Were You Expecting To Laugh This Hard At Smokey Robinson? I Wasn’t.

Presenting the comedy verite’ blog gold of Men Who Look Like Old Lesbians

(Link swiped from Can’t Stop The Bleeding)

Coming soon to your website: videos you don’t like

Google’s confusing purchase of YouTube has so far borne little in the way of a public proof of the concept behind the purchase. It is fair to expect such a proof, monumental as it would be: the public emergence of a business model that is based on selling your neighbor’s house and possessions is a historic development we eagerly await. Presuming it is not our neighbor placing our home on the market, naturally.

Google’s AdSense program, wherein space on web site pages are occupied by ads served by Google and paid for by Google’s advertising clientèle includes hundreds of thousands of websites. In an effort to leverage Google’s purchase of YouTube (to do something with all that video) and simultaneously expand and strengthen AdSense, Google will announce today that YouTube videos are being added to the AdSense program. This means those easily-ignored text ads in the right-hand column will now include video clips, targeted by subject just like AdSense ads are now. From Miguel Helft’s piece in today’s New York Times:

The service, which represents the first major combination of a Google product with YouTube, will give video creators wide distribution beyond YouTube via Google’s network, known as AdSense. Since the videos will be surrounded by ads, the service is another way for Google to cash in on the huge number of video clips stored on YouTube.

Several other networks distribute videos and ads on the Web, but none reach as many Web sites as AdSense.

Google said it would share revenue from the ads with the creators of the videos and with the Web sites that embed them, though it declined to specify what percentage of the revenue will be kept by each party.

“We are creating incremental distribution for our content providers,” said Christian Oestlien, product manager for AdSense. Mr. Oestlien said the system would also allow publishers to make their Web sites more compelling and give advertisers a new way to reach customers.

While many Web sites already embed YouTube clips in their pages, this system would allow them to make money from the clips. They would not, however, have the same level of control over what clip gets embedded.

Sure, if your definition of “compelling” includes handing over more page space to quasi-random clips of god-knows-what production value, usefulness, quality level, credibility, etc. At least the thorny issue of YouTube video ownership has been sidestepped (yet again):

For now, the system’s scope, and its potential to deliver new revenue to Google, is limited, because only about 100 media companies that have created YouTube videos will be participating.

Google declined to give a full list of participants, but of those it listed, none were large media companies. They include Expert Village, a producer of how-to videos; Ford Models, a modeling agency; and Extreme Elements, which creates videos about extreme sports. Over time, Google expects to use AdSense to syndicate other types of content besides video, the company said.

Seems like a long way to go just to assemble a list of 100 companies who make videos nobody wants to see.

And about these videos: is there an end in sight for this charade where we pretend that a media asset has no important qualities beyond its indexability in a search engine? As we watch the craft of filmmaking succumb to the same race to the bottom that music, graphic design and print each suffered in the wake of the personal computer, is there any chance we will notice that, contrary to Josef Stalin’s famous comment, quantity does not have a quality all its own?

Google Identifies New Spammer: Itself

As Google’s reach expands, its grip tightens. The company’s stern rules governing what is and isn’t spam are already taken as gospel, and form the effective operating principles of hundreds of thousands of webmasters, all terrified of offending the Big G. Get a bad rep at Google, and watch your traffic dwindle or outright cease when they remove your site from their index.

Sudden negative attention from Sergey and Larry’s octopus is so serious that it turns out that nothing can save you from their wrath - it doesn’t even help if you happen to be Google. From today’s ComputerWorld:

Readers of Google Inc.’s Custom Search Blog were handed a bit of a surprise Tuesday when the Web site was temporarily removed from the blogosphere and hijacked by someone unaffiliated with the company.

The problem? Google had mistakenly identified its own blog as a spammer’s site and handed it over to another person.

The change was first noticed by the Google Blogoscoped Web site, which noticed that posts on the Custom Search Blog had been deleted and replaced by a strange comment from someone identifying himself as Srikanth.

“Google Custom Search, is the wonderful product from Google which many webmasters have been looking and dream for,” Srikanth wrote. “Also Google Custom Search is integrated with Ad-sense, which means make money while keeping users on your site for longer time with custom search engine. … Good Luck for all the Custom Search customers(??).”

This blog typically offers tips and tricks for users of Google’s Custom Search Engine software, which can be used to build customized Web sites that search specific Web sites or pages.

Srikanth’s tone was out of character for an official Google blog, prompting Google Blogoscoped to speculate that the site may have been hacked.

The answer turned out to be less sinister, according to Sean Carlson, a Google spokesman.

“Blogger’s spam classifier misidentified the Custom Search Blog as spam,” he said via e-mail today. Typically, Google notifies blog owners when it has spotted content associated with spam on their Web sites to give them a chance to clear up any misunderstandings.

However, that didn’t work out in this case. “The Custom Search Blog bloggers overlooked their notification, and after a period of time passed, the blog was disabled,” the company said.

When blogs are disabled like this, their URL becomes available to the general public. That’s when Srikanth swooped in and wrote the joke post.

“It was a case of “URL squatting and not a security issue or any kind of hack,” Carlson said.

Google quickly realized its mistake, and the Custom Search Blog is now back in action.

Technorati Inna House

It’s not a blog launch until you set up a Technorati Profile.