What is this new Policy Shift?

Google recently announced that they are going to be eliminating a significant number of their privacy policies across their different services to make way for a single new privacy policy. This policy states that on March 1 of this year Google will begin integrating information from each of their different web services in order to develop a profile for each user. Google states that these profiles will be used to “tailor” search results and provide advertisements that each user will find more relevant. If you aren’t already worried about this policy, you should be.

Who Should Care and Why?

Just about everyone. Anyone who uses any form of Google web service (i.e. YouTube, Gmail, Google+, and Google’s search engine) and enjoys some level of privacy. The new policy becomes much more frightening in conjunction with the fourth privacy principle of the Google company philosophy:

People have different privacy concerns and needs. To best serve the full range of our users, Google strives to offer them meaningful and fine-grained choices over the use of their personal information. We believe personal information should not be held hostage and we are committed to building products that let users export their personal information to other services. We don’t sell users’ personal information.

This means that as of March 1, any online activity that you perform with some degree anonymity using one of Google’s services will be public knowledge that is associated with your name, your face, and your phone number. This should be particularly off-putting to android phone users whose real-time location, Google Wallet data, and much more will also be available.

The Take-Away Message?

So what can you do? Not much really. There’s no way to opt out of this debacle. If you plan on continuing to use Google’s web services, you’ll simply have to submit to these policies and the fact that all personal information you share or indicate with them being available to anyone who cares enough to know. Ultimately you’ll just need to reevaluate using Google’s services instead of their alternatives. Time to break out the pros & cons charts again!

The Chinese government has had a long-running history of restricting and censoring the internet. From blocking access to Google search results, to censoring websites with information that it believes provide information that would undermine the authority of the Chinese government and culture, China makes sure that it keeps tight controls on what its citizens are able to do online. Many citizens, in a quest for free access to information, have responded to these restrictions by using VPN services to get access to the outside world.

Now, it seems, the Chinese government has decided to start a new round in the war for the internet in China. As the Wall Street Journal reported this morning, China has begun clamping down access to the servers of companies that provide VPN services to Chinese citizens in an attempt to close the loopholes in its censorship regime. In addition, the government, which has always seemingly been at odds with Google, has apparently begun carefully disabling certain portions of Google’s popular Gmail service. Google has accused China of disabling Gmail in a way that makes it look like a technical error on Google’s part rather than all-out censorship. Google has previously accused the Chinese government of hacking into its Gmail system to compromise the privacy of Google’s users.

Only time will tell how this new round of restrictions and regulations will play out in China. Hopefully, in the long run, the government will back down on its restrictions and allow its people free and open access to the internet.

.co has just recently been released as a new website ending, as if there weren’t enough already out there.  The question is what is this new domain and how is it different from .com.  Due to the rising traffic online a lot of .com names have been taken so people are constantly looking for new endings so that SEO rich phrases can be used for their website.  Different endings have also been used make dictions as to what type of site the user would be entering.  For example, .gov websites are only aloud to be federal government agencies, and .orgs are supposed to be for non-profits companies.  .net was created to be for technology and network companies, but as become a viable substation for a website when .com is taken.  So the question is what is .co? and what does that mean for it’s future and place in the market?

.co used to be the international ending for Columbia but the Columbian government in a effort make money decided that it would allow non-Columbia companies to register for .co and it moved all of its national websites to .com.co.  These meant that domains like ford.co, e.co, and apple.co were up for grabs.  E.co was reportedly sold for 81,000 dollars.  It is still uncertain if .co will become popular or how Google will treat .co websites verses .com for SEO purposes, but it is sure causing a lot of noise in the website community.  Domain distributers are really advertising about how successful these new .co are going to be.  Research firms have also surveyed consumers about .co and found that they mostly associate .co with either a corporation or a company.  .co could be a huge success or a big flop.  There have already been over 600,000 .co domains bought and there millions of great domains left. This could be a great opportunity for entrepreneurs.  Time will tell how successful .co will be.

For other Blogs written by Ford Jordan check out www.fordjordan.com

If you’ve used YouTube recently, you’ve probably noticed that many of the videos on the site now feature subtitles or closed captioning. And, if you’re even more astute, you might have noticed a CC button that allows you to turn on closed captioning for just about any video on the site.

What’s going on here? Well, YouTube has introduced a new feature that lets people add a closed captioning file to their videos when they upload them to the site. For those videos that don’t have a CC file, they’re using speech to text technology to generate the subtitles. This technology is something that is being implemented by companies like Adobe in video editing software. Basically, it lets the computer do the work of figuring out what was said so that the user doesn’t have to type it all in.

To some, this might seem like an odd feature for YouTube to be adding. But we must remember that YouTube is owned by Google and Google specializes in search. Allowing the actual words in videos to be indexed means that YouTube can do a much better job of searching for particular videos and can, hopefully, create a better experience for its users using this method. In addition, it brings Google one step closer to indexing all the world’s information.

Want to read a little more? Check out ReelSEO’s article on YouTube’s speech to text technology.

Before taking this course, I was clueless about Google Analytics and what keywords are. Although I learned a few things about these, this clip definitely taught me a few things about maximizing good use of key words. Check it out.