Google States Case for Online News in WSJ

Original Article: Google has created a new web crawler specifically for Google News. What this means is that publishers who do not want Google News to index their content can more easily control that. That also applies to publishers who don't wish to completely cut out indexing, but wish to limit/restrict certain elements of their content from being indexed.

Google offers this new crawler at a time when Google's relationship with online news is a heavy focus of discussion throughout the industry, with the FTC's meeting of the media minds taking place. This week Google already announced some changes to how it handles paid content (by offering a five-article limit for the "first click free" plan). Now the company appears to be further extending its olive branch to concerned publishers (whether or not that will be enough is another discussion).

In the past, publishers have been able to block Google from content via robots.txt and the Robots Extension Protocol (REP). They have also been able to keep content out of Google News and stay in Google Search, by using a contact form provided by Google. Now, Google is making it so publishers don't even have to contact them.

"Now, with the news-specific crawler, if a publisher wants to opt out of Google News, they don't even have to contact us - they can put instructions just for user-agent Googlebot-News in the same robots.txt file they have today," says Google News Senior Business Product Manager Josh Cohen. "In addition, once this change is fully in place, it will allow publishers to do more than just allow/disallow access to Google News. They'll also be able to apply the full range of REP directives just to Google News. Want to block images from Google News, but not from Web Search? Go ahead. Want to include snippets in Google News, but not in Web Search? Feel free. All this will soon be possible with the same standard protocol that is REP."

"While this means even more control for publishers, the effect of opting out of News is the same as it's always been," says Cohen. "It means that content won't be in Google News or in the parts of Google that are powered by the News index. For example, if a publisher opts out of Google News, but stays in Web Search, their content will still show up as natural web search results, but they won't appear in the block of news results that sometimes shows up in Web Search, called Universal search, since those come from the Google News index."

Cohen says Google News users shouldn't notice any difference in their experience with the service. It will be interesting to see the reaction from disgruntled publishers, and whether or not this will make any significant difference in how they view Google News.

LinkedIn, Microsoft Outlook To Forge Ties

Heavy users of LinkedIn and Microsoft Outlook will soon have to do a lot less tab-toggling. Microsoft has introduced something called the Outlook Social Connector, and early next year, LinkedIn will become the first networking site to support it.

As you'll see in a moment, the Outlook Social Connector is an accurately named offering. A post on the LinkedIn Blog explained that, with it, a user will be able to "[k]eep up with LinkedIn connections right from your email inbox." You can see a picture of what that'll look like below.



Then comes click-saver number two: the ability to email LinkedIn contacts straight from Outlook. The Outlook Social Connector will create an Outlook Contacts folder with all of their info, and automatically fill in "to" fields when users start to type out people's names.

Finally, while using Outlook, it'll become easier to forge new connections. The post suggested, "Just click a button next to any e-mail you receive and instantly send an invitation to connect to the e-mail's sender."

We'll admit: there may not be a huge market for this sort of thing. But in certain sectors (HR, PR, etc.), the Outlook Social Connector's tie-up with LinkedIn should come in handy, and will likely increase the profiles of both entities.

Get Your Videos Indexed in Google Results

Google wants webmasters who offer video content to be able to get their videos displayed in search results more easily. The company has announced that that it now supports Facebook Share and Yahoo SearchMonkey RDFa, which are both markup formats that allow webmasters to specify information that is important to video indexing.

"While we've become smarter at discovering this information on our own, we'd certainly appreciate some hints directly from webmasters," says Google's Michael Cohen, Product Manager for the Video Search Team.


The formats cater to simple things like titles and descriptions within the HTML of a video page. Google by the way also suggests that webmasters make their markup on video pages appear in the HTML without the execution of JavaScript or Flash.

On top of supporting the aforementioned formats, Google has also kicked off a series of Webmaster Central Blog posts, which are aimed at giving tips to get your videos indexed. One subject they have already discussed is the submission of video sitemaps.

Webmasters can submit their video sitemaps to Google via Webmaster Tools. The video sitemap uses the Sitemap protocol, but it also has additional video-specific tags. The details on how to create a video sitemap are explained here.

Keep an eye the Webmaster Central Blog for further tips in the near future. You can see what Facebook Share and Yahoo SearchMonkey RDFa look like here.

Facebook Protects User's Data In Civil Case

Privacy advocates who are in the habit of protesting Facebook's policies may owe the social network an apology. When an airline subpoenaed a user's data, and even after fines were later levied, Facebook refused to hand anything over.

For better or for worse, we'll never know whether Facebook would have been willing to send armies of lawyers to the Supreme Court; the matter came to an anticlimactic end when the Virginia Workers' Compensation Commission backed down and the woman at the center of things agreed to release the data, anyway.

Still, here's the story. Shana Hensley hurt her back while working for Colgan Airlines and began to collect disability benefits. Then, as Declan McCullagh reports, "After about 18 months . . . Colgan Air claimed that Hensley was not cooperating with its efforts to find her a desk job and appears to have concluded that Hensley's holiday vacation photos posted on her Facebook account would demonstrate that any back problems were not severe."

Hensley's Facebook info was subpoenaed, Facebook stood its ground, the Workers' Compensation Commission enacted a $200-per-day fine, and when Facebook cited the federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act, everybody backed down.

Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt explained his company's actions to Peter Bacque by stating, "Facebook is built on trust and users rely on us to enforce their privacy settings."
source: http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/09/15/facebook-protects-users-data-in-civil-case

Google Introduces New Drawing and Form Features for Docs

Google has launched some new features for Google Docs. They have made a couple improvements to drawings and added several new features to Forms.

As far as drawings, Google has made it easier for users to build flowcharts, by adding 20 new shapes for standard flowchart components. In addition, users now have more control over drawing text layout by supporting explicit line breaks in text boxes and text within shapes. The features can be accessed, by simply inserting a drawing into any document, spreadsheet, or presentation.

As far as forms, you can now gather responses for a group of similar questions in a new, compact grid format. The Grid question type lets users label several columns and create a limitless number of new rows. Row results appear in their own spreadsheet columns with their own summary charts.

The summary charts themselves actually have new formatting as well:

The form editor supports right-to-left text input now. “When you enter RTL text in the form editor, it will automatically switch the directionality of the form editor and rendered forms (similar to Gmail and other Google Apps),” explains User Interface Software Engineer Eric Bogs on the Google Docs blog. “This means your text and questions will flip directionality, making it easier for RTL users to create and use forms.”

Google Apps customers have two options for using forms within their organizations now. They can automatically collect respondents’ usernames as usual, and they can also now require sign-in to view a form.