Google has doubled its profits for the second quarter, taking analysts by surprise.
Says USA Today:
The search giant reported $2.5 billion in revenue, up 77% from the year-ago quarter. Net income was $721 million, or $2.33 per share, up from $342 million, or $1.19 per share, a year ago.
Analysts had expected Google to report per-share earnings of $2.22.
Interesting use of a map mash up showing news and blog coverage of the crisis in the Middle East. Gives an unusual perspective.
According to Micro Persuasion Google Video has added “in-stream permalinks. The move, which goes one better than YouTube, means that now you can link to a specific part of a video. All you need to do is append the time in this format (#1m35s) to the video URL.
Google Labs has a new product – Google Accessible Search. The site works by analysing the meta data and html on sites to bring back those most likely to be more readily used by the visually impaired – those which work well with images switched off, for instance. It is linked to Google Co-op so site owners can self-identify.
Click fraud is growing, according to a report quoted by PaidContent.org
Another report makes it harder for search portals to deny click fraud as a growing concern. According to the Click Forensics study, fraudulent clicks on search-related online ads rose to an average of 14.1 percent last quarter, up from 13.7 percent in the first quarter. Earlier this month, advisory firm Outsell interviewed advertisers and estimated the rate as closer to 14.6 percent, or $800 million lost in revenue a year.
Hong Kong Youth Enlisted For Online Copyright Patrols, says PaidContent.org
Forget bots and automated web crawlers … the Hong Kong government has enlisted 200,000 youth ages 9-25 from 11 organizations including the Boy Scouts and Girl Guides to patrol the online discussion sites for copyright violations.
According to Wired News Netscape is offering to pay people to blog. The story goes on:
Jason Calacanis offered up to $1,000 a month to woo volunteer posters away from popular reader-generated link sites like Digg and Reddit. A post on Calacanis’ personal blog is offering potential contributors — which he’ll call “Netscape Navigators” after they jump ship — the $1,000 monthly stipend for a minimum of 150 posts on the recently redesigned Netscape site.
The posts would be similar in content to the highly popular submissions on Digg, which are generally sparse on original content but offer links to original stories elsewhere on the web.
Calacanis believes that “crowdsourcing”, where a large pool of users contribute content to a community with little or no monetary compensation, is an outmoded idea.
According to eWeek YouTube, the video sharing site, has broken through the 100 million videos served up a day barrier. The site was launched only late last year and now has 29% of the US multimedia entertainment market online, according to eWeek – quoting Hitwise. According to the company’s fact sheet 60,000 videos are uploaded daily.
El Tiempo, a major daily newspaper in Columbia, has just relaunched its website and incorporated a swath of Web 2.0 features, according to Jeff Jarvis, who was himself quoting Boz.
They have activated comments on articles. Comments can be voted up or down by readers. They have a most read and most active search section on the homepage. It looks like they may incorporate tags next.
In case you have a few spare moments over the summer and are at a loss as to what to do with your time, you might want to considermaking a watch by hand. Amazing.