According to the MSN Virtual Earth Blog, Ask.com has thrown out its mapping platform for Ask Maps and is now using Microsoft Virtual Earth as its new platform.

Ask.com is using Microsoft Virtual Earth for Ask Maps, Ask City (search for Businesses, Events and Movies per US City) and their Web Search including the Bird’s Eye view. The new integration is as of now visible in the United States only. However, speculations are that other countries such as Japan, Spain, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and the UK that are still running the Ask Maps in the Beta phase will be reverting to the new platform very soon.

Google and Yahoo! have encountered a new hurdle in their dominance of the Search Engine world. A European Union Privacy Panel has asked Google and Yahoo! to follow the European Data Protection Rules and shed all collected user data in six months. The fact that both these Search Engines are based outside Europe hasn’t made any difference to the panel report

To enhance user trust and experience, Google Analytics has recently enabled sharing of Google Analytical Data. The improvement is primarily directed towards providing transparency, choice and improved product experience. This feature will not affect a user’s account in any ways, without the approval of the user for individual product and services.

Google Analytics Data Sharing Program

According Webmaster world, Google is allowing other Webmasters (who could also be your competitors) to damage your site and destroy its online credibility. It is a harsh reality that these days many Webmasters deploy dirty trade tricks to defame a competitive website. This is also known as ‘Google Bowling’. Some of the most common deceitful tactics employed these days are:

1. Spam: A competing Webmaster can use scam script that will leave your site’s URL in thousands of blog comments and forums. This would make the Google spiders believe that you are spamming those sites. This will greatly affect your ranking and credibility as well.

According to a recent announcement, Yahoo! Inc has stepped up its efforts towards the sales of graphical and premium advertisements by revealing the details of its new Advertising Management Platform or AMP. The project that is still in the developmental stages will enable Yahoo’s publishing partners to place advertisements on their own sites, as well as on Yahoo!. Advertisers will also have the opportunity to advertise on the websites that are rapidly associating themselves with Yahoo’s growing network. They will be able to focus their advertisements by demographic and geographic targeting and user’s online behavior.

SMX or search marketing expo which is going to be held from April 22nd to April 23rd 2007  is intended for experienced online search marketers keen on learning the power of user engagement. The expo would include high level sessions aimed at refining the marketers to the  continually growing world of online searches. This event would be a collection of affluent members of search marketing who would be able to share and learn in their native language of online marketing.

Holistic Search Marketing:

A business is only as good as its marketing strategy. Key Performance Indicators (KPI) is essential for a business to thrive in the online environment. These indicators can be categorized into ‘Online Indicators’ and ‘Offline Indicators.’ A few online indicators can be:

1. Visits: A well structured and maintained website will be visited more often by potential customers. The rates of visits on the web page contribute to the success rate of the online endeavor.

Podcasting is a fairly new term which was coined in 2004. Fusing two words: iPod and broadcasting together we have what we call podcasting. What is being listened to has been around since the mid nineties in various forms but not as convenient as it is now due to the ability to subscribe and automatically download them.  However, it doesn’t mean that you can listen to a podcast only on an ipod, instead you can listen to podcasts on any other portable player including a desktop computer. Today podcasting is becoming an ever increasing rage both among everyday users and business.
  
Audio-blogging, audio magazines and web-casting are some other terms that have been used to   describe podcasting. Those who create podcasts are called podcasters and podcatchers are the people who regularly look for new podcasts and also download them. Podcatcher is also the software that is used to find and download the podcasts. Over the years podcasting has evolved as a new medium for broadcasting. Nowadays, many businesses and corporations use podcasting as a means to widen their business horizons by finding new and larger markets. The podcasts can surpass the traditional broadcasting and advertising limit and can provide big and small businesses to make their presence felt all over the world.

The number of online video viewers is on the rise today. Taking the survey reports of US alone, we can see that there is a positive increase in online video viewing. In 2003, there were only around 55 million online video viewers; however, in 2007 the number has gone higher to be 140 million. And the figures are only expected to grow with time. Therefore, online video marketing is going to be a key player in the time to come. Web companies that desire to reach masses efficiently would feel only a greater need of turning to online video marketing companies.

Search optimization marketing with SEO is now easier as Google adds a new way to communicate to Google about their site map. Now just specify a line that is the site map in the robots.txt file and all search engines will be able to locate it. Vanessa Fox with Google still suggests that the site map is submitted to Google to help identify any errors that it might contain.