Nielsen says it's not what sites you visit but how long you stay
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Blog: Nielsen/NetRatings to change Web site ranking to focus on time spent rather than page views
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Also: What your phone knows about you. See what people are saying on News.com Extra.
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and who is MBL, DIGG and what-not anyway?Â  The MyBlogLog hype is pretty much over by now it is also not everything as peachy with them as it used to be. The issues with the security holes that were uncovered and theÂ banning of the user from the Network that uncovered them, privacy issues about data collected [...]
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I&#8217;ve heard the warnings at conferences and especially in the Social Media Optimization field that spamming or multiple submissions to Digg and other social news sites could lead to the banning of that URL from future Digg listings. Seems that such a horrible fate was brought about on SearchBliss.com although they say that they were not [...]
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Sears and Kmart customers who sign up for a new marketing program may be giving up more private information than they&#39;d bargained for, a prominent anti-spyware researcher claims.According to Harvard Business School Assistant Professor Ben Edelman, Sears Holdings&#39; My SHC Community program falls short of U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) standards by failing to notify users exactly what happens when they download the company&#39;s marketing software.And given the invasive nature of the product, Sears has an obligation to make its behavior clearer to users. &quot;The software is not something you&#39;d want on your computer or the computer of anyone you care about,&quot; Edelman said in an interview. &quot;It tracks every site you go to, every search you make, every product you buy, and every product you look at but don&#39;t buy. It&#39;s just spooky.&quot;Edelman has written up an analysis of Sears&#39;s software, set to be made public on Tuesday.Problems with the retailer&#39;s My SHC Community program were first brought to light in late December, when CA senior engineer Benjamin Googins, wrote a blog entry criticizing the software, which was written by VoiceFive, a subsidiary of Internet measurement firm ComScore.Sears launched the My SHC Community in March, intending it to be a vehicle for customers who want a voice in the company&#39;s direction. &quot;It&#39;s still kind of in its early days,&quot; said Rob Harles, vice president of MY SHC Community, in an interview conducted prior to Edelman&#39;s post. &quot;It&#39;s mainly used right now for research, but what we want to do is open it up so it&#39;s creating dialogue with our customers.&quot;Sears Holdings, the owner of the Sears Roebuck and Kmart department stores is the third-largest retailer in the U.S.Sears offers members $10 and a chance to win one of several sweepstakes as an extra incentive to join the program.But in return, a small percentage of members must install extremely invasive software.According to Googins, the product monitors not only all of the user&#39;s Web traffic, but also keeps track of secure sessions like visits to bank sites, sniffs through e-mail headers, and then sends that information to a ComScore.While Googins called the software &quot;a significant threat to privacy,&quot; Harles doesn&#39;t see it that way. First off, he said that members can join the community with or without the tracking software and that less than 10 percent of the members have signed up for the tracking program.And those who get the tracking software installed have all personally identifying information scrubbed by ComScore and are informed of exactly what&#39;s going on, he added.Harles sent Googlins a detailed rebuttal to his claims, which the CA researcher has published on his blog.Edelman said Monday the Sears executive is simply wrong. &quot;The comments from ... Rob Harles are remarkable,&quot; he said. &quot;Exactly contrary to actual facts as best I can tell.&quot;Sears does disclose that it is installing tracking software, but doesn&#39;t do enough to make sure that users have seen these disclosures before they download the program, Edelman said in his analysis.&quot;The FTC requires that software makers and distributors provide clear, prominent, unavoidable notice of the key terms,&quot; he wrote. &quot;SHC&#39;s installation of ComScore did nothing of the kind.&quot;In an interview, Harles said that Sears had no immediate plans to change its disclosure policies, but he did say that My SHC Community would undoubtedly evolve in some ways.This isn&#39;t the first time ComScore&#39;s software has been in the news. In June, Edelman documented how they company&#39;s tracking software was being installed on some PCs without consent.&quot;Why so many problems for ComScore?&quot; Edelman wrote in his latest blog posting. &quot;The basic challenge is that users don&#39;t want ComScore software. ComScore offers users nothing sufficiently valuable to compensate them for the serious privacy invasion ComScore&#39;s software entails. There&#39;s no good reason why users should share information about their browsing, purchasing, and other online activities. So time and time again, ComScore and its partners resort to trickery (or worse) to get their software onto users&#39; PCs.&quot;
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Just tried to log into Digg and received this response:  Upgrade in Process. New features are minutes away&#8230; Can&#8217;t wait to see what the new features are :)
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Q: What are the top 10 most popular Web sites? _ Anne Vari  A: Mark my words, Anne: This Internet thing will never last. It's a fad.
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(InfoWorld) - People in the U.S. have steadily increased the amount of time they spend watching videos online and Google's YouTube remains by far their preferred video site, according to a study. In July, almost 75 percent of U.S. Internet users watched videos online, up from 71.4 percent in March, according to comScore Networks. The monthly time spent watching videos went up to an average of 181 minutes per viewer in July from 145 minutes per viewer in March, according to comScore. People in the U.S. are also watching more video clips. In July, the average user watched 68 clips, up from 55 clips in March. Overall, almost 134 million U.S. Internet users watched a little over 9 billion video clips in July, up from 126.6 million people and a little over 7 billion clips in March. In July, Google ranked as the top provider of video clips, serving up 27 percent of the total -- almost 2.5 billion clips -- most of them via YouTube, comScore said. Yahoo nabbed a distant second place, serving up 4.3 percent of the clips. Fox Interactive Media, the News Corp. Internet division that includes MySpace.com, came in third with 3.3 percent. Viacom (3.1 percent) and Disney (2 percent) rounded out the top five. Google also ranked first in July in unique video viewers with almost 68 million, followed by Fox Interactive (35.8 million), Yahoo (35.3 million), Time Warner (26.6 million), and Viacom (22.6 million), comScore said. After years of unfulfilled promises, online video has taken off in a big way in the past year and a half, rapidly accelerating its momentum across a wide variety of sites. The revolution is widely credited to YouTube and its video-sharing format, but now companies are prominently featuring videos in portals, news sites, blogs, social networks, online stores, and film and television industry sites. YouTube's popularity can be attributed to several factors, including its ease of use forÂ bothÂ viewers and uploaders; a strong community of millions of people who submit, view, and share personal videos; and an abundance of commercial clips from movies and television. It is this last component of its popularity -- the commercial clips -- that have put YouTube at the center of the Internet industry's struggle with video copyright protection because many of those videos are copied and uploaded without their owners' permission. A landmark legal action is currently under way, asÂ Viacom pursues a copyright-infringement lawsuit against Google over the unauthorized appearance of its clips on YouTube. In addition to copyright, other technical and operational issues are in flux, such as the options for generating revenue from video content, the best ways to use video for online advertising, and the different alternatives of delivering the clips to viewers. Another area of interest are video search engines, as well as alternate devices for online video beyond the PC, from small ones like cell phones to large ones like living-room home entertainment centers. For example, currently the Web seems a vehicle primarily for short video clips as evidenced by comScore's finding that the average video clip duration in July was 2.7 minutes.
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(InfoWorld) - Google Inc.'s plans to shorten the life-span of cookies installed on a user's computer, ostensibly to improve user privacy, is being dismissed by some as complete hype. Apart from making it appear that the company is taking steps to address growing privacy concerns related to its data storing habits, in reality, the move changes very little they said. "No users will experience any gains in privacy at all due to Google's change in policy," said Randy Abrams, director of technical education at ESET, a vendor of antivirus products based in San Diego. "It's not a bad idea. It's just a worthless one. (Google's announcement either) demonstrates a complete lack of understanding about the role cookies can play in privacy, or else utter contempt for the intellect of Google users." In a blog post on Monday, Google's global privacy counsel Peter Fleischer said that in the coming months the company will start issuing user cookies that will be set to auto-expire after two years. Currently the cookies set by Google on a user's computer are designed to expire in 2038 -- unless users set their browsers to delete them sooner, he said "After listening to feedback from our users and from privacy advocates, we've concluded that it would be a good thing for privacy to significantly shorten the lifetime of our cookies," Fleischer said. But the fact that Google's cookies will auto-renew every time a user visits a Google web site completely negates any affect the move might have had, Abrams said. Only users who do not return to Google for two years will have their cookies auto-expire after that period. In all other cases, cookies will auto-renew and reset their life-spans with each visit to a Google site. Consequently the move has no effect on Google's existing privacy posture, said Pete Lindstrom an analyst with the Burton Group in Midvale, Utah. "As far as I can tell, there's going to be no change to the effective level of their intrusiveness, which I don't think is too significant in the first place. Maybe they want to get a little bit of privacy press." Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Google's plans to shorten the life-span of its cookies come amid growing concerns, especially in the European Union (EU), about its data retention policies. In June, Privacy International, a global privacy advocacy group, placed Google at the bottom of a list of 23 internet companies for "comprehensive consumer surveillance and entrenched hostility to privacy." In June Google announced that it would anonymize its search server logs, including IP addresses and cookie ID numbers after 18 months. That move was in response to a letter sent in May by the EU's Article 29 Data Protection Working Party, which expressed concerns about the length of time Google stores information in its search server logs. The letter, addressed to Fleischer, noted that server logs contain information that could be linked to an identified or identifiable person and therefore come under the purview of European data protection laws. In the same letter, the EU group also expressed concern about the 30-year life span of the cookies that Google installs on user systems. The letter noted that the Google's cookie lifespan was "disproportionate" to its stated purpose of storing user preference information.
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(InfoWorld) - Google Inc. will make the data it stores about end users anonymous in its server logs after 18 months, part of an effort to deflate concerns about privacy raised last month by a European Union working group. In a letter sent to the group on Monday, Google also said it is looking at ways to redesign its Web cookies and reduce the length of time they are stored on users' PCs. Cookies are small files that uniquely identify a Web browser and are widely used to track surfing behavior and store user preferences. The letter, from Google's global privacy counsel, Peter Fleischer, was in response to a letter sent last month by the E.U.'s Article 29 Data Protection Working Party, which outlined its concerns about Google's service. Among them, it questioned why the company needed to retain its server logs for 18 to 24 months, saying the practice does not appear to meet Europe's data protection rules. The server logs, which include search histories, can be linked to individual users and therefore constitute personal data, the group said. Fleischer responded by saying that Google would make data anonymous in its server logs after 18 months, the low end of its previous commitment. "We ... firmly reject any suggestions that we could meet our legitimate interests in security, innovation and anti-fraud efforts with any retention periods shorter than 18 months," Fleischer wrote. The company said it needs the log data to improve its search algorithms, fight click fraud and spam, comply with data retention laws, and meet "valid legal orders from law enforcement as they investigate and prosecute serious crimes like child exploitation." It noted that the E.U.'s own Data Retention Directive will require companies to retain such data for 6 to 18 months when new laws go into effect by 2009. Since few countries have passed their retention laws yet, "we have no choice but to be prepared to retain log data for up to 24 months," Fleischer wrote. The working group had also complained about the length of time Google stores cookies on users' PCs. Google said that it is exploring ways to redesign its cookies to improve privacy and that it would make an announcement "in the coming months." One observer, while acknowledging privacy concerns about Google, was critical of the working group for singling out one company. "These concerns would have been equally applicable to Yahoo or Microsoft or many other companies on the Internet," said Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of the Web site Search Engine Land, who wrote a detailed analysis of Google's response. Microsoft and Yahoo have not specified how long they store their log files, he said, and they may retain them for longer than Google. He also said the group showed "technical ignorance" by focussing on server logs. Like other search engines, Google collects information about users each time they register for a service such as Gmail or Adwords. These "user databases" contain more personal information than server logs can gather, and they are often retained until a user closes the account or actively deletes the information, he said. The working group in its letter last month cited Google's "market position and ever-growing dominance." It also thanked the company for its "ongoing engagement with the data protection community," especially in contrast with "a lack of engagement by some of the other leading players" in the search industry. The group is expected to discuss Google's response at a meeting later this month. Â
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Prime-Time viewership numbers compiled by Nielsen Media Research for May 21-27. Listings include the week's ranking, with viewership for the week and season-to-date rankings in parentheses. An "X" in parentheses denotes a one-time-only presentation.
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NEW YORK -- A leading online measurement service will scrap rankings based on the longtime industry yardstick of page views and begin tracking how long visitors spend at the sites.
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SEATTLE - The latest search engine from Google could turn out to be a privacy nightmare! Once installed in a computer running Windows XP or Windows 2000 (with Service Pack 3 or higher), the Google Desktop
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(InfoWorld) - When it comes to protecting the privacy of its users, Google ranks worse than any other Internet company, according to an interim report by Privacy International. The international watchdog group also accused Google of engaging in a smear campaign in response to its findings and demanded an apology. Privacy International's findings, based on six months of research, placed Google at the bottom of 23 Internet companies examined by the group. Google was the only company to earn the bottom ranking for "comprehensive consumer surveillance and entrenched hostility to privacy." Other companies, such as Microsoft and Yahoo, rated slightly better that Google. Microsoft was given a rating of four out of six for "serious lapses in privacy practices." Yahoo was given a ranking of five of six, one better than Google, for "substantial and comprehensive privacy threats." "We are aware that the decision to place Google at the bottom of the ranking is likely to be controversial, but throughout our research, we have found numerous deficiencies and hostilities in Google's approach to privacy that go well beyond those of other organizations," Privacy International said. In particular, the group cited the large amount of data that Google collects about its users and lack of privacy controls. "Google's increasing ability to deep-drill into the minutiae of a user's life and lifestyle choices must in our view be coupled with well defined and mature user controls and an equally mature privacy outlook," Privacy International said. "Neither of these elements has been demonstrated." Privacy International plans to issue a final report in September. Google executives were not immediately available to comment on the report's findings. But an open letter to Google CEO Eric Schmidt from Privacy International Director Simon Davies accused the company of engaging in a smear campaign in response to the group's findings. "Two European journalists have independently told us that Google representatives have contacted them with the claim that 'Privacy International has a conflict of interest regarding Microsoft.' I presume this was motivated because Microsoft scored an overall better result than Google in the rankings," Davies wrote. Google allegedly claimed a conflict of interest exist because one of 70 people on Privacy International's board of advisors is a current Microsoft employee. Davies rejected the charge and listed five critical actions the group has taken against Microsoft, including support for the European Commission's investigation into Microsoft. "Can I be so bold as to suggest that your company's actions stem from sour grapes that you achieved the lowest ranking amongst the Internet giants?" Davies wrote, demanding an apology from Schmidt. This isn't the first time that Privacy International has raised privacy concerns about Google. In 2004, the group filed a privacy complaint over Google's Gmail service with regulators in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Greece, Italy, Spain, the Czech Republic, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, Ireland, Portugal, Poland, Austria, Australia, and Canada, as well as with the European Commission. To date, Google has rejected concerns over the information it gathers and stores about users. Speaking recently in South Korea, Schmidt dismissed privacy concerns over the data collected by the company, saying users worried about privacy can always choose not to use the company's services. He also said Google deletes information about users after a certain period of time but did not say how long that period is. Privacy concerns about Google have also been raised overÂ the company's acquisition of DoubleClick, sparking anÂ investigation by the U.S. Fair Trade Commission (FTC). That investigation is ongoing. While Google has taken flack from critics for its privacy policies, the company has acted to protect users in at least one case: In January 2006, Google was the only company to resist a U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) subpoena for a random sampling of 1 million Web addresses that users searched for. AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo did not fight the DOJ's request, which did not seek information that would have identified the users who made the search requests contained in the sample. Ultimately, Google shared a smaller amount of data with the DOJ.
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I was questioned today by a developer who was watching a particular IP address scan his site. The IP was 65.54.188.86 and is registered to Microsoft Corp.
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(InfoWorld) - Google has decided to make the data it stores about end-users anonymous in its server logs after 18 months, according to a blog posted Monday by the company's global privacy counsel. Previously, Google had said it would make the data anonymous after 18 to 24 months. The decision comes in response to a letter the company received last month from a European Union data protection working group regarding Google's privacy policies. Separately, a report released last week by Privacy International ranked Google worse than any other Internet company in protecting the privacy of its users. In its letter, the Article 29 Working Party, an advisory panel of representatives from the E.U.'s national data protection authorities, asked Google to explain why it needed to keep user data for 18 to 24 months. The group said server logs contain information that can be linked to a particular person and that collecting such data must comply with the EU's data protection laws. The working group said keeping the information for 18 to 24 months does not meet those laws, and it asked Google to justify its reasons for keeping the information for that length of time. The group said it planned to discuss this issue at a meeting later this month. In a response, privacy counsel Peter Fleischer said: "The Internet is a global medium, and the principles at stake -- privacy, security, innovation, and legal obligations to retain data -- have an impact beyond Europe and outside of the realm of privacy." He added: "These principles sometimes conflict: While shorter retention periods are good for privacy, longer retention periods are needed for security, innovation, and compliance reasons." Fleischer said Google believed it had "struck a reasonable balance between these various factors" and that its policies were consistent with E.U. data protection laws. Fleischer said Google needed to retain server logs for a variety of reasons, including: to improve its search algorithms for the benefit of users; to defend its systems by fighting click fraud and spam; to comply with data retention legal obligations; and to "meet valid legal orders from law enforcement as they investigate and prosecute serious crimes like child exploitation." "After considering the Working Party's concerns, we are announcing a new policy: to anonymize our search server logs after 18 months, rather than the previously established period of 18 to 24 months," Fleischer said. "We believe that we can still address our legitimate interests in security, innovation, and anti-fraud efforts with this shorter period. However, we must point out that future data retention laws may obligate us to raise the retention period to 24 months." Fleisher said Google disagrees that it could meet "legitimate interests in security, innovation, and anti-fraud efforts with any retention period shorter than 18 months." In addition, Fleischer said Google was considering the working party's concerns about cookie expiration periods and said it was looking into ways to redesign cookies to improve privacy and would make an announcement on the issue in the coming months. "As we build new products and services, we look forward to continuing our discussion with the Article 29 Working Party and with privacy stakeholders around the world. Our common goal is to improve privacy protections for our users," Fleischer said. In his blog, search engine analyst Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of SearchEngineLand.com said, "It's nice to see Google make such a fast, responsive move, though it is reacting to something that felt more like a political show rather than a real effort to improve privacy protection." Sullivan also criticized the working group for singling out Google. "I find the letter fairly amazing from a group that supposedly is concerned about privacy, in how it fails to ask any substantial questions and suggests, frankly, technical ignorance," he said in his blog. "It simply feels motivated out of political posturing. Where are the letters for Microsoft and Yahoo?"ADVERTISEMENTIBM Information On Demand 2006Industrial Industry Leaders, please join us at IBM's premier information management global event, IBM Information On Demand 2006, October 15-20, Anaheim, CA. More IBM business and technical solutions content in one place than ever before! Select from  over 800 sessions. Register today!
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Your site being Dugg to the point of site downtime or sticking with a bad host can have a negative effect on your Google rankings, and even a temporary delsting from Google.  Google&#8217;s Vanessa Fox explains in Google Groups: If the host is down when Googlebot tries to access your pages, then those pages may disappear [...]