Top Items:


Ad and image placement: a policy clarification — We've recently received a number of emails from publishers asking how we feel about the placement of images near Google ad units. There's been some confusion on this issue, and so we turned to our policy team to set the record straight.
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Australian court rules against MP3 link site — update Linking to copyright music posted elsewhere online without permission can be illegal, an Australian appeals court ruled Monday. — The issue before a three-judge panel at the Federal Court of Australia was whether Stephen Cooper …
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Allowing Linking To MP3s Still Illegal In Australia; Ruling …
Discussion:
Weatherall's Law


Google Deprecates Their SOAP Search API — In an odd move Google has quietly deprecated their Search SOAP API, will no longer be issuing keys, and have removed the SDK from their site. They did not even issue a blog post about it. They will continue (for how long?) to support existing users, but will not do any bug fixes.
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PixSense, offering auto-storage of mobile photos & video, raises $5.4M — PixSense, a service that lets you automatically save and store your mobile phone photos — without the pain of syncing with a PC — has just raised $5.4 million in a first round of funding.
Discussion:
michael parekh on IT
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PixSense Secures $5.4 Million in Series A Funding for Mobile Photo …
Discussion:
Mashable!

NASA-Google partnership ready for liftoff — The NASA Ames Research Center and Google have signed a formal agreement to collaborate on projects ranging from studying scientific-data search technology to using Google Earth flyovers for the moon and Mars. — The R&D partnership was announced …
Discussion:
Bruce Clay, Inc. Blog
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NASA and Google to Bring Space Exploration Down to Earth
Discussion:
Gizmodo, Google Blogoscoped, Monkey Bites, Tech_Space, Valleywag, ResourceShelf, Google Operating System and Search Engine Land

The iPhone is launched ... by Linksys, not Apple — The iPhone has arrived, but not from Apple. — Linksys, a division of Cisco Systems, introduced two VOIP (voice over Internet Protocol) handsets adding to five others the company already offers. The group of phones is now part of a Linksys family of products called iPhone.
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iPhone surprises technology world
Discussion:
Scobleizer, Monkey Bites, Cult of Mac, Ubergizmo, Gizmodo and Alice Hill's Real Tech News

My Battle with MGM Over Wargames.Com — For the past three months I've been privately engaged in a time-consuming dispute with Nathan J. Hole, a lawyer representing MGM Studios who claims that Wargames.Com, a domain that I've owned since April 16, 1998, is the rightful property of the film company …
Discussion:
Digital Life

Digg continues to battle phony stories — Digg continues to crack down on users who plant phony stories on behalf of marketers, recently deleting a user who posted a story about a company that offered to compensate him. — The news aggregate site, which allows users to play editor and decide …
Discussion:
digg

Suburbs against the U(ni)verse: the battle over AT&T's fiber rollout — Introduction — It wasn't supposed to happen like this. AT&T's IPTV-based U-verse service was being tested with great fanfare in San Antonio, and the company was ready to start in on the real deployments.


Imbalance in Net speeds impedes sharing — NEW YORK - Blame the Internet's legacy systems if Jay Glatfelter falls asleep Thursday mornings. — Co-host of an online audio show about "Lost," Glatfelter must wait about 40 minutes to finish posting his program to the Internet in the hours after ABC's Wednesday night broadcast.

Cingular to offer MySpace on cell phones — Cingular Wireless, the largest U.S. wireless phone carrier, will offer a version of popular social-networking site MySpace.com on its phones in an expansion of their partnership, the companies plan to announce on Monday.
Discussion:
Engadget Mobile, CrunchGear, The Wireless Report, The Wireless Blog, Gizmodo and Search Engine Journal
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Natali Leaves TechCrunch — Natali Del Conte's last day with TechCrunch was last Friday. I'll let her make her own announcement regarding what she'll do next, but I want to wish her luck on behalf of the entire TechCrunch team. She was here just three weeks, but it's clear she's going to be a star at whatever she chooses to do.

EBay Is Expected to Close Its Auction Site in China — Acknowledging that the online auction market in China is enticingly fast-growing but frustratingly tough to crack, eBay will shut its main Web site in China and enter into a joint venture with a Chinese company instead, a person briefed on the plans of the companies said yesterday.

Malware: Quality drops but quantity rises — Kaspersky: Ever-increasing amounts of malware are taxing the resources of security companies — They just don't make malware like they used to. Or at least like they did earlier this year. Even low-quality malware, however …
Discussion:
Techdirt

Google's radio ad tests hit snag — analyst — SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) - Google Inc.'s nascent radio advertisement business, known as Google Audio, has run into an unexpected snag: it seems Google doesn't have access to enough radio airtime for would-be advertisers to thoroughly test out the initiative, an analyst said Monday.

Deftly dealing with duplicate content — At the recent Search Engine Strategies conference in freezing Chicago, many of us Googlers were asked questions about duplicate content. We recognize that there are many nuances and a bit of confusion on the topic, so we'd like to help set the record straight.

Verizon joins Asian consortium to build $500-million U.S.-China network — Verizon Business said Monday that it has signed an agreement with a group of Asian telecommunications firms to build an advanced undersea optical cable system linking China with the U.S. mainland.