YouTube, the social networking video sharing community, is said to be in discussions with Sony & Lions Gate Films to offer a Film & Movie Rental service through the YouTube portal.

YouTube, one of the internet’s visited websites, recently announced that it would be offering premium, professionally produced content onto its network in order to attract more users and increase advertising revenue. Last month, as part of an agreement, Time Warner, CNN, Cartoon Network and Adult Swim added older content to the YouTube Network. At present the majority of YouTube content is user generated or uploaded. The addition of paid content will see a dramatic change to the existing site, offering new sources of revenue and advertising opportunities.

“Google’s trying to find ways to better monetize this very good asset,” said Andy Miedler, an analyst at Edward Jones & Co. “As long as the economics make sense, I certainly applaud them for trying to increase the revenue stream.”

Chris Dale, a YouTube spokesman, declined to comment on “rumors or speculation.”

“We hope to expand on both our great relationships with movie studios and on the selection and types of videos we offer our community,” Dale said, without being more specific. The Wall Street Journal reported the story yesterday.

YouTube has also reported that it has come to a final settlement with PRS for Music and Music Videos will shortly be available to view in the UK once again. PRS requested a large royalty fee from YouTube for playing and distributing Music Videos and related content. YouTube announced that the Fee structure was too high and that advertising revenue would not fund such high charges.
After lengthy discussions with PRS, YouTube announced back in March that it would be blocking music content until a settlement could be made in regards to license fees. Nearly 6 months on and the service will finally be renewed.

Article by Creative SEO UK

Social Media bookmarking site Digg is said to be adding NoFollow tags to site links in order to reduce to volume of spam listings in its network. The links which will be directly affected are within user profiles, comments and unpopular posts. The addition of NoFollow tags will mean that Digg will not pass on link juice and page rank to any link which qualifies for the NoFollow tag.

Many Digg users create and submit content to Digg just for the links back to their sites. Quality content will drive high volumes of direct traffic to a website, through the Digg network, but many users are more interested in creating poor quality content in order to generate as many links as possible.

Digg have not explained how popular a link needs to be in order to qualify to have the NoFollow tag removed, the Digg blog announced the change but did not detail the criteria.

Digg have said that they have been working with leading members of the SEO community to come up with an effective and fair rule. No names have been given but you have to hope that this is not a result of pressure from Google.

Article by Creative SEO UK

The Google email service, Gmail, went down on Tuesday for over 2 hours. Google has admitted that the Gmail downtime was a “Big Deal” for millions of domestic and business users.

Google have admitted that the outage was a result of routine server maintenance. A few of its servers were taken offline which resulted in the remaining servers being overloaded with traffic. Google has apologised and has said it will make every effort to stop the issue from happening again in the future. The Gadgetwise blog has reported that the issue was intensified as Google use Gmail internally and were unable to communicate.

Gmail is normally a very reliable and trusted service although there have been three outages this year, Google has rectified the issues extremely quickly maintaining the service. In June ComScore reported that Gmail had over 149 million worldwide users.
Gmail is also an important and integral part of many large and international businesses. More and more companies are switching to Gmail, delivering email over the internet and scrapping in-house email solutions. Outsourcing email online is extremely cost effective and can potentially save companies a lot of money and offer a larger amount of storage and functionality.

Despite yesterday’s issue Gmail is held in high regard, we have yet to see if yesterday’s outage will damage the image of Gmail as a reliable business tool.

Article by Creative SEO UK

Sony and Google have signed an important deal to incorporate Google’s Chrome internet browser into new Sony Laptop and Desktop computers.

Google Chrome currently only holds a very small part of the browser market place; this is partly a result of Microsoft only including their own browser, Internet Explorer, with their Windows Operating Systems. Microsoft has been challenged on multiple occasions about the lack of choice available to the new system user and is reported to be considering adding further browsers in the near future. Chrome currently lags well behind the market leader and Mozilla’s extremely popular and reliable Firefox browser.

Internet explorer is currently being used by nearly two thirds of all internet users, while chrome is used by less than 3% according to Net Applications.

“User response to Google Chrome has been outstanding, and we’re continuing to explore ways to make Chrome accessible to even more people,” Google said.

Google is planning to sign further deals with other manufacturers, keen to promote the use of its browser further Google has a big mountain to climb

Article by Creative SEO UK

Google Suggest is a simple yet powerful service which suggests a list of popular keywords, when inputting characters for a keyword search, within a search input box. As more characters are added the suggested search terms are refined to offer more relevant list of keywords based on the additional characters. This is not new technology and is currently being used as part of the Google Toolbar. What is new is the introduction of the service within the Google News website.

Google have adjusted the algorithm to feature only news related keywords and terms. The new feature is available in multiple Google News Languages including; English, French, Italian, German and Spanish.

Article By Creative SEO UK