Representatives of 21 of the EU’s member states, including the UK, have signed off on the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) – the European version of the US SOPA and PIPA rolled into one and cranked up to 11. Only Cyprus, Germany, Estonia, Slovakia, and the Netherlands have held off on signing the treaty, which [...]
From Boingboing: Michael Geist sez, Recent revelations that the content industries are demanding that Canada implement SOPA-style provisions into its copyright law have raised concerns the law could be used to target legitimate sites. Industry lawyers say there is no reason for worry, yet an analysis of the proposed law set against the claims made [...]
From BoingBoing: Michael Geist sez, The Internet battle against SOPA and PIPA generated huge interest in Canada with many Canadians turning their sites dark (including Blogging Tories, Project Gutenberg Canada, and CIPPIC) in support of the protest. While SOPA may be dead (for now) in the U.S., lobby groups are likely to intensify their efforts [...]
Michael Geist sez, While there is little that people living outside the U.S. can do to influence SOPA and PIPA, there are many reasons why it is important for everyone to participate in tomorrow’s SOPA protest. First, the SOPA provisions are designed to have an extra-territorial effect in countries around the world. Second, non-U.S. businesses [...]
If you’re still considering whether to add a Google+ badge on your website, consider this: We recently looked at top sites using the badge and found that, on average, the badge accounted for an additional 38% of followers. When you add the badge visitors to your website can discover your Google+ page and connect in a variety of ways: they can follow your Google+ page, +1 your site, share your site with their circles, see which of their friends have +1’d your site, and click through to visit your Google+ page.
The Google+ Badge makes it easy for your fans to find and follow you on Google+. With these additional options, we hope it’s even easier to create a badge that fits your website.
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Representatives of 21 of the EU’s member states, including the UK, have signed off on the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) – the European version of the US SOPA and PIPA rolled into one and cranked up to 11.
Only Cyprus, Germany, Estonia, Slovakia, and the Netherlands have held off on signing the treaty, which will give authorities even more power to enforce copyright than was contained in aforementioned online-piracy legislation currently on hold in the US.
In a signing ceremony in the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, His Excellency Mr. Hans Dietmar Schweisgut, head of the EU delegation, said in a statement that ACTA “aims to improve enforcement mechanisms to help its members combat IPR infringement more effectively.”
It seems he’s quite isolated in this opinion, however. Thousands of protestors took to the streets in Poland to protest the signing of the treaty, which was developed behind closed doors by media industry lobbyists and politicians, and hackers have been busy registering their protests online.
In an unprecedented move, the French European Parliament member assigned to monitor the treaty proceedings, Kader Arif, resigned in protest at the signings, and issued a strongly worded rebuke, saying that the EU was trying to have as little public debate on ACTA as possible, and that right-wing groups were trying to ram it into law with no oversight.
Remember a while back when you uploaded all that audio to Google Music? Good news! You can download those tunes now.
Google just pushed a new version of Music Manager that allows you to download previously uploaded and purchased tracks. The music files are downloaded as 320kbps mp3s.
The Music Manager also features an interesting bit of YouTube integration. If a YouTube video is available for a track, you can post that video to Google+. Because you know they weren’t going to have an update without throwing some Google+ love in there. [Google Music]
We’re taking bird’s eye view to a whole new level with the latest version of Google Earth, released today. With Google Earth 6.2, we’re bringing you the most beautiful Google Earth yet, with more seamless imagery and a new search interface. Additionally, we’ve introduced a feature that enables you to share an image from within Google Earth, so you can now simply and easily share your virtual adventures with family and friends on Google+.
A seamless globe
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Starting today, we’re updating our Top Search Queries feature to make it better match expectations about search engine rankings. Previously we reported the average position of all URLs from your site for a given query. As of today, we’ll instead average only the top position that a URL from your site appeared in.
An example
Let’s say Nick searched for [bacon] and URLs from your site appeared in positions 3, 6, and 12. Jane also searched for [bacon] and URLs from your site appeared in positions 5 and 9. Previously, we would have averaged all these positions together and shown an Average Position of 7. Going forward, we’ll only average the highest position your site appeared in for each search (3 for Nick’s search and 5 for Jane’s search), for an Average Position of 4.
We anticipate that this new method of calculation will more accurately match your expectations about how a link’s position in Google Search results should be reported.
How will this affect my Top Search Queries data?
This change will affect your Top Search Queries data going forward. Historical data will not change. Note that the change in calculation means that the Average Position metric will usually stay the same or decrease, as we will no longer be averaging in lower-ranking URLs.
Check out the updated Top Search Queries data in the Your site on the web section of Webmaster Tools. And remember, you can also download Top Search Queries data programmatically!
We look forward to providing you a more representative picture of your Google Search data. Let us know what you think in our Webmaster Forum.
