Archive for July, 2009

(Cross-posted from the YouTube Biz Blog)

Last week the world watched in wonder as Jill Peterson and Kevin Heinz's wedding party transformed a familiar and predictable tradition into something spontaneous and just flat-out fun. The video, set to R&B star Chris Brown's hypnotic dance jam "Forever," became an overnight sensation, accumulating more than 10 million views on YouTube in less than one week. But as with all great YouTube videos, there's more to this story than simple view counts.

At YouTube, we have sophisticated content management tools in place to help rights holders control their content on our site. The rights holders for "Forever" used these tools to claim and monetize the song, as well as to start running Click-to-Buy links over the video, giving viewers the opportunity to purchase the music track on Amazon and iTunes. As a result, the rights holders were able to capitalize on the massive wave of popularity generated by "JK Wedding Entrance Dance" — in the last week, searches for "Chris Brown Forever" on YouTube have skyrocketed, making it one of the most popular queries on the site:


This traffic is also very engaged — the click-through rate (CTR) on the "JK Wedding Entrance" video is 2x the average of other Click-to-Buy overlays on the site. And this newfound interest in downloading "Forever" goes beyond the viral video itself: "JK Wedding Entrance" also appears to have influenced the official "Forever" music video, which saw its Click-to-Buy CTR increase by 2.5x in the last week.

So, what does all of this mean? Despite compelling data and studies around consumer purchasing habits, many still question the promotional and bottom-line business value sites like YouTube provide artists. But in the last week, over a year after its release, Chris Brown's "Forever" has again rocketed up the charts, reaching as high as #4 on the iTunes singles chart and #3 on Amazon's best selling MP3 list. We've seen similar successes in the past with partners like Monty Python.

One of our main goals at YouTube is to help content creators effectively make money from the distribution of their content online. That they can do so in a way that brings artists and our community together to create fun, spontaneous and inspiring works, is one of the best and most exciting things about YouTube.

Posted by Chris LaRosa, Technical Account Manager, and Ali Sandler, Music Partner Manager

To keep our listings fresh, items older than May 1st, 2009 with no expiration date or an expiration date far in the future will soon expire. Additionally, draft items and items uploaded through the "One at a time" option will be deleted after expiration. Once you've switched over to uploading items through a data feed, we encourage you to submit as often as necessary to keep the information in your listings accurate.

Posted by Ioannis Kalafatis, Product Manager, Google Base

Many of you are probably already familiar with the Yahoo! Shortcut that appears at the top of the Yahoo! Search results page when you search for a local business,.  Starting today, we’re enhancing the Yahoo! Shortcut for local businesses to include links to information you care about most and an overlay that displays content directly on the search results page.

For example, if you conduct a search on a business, such as “Coupa Café Palo Alto,” you will see the following Shortcut:

You can now see a selection of images and reviews for the business directly on the search results page by clicking the “Reviews” and “Photos” tabs on the Shortcut, saving you time and giving you the information you need in one place:

We’ve enhanced the Shortcut for category searches too, for when you are searching for a type of business and don’t have a specific business name in mind. For example, when you search “sushi palo alto,” you’ll see a list of sushi restaurants in Palo Alto in the Shortcut, which again pulls content directly onto the page to help you decide where to go:

The local enhanced Shortcut brings the most relevant information from across the Web so you can find what you need in one place. It is also a part of our continuing effort to better understand query intent - what users mean in their queries - and to match it with the right content. About 20 percent of online searches have a local intent, where users are looking for businesses, organizations, events, and other information in a specific geographic area. Not only does this enhanced Shortcut make your time online more efficient, but it also helps you make the best use of your time when you’re off the Internet.

So give the local enhanced shortcut a try - remember that you can always find local business information by searching by city (”giordanos chicago“) or by zip code (”florist 94041“).  Let us know what you think.

Nitzan Achsaf

Sr. Product Manager, Yahoo! Search

Given the Yahoo! Microsoft deal news today, many of you are wondering what will happen to Yahoo!’s search offerings for developers. In particular, we’ve received a number of questions about our two most popular search services: SearchMonkey, which allows developers to use structured data to enhance the usefulness of Yahoo! search results, and BOSS, our popular full-featured search API.

For SearchMonkey and BOSS, we currently do not have anything concrete to tell you. Clearly, we’ll need to work with Microsoft to determine what makes the most sense for you and for us. For more details, please see Ashim Chhabra's post to developers on the Yahoo! Search BOSS group.

We’ve also received questions about the future of Yahoo!'s other developer offerings, such as YUI, YQL , and Pipes. We wanted to let you know that today’s news does not affect these products. None of our other non-search developer products are affected. Yahoo! remains fully committed to supporting and adding new features to these important tools and services.

In fact, we think there's never been a better time to work with us. For example, you can publish your users’ actions and interactions on your website into our Updates API and have these updates propagate throughout Yahoo!. You can build an application to run on My Yahoo!. And, coming soon, you'll be able to use YAP to build an application that could even run on our new homepage.

When we have new information to share about SearchMonkey and BOSS, we’ll be sure to let you know. In the meantime, we invite you to continue to use and build on the incredible developer products we offer today. If you have questions or concerns, I encourage you to voice them on the YDN forums. We look forward to hearing from you and working with you!

Chris Yeh
Head of YDN

by Claudine Zap and Vera H-C Chan

Ever take the inkblot test—or at least see one administered on TV (like in any "Law & Order" episode)? If so, then you know that there are no right or wrong answers on a Rorschach test, but responses do provide insight to the test-taker's state of mind.
 
And yet, a controversy about the posting of 10 Rorschach inkblots on Wikipedia is rocking the scientific community, according to The New York Times. In addition to the blots themselves, the Wikipedia entry also includes the most common interpretations of what these blots look like—the old bison vs. butterfly vs. moth.

Taking the Test
The Rorschach test—a series of ink blots shown to patients, who are then asked to explain what they see—is named after Swiss psychologist Hermann Rorschach. Five of the blots are black-and-white, two are black, white, and red, and the last three are in pretty colors. (Or not pretty, depending on your view.)

The test-taker is evaluated on 100 variables, which will show what he/she truly feels deep inside—not just separating psychotic thinking from "normal" thought. One Rorschach FAQ site describes it as asking "How does someone view and organize the world around them?"

One nonprofit parenting site, SPARC, explains that it's not only what patients say in describing what they see, but also what "hand gestures and body movements" they make. (Interestingly, SPARC precedes its lengthy description of the whole process with a disclaimer, posted "after repeated letters from dozens of outraged psychologists and psychiatrists.")

Illuminating or Cheating?
Is the test's public availability stimulating free debate, or enabling test-takers to "cheat"? Depends on how you look at it:

• From the Wiki view: Supporters say it's informative—and searches on Yahoo! for "rorschach" have popped up 111% in the past week.

• From the psychologists' view: These "cheats" could help test-takers game the system and get in the way of research. And if patients peek at the interpretations beforehand, they may get in the way of their own diagnoses.

• From the test publishers' view: The test's publisher is "assessing legal steps" to have the images removed from Wikipedia, even though those images—created some 90 years ago—are in the public domain. Still, one spokesperson huffed that Wikipedia's position is "unbelievably reckless and even cynical" for recognizing concerned claims and posting the images anyhow.

But Does One See Results?
Despite the outrage over Wikipedia's posting, not all researchers believe in the test's validity. The method was severely criticized in the 1950s and revised in the 1970s. Scientific American revived its 2005 article that called Rorschach's test "frequently ineffective" as a mental health tool.

Ideally, at least two clinicians should be involved in the interpretation of the test's results, but often they may not agree. Even worse, according to the article "What's Wrong With This Picture?", research also "suggests" that the Rorschach can't really gauge violent tendencies, depression, sexual abuse in children, antisocial tendencies, and so on. Since the test is administered to all kinds of people, from convicts seeking parole to parents in custody battles, obviously a lot rides on the interpretation of the results.

By the way, the Wikipedia uproar erupted in June, when an emergency-room doctor added the remaining nine inkblots to the one Wikipedia already had. When The New York Times told the doctor about all the experts' complaints, he replied, "Show me the evidence." Preferably not in the form of an inkblot.

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by Claudine Zap

If you love "Star Trek" but wouldn't be caught dead in costume (yes, Comic-Con counts) or have long outgrown your action figure collections, consider this: You can simply smell like a character from "Star Trek."

According to Gizmodo, the scent that only a Trekkie could love is called "Red Shirt." The male cologne is a sly reference to the expendable characters on the TV show that faced certain death. Get it?

Relax, unless Danger is your middle name, there's no cause for concern here. Although the blog i4u points out this cologne put out by Think Geek (retailing for an eye-popping $30) might make you smell nice, that's no guarantee with the ladies. Hey, we warned you.

Look, it's just a scent. Not magic in a bottle. So geeks-at-heart, pick some up and boldly smell like no man has before. (Sorry, we just couldn't resist.)

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With Labor Day weekend fast approaching, perhaps you’re thinking about a quick trip to Vegas. Airfares aren’t too expensive, but the cost of a hotel room may give you second thoughts, especially since the best properties tend to get up booked up during holiday weekends.

 

Fortunately, Bing Travel has created an intelligent tool to help you figure out whether the hotel rate you’re being offered is a deal or not. Unlike the Price Predictor, the Hotel Rate Indicator doesn’t project whether the cost of a room will go up or down on the dates you want to stay; instead, it compares the current rates to past rates for that hotel, helping you buy with confidence.

 

Here’s how it works. From Bing Travel, search hotels in Las Vegas for your dates. On the search results page, you can filter by the number of stars, amenities, brand or geographical location. Then, click “open map” to see a visual layout of the available hotels for your selections:

 

 

 

 

In this example (the search was conducted on July 27), the yellow coloring shows that most of the hotels on the Strip have an “average rate” for Labor Day weekend. Mouse over each property and you’ll see the specific prices, such as $299 for the Bellagio (#8).

 

The hotel with the green coloring is the Hard Rock Hotel (#2), which the Rate Indicator says is a “deal,” with an average price of $239/night. That could be a great choice for your stay in Vegas. And the hotel shaded in red? That’s the Mirage (#14), which is marked as “not a deal,” with an average rate of $319.

 

The Hotel Rate Indicator is also great for travelers whose dates are flexible. Let’s suppose you’d really like to stay at the Mirage, so you can watch its exploding volcano up close. Click on the hotel listing to see the average rates for weekends before and after the dates you originally picked:

 

 

 

 

Here, the Rate Indicator shows you that you could actually stay at this property for about half the cost, just by going the weekend before. Mouse over the short green bar and you’ll see that the average rate is only $169. Now that’s a deal! Just be sure not to squander all your savings at the blackjack table.

 

— Mike Fridgen, Director, Bing Travel

Today we're releasing two enhancements to Google Apps Directory Sync, a tool that helps businesses synchronize the user and directory information in their LDAP systems with Google Apps. These changes complement the improvements to contacts in Google Apps that we announced a few weeks ago.

Now Google Apps Directory Sync not only helps synchronize employee contact information, but also information for non-employees that are listed in the central LDAP directory. This way, employees can easily look up and contact important customers, partners and vendors, too.

This release also expands the list of contact fields that can be synchronized between an LDAP system and Google Apps. Rich user profile information like multiple phone numbers, addresses and job titles are now supported, making full profiles easily accessible by employees.

Posted by Navneet Goel, Product Manager, Google Apps team

Get timely updates on new features in Google Apps by subscribing to our RSS feed or email alerts.

When we launched Snap Previews Anywhere an Internet eon ago, we quickly realized that as helpful as previews were, most pages from a site offered similar visual information. (Previews of every page on Wikipedia, Amazon, Flickr etc. were virtually indistinguishable.) As a result, in the spring of 2007 we raised the bar and [...]

by Vera H-C Chan

Dog may be man's best friend, but looks like woman can depend on the beluga whale.

That's what Yang Yun found out when she participated in a free-dive contest at China's Harbin Polar Land. The challenge was for divers to go down the aquarium's 20-foot pool and stay as long as they could stand it—without breathing equipment. Did we mention the water's freezing cold?

The 26-year-old's legs cramped up on her way up, and thought she wouldn't make it. Officials noticed nothing awry, but a beluga whale named Mila figured out the human being was in distress. This Fox News slideshow shows human Yun sinking and Mila the whale leaping in to assist. The Daily Mail lets you enlarge the two photos showing how Mila used her mouth to move Yun, then nose her up to the surface.

Only when Yun got pushed to the surface did anyone figure out trouble had been brewing in the deep. One organizer says Yun "owes her life" to Mila, a "sensitive animal who works closely with humans."

While neither of the whales are identified in this 2008 Polar Land photo (beluga are also called white whales), the underwater performance should give you an idea just how closely the water and land mammals work together.  By the way, the Museum of Natural History also notes that, according to native lore, "beluga whales help each other give birth." Now that really sounds like a woman's best friend. 

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