In addition to today’s Internet Marketing Monitor coverage, we felt these stories were worth pulling out of the multitude of news items for July 11, 2007:

Policy group says Google soft on piracy [Reuters]

Yeah… big deal. Google has been slow to take any responsibility for piracy on its properties since day one. YouTube, for example, puts 99% of the burden of proof on copyright holders to find and deal with copyrighted material. New stuff is in the works but it remains to be seen how content producers will react to that. You can’t really blame Google too much, though. When you’re indexing the entire known web it can be difficult to weed out ALL of the infringing material. But piracy is also just something that goes along with any service that gives users the unchecked ability to upload and add content. It’s not a Google-specific issue.

Nielsen Alters Web Ratings, Favoring AOL Over Google [The Washington Post]

I’ve been waiting for more people to do this. We all know that page views don’t tell the best story. But for whatever reason (nostalgia… convenience… laziness) we continue to spout off about page views. Compete added a new metric back in April. Nielsen finally bit the bullet and added what it calls “Total Minutes” to it’s service… and calls it the best measure of online engagement. And according to Nielsen’s Total Minutes metric, AOL, Yahoo, MSN/Live, and Fox Interactive are all more popular than Google. It’s really not that surprising. Some people call Google the “start page of the Internet”. But it’s not an engaging property. It loads… people search (and then click away on a search result)… or they type in a URL and go elsewhere right off the bat. Things should begin to change as iGoogle, Gmail, and other Google services increase in usage. But for now, the portals still dominate a lot of people’s online time.

Google Maps Mashups 2.0 [Google LatLong]

“Mashup” is one of those Web 2.0 phrases that few outside the biz really know. If I told my mom that Google had made creating mashups with maps easier she’d probably stare at me blankly for a few seconds and then change the subject. Needless to say, mashups are big among the tech communities and Google Maps is a favorite application from which to create them. To make the creation of dynamic mashups easier, Google has created a new platform called Mapplets that lets developers overlay Google maps with their own data. From what I can tell, though, this isn’t a revolutionary new product as much as a reaction to what devs were already doing with Google Maps. Regardless, it’s a nice addition to the Google Maps arsenal of tools.

How To Use Google AdWords Search Query Report [The Lonely Marketer]

One of the best ways to research the effectiveness of an AdWords campaign is to find out what people are searching for when your ads are displayed and/or clicked. The Search Query Performance report in the AdWords admin is, in turn, one the best ways to find that out. It not only shows you what people were looking for when your ad’s impression was triggered, but also whether or not your campaign is really targeted toward that keyword/phrase (which can help you further refine your ad group). In his pictorial guide to using the report, Patrick Schaber walks you step-by-step on generating - and interpreting - your very own Search Query Performance report.

In case you hadn’t noticed, the past week or so has been a little on the slow side, post-wise. We’ve been wrapped up in a big project but I promise that the slow-down is temporary. Thanks for your understanding.

See you all tomorrow!