Google v. Technorati (and Hitwise v. Comscore)

by Michael Arrington

Metrics company Hitwise writes a sensational blog post showing the dramatic rise of Google Blog Search against competitors Technorati and Sphere. Their data is saying that this week, for the first time, Google Blogsearch surpassed Technorati in total visits.

Google Blog Search just passed 0.0025% of total internet traffic, according to Hitwise, v. 0.0023% for Technorati. The reason for the surge seems pretty straightforward: Google linked their Blog Search product to Google News in October, which had a immediate and significant impact on traffic. Google also added a Blog Search link in the “More” section on the Google main page. It was not enough to take the lead, but a recent Technorati decline in traffic put Blog Search on top.

It makes sense that the extra attention Google is giving BlogSearch would result in a spike in traffic, but we looked to Comscore for confirmation. What a surprise.

Comscore tells a much different story, and one that makes little sense given the facts. The most recent Comscore data (November) says Technorati had 3 million page views v. Google Blog Search’s 1 million. But Comscore also shows highly erratic Technorati data over the last twelve months, swinging from a high of 22 million page views in April 2006 to a low of 1 million in December 2005.

We’ve seen situations where Comscore showed erratic traffic swings before. In August Comscore showed a significant decline in Del.icio.us traffic, when Hitwise said it was increasing. Yahoo showed disclosed some internal traffic stats and it turned out Comscore was dead wrong. In the case of Technorati v. Google, it looks to be wrong again.

(c) www.techcrunch.com

Taiwan Quake Rattles Asian Communications

by Geoff Duncan

The 7.1 magnitude quake which hit off Taiwan's southern coast Tuesday has disrupted telecommunications and Internet service in Asia.

The 7.1 magnitude earthquake which struck off Taiwan's southern coast Tuesday has dealt a sharp blow to telecommunications and Internet service in south Asia and the Pacific Rim, as companies estimate it may take weeks to fully restore service. Communications providers are attempting to re-route traffic destined for areas as diverse as Hong Kong, Japan, China, the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Australia, and India, but congestion and service outages may impact services for weeks.

According to Verizon, as many as 18 underseas telecommunications cables serve the Pacific Rim and south Asia; several cables were damages as a result of the Taiwan earthquake, and it may take weeks to get repair teams into the area, locate the problems, and effect repairs.

The U.K.'s Cable & Wireless has been redirecting traffic throgh Australia and Japan. Chunghwa Telecom said communications between Taiwan and Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and Hong Kong were offline, as well as communication to China, which were all routed through Hong Kong.

The quake hit just offshore from the town of Hengchun, came on the second anniversary of a tsunami that took more than 200,000 lives in southern Asia. Two people were killed when their home collapsed, and a total of 42 people were reported injured in southern Taiwan.

(c) www.digitaltrends.com

Newfangled DVD Copy Protection Apparently Cracked; Now The Real Fun Starts

Next-gen DVD players are already something of a joke. Despite their ability to play HD content, industry infighting over two competing standards has stymied their introduction, and their high prices don't help, either. But HD isn't the only new feature these players enable -- they've got a fantastic new DRM scheme, called AACS, too. But, just like pretty much every other DRM scheme out there, rumors say it's already been cracked. It's inevitable, really, and illustrates just what an exercise in futility implementing DRM is: it certainly doesn't stop piracy, as the content available on file-sharing networks indicates, and it simply raises costs and prevents honest consumers from using content they've legitimately purchased in the ways which they'd like. In any case, if AACS really has been cracked, it will be interesting to see the industry response. AACS is supposed to be able to adapt and be changed as time goes on. For instance, keys on playback devices can apparently be revoked and updated in order to allow the DRM to be updated and keep pace with cracks and hacks. However, simply not updating a player may not shield a user from updated DRM, since the copy-protection on discs will change, too -- and if a player hasn't been updated, it won't play the new media. Surely the movie industry feels great about this, and thinks it's really got one over on crackers and pirates. Here's the thing, though: whatever changes they make, the DRM will just get cracked again. And changing around the DRM and requiring updates and breaking functionality isn't going to hurt those people -- it's just going to frustrate honest consumers who won't understand why their expensive DVD player won't play movies any more.

(c) www.techdirt.com

Japanese Media Still Unhappy with YouTube

 by Geoff Duncan

Japanese media groups have called YouTube's response to copyright violations "unsatisfactory," but are still hopeful things can be worked out.

Just after its acquisition by Internet titan Google, popular video sharing Web site YouTube pulled down nearly 30,000 Japanese video files from its service in response to complaints from JASRAC, the Japan Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers. However, Japanese publishers are far from happy with YouTube's efforts to remove copyright violations from its service, characterizing the company's response as "unsatisfactory." However, publishers are still hopeful a solution can be reached without litigation.

On December 4, JASRAC outlined a series of of preventive measures it would like to see taken to deter copyright infringements on YouTube until a comprehensive system can be put into place. JASRAC asked for Japanese-language notices on the YouTube site warning that copyright violations are illegal, that YouTube collect names and addresses of users uploading video material to the site, and that YouTube terminate accounts of users who post copyrighted material. JASRAC sets a deadline of December 15, 2006…which came want went with only a brief reply from YouTube's Chad Hurley and Steve Chen.

In their response, YouTube said they're working on Japanese-language versions of their copyright warnings, and has been terminating accounts of users who repeatedly violate their terms of service. YouTube also offered a simplified version of tool enabling publishers to request take-down of infringing material. However, YouTube noted that it does not currently require any sort of user authentication but would "strive for improvement"—but offered no concrete information or timetable. YouTube also indicated it wanted its senior staff to meet with Japanese publishers in regard to business development in Japan.

(c) www.digitaltrends.com

Google Top Searches: Based on Everything and Nothing

by Michael Arrington

Google made a clarification today to their much criticized list of most popular queries in their search engine. The list raised eyebrows because it included some fairly unlikely terms. “Bebo” for example, was the number one term on the list.

In the original announcement, Google said: “Google today announced its annual Zeitgeist, featuring lists and charts of the most popular and fastest-rising global search terms that people have typed into Google.com.” It turns out that while that statement was literally accurate, it was still somewhat misleading.

In the clarification today, Google said: “we do not simply retrieve the most frequently-searched terms for the period — the truth is, they don’t change that much from year to year…Instead, we looked for those searches that were very popular in 2006 but were not as popular in 2005 — the explosive queries, the topics that everyone obsessed over. To come up with this list, we looked at several thousand of 2006’s most popular searches, and ranked them based on how much their popularity increased compared to 2005. (”Bebo”, for example, had very little traffic in 2005.) We also gave a bit higher score to searches with more traffic. Similarly, our “what is” and “who is” lists are not necessarily the absolute most frequent searches, but rather those that best represent the passing year.”

I agree with Liz Gannes at GigaOm. If at the end of the day Google is taking the top few thousand searches, subjectively picking a handful that are interesting and then redetermining the order based on velocity of growth rather than overall rankings, we end up with a list that is, in the end, completely meaningless.

(c) www.techcrunch.com

Gmail Disaster: Reports Of Mass Email Deletions

by Michael Arrington

Just a week after I wrote “Uh Oh, Gmail Just Got Perfect” a number of users started complaining that all of their Gmail emails and contacts were auto deleted.

The first message, posted on the Google Groups forum on December 19, stated “Found my account clean..nothing in Inbox, contacts ,sent mail..How can all these information residing in different folders disappear? ..How to write to gmail help team to restore the account..is it possible?..Where to report this abuse?.Any help ..Welcome..Thanks in advance ps101″

Other Gmail users then added to the conversation, saying that their emails had been deleted as well. Most of the users reported using Firefox 2.0 and that Gmail was open in their browser when the deletions occured.

The cause of the problem isn’t clear. One user wrote that after the deletion they received the following message: “This is not a mistake. All your emails and contacts have been deleted on purpose. This was a malicious attack and not an error. Have a nice day. =)” One user pointed to a known security issue with Firefox 2.0, which was fixed in 2.0.0.1.

On December 22, four days after the initial incident was reported, a Google representative posted this message on the thread:

Thank you all for reporting this issue. We apologize for the scare and
inconvenience that it’s causing. We’re actively investigating as we
speak, and we’ll follow up individually with users in this thread as we
get to the bottom of the problem.

We appreciate your patience and understanding.

Google’s official policy is that once emails are deleted, they are gone forever. And based on the Google Groups thread, no one has been able to have their Gmail accounts restored to pre-deletion status.

Update: A representative from Google just sent the following email:

Hi there TechCrunch folks,

We saw your post today about Gmail and wanted to let you know what was going on.

Regretfully, a small number of our users — around 60 — lost some or all of their email received prior to December 18th. Once we found out about this issue, we worked day and night to confirm that only a few accounts were affected and to do whatever we could to restore as much of the users’ accounts as we could. We’ve also reached out to the people who were affected to apologize and to work with them to restore the email from any personal backup they might have.

We know how important Gmail is to our users – we use it ourselves for our corporate email. We have extensive safeguards in place to protect email stored with Gmail and we are confident that this is a small and isolated incident.

Thanks,
Courtney

(c) www.techcrunch.com

Power Jacket Exo-Skeleton

It’s cool-looking, but don’t expect to have super-human strength with this suit. It has been designed to help partially paralyzed people in their rehabilitation. In this photo, the left arm will mimic the motion of the right arm, thanks to the synthetic muscles (the blue tubes). That, in turn, will help patients remember “the feeling of moving the arm themselves”.

The device will be tested in Japan and might be on the market by 2009 for $17000 before eventually being mass-produced at a cheaper price.

(c) www.ubergizmo.com