Omar Kattan - search in a nutshell

Iran has decided to block access to Google search and Gmail service.  This is supposedly part of a “clampdown on material deemed to be offensive” as reported by the Mehr news agency. 

Hamid Shahriari,  secretary of Iran’s National Council of Information said,  ”I can confirm these sites have been filtered.”

Similar to China, Iran has very tough censorship laws banning websites that promote sexual and politically sensitive content.  Iran also censors sites discussing women’s rights.

Iran’s latest censorship laws are part of an ongoing clampdown on an internet-savvy society attempting to embrace western ideals and habits.

Will it last?  Maybe for a while, but this is exactly what will inevitably bring down the current leadership… but lets wait and see…

Yahoo! and Bebo, the UK’s largest social network, have forged an exclusive strategic partnership.  As a result, Yahoo! will sell the majority of Bebo’s display advertising in the UK and Ireland. This is Yahoo!’s first agreement of its kind with a social networking site, which will substantially increase the inventory available to it.

This partnership will enable Bebo’s sales team to continue and to deepen its focus on offering sponsorship and engagement marketing solutions, including brand integration in its groundbreaking entertainment properties such as the online drama, Kate Modern and the recently announced, Sofia’s Diary.

The partnership also brings Bebo users the power of Yahoo! Answers - a community-driven knowledge service that has grown to a global audience of 90 million and 250 million answers. Yahoo! Answers will be integrated into Bebo’s website, allowing users to ask and answer questions posed by other users within the Bebo community and beyond.

Yahoo! and Bebo have also announced the development of a new Bebo Toolbar that will enable Bebo users to monitor their social network even when they are not on the Bebo website.

This exclusive partnership is the next step of our ongoing strategy to build the largest and most effective online advertising network. Bebo joins our existing partners, Eurosport and Vodafone as part of that ad network, which also includes the BlueLithium publisher network and advanced targeting tools, and the Right Media ad exchange. Working with Bebo gives advertisers the opportunity to reach the important 13-24 year-old age group.

Yahoo! and Bebo will begin to roll out the initiatives outlined in the agreement during the 4th quarter of this year. Yahoo! began providing search on Bebo in May this year in a previous deal, which is extended under this new agreement

Just in… Yahoo! has acquired Blue Lithium, a San Jose, California-based company with 100 employees.  The price tag for the purchase… a whopping 300 million dollars! (thats £149.4 million). The purchase was an all cash deal!

Blue Lithium is the 5th largest advertising network in the US and the 2nd largest ad network in the UK, this is according to Comscore.  Blue Lithium also boasts 145 million unique visitors per month. 

Susan Decker, president of Yahoo!, said of the purchase:

“Blue Lithium’s expertise in network management will better enable Yahoo! to manage supply and demand across our network by balancing advertiser goals with publisher value.”

This is the official statement on the Blue Lithium site:

“The acquisition of BlueLithium enables Yahoo! to accelerate its advertising, product, and engineering roadmaps, and gives the company increased capabilities to sell and measure performance-based campaigns both on and off the Yahoo! network.”

It seems like Google and Yahoo are on an ad network buying spree…  only a few months back Yahoo purchased Right Media, for 680 million dollars and Google purchased DoubleClick for $3.1bn back in April (although this purchase is still under watchdog scrutiny).

My prediction… MSN to make the next big move.  Watch this space….

Google announced today that it will be launching a new “in-video” ad format on its sister site YouTube.  The new ad format is supposed to be 10 times more effective than the existing ad formats.  The new ads will be in the form of “animated overlays that appear on the bottom 20 percent of a video,” said a Google spokesman.

The ads are designed to pause the video and appear within the first fifteen seconds of the videoclip and last for ten seconds.  Users will have the option of either stopping the ad and continuing to watch the video or clicking on the ad to go to the advertiser’s site.

The new ad format will only appear on videos supplied by YouTube’s official content suppliers and not on “amateur videos” which constitute the vast majority of the site’s content.

Google bought Youtube almost 10 months ago for $1.65 billion and has stayed away from monetising the videos until today.  Google will charge advertisers $20 CPM (20 dollars per 1000 times the ad is displayed), a price it deems appropriate for potential exposure to 190 million visitors per month.

You can start seeing the ads today, although, I for one would rather watch the video, sorry G!   

Google has launched Google Moon in honor of the first manned Moon landing, which took place on July 20, 1969,

They’ve also added some NASA imagery to the Google Maps interface to make it even more interesting.

This is what Google’s always been good at, making all the world’s information accessible to the average joe and jane on the street. 

Its also fantastic for kids learning about the moon landings at school; they can now actually see where each mission landed and if they hover over the pin, a bubble appears summarising the mission.

A small step for Google, a giant step for the development of search!