Where's Germany? Why, it's right here

According to Google, it's right here on this blog. A quick look (UK settings) shows Netcoms Dot Com as the number two result for 'Where's Germany'.

I was surprised to see the amount of traffic coming through for this term after this post started the ball rolling. No doubt a mixture of a recent post, plus the keywords in the title tag. Let's see how long it lasts.

Double Trouble

There's an excellent history of the online advertising industry, as part of Google's explanation of why they bought DoubleClick, essentially adding their ad sales network to DoubleClick's ad serving network.

As well as giving Google a significant foothold in another key area of the online ad industry, it also gives them access to DoubleClick's agency relationships, to capture both the short and the long tail of the ad industry. Smart move.

Google warming

Laudable initiatives from Google at ensuring that they become a carbon neutral company and beyond. Let's hope that this becomes a template for the corporate world.

Will be interesting to see how much their use their existing destinations as a way of campaigning online, as there are some topics where you shouldn't remain neutral...

Where's Germany?

So, YouTube is going international with sites in nine different major markets. However, the one surprising omission is Germany.

While Germany has Sevenload.com, this is still a huge digital market and a quick search shows plenty of German content already on YouTube. What will the locals make of the apparent snub? Maybe the German reaction to alleged Flickr censorship and the legal issues at the core played a factor in the delay...

Time to update the blogger templates

This blog has had the same template for a couple of years now, after I decided to take it out of the pre-2000 design phase and bring it up-to-date. As ever, internet design moves fast and it's already looking dated.

So, I decided to check out the available blogger templates having expectations of at least some of the open-source creativity you get with Wordpress. However, the templates were lacking in number and excitement so I'll stick with this for now.

Time to create a few more?

It's harder than you think

Google has responded in the debate about video fingerprinting as a way of controlling the use of copyrighted content on YouTube. Both Microsoft's Soapbox and MySpace video already have video fingerprinting in place, so you can understand many content owner's frustration about the delay.

However, Google does make some interesting points about the difficulties in identifying copyrighted content when sometimes copyrighted content may be legitimately posted independent of Google's content deals. As it says, porn or violence are reasonably clear to all (but still a judgement call) whereas users may not know if a piece of copyrighted content is legal or not.

Whatever the merits of the arguments, Google needs to implement their technology sooner rather than later to appease the concerns of many content owners.

Going public about privacy

As you would expect from their communications policy, Google are using their blog on a corporate level to respond to the privacy storm caused by the controversial report from Privacy International, while Googler Matt Cutts responds on a personal level in his 'official' blog.

Their response and those of many of the blogosphere have successfully generated debate about the report and have put their side of the story across. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the report, it has put privacy at the centre of debate on the internet and that can only be viewed as a positive.

Google raising the stakes

There have been a significant number of Google offerings of late as they extend this offering into mashups, desktop and extend the functionality of the mapping tool:

- Google Gears: allowing you to read your Google Reader RSS feeds offline with the technology open to external sites and services
- Purchase of Feedburner: feed distribution and management tools
- Google Mashup Editor: rival to Yahoo Pipes
- Google Mapplets: embed mini applications within Google Maps
- Purchase of Panoramio: geo-located photo sharing

All part of the battle for acquisitions and innovation between the big three of Microsoft, Yahoo and Google.

Blogger custom domains

About time too. Blogger.com now lets you buy your own domain, point it at the Google Blogger servers and they will take care of the hosting. So, for those of us that like to have our own domain for SEO, vanity or other reasons rather than the default 'dot blogspot', we can do so for the price of a domain.

May be a little late to capture those lost to Wordpress and the like, but another important step in making Blogger.com a competitive service again for medium to advanced users.