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All around Google, we’re proud of our work, our culture and, most importantly, our people. In the spirit of celebration, this spring and summer Googlers have participated in Pride celebrations in Tel Aviv, New York, Zürich, San Francisco and many other cities around the world. Pride is a time for the LGBT* community along with families, friends and supporters to stand up for equality, and to honor those who paved the way for us to express sexual orientation and gender identity openly.

In the U.S., this year’s celebration is historically important: it’s the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots in New York City, a response to what was then routine police harassment of LGBT people. Some 75 Googlers, family members and friends marched with several hundred members of New York’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center. Hundreds of Googlers also joined other U.S. celebrations in Pittsburgh, Chicago, and San Francisco.

Earlier this month, around 50 Googlers and friends gathered to celebrate at Europride, Europe’s best-known Gay Pride celebration. This year it was in Zürich, Switzerland. After weeks of sunshine, on the morning of the parade it began to storm, but that didn’t deter our intrepid Googlers from being out at 6:30am turning a 28-ton truck into a rainbow-colored nightclub on wheels. Hundreds of nuts, bolts and gallons of helium later, the truck was transformed, the sun came out and we were ready to march through the city streets, cheered on by a crowd of 50,000.

Google is a company that supports its LGBT employees, taking a public stand stand on issues that are important to our community. This is not the first year that Google has supported Pride, and it will certainly not be the last. We hope you enjoy this photo album of our global celebrations.

*LGBT stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgendered people and is also intended to include people who identify as queer, asexual or intersexed, amongst others.

Posted by Cynthia Yeung, Partner Strategy Team

Read the rest here:
Celebrating Gay Pride 2009

We use the Internet all the time: at home, at work (especially at Google!), on the move, and, increasingly, at school. We believe that the Internet and cloud-based tools are a key part of a 21st century classroom, helping students learn and teachers teach in collaborative and innovative ways. Students use Google Docs to work on group projects; classrooms use Google Sites to show off their work; and teachers use Forms in Google Docs for instant grading and Google Calendar for lesson planning. Google Apps Education Edition is helping schools build online communities for students, teachers and parents, and we now have 4 million students using Google Apps Education around the world.

This week the Google Apps Education team is launching a few new ways to make it easier for K-12 schools to use Google Apps, and attending the National Education Computing Conference (NECC) in Washington D.C. To help address schools’ email security needs, Google Message Security (GMS) will be offered free to current and new eligible primary and secondary schools globally that opt in by July of next year. GMS filters out email messaging threats, and education IT departments can customize the filtering rules and group messaging lists to suit their schools. We’re also launching the Google Apps Education Community site for educators and students to share tips and ideas for using Google Apps in their classrooms, as well as the Search Education Curriculum and a Google Apps Education resource center with more than 20 classroom-ready lesson plans for teachers. We’ll be adding more to these resources going forward.

If you’re at NECC this year, come visit the Google team in booth #3148. If not, the teaching and learning continues with some cool presentations and lesson plans on the Google Apps Education Community site, or you can learn more at google.com/a/edu.

Posted by Dana Nguyen, Google Apps Education team

Originally posted here:
Google heads to grade school: New resources for K-12 teachers and students

You’ve read about the bills changing the definition of nexus sweeping the nation and why they are wrong.

The simple truth is that they are based on a loophole left by the Supreme Court. In Quill v. North Dakota (1992), the Supreme Court ruled that only the US Congress can force companies without nexus in a state to collect sales tax for that state. The loophole was that having a salesperson in the state created nexus.

Who is a salesperson?

A smart lobbyist figured out that the states can expand the definition of a salesperson to include anyone who is paid commission for advertising on its site. They neglected to realize that this is advertising and can be cut off with the click of a mouse, just as Amazon has done in several states and promised to do in several more. That means no increase in sales tax revenue. The real equation is: AB178 = a decrease in income tax revenue + a decrease capital gains tax revenue + an increase in unemployment payments. In other words, it equals less revenue!

Let’s end the debate

Enough on what is constitutional or fair. Enough talking about how there is no revenue because affiliates will be terminated by the retailers or affiliates will move to other states. No one in state government is interested in that. They want another solution. (I’ve told them that doing nothing is a better solution. That resonates about as well as talking about a solution from Congress.)

My solution: Climb through the looking glass

My solution is climbing back through the same loophole the states are using. It’ll kill loyalty sites (including my own) but it will keep many more around and suck all of the revenue from bills like AB178.

Enter Shopzilla, our white knight

The Shopzilla Publisher Program is perfect for this. Not only does Shopzilla pay on a CPC basis, it has a quality filter to protect retailers. That means that any sites that have questionable practices or low-quality traffic, will be paid less or will not be able to survive.

Shopzilla is where you can find many of the stores who terminated NY affiliates. I did a quick search and here is the list that I found. I’m sure there are more but I wanted to get this out today. I think that any retailers who want to keep their affiliates in all 50 states should consider using Shopzilla. In addition, I am guessing that some of the other comparison shopping networks have similar programs to compensate publishers using CPC and systems to protect retailers against low-converting traffic. I’d also bet that the affiliate networks will join in with their own CPC compensation structures.

Sign up: Shopzilla Publisher Program.

The list

Here’s what I have so far:

Tirerack (CJ)

Conclusion

There is no revenue for the states to gain. In fact, there is only income tax and capital gains tax revenue to lose and increased unemployment payments.

State legislators, PLEASE STOP THE MADNESS! I know you are being promised a lot of money. Please talk to your constituents who are affiliates and find out the truth about these bills.

Read more:
The End of Affiliate Marketing or the Rebirth of CPC?

Farming gold is expected to become a big enough problem that China has banned gold farming. What? Who farms gold?

For those unfamiliar with this hidden economy, “gold farming” is a term that refers to performing tasks that allow you to level up in games. Such “farming” includes actually digging for gold, building characters for sale, lurking to kill players who regenerate in the same place, and other actions which may save time and effort for would be game players.

There is a sizable business in MMORPGs for gold farming especially in World of Warcraft. One report suggests gold farming is worth between $200M and $1B in real money. Yes, it’s a virtual good story, and there are hundreds of companies, mostly in poor areas and third-world countries, who “farm gold” to sell to buyers in the US and other western countries.

While this may sound enterprising, the buying and selling of characters, goods, and services in the real world for virtual world benefit, could have dire consequences – at least the Chinese government believes so.  From the official press release:

“Since 2007, virtual money trading has drawn official attention, with the government demanding tighter controls as such trading became an avenue for gambling and illicit trade.”

Can these virtual economies with virtual goods be such a big deal? Is there really that much criminal behavior around it?

The Chinese government thinks so and is attempting regulation through their Ministry of Commerce. From my own experiences I agree there is a high potential for illicit activity. Back in 2004, I personally saw enough fraudulent activity attempts at buying, selling, and trading virtual currency vehicles, my employer at the time, BitPass, put a high security watch and filter on one of the retailers of the Lineage MMORPG cards for one overseas partner who was using BitPass as a micropayment instrument. To them, at the time, micropayments really did add up to a genuine source of income.

I recommend you read the press release and the earlier discussion on virtual goods, if you have the chance. There’s a potentially enormous volume of transactions in China alone for virtual goods and online payments, big enough that the Chinese government has noticed and taken action.

View post:
China Bans Gold Farming

When you hear about how successful some affiliates are at using Twitter, it’s hard to ignore it as a potential traffic source. For Shoemoney, it’s his second biggest blog traffic source, and Ted Murphy get’s 40% of his blog traffic from Twitter. But those are blogs, not affiliates sites, so the question still remains: does twitter convert for affiliates? Will twitter-networking drive sales?

Well, some numbers from Hitwise indicate that Twitter doesn’t even drive that much traffic to ecommerce in the first place — at least in the UK, anyway.

During May 2009 Twitter was the 30th biggest source of traffic for other sites in the UK, accounting for 1 in every 350 visits to a typical website. Over half of this traffic (55.9%) is sent to other content-driven online media sites, such as social networks, blogs, and news and entertainment websites. However, only 9.5% of Twitter’s downstream traffic is sent to transactional websites (i.e. travel, business and finance sites, plus online retailers). By contrast, Google UK (the country’s biggest search engine and source of traffic to other websites) sends 30.7% of its traffic to transactional sites, while for Facebook (the UK’s most popular social network), the figure is 14.7%.

Does this mean that Twitter is a waste of time? Maybe not. As the Hitwise blog posts goes on to note, Dell claims to have generated $3m in sales via Twitter. So what does this all mean for affiliates?

Well, for starters, maybe most “transactional websites” just haven’t started using Twitter strategically.

But ore importantly, it’s also possible that many ecommerce sites that do use Twitter aren’t using it properly. Twitter is a social network, and a social network is a place where people interact with other people. So using Twitter to post repeat adver-tweets is going to fail.

A strategic use of Twitter would be using not just as a brand, but as a person who builds actual relationships with other people. People are on Twitter to interact, not spend money, so they have to trust you before they’re going to buy from you.

So can affiliates use Twitter to drive referrals? Probably. But only if you’re:

1. focusing on building actual relationships by interacting in a meaningful,
2. and reaching out to a targeted audience that might actually be interested in the products you promote.

Once people trust you, then they might visit your site or blog, and subsequently convert into referral, but you have to first earn that trust, and you’re not going to do that by spamming them.

That being said, before investing too much of their time in Twitter, affiliates should bear in mind that it’s just one of several potential acquisition channels. As Hitwise pointed out, search is still driving way more ecommerce traffic. So while affiliates are building up their trust and Twitter network, they should also keep doing what still works for them elsewhere.

The rest is here:
Can Twitter Drive Sales?

This is the first of a series of posts from YouTube’s news and politics blog, Citizentube. -Ed.

YouTube is the biggest video news site on the Internet, and at no time in our site’s history was that more apparent than in these last two weeks of the crisis unfolding in Iran. As hundreds of thousands of Iranian citizens took to the streets of Tehran to protest the national elections, the government kicked out foreign journalists, leaving citizens themselves as the only documentarians to the events unfolding there. We’ve been highlighting many of these videos and keeping track of the latest developments on our YouTube news and politics blog, Citizentube.

Though the circumstances in Iran are unique, this isn’t the first time that citizens have played a crucial role in reporting on events around the world. Burmese citizens uploaded exclusive video footage to YouTube during the protests in Myanmar back in 2007; people in China’s Sichuan province documented the devastating and historic 7.8-magnitude earthquake of 2008 in real-time; and eyewitnesses to the shooting of young Oscar Grant by Oakland police forces captured the event on their cell phone cameras and uploaded videos to YouTube for the world to see. Citizens are no longer merely bystanders to world events. Today, anyone can chronicle what they see and participate in the news-gathering process.

Though it’s the phenomenon of citizen reporting that YouTube is probably best known for, we also have hundreds of news partners who upload thousands of videos straight to YouTube every day. You can see lots of these on our news page at youtube.com/news. Many of these organizations have used YouTube in unique ways, like asking the community to submit questions for government officials, providing a behind-the-scenes look at traveling with the Obama press corps and accepting video applications for a reporting assignment in West Africa. We believe the power of this new media landscape lies in the collaborative possibilities of amateurs and professionals working together.

And so today, we’re launching a new resource on YouTube to help citizens learn more about how to report the news, straight from the experts. It’s called the the YouTube Reporters’ Center, and it features some of the nation’s top journalists sharing instructional videos with tips and advice for better reporting. Learn how to prepare for an interview; or how to be an investigative reporter from the legendary Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward; or how to report on a global humanitarian crisis from Nick Kristof of the New York Times. All of the videos are available on the YouTube Reporters’ Center channel.

Posted by Olivia Ma, YouTube News and Politics

View original here:
Media and citizens meet in the YouTube Reporters’ Center

If you develop iPhone or Android applications, we’re happy to let you know about the beta launch of AdSense for mobile applications. Participants in the beta will be able to display text and image ads in their mobile applications to earn revenue. We’ve seen positive results in our trials, and we’re excited to roll this out to new developers to continue supporting the growth of mobile applications.

You can visit our new microsite to learn more about AdSense for mobile applications, see our beta requirements, or sign up. If you’re selected to participate in the beta, we’ll be in touch with you shortly with next steps for getting started.

You can also learn more about the program by watching the video below, in which Howard Steinberg, Director of Business Development at Urbanspoon, describes how he tested AdSense for mobile applications:

Posted by Alex Kenin – AdSense for Mobile Applications Marketing

View post:
Generate revenue from mobile applications

At Google we seek to serve a broad base of people

Advertisers place a great deal of focus on the title and description in their ad copy, but the url is often overlooked. The display url of your ad also has an effect on whether or not people are likely to click on your ad. If you use a display url that contributes to a high click through rate, you will in turn be paying a lower average cost per click and saving money. Testing display url’s is a great way to increase your click through rate.

Both differing domain names and differing url extentions should be tested. The domain name you use should be very relevant to what you are advertising. If you advertise a wide range of products or services, it may be worthwhile to set up several domains, each with a relevant domain name to a specific product and use these in your advertisements.

You should also be testing different url extentions. For example if Ten Golden Rules has an ad group set up to advertise SEO Consulting, rather than just including the top level domain (www.TenGoldenRules.com) as the display url, variations should be tested, such as (www.TenGoldenRules.com/SEO-consulting).

Spend Less in AdWords with URL Testing

At Google, we are moved by the life and untimely passing of Michael Jackson. As word spread of his death, millions and millions of people from all over the world began searching for information about the pop icon. The following chart shows the meteoric rise in related searches around 3:00pm PDT:

Search volume began to increase around 2:00pm, skyrocketed by 3:00pm, and stabilized by about 8:00pm. As you can see in Google Hot Trends, many of the fastest rising search queries from yesterday and today have been about Michael Jackson’s passing (others pertained to the death of another cultural icon, Farrah Fawcett). People who weren’t near a computer yesterday turned to their mobile phones to check on breaking news. We saw one of the largest mobile search spikes we’ve ever seen, with 5 of the top 20 searches about the Moonwalker.

The spike in searches related to Michael Jackson was so big that Google News initially mistook it for an automated attack. As a result, for about 25 minutes yesterday, when some people searched Google News they saw a “We’re sorry” page before finding the articles they were looking for.

Michael Jackson led an amazing and controversial life in the public eye. Many of us have a “Michael Jackson story.” Mine is that he actually taught me how to moonwalk — thanks to many an hour I spent in front of the television trying to mimic his performances. Regardless of your story or personal opinions about this astounding performer, global interest in the King of Pop is undeniable.

Posted by R.J. Pittman, Director, Product Management

Read the rest here:
Outpouring of searches for the late Michael Jackson

Huge congratulations to Daniel Halasz from Hungary, who was awarded the Google Photography Prize this week. This was a global student competition to create themes for iGoogle. More than 3,600 students from across the world entered, and a couple of weeks ago we asked you to vote on the shortlist. The six finalists who got the most public votes were Amelia Ortúzar (Chile), Fahad AlDaajani (Saudi Arabia), Matjaz Tancic (U.K.), Mikhail Simin (U.S.) and Vesna Stojakovic (Serbia) — congratulations to all of them! From that group, a jury of respected art critics and artists chose Daniel as the winner. They also gave a special commendation prize to Aliyah Hussain from the U.K.

You can see the work Daniel and the other finalists submitted at the Saatchi Gallery in London until Sunday, June 28th. Come by if you’re in town, or have a look at their photographs on google.com/photographyprize, where you can also add them to your iGoogle homepage.

Posted by Posted by Louise Rigby, Consumer Marketing Team

View original post here:
We have a winner for the Google Photography Prize

Yesterday, Mitch Joel’s blog featured a video from Clay Shirky speaking at the TED conference on the phenomena of social media being used by everyday citizens for political purposes – often scooping or even eliminating the need for the media. Shirky cites recent efforts by social media users to validate results in countries experiencing voting conflict.

Our CEO, Jay Berkowitz, recently did a presentation which included this topic – refering to it as the opportunity to”disintermediate” – or cut out the middle man. Jay cites current online services that disintermediate, including companies using Twitter for customer service, and websites like HARO (Help A Reporter Out) which connects reporters with sources.

The process to disintermediate was a keystone of the overall design of the internet when the “www” was first formed. And the ability to do it via social media has been around since the beginning, too (consider forums, chat rooms, etc).

Today’s social media interfaces provide a rich/multi-media approach to the same opportunity. It has taken the kind of widespread adoption of these tools prevalent today for this to become noticed by the world. With these mainstream tools that have unlimited global reach, small voices can now get the attention they desire.

The “middle man” better be looking behind him. He’s rapidly becoming obsolete.

Read more:
Disintermediate – What the “Web” Was Created For

This week, we are adding award-winning blogs to the BAMroll. They were recognized at the a4uawards in June in the category of “Affiliate Marketing Blog of 2009.” We agree with the judging panel that the following blogs are about affiliate marketing in a big way. By ‘big’ we mean it’s worth downloading our OPML file from the BAMroll page so you can stay updated on their insightful and applicable posts…

• Affiliate $tuff is the Affiliate Marketing Blog of 2009, and what a well-deserved award! This blog manages to be endlessly informative without overwhelming. It’s like an encyclopedia-yearbook hybrid: useful, searchable, entertaining, and with notes from the popular crowd written in the margins. Check out her wonderful glossary.
• Lee McCoy was highly commended for this award, and again, very well-deserved! Easily absorbed, with a hands-on approach, and very good foresight–such features make it worth your time to read. Social media aficionados will be particularly satisfied with his defense of it’s value to online marketers.

A very sincere congratulations to Kirsty and Lee! There are badges here for you to put on your blogs.

View original post here:
BAMroll Update: Thursday, June 25, 2009

Sign the petition

Before I start, I am going to ask that you sign the petition I started. It is all explained below. To sign, just tweet the following on Twitter:

petition @nmevans to Stop the #affiliatetax. Don’t hurt small biz in CA! http://act.ly/q retweet to sign

From the beginning… AB178

Brook Schaaf has a good write up on the California Affiliate Tax.

act.ly and my petition

My friend Clay Johnson told me about a new website, act.ly that launched this week. It is a brilliant idea. You can read the inspiration for it here. It is a service to post petitions that get signed when people retweet on Twitter. It requires that the person starting the petition select a single Twitter account to receive all of the votes.

I decided to give it a try. I found the account for Noreen Evans, the chair of the California Legislature’s Budget Conference Committee (or an account that appears to be hers). I hope that she reads the petition, the e-mails she is getting and this blog post. I hope that she sees that the bill, while well-intentioned, does not achieve it’s goals and will hurt some of California’s small businesses.

As you know, changes to the definition for nexus were proposed in February as AB178 by Assemblymember Nancy Skinner. She was unable to get the votes required to send the bill to the full Assembly so she tabled it (made it a so-called two-year bill which gave her until January, 2010 to get it through the Revenue and Tax Committee). There wasn’t a hearing on the bill. I know that because I received an e-mail telling me that the bill would not be heard as my cab pulled up to the state capital when I was going to testify.

It’s baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaack!

Things work differently in government than in business. The Budget Conference Committee spent the better part of a month working out the details of the budget. At 6pm on the last day of negotiations, a trailer bill was introduced with 9 provisions, one of which was AB178. There was little or no debate and no opportunity for public comment. It was passed along party lines.

Amazon says “NO!”

This week, Amazon sent a letter to state leaders letting them know that Amazon would terminate its California Associates (affiliates) should the definition of nexus change. Many other online retailers will follow suit and terminate affiliates.

Failure to achieve its goals

Lawmakers state 2 goals in AB178:

1. Increase the State’s revenue
2. Help brick-and-mortars

Should retailers terminate affiliates, neither goal will be achieved. Affiliates from other states and abroad will find ways to pick up the sales as those of us hurt by the bill see our userbases disappear and our revenues decline. That means that there may be a net decrease in revenue for the State.

Brick-and-mortar, if they have been hurt by stores such as Amazon not collecting sales/use tax, would see no benefit as Amazon will continue to not collect sales/use tax from Californians. So the B&Ms aren’t helped and businesses that use affiliate marketing are hurt.

Or are we?

I try to run my business in a way that is good for our store partners and our shoppers. I spend time looking for ways to build sites that add value, not looking for loopholes. Should this bill pass and we get terminated by the likes of Amazon and Overstock and others, there is a HUGE loophole that was created in the latest draft of the bill.

If we are terminated by stores for using commission-based compensation, why not switch to using links from comparison shopping engines? Of course, this solution works for some business models and not others. We can’t offer cash back from those links but we can maintain the relationships until we see some rationalization in the market.

Budget Vote Crisis

The state legislature voted on parts of the budget yesterday and did not pass them. The change in nexus for out-of-state retailers is in a separate trailer bill. So there is still time. Please sign the petition by tweeting the following:

Sign the petition!

petition @nmevans to Stop the #affiliatetax. Don’t hurt small biz in CA! http://act.ly/q retweet to sign

Source:

Squidoo has made some major Policy Changes!!You have until mid-July to get your lenses inorder or they may be locked or deleted.Key areas of change:#1 No Spam#2 No X-Rated or Porn#3 No junk topics#4 A new limit on “overly promotional lenses”#5 Plagiarism takedownYou may think you know what these mean, but checkthis out closely. “Junk Topics” may include any lens on”weight loss” for example.Let’s

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Squidoo Policy changes: check your lenses NOW!