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We C what Brangelina are up to, suspend disbelief as Liz visits Larry and marvel at how Jacko can turn a phrase. Also, Katie leaves Today, idol worship, the real and the fake at Cannes, and more. -M!

A panel discussion of the new Second Life Library 2.0, located in a virtual reality environment, presented by Lori Bell, Greg Schwartz, Jami Lynn Schwarzwalder, and others on May 31, 2006. (25.5 MB...

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Today's search podcast covers Travelin' green with advice from The Earthday Network and Google, Bill Gates talking about Microsoft's 5-year battle plan to get users to navigate to them for search (instead of Google) and some nice SEO tips about optimizing using languages outside English. Listen to Daron Babin and Detlev Johnson discuss Google supporting Mozilla Firefox 2.0 with Anti-Phishing technology, and with such strong ties to the Firefox browser, shouldn't Google just buy Mozilla Corporation? Hear all these stories and much more!

Tune-in by listening to this MP3 file, listening via WebmasterRadio at 11:30am Eastern and repeated at 2pm Eastern Tuesday through Friday, via our Odeo channel or through iTunes via this link (or use alternative iTunes instructions explained here) or though our Yahoo Podcasts channel. Need more help tuning in live or finding the chat room? See the Daily SearchCast FAQ.

Below are links to items discussed:

• Travel Green With Tips From Google
  Promoting companies that offer environmental benefits, Google has partnered with The Earth Day Network to provide Have a Green Summer tips for traveling green. Check out special "tours" using Google technologies that highlight businesses that offer a useful green alternative to the status quo, including an alternative fuel car service out of New York, (I actually used Ozo on a previous trip), and earth friendly fun activities pinpointing parks, links to hiking trails and museums. The tips Google provides are meant to guide searchers and better help those looking for environmentally responsible hotels and accommodations. The tips simply add environmental...
• Microsoft Patiently Waiting To Advertise
  Marketwatch, reporting from the D4 conference, quotes Bill Gates discussing Google as "very much the leader" contrary to Microsoft having made previous grand statements about matching Google within 6-months far longer ago. Bill Gates announced "it's a five year battle." The plan is to get users to navigate to Microsoft search rather than Google. Mocrosoft has invested heavily in search, and search (among other Web services) will see an increase of $2 billion more in investment over the next year than what was initially planned. And when it all comes together, the plan is to spend on advertising to let...
• Language Specific SEO Advice
  A very well written elaborate (PDF) whitepaper by Huiping Iler explains in great detail what's involved, and most of the difficulties, with search engine rankings outside English. Consider that users are faced with filters, radio buttons and other obstacles during the search process, and you can picture what must be done to establish visibility with your target audience. Consider the facts pointed out by Iler, such as 60% of searches are performed in languages other than English, English has approximately 500,000 words, compared with French having approximately 300,000 and all forms of Chinese combined characters amount to approximately 50,000. One...
• Google Anti-Phishing Will Be Part Of Firefox 2.0
  While Microsoft makes the dominant Internet Explorer 7 which will be bundled with Vista, Google has strong ties to the upstart Firefox browser, employing key developers and supporting Firefox with a search affiliate deal worth 10's of millions of dollars. Both browsers will have state of the art anti-phishing capability, protecting users from online scams that steal identities among other crimes. Google collects an online list of phishing sites to help alert users of the Google Toolbar, and the same technology is planned to provide Firefox 2.0's Safe Browsing features. Firefox has approximately 20% of the browser market share and...
• Redfin Gets Funding and Prepares to Go National
  Seattle-based Redfin.com was one of the first real estate “mashups” to employ a map interface as a primary navigation tool for real-estate search. The site was quickly joined by other real-estate mashups, HousingMaps.com (the early poster child for mashups), HomePages.com, Trulia and, more recently, Zillow....
• Pay-Per-Call Looking For Ways To Grow
  The Pay-Per-Call industry has a number of folks that assumed far faster growth than what has realized to date. Looking for ways to get more advertisers participating, the companies that offer Pay-Per-Call advertising are posturing and making deals with mobile search service providers to expand inventory. Search users are also slow to adopt mobile search, although acceptance of mobile, especially with local mobile search for travelers, is probably a mere matter of time and excellent small screen device options. Pay-Per-Call advertising networks hooking up with mobile search providers makes a lot of sense, since the small screen device people will...

Today's reading by Kristen McQuillin. Send questions and comments to librivox@yahoo.ca

by Tobias S Buckell 13 minutes, 19 seconds Unabridged Short SF Story 2000 When the fuel went, Mara's town turned to windpower. They struggled on as the lights left, as the cities fell fallow, and plastic became a memory. Their...

Details via the TeleRead Web Log. Accessibility is an issue very dear to me and, I know, to the blind readers of David F's blog. Perhaps 70 percent of America's blind people are unemployed, and what better way to improve themselves than through books with which speech synthesizers get along well?

That's not the reality today, however, thanks partly to a less-than-fully-committed standards effort over the years from the International Digital Publishing Forum. Alas, in the just-finished election, IDPF members failed to re-elect board member George Kerscher--a blind man who is a prominent disability advocate within the tech community. Once the IDPF had even chosen George as chair, but I guess priorities change. Yes, for the benefit of the sighted, that's George in the photo.

A second blind-friendly candidate, Mark Carey, also lost. While the e-book industry is getting better, it still has a long way to go toward full accessibility.

One result is that David F can't be nearly as productive as a super-gifted book reviewer as he could be if true e-book standards existed.

Luckily another e-book standards group has emerged, the OpenReader Consortium, in which I'm involved along with Mark and others; and we'll cherish particpation by blind people and others with print-related impairments.

- Text by David Rothman

Book discussion of the graphic memoir Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, held on May 30, 2006. Sponsored by the Washington Talking Book & Braille Library. Includes a discussion of the challenges of...

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Today's search podcast covers Ask, the only major search engine that had a special Memorial Day homepage, a quick heads up on the new Yahoo! Weather report and a reasoned breakdown about links as confusing messages appear from Google company blogs. Meanwhile, the rumors about Google Payments start to swarm and build up to the tempest that hit the likes of CNet. So, we ride the tempest wind and rain to tell you all about what we hear might be happening. Check out the new Mashup WikiMapia!. We tell you how to find a UK PacMan crop-circle gobbling up dots and much much more!

Tune-in by listening to this MP3 file, listening via WebmasterRadio at 11:30am Eastern and repeated at 2pm Eastern Tuesday through Friday, via our Odeo channel or through iTunes via this link (or use alternative iTunes instructions explained here) or though our Yahoo Podcasts channel. Need more help tuning in live or finding the chat room? See the Daily SearchCast FAQ.

Below are links to items discussed:

• Mazeltov Barry & Yisha!
  If all seems quiet from hard-working chief news correspondent Barry Schwartz, that's because he's off on his honeymoon. Barry married Yisha yesterday, concluding the engagement he started with a wedding proposal on Ask last year. Congrats from all of us at Search Engine Watch to the happy couple! If you'd like to send your best wishes, pop by our Search Engine Watch Forums thread, Rustybrick Getting Hitched This Weekend!...
• Ask Recognizing Memorial Day
  The Ask homepage has recognized Memorial Day with an image and link to customized search results. While Memorial Day is specifically an American holiday, Thanksgiving is also specifically American and most search engines had fun with their logo on that day last year. Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft apparently skipped the day for custom search, while Ask has nicely provided references to the history of Memorial Day, recipes and other observance tips. Postscript: We can expect most Holidays to be highlighted on Ask in the future. Our friend Gary Price wrote in to explain the Memorial Day reference at Ask is...
• Yahoo! Weather Report
  Yahoo! announced late yesterday that they have begun an update to their Web Search index. You can expect some changes to your Yahoo! rankings over the next several days, and if you want to provide feedback, they supply a new form that you can use to do so. The form field is limited to 6 lines of text, so prepare only short commentary, but you can specify whether your issues are technical in nature, a suggestion or just general feedback....
• About Links From Google
  The Google Sitemaps team posted to their blog in response to a question at SearchEngineWatch Seattle. Interestingly, they note that links from bad neighborhoods do not harm a site's rankings, only links to bad neighborhoods. It has long been theorized that links from bad neighborhoods do cause ranking problems and this goes against conventional thinking. Link networks often populate quality content sites with paid text links as part of their program. If at all possible, Google obviously wouldn't want to remove quality content from their search engine. One solution is to make outbound links from quality sites that sell links...
• Rumor: Google Payments
  Rumors have been flying since yesterday about Google's plan for a payment system and recent developments. Although unsubstantiated at this time, the talk is not new. Google itself has made some overtures about a pending payment system, and we can expect one to arrive sometime in the near future....
• WikiMapia: Google Maps and Wikipedia Mashup
  Coming on the heels of the recently launched Microsoft MapCruncher, WikiMapia uses the Google Maps API and a Wiki interface. This enables users to enter or edit information with map hotspots. They ask that you refrain from adding anything that wouldn't be useful to everyone. Currently, the entries mainly consist of empty hotspots on buildings of interest, but a UK PacMan was also spotted. The search functionality only works searching tags applied to entries. There just aren't enough entries yet. I searched [cropcircle] from the main screen, and it limited the hotspots to the single entry with that tag. If...
• Political Actions By Google In Washington Seen As Naive
  Threatening everything from Net Neutrality to regulating companies with operations in China, tech companies must take their cause to Washington. The Seattle Times details lessons learned by Microsoft over its antitrust woes, and characterized Google has having taken serious missteps by irritating Republicans in power with its employees modestly contributing nearly entirely to Democrats and under staffing its DC operations. Google countered that they are "not a partisan presence in Washington," and "recently announced the hiring of Bush White House aide Jamie Brown for a senior position." The general sense is that Google will take lessons learned from Microsoft and...
• Google Pressures CHMoogle Into Name Change
  The chemistry search engine CHMoogle encountered opposition to its Trademark filing by Google, and decided to resort to eMolecules rather than take on the search giant. Although eMolecules' attorneys could argue the different audience and content wouldn't cause consumer confusion, the complaint against them met its mark with CEO Klaus Gubernator. A legal proceeding would distract the company from its mission addressing the lack of "cheminformatics" in Web-wide search engines....
• Free New AdWords Alerts Service
  A free alert service kicks off with two alerts related to Google AdWords and AdSense. You can get daily email alerts with the costs of the most expensive AdWords both by bid and by cost per day. Today is a new alert by keyword that emails you when new advertisers appear for a keyword you supply. Assuming you don't mind a flurry of email when tracking popular categories, this can be handy....
• A Google Powered TV Guide
  Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, comments that their mission is to provide access to everything, including television content. Using Google search capability, coupled (for instance) with Media Center or an XBox, this vision could potentially be realized. There are questions, of course, about Internet connections fast enough to withstand the bulky data transfer that such content requires. This may ultimately get supported by a new format of advertising that Google is continually testing on a weekly basis....
• Marchex Acquires Local-Vertical Search Company Openlist
  New York-based Openlist, a local, vertical search engine, was acquired by Marchex, which provides search and contextual marketing but also owns a network of thousands of "direct navigation" domains. Little-known Openlist was co-founded by former Jupiter analyst Matthew Berk as Local-i and has been around for roughly two years. The deal is worth $13 million in cash and stock and Berk, among several others, now joins Marchex. One can think of Openlist as Citysearch built by aggregation. I think that Openlist is doing some of the most interesting work in Local right now; and the acquisition makes Marchex a potentially...
• Kozoru To Launch Chat-Based Search Technology, Byoms
  Internet search is in many ways fairly standard now, and although existing search engines bring out new features, or new engines appear, it isn't often that you see anything that's really different. However kozoru is launching a chat based search resource called byoms or 'build your own mobile search', with a public beta going live on June 5th. This is something of a departure from traditional search, by allowing users to run their own searches using a chat client....
• Fixing AOL Search
  Jason Calacanis has written a forthright piece on the importance of fixing AOL search. He's examined Google, Yahoo, MSN and AOL search, and in particular looked at the position of the first organic result, down to the number of pixels from the top and the left, together with useful screen shots. Danny wrote on the same subject of the positioning of results a couple of years ago. There's absolutely no doubt that the positioning of organic results is very important, but as a searcher there are other things that I worry about rather more....

If you are interested in languages, cultures, and unique literatures, Outwitting History is for you. If you like reading about books, libraries, how several young volunteers started a grassroots organization that now has over 35,000 members, again Outwitting History is for you.

I found a friend's comparisons of Yiddish and Braille fascinating.

To learn more about Yiddish book preservation, go here.

Just a quick note to mention that the second part of my two-part session for the SirsiDynix Institute is now available online, linked here in mp3 format. Those of you subscribed to my podcast feed should receive it automatically. And don't forget that the SirsiDynix Institute podcast feed is now available as well.

This one is a little rougher than the first part, primarily due to a throat tickle that I developed about two-thirds of the way through. It's painful for me to listen as I struggle to maintain my voice along with my train of thought. My apologies in advance.

You can also view the slides and audio together in the recorded LiveMeeting.

There were a number of good questions that were posed in the chat log that I was unable to answer in the given time. At some point in the near future, I'll post some answers to those questions here.

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