Last month, the mayor of Topeka, Kansas, stunned the world by announcing that his city was changing its name to Google.

Now Google has honored that gesture by changing its name name to Topeka for April Fools’ Day. This makes Bill Bunten the Mayor of Google and Eric Schmidt the CEO of Topeka, Inc.

Of course, marks as famous as Topeka and Google require brand standards. So the announcement was accompanied by this usage guide.

This evening, Facebook rolled out a feature that lets users repost each other ’s shared items, with a “via” link attached for attribution back to your friend.

All you do is find a posted item in your news feed and click “share” as shown to the right just below my post. This adds a post with a “via [your friend’s name],” which you have the option to remove, to your own News Feed. Your friends will see this in their News Feeds, and so a new viral loop begins.

Facebook and LinkedIn Vie for Real-Time Search
Since the most frequent use of retweets on Twitter is links,  and since aggregators like Tweetmeme watch which stories get retweeted the most, it’s a move that make Facebook more Twitter-like.  In contrast, last month LinkedIn provided a level of Twitter integration by establishing the #li tag, which allows tweets to appear on the site, and a check box to repost FB items.

Continued

Finding videos via search isn’t new, but playing them inside ad listings is.

For example, if you enter the word “Fame” in Google, you may have the option to play the movie trailer, which will roll surrounded by all the other search results. Google expects increasing video in ad results.

This gets searchers to video content more quickly. It also benefits Google by keeping searchers on Google’s site, so after watching the video, they can easily click on other results or initiate a new search.

If search engines find video in results is better for users (and their business model), they’ll factor this into their pricing and positioning algorithms. This could fuel video efforts, just as factoring site quality into PPC pricing spawned a generation of overnight SEM gurus.

There is a growing disconnect between the legal staff who write terms of use for websites, those who operate the site, and site visitors. I’ve come to believe that each level of disconnection introduces new sets of legal risks, which this story only start to illustrate.

Chris Soghoian observed in CNET that

Google’s terms of service, thick with legalese, state that:

“You may not use … Google’s products, software, services and web sites … and may not accept the Terms if … you are not of legal age to form a binding contract with Google.

Of course if you’re in the US that means that anyone under 18 is accessing Google’s computer system in violation of its terms of service. And this applies to all Google services, YouTube, Gmail, and Image Search.

Ignoring Legal Risks Leads to Selective Prosecution
Federal prosecutors recently used the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act to selectively prosecute Lori Drew as a hacker for violating MySpace’s terms of service. She lied about her identity, and harassed a troubled minor who was also using the system under a false identity. After the child committed suicide, a media and political frenzy resulted in federal prosecutors turning a breach of the site’s terms, which might not have even been civilly enforcable, in to a federal criminal case.

Ignoring the Disconnect Between Terms and Practice May Partly Void the Agreement
Obviously, online services retain the right to modify their own terms of use.  You may begin a user experience with a minimal grant of rights and a maximum of restrictions when reflexively accepting terms. However, when site staff clearly operate to the contrary to those terms, and in some instances assure users that terms in the TOS won’t be enforced, isn’t the contract being modified within the user experience?

Smoking Gun: Google for Kids
Google in fact provides safe-search resources just for kids. There’s no easily accessible link to terms of service, so arriving new users aren’t even exposed to them.

Question 1: By creating this site and its other practices, doesn’t Google by their own practice modify their terms?

Continued

Siding with the American Civil Liberties Union, Judge James M. Munley has barred the Wyoming County District Attorney from pursuing threatened felony charges against teenage girls he has accused of sending explicit photographs over their cell phones.

The controversial case over so-called “sexting” was filed by the ACLU, along with the parents of three girls, in federal court in Scranton. They contend that photographs of the girls are not pornographic and are protected under the First Amendment.

Today, US District Judge James Munley issued a temporary injunction barring DA George Skumanick Jr. from pursuing criminal charges against the three teens, reports the Times-Tribune in a breaking story. Two of the photos at issue showed girls from the waist up, wearing bras. The third shows a teen topless, wearing a towel from the waist down, after stepping out of the shower, reports the Associated Press.

Video distribution sites such as YouTube, Metacafe, and DailyMotion host video files that can infringe the rights of content owners and brand holders. Until now, if you’ve needed to protect video assets, its been tough because video files are easily reformatted, edited, and distributed with changed metatags.

Now, a tier of start-ups are competing both to do the analysis to detect infringement and help rights holders better monetize their assets.

Anvato, a contextual video search which scans more than a million videos in just five seconds, scored Series A financing, led by Oxantium Ventures, at the close of 2008. Publishers simply register videos or have the service spider their site looking for new assets. The technology helps publishers identify their copyrighted content across the web, allowing them to either ask that infringing videos be removed or monetize using a centralized control panel that can configure ad campaigns across multiple video sites.

Then last week, Auditude reportedly scored a $10.5 million second round of funding led by Redpoint Ventures and Greylock Partners. Auditude has the “fingerprints” of 450 million videos, and content partnerships with MTV, MySpace, and Comedy Central.

Meanwhile, YouTube’s internal effort,  Video ID, has partnered with Disney and Time Warner.  There’s a convergence of companies competing to protect video assets and your brand in the world of online video. All this leads to the promise of progress in catching up with the revolution in online video, and providing integrated tools to detect infringement and help content owners profit from the attention their work is earning online.

Have you heard of blended search? (That’s “search,” not “scotch.”) It’s when a search engine presents your search results from more than just webpages. It can include things like images, books, news and video.

In 2007, Google released Universal Search, their flavor of blended search. On top of Google’s search engine results page, you’ll see categories of results that allow you to filter for things like images, news, shopping, etc.  However, what comes up initially below the paid listings is the highest-ranked results from within in those categories. So, instead of just webpages, the organic listings (aka: non-paid) contain groupings of results within pertinent categories.

Since organic search efforts have been focused on webpages, you can imagine how blended search is going to shake up the field of SEO. Instead of one category of search engine results, you now have multiple categories to contend with.

Continued

Yesterday, Google announced a limited time offer to bring its employees stock options back to par, by trading them for what their stock will be worth on March 2nd, 2009.

About 85% of Google’s (remaining) employees have stock options with a value which is, well, below zero. That is, their exercise price is higher than the market price.  I can say from experience that keeping options above water help preserve a firm’s entrepreneurial mindset.

This will cost Google approximately $460 million over the remaining vesting period for these shares, which ranges from six months to five years. That’s what Google’s board is ready to pay to keep staff motivated, and preserve some of the tech-start-up mentality that can fade with corporate growth.

The Consumer Law & Policy Blog describes a case of arguably false advertising, in which a “face lift” firm paid for keywords relevant to people complaining about their trademarked service, but connected them to a site singing its praises. Their apparent intent was to draw those seeking information for detractors to a forum which only promotes the product without acknowledging complaints at all.

The ad’s format is “<Trademarkname> Complaints….a Stanford Doctor speaks out”. As I write this, simply enter “Lifestylelifts Complaints” in Google to see the ad. It establishes the expectation of a complaint site without any exact promise of the forum’s scope or independence. However, reasonable readers would expect to see complaints about the product. And that’s not what they get.

The deception, however, is momentary and ends at the bottom of the landing page that the ad leads to; the trademark holder identifies that it operates the site. So, imaginably, those who want to find true complaints could use their back button and return to the search page for other choices.

The Consumer Law & Policy Blog asks:

Are there viable theories for pursuing the use of deceptive keyword ads by the trademark holders themselves?  A number of theories come to mind.  Consumers might bring a deceptive marketing complaint to the FTC, or might sue under such state consumer laws as section 17500 of the California Business and Professions Code.  Or, perhaps a competitor of Lifestyle Lift might contend that the Google ads are deceptive promotions and file suit under section 43(a)(2) of the Lanham Act.

There might be, but any claim of false advertising would be nuanced. Though a false impression is created, it is done without outright false statements. To the extent that such ads are confined to a single site, and that they do not crowd out other paid or organic results, I’d prefer that such practices would be left to the judgment of consumers rather than courts.

As important as being free from even momentary confusion may be, consumers may have a greater affirmative right to have have efficient access to communications. This would include both access to complaint sites and to paid postings by mark holders attempting to answer or diminish such concerns, as long as such efforts are generally non-deceptive and not engineered to prevent access to legitimate complaints.

Momentary confusion after reading or clicking on an ad is a low threshold for claiming deception. In both cases of trademark and consumer rights, I would hope the legal system’s focus would be reserved for those making efforts at concerted deception, rather than statements that only have potential to create moments of confusion.

Skepticism and a tolerable level of confusion come with any robust marketplace. Completely removing the likelihood of confusion would take a considerable portion of consumer communication along with it. This seems like a job better done in the court of public opinion.

According to an article in The Register, Google’s Vice President of Search Product and User Experience, Marissa Mayer, observed that editorial judgments may play a key role in Google searches in the near future. Mayer made her comments at the Le Web conference in Paris on December 10th. If this change does materialize, the editorial input would come from Google’s “personalized search” as represented by its new Search Wiki. It would turn the search industry upside-down, and would likely compromise Google’s search objectivity.

Continued