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Last night I was looking up some books that were recommended to me, and saw my first Google Book Search in the # 1 SERP [Travel Wise: How to Be Safe, Savvy and Secure Abroad] (screen shot below).

Google Book Search Affects ECommerce, Is Your Vertical Next »

Earlier this week Barbara Boser of 3 Dog Media made a post asking people to turn their avatars pink for Breast Cancer Awareness Month.
Breast Cancer, Social Media, and Picnik.com »

Having been involved in internet marketing for more than a few years, it’s interesting to see ideas fall out of favor only to come back in fashion, specifically email newsletters and true community building. Newsletters and Community Building »

I’m cruising through my feeds this morning and I notice a headline from the New York Times that might interest me

Let’s Talk About Your Big But »

As both Youtube and Wordpress are mature products I would have imagined this plugin existed hower after several days looking it doesn’t look like it’s available.

I’m looking for a wordpress plugin that use the youtube API and automatically pulls in new videos as they are posted and automatically creates a single post for them. I’m just interested in working with a username, not keywords or tags. The reason is if you use keywords or tags other people can cause use them and make the plugin to pull in unapproved videos.

Ideally you would be able to configure how often it checks for new videos and tell it which category to put the videos in.

The Youtube API currently only spits out a pic with a link to the video not a true embedable video. Wordpress also munges the code if you write it directly. If you were looking to be quick and easy I’d suggest working with the smartyoutube plugin and spitting out the output in this format and popping that into the post.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00000000

if you wanted to be extra cool you could add a function to put the latest video in the sidebar so you wouldn’t need to update the template when a new video comes out.

It’s a friends personal project so there’s no budget, but they will give you a link, and I’ll help pimp you out here as well. I know I’m not the only one looking for this plugin, so I have to imagine you’ll get some link love elsewhere as well. If you’re interested drop a note in the comments or contact me … thanks.

You know there are days where you really just cant believe the things you see. Cruising on over to the Martha Stewart blog you’ll read how they are running a contest and REQUIRING a link back to Martha’s Blog to be entered … (screen shot for posterity)

So what’s the deal Matt Cutts is Martha within the Google guidelines on this one? Can we all scurry about running similar promotions on our blogs without fear of the google hammer of justice … or is more of the same old same old two tiered google justice system …

Doing a vanity search for myself I noticed something interesting, here’s a screen shot when you list the top 20 results, notice the double videos in the middle

Is Google Pushing Universal Results »

I’ve often chided google for trusting wikipedia so much when Wikipedia says we don’t care about accuracy or truth, just verifiability. It now looks like they’ve taken it a step further and pitched truth out the window with the dodgeball development team. Here’s a screen shot from Sunday afternoon where according to the Google SERP’s Paul Newman died in a plane crash … way to go big G …

One of the things that’s really missing from my chumby is a simple calendar widget. I’m just looking for simple month view and the ability to flip back and forth through months.The widget exists in German but not in english. I even tried pulling up the Google Calender widget and attaching it to blank calendar, to find out it only lists agenda view.

I suspect part of the problem is because so few people understand yearly/monthly calendrics. If I were writing a monthly calendar program I would use the perpetual calendar formula. It’s really not as complicated as it looks, basically some simple math applied to a matrix and baada-boom badda-bing.

If you’ve got a son or daughter who’s into programming and you think could handle it, I could probably find some budget for it. I’ve also got some ideas for comercial widgets that do have a budget down the road if things work out …

One of my favorite things about Google is how the show a wide variety of domains for search results, especially for breaking news terms like [Washington Mutual]. It’s not like the top 20 results have 6 listings from Washington Mutual (shown in red) or 4 from the New York Times (shown in blue). Nothing like actually having to look at 20 results to actually have to get 10 answers when you want a good user experience …

(click to enlarge)

So What the heck is feedproxy.google.com why is it out there, what’s it being used for, why is google letting it be indexed, why are 164,000 pages in the index [site:feedproxy.google.com] and why is it ranking?

it’s not like google places to much value on domain authority or anything …

interesting

oh and BTW can I mention what complete PIA it is to have celebrities muddying up SERP

I’ve never been a fan of the “river of news” style of reading rss feeds, prefer to organize and prioritize my feeds using the tag/folder functionality. When I was using a Samsung Blackjack there was a “tag view” option. However when I switched over to an iPhone, I got the new graphic rich version but lost tag view. Thanks to some help from Mihai from the google reader team I can view the tag/folder view again.
How To Get the Google Reader Tag Folder View on Your iPhone »

Here’s video interview number two with Loren Feldman, where we talk about twitter, Google, and Matt Cutts … last 15 seconds are NSFW for you office people …

So I was looking up a hosting KW in my logs, then reputation defender, however Google adwords showed me an ad related to my previous search. Reputation Defender has zero to do with with website hosting, and there’s no way they would have bought that KWD … hmm …

Here’s a screen shot of a Google search I did earlier today, made me wonder why Google thought it was important to include the date so many times

It’s even more odd considering the issues they’ve been having with getting dates right in Google news

I had the pleasure of hanging with Loren Feldman of 1938 Media about 2 weeks ago, here’s the first of three interviews

Oh and if you aren’t already subscribed to the 1938 Media email list I’d recommend getting on it …

Earlier this week I made a post about Guy Kawasaki, and in retrospect it wasn’t the best course to take, and I’d like to apologize. My intent wasn’t to damage his reputation, because he is an author and speaker I like and respect. My intent for the post was to put Google on the spot for their paid link policy and bring the issue in front of a wider audience.

To be clear the decision to change the title of the post and re-order the content with Guys explanation first was my own. No one threatened me, no one had their lawyers send nastygrams to me, no black helicopters or any of that.

People make mistakes, sometimes really bone-headed stupid ones, in incredibly public places. It’s not the first one I’ve made and I doubt it will be the last, but hopefully I realize when I do make one and try to fix it.

Last week there was a bit of a brouhaha over Google news incorrectly giving the wrong date for a news story. In that particular incident Google news picked up a 6 year old story about United Airlines filing bankruptcy which upset the stock market for that particular stock. I’ve seen things like that happen before in the past despite Google saying that it was an isolated incident. Here’s an example of where Google News is still assigning the wrong date.
Google News is Getting the Date Wrong on Old News Stories »

So last week google had a blog post entitled Demystifying the “duplicate content penalty” and if you haven’t read it I’d recommend doing so. However I’m going to disagree with some parts of the post, because IMHO you really can hurt yourself with duplicate content. Yes Virginia You Can Hurt Yourself With Duplicate Content »