Almost one year to the day after the Chinese government placed a ban on both the English and Chinese-language versions of online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, both have been lifted.

As of this week it has been reported that the Chinese government has lifted the ban on the Chinese-language version of Wikipedia. This decision comes only one month after the government lifted the ban from Wikipedia's English-language version in China. Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia said "We don't know what prompted the block and don't know what prompted the unblock."

Created in 2001, Wikipedia "has rapidly grown into the largest reference Web site on the Internet", according to the website's creators. Wikipedia's content is free and users around the world can collaborate on different articles. The website itself is a "wiki", which means that anyone with internet access can correct, edit, or add to any page on the site to improve upon the encyclopedia's information.

The fact that users of the site can contribute their own knowledge and accounts of events may have led to the Chinese ban of Wikipedia in the first place.

Controversial information was made available to the Chinese public which the government did not want them viewing. Some of the material is still being blocked on the site even after the ban was taken off, such as Pro-Democracy articles like the ones from the 1989 movement and massacre in Tiananmen Square.

The Chinese-language Wikipedia website features more than 90, 000 articles, which are contributed mostly by Chinese citizens. However the percentage of Chinese citizens contributing to the site has gone down considerably as a result of the government-approved, more restricted encyclopedia, Baidupedia, which was created by search engine Baidu.

Baidu was, ironically, accused of lifting information from Wikipedia, sifting through only the information that they thought fit for the eyes of the Chinese people.

Baidu's marketing director Bian Jiang claims, "The sharing of information is instrumental in the development and the continuity of knowledge. The act of sifting out relevant information and editing is in itself a process of information packaging,"

To see just how restricted Baidupedia actually is, I visited the site and searched for Tiananmen Square; the search yielded absolutely no results. There is no English-language version of this site, so I translated the entire Chinese-language website.

Wikipedia's Chinese-language site did actually have some information of the Tiananmen Square "incident", as they put it. The information is essentially written to say that some insolent students staged Democratic protest and were killed; it neglects to mention that the students were un-armed.

Wikipedia is not the only company that had to choose between adhering the censorship placed on their sites by the Chinese government, or risk losing access to the country all together. Reporters Without Borders has also criticized Yahoo! and Google for "yielding to the Chinese government's censorship requests."

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Today's keynote featured the lyrical stylings of Danny Sullivan, whose decade-long observation of the search engine industry has been a fixture of his blogging and conference sessions. WebProNews settled in for the story.

Danny Sullivan will be a free agent soon, his long-time association with Search Engine Watch coming to an end, to be followed by his departure from the Search Engine Strategies conference series. He announced during the keynote that he, Barry Schwartz, and Chris Sherman would begin writing about search on a new website. "Danny Sullivan's Search Engine Land" launches on December 11th.

Those who may have been a little surprised that he would keynote a rival conference learned how much he respects the work done by Brett Tabke at WebmasterWorld and PubCon.

He spoke respectively of his hosts, and credited them with being an influence on the search industry. They coined the phrase "Google Dance," which many of our readers will recognize as the times when Google performs an update with its index. Sullivan said that when things go wrong in search, WebmasterWorld is usually the first place to find out about them.

Sullivan also credited Tabke and company with influencing the formation of Sitemaps.org. The new site will be jointly supported by Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft and will encourage webmasters to use sitemaps to help search engines index their sites best.

He remarked about the state of search by discussing how it has become confused in the mainstream media with search advertising. Some in traditional media disdain contextual ads, rating them just above classifieds in appeal.

(The impact paid search has had on the fortunes of print media empires in particular, by being a measurable ad medium, probably has a lot to do with this perception among the mainstream media. - David)

Even though the media equates Google with advertising, ads are not search. Sullivan noted very directly that search is now a fundamental marketing medium.

It may be too fundamental for some marketers, who complain about SEM not being friendly to brands. Search marketing is not about brands, though; Sullivan said it is about providing an answer to a query. A searcher seeks, and a search ad and organic results deliver.

The confusion for brand marketers probably rests in the idea that search is a reverse-broadcast medium. Sullivan noted that the searcher broadcasts a desire through a search engine, and is served with a response. Think of SEM as a yellow pages directory to get the idea.

He carried the reverse broadcast metaphor forward, in likening the major search players to being key "desire broadcast" stations. Search marketers understand how to feed and optimize the messages shown on those stations.

Those SEMs scout the location, write the script, and deliver the result on request when the searcher broadcasts that desire.

Sullivan also recounted the generational progression of search over the past decade. Initially it was just a way to find words on a page. Then it moved to the second generation, where links became important and PageRank became a household word (among those who follow search, anyway.)

Now search is in a third generation, which Sullivan marked as the time of vertical search and personalized search.

Verticals focus on a specific niche. They exchange horizontal breadth of scope for vertical depth of coverage for topics like news, health, music, etc.

With personalized search, less spam and junk come to the user as their searching habits form the scope of their specific search results. It's based on what the user visits, or what their network visits, and is aggregated over time.

To capitalize on this new generation of vertical search, Sullivan recounted the mantra of quality content, including titles and descriptions, for site publishers to follow. But it's also important to watch how the search companies expand beyond search, to places like video or audio advertising.

Webmasters need to watch their metrics. Sullivan said all of them are metrics marketers, because they market based on the metrics they reach with their sites, and the metrics they wish to reach.

As time progresses, search marketing should become more of a key strategy in advertising and public relations campaigns as soon as they begin. Sullivan also cited challenges, like privacy and copyright questions, that will continue to vex the search engine industry.

"Search is here to stay," he said. "It's now a fundamental ad medium, like the traditionals." Even these challenges aren't going to change that.

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Tags: PubCon, Danny Sullivan

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Google is having quite a day. The company has been initiated into the SandP 100, and its stock is very close to hitting the $500 mark (may, in fact, hit it before I finish this article). There is also news that Google is "winning" the "UK search battle," with a year-on-year share increase of nine percent.

Web User's Veronique De Freitas reported on the latest figures from Hitwise UK, writing, "Google accounted for 78 per cent of all UK searches last month, a nine percent increase over the previous year, while Yahoo took second place with just 7.7 per cent."

What little was left of the UK search market was generally spread between Microsoft and Ask. "Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask collectively accounted for 96.6 per cent of all UK internet searches last month," the WebUser article continued.

Heather Hopkins, vice president of Hitwise's UK Research branch, commented on the findings. "Google and Yahoo! Search in particular are seeing strong growth in their share of the UK search market and their share of referrals to online retailers," she told Spannerworks. "Growth for these search engines seems to be organic, driven in part by toolbar usage but also growing familiarity with the Google and Yahoo! brands."

Aside from the occasional clash concerning human rights and privacy in China, it seems that Google can do no wrong. Its dominance in the American search market is, if not quite as amazing as its control in the UK, still impressive. WebProNews writer Joe Lewis even recently compared Google to the Roman Empire.

For the record, though, the company's stock still hasn't quite hit the magic number - right now, it's at 495.75. You can, if you want, check its current price here.

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Tag: Google

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Soon Cingular Wireless will introduce mobile phone banking to its customers. The features will include funds transfers, paying bills and other online banking transactions.The mobile banking launch is expected to take place in early 2007.

Cingular has teamed with Firethorn Holdings to enable customers to do their banking with Web phones. Cingular has been in talks with a variety of banks concerning their participation.
Spokesman Mark Seigel for Cingular said, ""We hope a lot of banks participate, the early signs are very encouraging." Cingular does not have plans to charge an extra fee for the service. They will charge for the bandwidth customer's use while doing their banking. Banks may also charge an additional fee.

In order to be able to use the service you must have an account with one of the participating banks. Cingular has not said which banks they are in negotiations with.

To receive access to the service Cingular customers will go to their banks website and sign up for the mobile banking service. The bank will download the service and then customers will be able to do their banking.

Mark Collins, Cingular's vice president for long-term products and services planning said, "Two-thirds of America's 300 million people now use wireless phones and nearly 60 percent of wireless customers use their handsets for something other than making calls. It is only natural that we move the ease, convenience and efficiency of electronic banking onto the wireless device."

On the issue of security spokesman Mark Siegel said that Firethorn is using a data-encrypted, password-protected network. One other safety feature is if a consumer's phone is ever lost or stolen users will be able to erase the contents of their mobile phone.

The overall impact this will have on the banking and wireless industry will be of some interest. How much revenue this will generate and who will be the next wireless provider to venture into the mobile phone banking arena will be the thing to watch.

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Lots of new features for AIM's 42 million users arrived with the latest edition, AIM 6.0, including offline messaging, and conversation logging so people can go back and relive their favorite LOL moments in a given chat.

A variety of updates to the client software for AIM 6.0 arrived from AOL. Users of the wildly popular messaging software can leave messages for offline buddies and notify them via RSS after updating their accounts on Flickr, YouTube, and other sites.

Those who want to keep track of their AIM services on a mobile device may access the Mobile Dashboard from the AIM client. People can set up IM forwarding to their mobile device, and set alerts for news and reminders for special events through the Dashboard.

People with a lot of friends should like the expanded Buddy List. That can now contain up to 1,000 contacts. Everyone on AIM now has an AIM Page on AOL's social networking site as well.

Users who are familiar with the AIM Today page that launches during AIM's startup will see some changes to it next week. AOL said this would match the look and feel of the new AIM client, itself updated from the design of the previous version, AIM Triton.

On the developer side, the promised Web APIs for AIM have been placed online. These and the embeddable AIM Whimsicals arrive as an extension of the Open AIM program that launched earlier in 2006.

Users should have no trouble making the switch from Triton to AIM 6.0. There are a few minor visual differences, but nothing jarring in the client. AIM 6.0 is available for Windows 2000 and XP platforms.

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Tag: AIM 6.0

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One vendor you're sure to see at virtually every SES and Pubcon conference is web analytics company, ClickTracks.

I had the pleasure of speaking at a few DMA conferences at the same time as ClickTracks founder John Marshall and found him to be one of the most enthusiastic evangelists for web analytics in the industry. On top of that he's really a very good guy.

John and his VP of Marketing, Michael Stebbins took out a few ClickTracks' freinds for dinner on Tuesday night and it proved to be some of the best conversation. I cannot emphasize enough, the importance of networking after the daytime sessions are over.

Here's Mike McDonald of WebProNews, Dan Thies of SEO Research Labs, Greg Jarboe of SEO PR and Michael Stebbins from ClickTracks. Missing from the photo is one of Dan's protoges, the amazing Shirley Tan. Check out my other photos of the Las Vegas Pubcon here.

On Wed I found John Marshall at the ClickTracks booth evangelizing their click fraud tools to an attentive group of conference attendees. After that, he was nice enough to give this little interview about Pubcon. I hope Brett sees this because it's great feedback about the conference.

I will be posting several other short interviews after my session today about public relations and social media. Just watch my YouTube Channel.

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Apple, creator or portable music player dominant the iPod, has begun training to defeat both Nokia and Microsoft in the race for music-playing phone supremacy.

Apple's iPod has yet to receive any viable contenders to challenge them in the MP3 player market, even with Microsoft's release of it's own Zune device. Following the announcement of an order placed by Apple to a Taiwanese manufacturer, however, rival companies are already attempting to compete with Apple's iPhone prototype.

Apple Computer's CEO Steve Jobs has placed an order to Taiwanese manufacturer Hon Hai Precision for 12 million iPhones, according to analyst citing reports in Asia. Reports say the iPhone could possibly be released after the MacWorld conference in January 2007.

The iPhone would have the capabilities of an iPod and would also include a 15, 000 song MP3 player, email, and 80 hours of video all in a cellular telephone.

If all goes to plan, CEO of Apple Steve Jobs will be announcing their release very soon, according to UBS analyst Benjamin Reitzes who wrote: "This data point is in line with our expectations that a cell phone could be discussed in January at Macworld with limited sales by February and broader distribution in spring 2007," in a research note.

Competitor Microsoft only released it's Zune portable music player on Tuesday, but they have already announced that they intend to make a cellular phone version of Zune. Microsoft creator Bill Gates even stated at a small press conference in Redmond, "the future of digital music is on phones."

Cellular phone giant Nokia released their own line of NSeries music-playing phones, in an attempt to compete with the release of iPhone. The expanded line of phones featuring cameras and offering it's own iTunes-esque digital music service called Music Recommenders.

Apple's iPhone is completely untested in the market and is taking a major risk in releasing a prototype without first testing it. Apple is apparently feeling the pressure to create a music-playing phone because of the fact that it is the leader in music-players right now, having sold over 70 million iPods, as well as analyst's statements on the future of music-playing phones. Pacific Growth Equities analyst Derek Wood said "I think over the long term mobile music is gong to be huge."

In an interesting marketing twist on Apple's part, they plan to release the iPhone "unlocked", meaning that it won't be tied to any carriers. Instead, users would be required to insert their own SIM card into the phone.

Essentially anyone, anywhere in the world could use the iPhone and could potentially mean millions of new prospects for Apple in the future, proving that the company is thinking about their future globally.

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Two major open source contributions from IBM for its Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) have placed it with the Apache Software Foundation as an incubator project, and out to the OASIS specification development group to create a true standard around the UIMA framework.

It had been about a year since IBM's Marc Andrews, director for strategy & business development for content discovery, chatted with WebProNews about UIMA. I talked with him while he was enjoying the always-cheerful environs of a busy airport somewhere about the latest news about UIMA.

The technology behind UIMA offers the promise of going beyond the typical search capabilities seen in search engines like Google and Ask today. UIMA understands unstructured information, stored in a multitude of formats, by its concept rather than just as keywords to match.

In January 2006, IBM placed UIMA on SourceForge, giving open source developers access to its framework.

The tech world and beyond have taken notice; two major projects, at the Mayo Clinic and the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, have been implementing UIMA-based solutions to aid in finding and facilitating deeper and more encompassing medical research.

Andrews said IBM has seen adoption of UIMA throughout the academic, government, and business worlds over the past year since we've spoken.

IBM's open source efforts continued with their recent steps into that community. Apache has launched a project, Apache UIMA, which should drive more community involvement with UIMA.

Ideally, Andrews would like to see what the free/open source software community can do with creating components that take advantage of UIMA to fulfill a given need. "Value comes from components that others can draw from," he said.

The OASIS efforts at developing a standard for UIMA are at a very early stage. Andrews said the official call for participation will come from the OASIS UIMA Technical Committee, comprised of heavy hitters like Carnegie Mellon University and the Army Information and Intelligence Warfare Directorate.

Those who would like to experiment with UIMA at Apache's project site will find IBM has contributed UIMA's version 2.0 source code to the incubator. Carnegie Mellon created a UIMA Component Repository, and analytics tools from sources like the UK's General Architecture for Text Engineering (GATE) and OpenNLP may be obtained freely.

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Tags: IBM, UIMA, Apache, OASIS

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Earlier this week, Google announced plans to hire over 500 new employees at its Dublin complex. The move, according to many, confirms Ireland's role as the search engine giant's hub in Europe.

Google opened its first Dublin offices in 2003 with a whopping five employees on hand, according to Eamon Quinn. More have been hired since then, of course, and the addition of 500 new Googlers will bring the tally to 1300, making the company's Irish presence "the largest outside the United States."

Michael Martin, the Republic's Minister For Enterprise, Trade and Employment, was quite pleased with Google's decision to expand. "Its investment here in Dublin is a huge vote of confidence in our knowledge economy and in our young, educated workforce," he told IrishDev.

"Today's announcement further endorses Ireland's ability to provide the technical infrastructure and skills base to support such operations," Minister Martin continued. "It confirms this country's status as the leading European location for the largest Internet activities in the world. It is an excellent example of the success being achieved by the Government's policy and IDA Ireland's strategy for the development of Ireland's digital media sector."

Those policies and strategies have certainly worked in Google's favor. The company, according to The Register and other sources, is "using a network of Irish companies to cut its tax bill, dropping its effective tax rate from 39 per cent to 31 per cent. This translated into a saving of €100m a year," or about $128 million annually.

John Herlihy, the European Director of Google's Online Sales & Operations, implied that the company is passing on those savings. Speaking to IrishDev, he said, "As we continue to develop our business, our EMEA headquarters has delivered huge value to all our customers - users and advertisers - from Iceland to South Africa and Ireland to Russia."

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Tag: Google

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Earlier this month, Google revealed a planned serious of changes to the way that AdWords evaluates landing page quality. In the first of a two-part series, the Inside AdWords team attempts to address the bevy of questions that have accompanied the announcement.

The team at the Inside AdWords blog tries, albeit rather poorly, to alleviate some of the concerns that webmasters are expressing concerning Google's ever-mysterious "landing page quality" system.

Why did you make this change right before the holiday season?
As more and more holiday shoppers turn online to find gifts, we want to do everything we can to serve the most relevant and highest quality ads to our users. By making improvements to landing page quality, we're not only able to help users (who are your potential customers) find what they want, but also help you maximize your leads because your ads will no longer have to compete with ads that are providing a poor user experience.
To give a bit more background, we had an internal debate about when to release these changes. We ultimately decided that since our focus is providing the most relevant advertising, it was best to launch these long-planned improvements as soon as we were ready to go, technically speaking.
Can a page that has a high CTR or conversion rate be considered a poor quality landing page?
In short, yes. Though the Quality Score incorporates the CTR of your keyword, when our system is specifically evaluating your landing page quality, it does not consider the CTR of your keywords or any conversion tracking or Google Analytics data in the account. Instead, it's focused on the actual content and relevance of your landing page to a user who clicks on your ad and ends up on your site. It is well worth noting that not all ads with a high CTR provide a good experience for users.
For example, an ad may promote a new home for sale in San Francisco for the query 'San Francisco homes', but after clicking on the ad, the user is taken to a page that shows houses in Seattle. This is not a particularly good experience for the user - but the ad itself could still be highly relevant to the keyword, and thus is likely to have a high CTR.
Will using Website Optimizer improve my landing page quality?
Using Website Optimizer to experiment with your landing page does not have any impact on your Quality Score or your landing page quality. Website Optimizer evaluates your conversion rates to tell you which marketing messages are converting most often on your landing page, whereas the Quality Score doesn't incorporate any conversion information. Please remember that once you've made a change to your landing page based on tests run with Website Optimizer, the Quality Score may change as with any other changes to your landing page.
We hope this helps to clear up some of your questions about this recent change. If you have additional questions, please let us know and we'll answer as many as possible the next time we write about landing page quality.
Interestingly enough, Google still refuses to shed any light as to what constitutes a high-quality landing page. It would be nice to at least have a general amount of insight as to the criteria that the company utilizes in its evaluation of landing pages.

Why? Because the financial bottom line is at stake, that's why. Google is playing with fire by instituting a system that has a direct impact on the minimum bid for keywords, while conveniently keeping the details of the scheme a closely guarded secret.

Webmasters don't need to see the actual algorithm, but if Google is going to starting jacking the price up for keywords that lead to poor quality landing pages, the company should at least have the common decency to share a little more information about how quality rating is calculated.

Inquiries to the Inside AdWords team concerning landing page quality have thus far gone unanswered.

Tags: Google, AdWords, Landing Page Quality

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