He hadn't heard anything about it even though he was at a tech conference in Denver today and yesterday. I said there you go, Google's strategy worked. But to no effect, longterm, because Facebook has the momentum and Google, try as hard as they want to stop it, will not be able to, any more than Alta Vista or Infoseek were able to stop Google once they figured out that their lunch was eaten. Google will be around for a long time, I'm not saying they will go away, but Facebook will be around too. And Google will have a hard time catching up to them.  Long-term, however they both have problems because advertising is on its way to being obsolete. Facebook is just another step along the path. Advertising will get more and more targeted until it disappears, because perfectly targeted advertising is just information. And that's good!  8/3/06: "Information is welcome, advertising is offensive."
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By David Crow  There was a time when Google's video streaming venture YouTube.com was state of the art; but even though it remains the world's fourth most-visited website, it is increasingly riddled with problems.
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The search engine giant has made it easier to navigate different media. It's also setting itself up nicely for video ads
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Google says it will soon begin testing a long-awaited system that can block unauthorized copyrighted clips from being uploaded to YouTube.
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Also: Google Shared Stuff plays well with others. Read these stories and more from around the Web on News.com Extra.
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Google Inc. may be frustrated in efforts to reach comprehensive deals with major media companies such as NBC or Viacom Inc. to put their videos on YouTube, but it is signing up hundreds of smaller media partners, The New York Times reported on Friday.