YouTube now lets you buy your favourite tracks direct from the site. This new offering allows site users to buy games and music through a number of YouTube partner companies. No more asking where you can get track x or when the latest game will be on release - click, pay and download. Sales links will be made available on the watch page below the viewed video.

Music and games lovers will be able to choose from links to sites such as iTunes and Amazon.com. It looks like it’s YouTubes intention to target “…partners across all industries — from music, to film, to print, to TV”. This should mean an almost limitless source of media for YouTube users.

Currently, the retail links are only available to US customers but YouTube are planning to slowly expand the offering globally. Google looks to be really ramping up their battle for the hearts and minds of…everyone. Add the YouTube announcement to the Adsense for games news and I think you’ll come to the conclusion that internet based revenue will probably drive Googles profits for the forseeable future.

Popularity: 50% [?]

Ask.com has been in the search game for a long time and has a history of novel ideas and innovations which have been copied by their larger search cousins. Unfortunately for Ask.com, this approach hasn’t helped grow their market share (Ask.com is currently in fourth place with about 6% of the market).

But “Try, try, try again” seems to be the mantra for Ask.com. Today sees the rollout of an updated version of its search engine - results are returned from the Web and “structured” sources of data in certain categories like entertainment, health and jobs.

Also included is an index of Q&A sites such as Yahoo Answers. Ask.com Chief Executive Jim Safka said, “Some of the best content is coming from individuals, not necessarily from professional publishers,”.

Other changes include a return to two panel layout that was dropped last year in favour of three columns. If you liked the three column feel you can always select this option on the search results page. Apparently, the shiney, new Ask.com is faster and returns more relevant results for common queries than the last incarnation.

To be honest, as a search engine user I don’t care if the results come back 1.3 or 1.4 seconds. For me relevancy wins hands down. It’s good to see that Ask.com is still in the game but I don’t think these changes alone will be enough to see a significant rise in their market share.

Popularity: 49% [?]

Now does that really comes as a surprise to anyone? The monitoring system was uncovered by a group of Canadian human-rights activists and computer security researchers. Basically, the surveillance involves the tracking of internet text communications that feature banned words and phrases.

The primary target of this surveillance is the users of Tom-Skype, a joint venture between a Chinese wireless operator and eBay , owners of Skype.

The human rights activists discovered the system about a month ago. Apparently, they found message logging server in China which contained more than a million censored messages. By analysing the messages they were able to put together a list of banned words that had triggered the system.  If you’re wondering how human rights activists managed to ‘just access’ servers in China it’s because the machine were, apparently, misconfigured. This allowed the team to simply download the logs.

Of slightly more concern is the report that the Chinese authorities also monitored conversations between Tom-Skype users and Skype users around the world (including user id’s).

Don’t forget that China isn’t the only nation watching its citizens. Intelligence networks around the world routinely collect internet based communications, albeit for reasons other than censorship i.e. counter terrorism.

Two final points for you - banned words found on the list included;  Falun Gong, Taiwan independence and the Chinese Communist Party, democracy, earthquake and milk powder. (Chinese officials are being slammed over their handling of earthquake relief and chemical laced milk powder.)

During the recent Olympic Games, China had an estimated that 30,000 or more “Internet police” monitoring online traffic, Web sites and blogs for political and other offending content!

Popularity: 48% [?]

It’s throwback time for the internet pioneer. No, we’re not talking retro apps, look and feel but a return rather an attempt to “…bring you the best of the web so you can find it…” Err, yes. There’s not a lot I can say to that!

To be fair to Yahoo, this actually looks like a serious attempt to recapture ground they’ve lost over the past few years AND to give users what they want. According to Toby Coppel, Yahoo’s European MD, the new look site will feature a reduction on its own content, web mail that brings Facebook-like friend updates and web apps and a range of new mobile search programs.

Reading into the statements it’s look like Yahoo is keen to focus on allowing their users to customise the front page with a mix of Yahoo and third party apps. If Yahoo can get this right it should see huge gains from them - good luck.

Popularity: 47% [?]

Things haven’t been looking good for StumbleUpon just recently. First, traffic levels have been flat for some time now. Second, eBay announced the are looking to sell their acquistion after only 18 months. Although these signs don’t look promising the actual number of users registering has been steadily growing. StumbleUpon is hoping that a new web toolbar will cure the current traffic malaise (note - apparently, users are signing up but not coming back to the home page which, in turn, returns low traffic figures for the site).

The key aspect of this new toolbar is that it doesn’t require installation. No more browser plugins to slow down Firefox - I’m up for that. The toolbar works like this - it runs algorithm based on your, and other users, preferences to direct you to websites that you’ll find interesting.

To use the toolbar, simply go to StumbleUpon’s updated home page and click on one of the ‘Recommended Sites’ links and you’ll see the toolbar, complete with Stumble icon, on top of the page. Nice and easy. The one flaw with this toolbar is that many new users will unaware of what it does. In other words, it’s time to get out there and beat the StumbleUpon drum!

Popularity: 47% [?]

Google Dominates

We all know that Google pretty much owns search, for now. One day, a new competitor will capture users imagination and knock Google of the perch but in the meantime the search giant is building up its empire. A report from comScore yesterday revealed the latest figures for online video viewing - guess what? Yeah, Googles YouTube won. Sorry, did I say ‘won’? I meant annihilated the competition! Nearly half of all the video views were served by Google.

In July, figures show that over 11 billion videos were watched online with Google accounting for 5 billion of those views. Googles closest rival was Fox Interactive (think MySpace TV) with only 445 million views. Microsoft trailed into third place with almost 283 million videos.

The figures for unique visits were equally impressive: Google with 92 million unique viewers in July, Fox Interactive on nearly 55 million viewers, and Yahoo in third position with 32 million unique viewers.

The current expectations are that Google will win everytime, but not to this extent. These figures are real slap in the face, especially for Fox Interactive who forked out $580 million dollars for MySpace. Time for a new plan of attack from Fox, Microsoft and Yahoo before it gets too embarassing.

Popularity: 29% [?]

Alongside contextual ads, of course!

Google announced yesterday that they are expanding historical newspaper archives that users can search online. Google will scanning the archives of a number of partnering newspapers then making the results available on Google’s News Archive Search.

The technology uses optical character recognition to scan and distinguish between headlines and text - basically, it’s an extension of Googles book scanning technolgies.

Unsurprisingly, the news archives results will run contextual ads from Google AdSense with click revenue will being shared with the original publishers. The service will initially launch with millions of articles which will extended in due course.

An interesting point to come out of this technology is Googles hope that the new offering will drive print subscriptions:

“This is built on scanning technology we built for Google Books, but with some new features.

We’ve already started this with books and maps, now we will do it with newspapers. Viewers will see it in their original context, can pan around and search. We will widen the user base and readership of news archives.

We already have News Archive search. You will see an interface similar to Google Books search. But our engineers have built in new algorithms to figure out [things like] what is a headline. As I mouse over the page, headlines are highlighted in blue, indicatingtheir clickability. When you click on something, it centers the story, and zooms in. You can do a snapback to the original article. In the sidebar, in addition to sponsored links we have related articles you can click on.”

Looks like another massive money spinner for the kings of search!

Popularity: 29% [?]

Share price down, down, down!

Recently, the share price of Yahoo was hovering the $34 mark - in part, thanks Microsoft’s attempt to buy up the internet giant.  Yesterday, the price dropped to a five year low of $17.75 - that’s around $23 billion less for the share holders to pad their wallets with!

This doesn’t look good for Jerry Yang - I reckon he’ll be replaced in the very near future but as to when this will happen, who knows! If prices continue to fall at their current rate I’m betting he’ll be gone by the end of November. The Yang farewell march may already be planned but with no formal announcement - look at this way, the Icahn attack dog has been quiet for a while now. Maybe a deal has been done to keep both sides of the table happy.

As to who will fill  Yang’s boot nobody knows but some pundits are betting on Dan Rosensweig returning which, if true, would be one the better decisions the board has made.

Popularity: 47% [?]

..in Japan.

Figures from Nielson Japan show that Yahoo took 76% of the 350 billion-ish search engine and portal-related pageviews leaving Google trailing far behind with about 5.4%. he figures translate to 21.9 billion pageviews for Yahoo and 2.2 billion for Google. That’s some catching up to do.

To most of us, it might not seem like a big thing until you find out that Japan has one of  the highest levels of internet penetration in the world (about 74%). This makes the Japanese market a key battleground for ad revenue. So how does Google beat Yahoo?

Mobile Web! By targetting Japanese mobile phone companies Google is seeking to sneak in the back door via pre-installed apps on handsets. Docomo and KDDI have integrated Google Search into their start menus which means users get content from mobile and web sites (plus ads, of course!).

Japanese users can also access Google Calendar, Youtube and other Google services. Some Docomo handsets are even being shipped with Google Maps pre-installed.

The question is, ‘Will it be enough?’. I’m not sure,  Internet portals are still big business in Japan and Yahoo caters to that need. Looks like Google are trying to ignore this and draw in users of mobile web apps. It may be successful but only if Google manage to persuade a whole nation of users that the Google way is best.

Popularity: 48% [?]

Another 3 years in the love shack.

That’s right, you can expect to see Google as the default search option inside Firefox for another 3 years or so. The original deal was originally supposed to expire in 2006 but the two internet darlings tied up for another two years. The latest deal should run until 2011.

The Mozilla foundation does well out of this deal - to the tune of $57 million in 2006. That’s in the region of 85% of Mozillas total revenue! Don’t jump the gun; this money allows Mozilla to pay for further development of the Firefox browser, bandwidth and infrastructure services. There is one downside - Mozilla is almost totally reliant on Googles money. Without it we might now see the polished product that Firefox currently is.

Makes me wonder why Goolge haven’t bought Mozilla yet, just think of the potential - a Firefox derivative to replace the traditional OS.

Popularity: 29% [?]