• Gavin O'Malley, Feb 24, 2010, 1:42 PM
  • Google's Latest International Showdown Telegraph (UK) et al. Perhaps more than any multinational corporation, Google has a singular knack for crossing paths with and rising the ire of foreign governments and bodies.

    In the latest example -- and one that's particularly threatening to Google's global operations -- the European Commission has launched an anti-trust investigation against the search giant after three online companies alleged that its search functions were penalizing their businesses.

    In particular, "The inquiry, disclosed late Tuesday, appears to focus largely on complaints that Google unfairly ranks the sites of [its] Internet competitors, in effect lowering their rank in search results that appear on Google sites," writes The Wall Street Journal.

    According to the Telegraph (UK), the investigation comes under the Lisbon Treaty's "abuse of dominant position" powers and marks the first time that Google has been targeted by the European Union.

    Under the headline, "Why Europe could prove Google's undoing," the Guardian (UK) writes: "Even if Google defends itself against allegations of anti-competitive behavior, a European investigation could spark all sorts of trouble."

    Sure, "The inquiry is at an 'early, fact-finding stage' and may not result in any further action, but it's clearly got Google worried," insists Digital Daily. "It was the EC, after all, that ultimately beat Microsoft into submission and forced it to alter its business practices."

    "Over the past decade, European regulators have fined other American technology giants like Microsoft and Intel billions of dollars for violating antitrust laws," writes The New York Times.

    In turn, "Antitrust experts said Google's decision to publicize the complaints itself -- on a company blog -- showed the company's determination to try and stop the case before it advanced any further," i.e., nip it in the bud.

    Read the whole story...
  • Is Display Advertising Doomed? samirbalwani.com There's something rotten with the state of display advertising, according to Samir Balwani, an online marketing adviser and strategist at SEO specialist and interactive agency Morpheus Media. The problem with the process of building and executing a display campaign happens when site owners allow advertisers to create custom ad units, full-page takeovers, and other sponsorship ideas.

    "If you can think of it, and are willing to pay for it, site owners will do it," which creates what Balwani calls an "interesting predicament." The issue is that site owners are flooding the market with an infinite supply of display ads, and therefore "continually reducing their value instead of increasing it." In other words, "Demand is having a hard time keeping up with the increased and potential supply." Read the whole story...
  • New EIC At DailyCandy Media Memo Popular lifestyle newsletter DailyCandy has hired Janet Ozzard as its new editor in chief. Most recently, Ozzard ran New York Magazine's Strategist shopping and fashion guide. Eve Epstein, who's edited DailyCandy for the past three years, will now serve as creative director of Swirl, the company's recently launched online sample-sale site.

    In the summer of 2008, Bob Pittman's Pilot Group sold DailyCandy to Comcast for $125 million. More recently, last May, CEO Pete Sheinbaum departed, and was eventually replaced by Hearst Digital's Beth Ellard last August. In December, meanwhile the company began paring back some of its local editions and laid-off some staff in the process, according to Media Memo. If and when the deal with GE and NBC Universal goes through, the blog says DailyCandy will end up as part of the combined company. Read the whole story...
  • R.I.P. 'Rickrolling' PC World Marking the end of an era, YouTube has gone and removed the original "Rickrolling" video from its site due to a terms-of-use violation. Though it likely won't be difficult to find Rick Astley belting out "Never Gonna Give You Up" online in the future, the original -- which racked up more than 30 million views -- is no more.

    "Rickrolling" started in early 2007 on the 4chan imageboard, and would later achieve national notoriety. The use of "Never Gonna Give You Up" apparently stemmed from a 4chan prank called "duckrolling," in which people were sent to an image of a duck on wheels. PC World cites a SurveyUSA estimate that at least 18 million Americans have been "Rickrolled" in recent years. Good times. Read the whole story...
  • Buzz Give Google Reader A Boost TechCrunch Despite a serious backlash, Google's Buzz is driving traffic for the search giant. Over the past month, Buzz -- which is part of Gmail but shares links to article and blog posts through Google Reader -- has driven sharing through Google Reader up 35%, according to AddThis. This number only measures sharing through the AddThis button, which is on some 600,000 Web sites, and gives users the option to share content online.

    Even with the boost, Google Reader barely registers compared to Twitter and Facebook, which account for 31% and 8% of all sharing via AddThis, respectively. Google Bookmarks does much better than Google Reader, with 5% of all AddThis activity. For what it's worth, the service is beating popular social ranking site Digg, which has 3%. Read the whole story...
  • Parlez-vous Twitter? TechCrunch New research may explain why so many consumers don't "get" Twitter, and its microblogging ways. It turns out only about half of the tweets posted on the service are in English, according to Paris-based firm Semiocas, which helps brands understand and interact with real-time Web services, which performed a semantic and quantitative study of Twitter based on an analysis of 2.8 million tweets.

    Curiously, that number is down a full 25% from last year, even though the company is based in the U.S. and has more users and momentum in English-speaking countries than anywhere else on the planet. Furthermore, Semiocast forecasts that its share will grow thinner in the future, as Twitter becomes more internationalized, and its pervasiveness spreads to Asia and Latin-America. Presently, the top 5 languages used on Twitter are English, Japanese, Portuguese, Malay and Spanish. Read the whole story...