Just today Adsense tried defining the adult content. As per the policy “AdSense publisher should know, ads may only be placed on family-safe content.” Here is the red marks from adsense folks:

1) sexually explicit pornographic images (or videos)
2) adult toys or fetish sites, sheer/see-through clothing, and lewd or provocative poses (even if clothed) that have sexually gratifying overtones.
3) articles with sexual health tips (including medical-related advice), erotic stories, and comment spam with adult keywords (most commonly found on sites with user-generated-content).
4) if you wouldn’t want a child to see the content or if you would be embarrassed to view the page in front of colleagues, then it’s probably not family-safe and you shouldn’t place AdSense ad code on it.

By the above definition, we know of a lot of huge tabloids, newspapers and magazines which should be banned. But, we don’t know why they are not. If you are a small or medium publisher or blogger, be carefull.

One of the interesting aspects is the mobile advertising and the Google TV advertising it offers. Althought mobile and internet TV has a big usage, this is a future growth area. With launch of 3G and tablets, the usage of the mediums is set to explode. In todays world, multimedia products can use this medium to their benefit. Smartphone users are growing day by day.

The company website talks about local searces too. This is an interesting concept as internet gets localized too. A lot of businesses have nothing to do with the rest of the part of the world. They are meant to be local and their services cannot spread far and wide. for example a local bakery or a plumber or babysitting.

For local search marketing, there is a requirement of multiple channels depending upon how advanced is the local population. Print dosen’t seem to be dying. Hence press release and other measures are needed. The online and visual market is now days very important. Local businesses can display their services instead of being just read. Then there is interactivity with the local population, that can be done via social networks. Social networks are free to use, however, there is a fee in case of optimisation. One can do the social media marketing him / her self, however, a lot of time is involved. Companies like Globe runner SEO form an important component for these services.

In a fast changing world, it is not possible to be updated on the current trends 24 X 7. One might loose out on this front if they do not engage a company which is more tuned to these development.

But, not so. I found the same story on a different forum. I dug for the owners email id and realised that it was the same as the previous forum which shut down. What was more interesting is that he had copied some 300 odd stories from my website. I asked my editor to follow it up. She wrote to him and got same replies. This time it was more brash. We took the screenshots. Our newer stories also got copied everyday. My editor persisted. She kept emailing him of the newer violation and she got replies the same way. She registered on his forum and appealed the members with predictable result. One of the interesting things that was in the forum reply was “what can you do, the webmaster lives in USA.” This got me thinking, “hell, USA is the place for most copyright violation ligitations, it must be easier to make him comply.” Another mail, the offender claimed that “I am not responsible for what users post on my forum.” We politely pointed it out that “webmaster is responsible for his content.”

Then I explored the Google DMCA. Wrote to them and got no reply.

One day, another interesting mail arrived from the offender. He wrote ” I have copied it under “fair use policy.” So, I searched for fair use policy. Upon reading, a sentence caught my eye. It was written that the servers which host the websites have the responsibility to make its hosted websites to comply to DMCA.

So, I wrote to the server which hosted the forum. Server promptly sent me their DMCA procedures. I filed them and sent it to them. After some days, I found that the forum did not have my stories any more.

Another pleasent surprise came up. Google returned with the DMCA form. The offender had mentioned that his adsense account should not be disabled and he has deleted all such content and what is left confirms to fair use policy.” Google had asked me to file a restrain case against the offender and send them the copy so that they can close his adsense account.

We do not want to harm others. So, I asked the offender the final time if he is willing to comply to our requirements. I told him that if I file a suit, then it will be for larger things like recovering damages etc. The answer was positive to us. We did not press the case.

Some lessons learnt. We had documented his violations. My editors constants mails (almost everyday) brought him jitters. DMCA with servers helps. We spent a lot of time and it taxed us a lot to go through the procedures without incuring a cost. Document everything. Hope this helps you if you have similar trouble.

The first impression was its crisp Safari look and then the gmail opened in a jiffy. Needless to say, it had imported IE 8 settings.

One word: Fast! That is how I can describe the browser. I haven’t seen anything that can match its loading.

One of the tests I did was that I closed the net connection without closing the browser. I tried opening a website, which I had opened a while back. Lo! It loaded with, even the advts. The browser even suggested that I should turn off add ons in rder to further speed up the loading. It also gave various levels of speed and the associated add on’s to be turned off.

A right click below the header and the option of menu’s were displayed.

I am trying out some sites with flash. In my opinion, it handles well, but, I still hate sites with flash. So, even IE 9 won’t convience me to visit flash sites, except for testing.

Verdict: I am changing my browser loyalty from Firefox to IE 9 for now.

Probably, this will help us to circumvent google big site bias. I am planning to block all major websites which keeps coming back on and on for searches. Although I tried to work on the procedure that google gave to block a website, but, I couldn’t. May be not enabled in India right now.

Webmasters beware. Here is what google says

In addition, while we’re not currently using the domains people block as a signal in ranking, we’ll look at the data and see whether it would be useful as we continue to evaluate and improve our search results in the future.

Geographic Shifts in Internet Usage Show Firefox Over-Reported, Internet Explorer Gains Share

With the new C.I.A. numbers factored in, Firefox loses global share since many of the countries it is most popular in (Western European, in particular) now have a lower percentage of global internet users. Internet Explorer gains as browser usage shifts to countries with higher percentages of Internet Explorer users.

On Google Chrome, the report says

Chrome surpassed 10% share of global browser usage for the first time in January by gaining .72% share month to month.

Overall, Internet Explorer is going to be the winner in medium term of say 10 years? I have seen that people have not even loaded mozilla or Chrome as they don’t come built in. In India, atleast, the government applications are built to support IE and people do not have internet connections with unlimited plans. The same trend is shown by the report too.

Internet Explorer 8.0 showed strong growth in January, gaining 1.15% share month to month (1.18% including custom editions). The latest beta version of Internet Explorer, Internet Explorer 9 surpassed 0.5% usage share worldwide. Windows 7 remains the largest user base of Internet Explorer 9, and it now accounts for 1.82% usage on Windows 7 worldwide.

One of the reasons, I saw it coming is that “Yahoo is a selfish search engine.” It tries to promote its own links first and it may not what we want. This is the same mistake Google is making and we have already told you that.

But Bing is by no means the Google of 1990′s even if we have fond that it is the best new bet on pure search engines. Google is not going to be defeated by the Bing any time soon. Here is what Statcounter has to say

StatCounter Global Stats finds that globally Bing reached 4.37% in February ahead of Yahoo! at 3.93%. Both trail far behind Google’s 89.94% of the global search engine market. In the United States Yahoo! at 9.74% still retains its lead over Bing at 9.03%. Google’s share in the US is 79.63%. In July 2009 Microsoft announced an agreement whereby Bing would power the Yahoo! search technology. This has been implemented in the US, Canada, Australia, Brazil and Mexico.

Facebook, an important player has refused to share its data with google, but, Bing has included Facebooks likes in its search and powers facebook search. This could be a loose brick for google.

The problem, as many webmasters are saying is that they cannot do without similar content. Its not possible to sustain blogs and websites with unique “only” content. They need to have similar content in order to increase volume and engage “their” viewers. A common problem is that, they don’t understand google terms as it is too much to read and they joke that you need a full time lawer or university degree in Google studies. One of the webbies says that he writes on keywords like “Al Qaida”, Lashkar e Taiba etc. He has very unique content. But, if you search with those keywords, the bigger sites come first and not his site. He is worried about what he calls “Googles Big Site Bias.”

Most small webmasters I have spoken to say that only big sites can come up with unique content and they hog the keywords too. One of them says that, why do you need google to search for bigger sites, people anyway go to bigger sites.

One of the webbies tells me that he has complained so many times to google regarding the Times of India website for splogs, common / similar content etc. He says that google would have penalised small website for the same reason, but, the Times of India website goes on. He says that Google is essentially scared of banning big sites.

As google keeps cold shouldering and insulting internet community with their search policies, adsense disruptions, unhelpful explanations and most of all “un-understable technologies,” people will increasingly take towards Facebook, Twitter and Bing.

1) Google: This is going to be the most dominant search engine. It is going to give you a very personalised search. It will even bring in its competitors search into its results. The flaw is that, its too technologically advanced for a common man to understand and its results are more skewed to bigger websites and popular content. Don’t expect to find a unique content from google search any more. If you are just a user, then, you may not need any other search engine again. But, if you are from the webmasters side, consider it to be a headache. The problem with google for both users and webmasters is that, google is too segmented. For example, if you search for a particular phrase, the chances are that you will get a crammed search page, that will show the latest twitter, google news, regular search results, results from your friends etc. In my experience, this is too complicated and distracting.

2) Twitter: Most of the webmasters who have created content, will tweet. You can get topics of your interest while you are connected to your friends. But, this will not let you search deeper inside the content. It can be a good competitor for Google News, Google Alerts and limited amount of Google search. Chances are that you may not have to use other search engines if you are connected to twitter. You may need other search engines only if you need a deeper search. I know of people who have said that they have reduced usage of google search by 90%. This should be the darling of webmasters in years to come.

3) Facebook: This is going to emerge as an alternative Internet ecosystem. First of all you will not get Facebook content in Google search. Secondly, it is replacing myspace as preferred social media by artists, companies and individuals. You will terribly miss major aspects of Internet in case you are not on facebook. Webmasters need to be here too.

4) Bing: This is the search engine to watch. “Currently” it will give you search results which is totally different from google’s complex biased search results. Bing is biased too, but, is increasing getting better with the quality of results. Of late, I have begun taking a good look at it, as it has begun bringing in traffic. Although, its a far cry from google traffic potential, you will be sorry as a webmaster if you do not pay attention to it.

In future, an individual search may look like this:

a) Twitter + Facebook + google/Bing + favourite social media. (Most definitely)
b) Twitter + Facebook + Google + favourite social media. (Most likely)
c) Twitter + Facebook + Bing + favourite social media. (less likely)

My romance with google is not yet over, but, I am not willing to let my old flame go. MSN has stopped taking me for granted. MSN has brought webmasters tool, Bing, Live, revamped hotmail, translator and ofcource has started sending some traffic again. MSN is something that google was back in 2000.

I have split up the workload : Firefox/chrome + google search and Internet Explorer + Bing.