After decades of Saints fans chanting "Who Dat?" at games, the National Football League, in its infinite wisdom, has started sending cease-and-desist letters to business owners in New Orleans, telling them to stop selling "Who Dat?" merchandise as it infringes on NFL trademarks.
TPM has found a rather charming ad currently being run in the Orleans Parish race for coroner. According to TPM, the ad from Dwight McKenna, "attacks the incumbent coroner, Frank Minyard, as a Dr. Frankenstein who sells body parts." That can't be true, can it? Well, yes, it is.
In honor of yesterday’s International Data Privacy Day, Google published its five privacy principles. They are:
- Use information to provide our users with valuable products and services. Search history informs personalized search, but users can opt-out.
- Develop products that reflect strong privacy standards and practices. For example, you can chat on Google Talk “off the record” so the conversation isn’t saved.
- Make the collection of personal information transparent. Last year, the Google Dashboard was launched to show you what info Google is collecting on you.
- Give users meaningful choices to protect their privacy. You can report privacy issues related to Street View. Google often blurs faces, for example.
Social bookmarking site Delicious has updated the ability to filter viewing options – plus added a new way to browse your bookmarks that is very StumbleUpon-like.
First up, there’s a new display options menu tucked into the top right corner of your bookmarks display. This is for when you’re viewing “My Bookmarks” – not on the main page. Here’s what it looks like:
Delicious also gave the option menu treatement to the tags section on the right sidebar in “My Bookmarks.”
Publicly Jason claims to be ignorant about SEO because it allows him moral flexibility and makes Google less likely to torch his site (even though he is blatantly violating their search quality guidelines, and has for *years*).
But when you look at the sales material that Mahalo pitches to corporations, in the 19 page PDF reads like an à la carte menu of SEO services, rather than sales material from a company ignorant of of SEO.
It includes a slide which highlights how well Mahalo Answers questions rank in Google titled “SEO value,” as well as the following statements (followed by my comments):
Whether you’re snowed in or enjoying sunny weather this weekend, take some time to read up on these Google updates:
Google Custom Search has made some changes to the hosted home page.
Google Analytics has made annotations available for all accounts.
Google Maps now offers personalized suggestions.
Google Image search for mobile has added Popular Image browsing.
The Google Research team blogged about building cluster applications.
Google Books updated their Home Page and Library.
I was talking to a friend yesterday who was at a conference where Demand Media’s CEO spoke, and he stated that nobody asked the big question: “what if google decides they don’t like you anymore?”
Then I got thinking about how Google torched Squidoo after Jason Calacanis went on his public campaign to rebrand it as spam. But today under the same level of scrutiny, how is Mahalo (which scrapes millions of 3rd party content listings *without any editorial filter*) not spam? Squidoo at least donates $10,000 a month to charity. Mahalo just “borrows” your content without permission and keeps all the cash.
A spokesman for Mancrunch said the marketer isn't trying to show CBS up or make a political statement. It's simply done the math and thinks the Super Bowl is the best place for the brand.
A spokesman for Mancrunch said the marketer isn't trying to show CBS up or make a political statement. It's simply done the math and thinks the Super Bowl is the best place for the brand.
On Hacker News, Melvin, from Web Design Company, had a great analogy on the Mahalo business model
Let’s use a different industry to illustrate what is happening.
Let’s say a band named The Beatles records a new album. The local radio station gets a copy of their album and plays their song. The listeners love it so they play it more often, but they don’t mention who the band is and on their website, they put up a link to download the song… but without any credits. Their audience grows. They get advertisers to advertise to their audience. They say, “hey, playing good songs gets us more listeners and more listeners gets us more advertisers, which gets us more $$. Let’s do this more often.” So they go do this 500,000 times, and each time never mentioning who the artist is. They grow and prosper while the artists starve.
