Google rewards original reporting, SFWA "caves," Scribd straightens up
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It's been a long weekend of copyright-related news; Glaskowsky finishes up with a Google deal and an announcement by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.
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I&#8217;m playing the devil&#8217;s advocate here, so keep that in mind in case I end up trampling all over anything you hold dear :) Google has taken a lot of flak on a lot of issues in the past few years - it&#8217;s a price an industry leader invariably has to pay.  Apart from Blogger spam [...]
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(InfoWorld) - Google has agreed to post a court order against the company on its Belgian Web site, dodging a potential fine of â¬500,000 ($639,000) per day for not doing so. The court order stemmed from a lawsuit filed by a group of Belgian publications that accused Google of infringing their copyrights by posting articles on its Google News Web site without their permission. The order, issued Sept. 5, required Google to stop posting stories from the Belgian papers. It was also required to post a copy of the court's order on its Web site for five days. Google removed the stories in mid-September but resisted posting the order, arguing that the dispute had already been widely publicized in the press. On Friday it lost an appeal against the order to post the ruling, the Associated Press reported. Google didn't immediately return calls seeking comment. The order now appears at www.Google.be and on the Belgian Google News Web site. The news site now features articles from Dutch and other international news outlets. Google will appeal the entire ruling at a hearing scheduled for late November, according to the Associated Press story. Google News includes headlines and brief summaries of news articles. Users click on a story link to be taken to the publication's Web site, where they can read the full article. This isn't the first time Google has butted heads with the news media. The French news agency Agence France Presse has anÂ ongoing lawsuitÂ that accuses Google of copyright violation for including its stories on Google News without subscribing to the AFP service. Google has also raised theÂ ire of some book publishersÂ for its Google Book Search offering, which allows visitors to view parts of books online. Groups representing publishers have filed lawsuits arguing that Google must ask for permission before scanning and displaying the contents of the books.
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Ben Ramsey has posted a (quick) new items over on his blog that looks at solving two problems he was having with his blog - the now non-functional Flickr feed and a sorting problem with array_multisort.   I recently upgraded a few things around here (in particular, an upgrade to PHP 5.2), and I noticed two issues that occurred after the upgrade. [...] I easily solved both of these issues.   The correction to the Flickr feed involved changing the namespace information for his request (adding a trailing slash) because the SimpleXML functionality got a bit more particular about the format.   The problem with array_multisort involved adding in a parameter that was implied in previous PHP versions, SORT_STRING, to get his code correctly working.
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Found in the search marketing forums: Measuring Cup; Is Google Weighting Clicks on SERP Entries More Highly in its Algorithms?; Link Building Campaign Imminent; and more.
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Playboy magazine on Tuesday  posted to its Web site an unpublished portion from its  interview with Google's founders, which raised regulatory  eyebrows not for what it revealed, but for its timing -- just  before the Internet search engine's much-anticipated initial  public offering.
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Blog: TypePad gets improved publishing features. Movable Type gets community and goes open source.
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Users will see book excerpts alongside ordinary Google Web page search results.
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Blog: Here's a follow up to a blog of a few days ago outlining workaround until Google issues a patch.
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Found in the search marketing forums: Google Project Knol; Site Created Using All Images; Multiple Hyphens in Root Domain = Spam? and more.
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(InfoWorld) - Google Inc. has reached an agreement with two groups representing authors and photographers in Belgium that had objected to the way the company indexes and displays their content on its Google News Web site. The agreements with Sofam, which says it represents 3,700 photographers, and Scam, which represents 20,000 writers, mark the first steps by Google in resolving a copyright lawsuit that forced it to remove French- and German-language Belgian newspaper content from its Web site. On Friday, a judge in Brussels heard arguments in that case, filed by a group of newspaper publishers, Copiepresse. Sofam (SociÃ©tÃ© MultimÃ©dia des Auteurs des Arts Visuels) and Scam (SociÃ©tÃ© Civile des Auteurs Multimedia) were among several smaller groups that had joined Copiepresse in its legal action. "We reached an agreement with Sofam and Scam that allows us to make extensive use of their content," Google spokeswoman Jessica Powell said on Monday. The agreement allows Google to use content from the groups in "new ways" that "go beyond what copyright law allows," she said. She declined to say if Google is paying the groups or to provide further details. Google has signed a deal to use content from the Associated Press newswire that it described in similar language. Copiepresse has complained that Google violates its members' copyrights by indexing their content and displaying it on Google News without asking permission. Google says the use is legitimate because it shows only a snippet of news stories, and because it directs users to the publications' Web sites to read the full story. On Friday, the judge in Brussels said she would give her verdict in the case early next year. Google News has also run into trouble in Scandinavia, where it launched two weeks ago. The company delayed the introduction of the news service in Denmark after publishers there objected to having to "opt out" if they didn't want their content displayed on Google's Web site. And a publishing group in Norway has protested the use of its members' news photographs, which it says is not permitted under Norwegian copyright law. Google has declined to comment on talks with any particular publishing groups, but says it is open to discussions to resolve disputes. Â
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It took a night of hard coding and testing today from the press room at Search Engine Strategies Chicago, but the new Search Engine Journal design has gone live and we&#8217;re currently hammering out the bugs and glitches. The new design is the masterful work of Chris Pearson, who is also behind the designs at [...]
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SEM firm Fathom Online has been reporting flat (or declining) average keyword prices for the past several quarters. But that doesn&#8217;t entirely make sense. Paid search revenues keep going up, driven in part by an influx of new advertisers. If you have more advertisers and more revenues in search it would suggest more competition over keywords. [...]
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Aaron Wall posted about a Google Algorithm Update last week and it seems that the changes were in terms of sandbox/trustbox modification and a lot of blogs have been benefitting from the change. Here at Search Engine Journal I&#8217;m noticing a lot more Google referrals and higher rankings in the SERP&#8217;s for terms associated with specific [...]
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Google Print, Google Print, Argh Argh Argh! Since I got back from Web Search University I have been buried in sites and resources to review.
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How forthcoming are search engines in disclosing their paid placement and paid inclusion policies?  They're better than they were a couple of years ago, but there's still room for improvement, according to a prominent watchdog group.
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Articles from the AP, AFP, U.K. Press Association, and the Canadian Press will appear directly in Google News pages.