In addition to today’s Internet Marketing Monitor coverage, we felt these stories were worth pulling out of the multitude of news items for May 23, 2007:

Google Is Big Brother [Search Engine Watch]

The issue here is a comment made by Google CEO Eric Schmidt about the future of the company’s role in our lives. In an interview with The Financial Times, Schmidt apparently said “(t)he goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask the question such as ‘What shall I do tomorrow?’ and ‘What job shall I take?’ â€?. What? Huh? Come again? Oh no… I don’t think I’ll be doing that any time soon, Mr. Schmidt. John Battelle has been cracking me up a lot lately and his response to this one didn’t disappoint: “The day I ask a search engine “what shall I do tomorrow” or “what job shall I take” is the day that one of you, please, should put me out of my misery”. Seriously. There’s a point where the Google obsession goes too far, folks.

$100 Million Payday For Feedburner - This Deal is Confirmed [TechCrunch]

TechCrunch says it has confirmed with a source “close to the deal” that it is, in fact, happening. To day, this has all be rumor and speculation. Of course… after the Engadget debacle I’m not taking any rumor confirmations from TechCrunch at face value until I see something from one of the parties involved. Assuming it’s true, this could potentially be huge. Google is fast on the way to dominating the RSS reader market. Throw in a popular syndication service like Feedburner - and the technology at its disposal - and you’ve got yet another market for Google to control. It also has some interesting advertising implications, as well. But I’ll wait until this has been confirmed by Google or Feedburner before delving into that matter.

AdSense coming to a video near you [Inside AdSense]

Google has begun a closed pilot test of in-video streaming ads. According to the post, publishers of video content will choose when the ad plays and which videos on their site the ads play on. Is it a stretch to assume that something like this would be rolled out across YouTube if the pilot test goes well? I don’t think so. Of course… it’d have to be modified a bit to work with the hosted nature of YouTube. But I won’t be the least bit surprised to see YouTube give this a go. Assuming, of course, that the year long pilot, 2 year closed beta, and 5 year standard beta period goes well.

Digg Bans Users Who Digg Too Often [Search Engine Journal]

Hmm… this may be the first good thing I’ve had to say about Digg in a long time. I, for one, am glad to see this happening. In a nutshell - Digg is tracking how long it takes people to Digg a story. If they don’t have time to read the entire story between clicking the headline and casting their digg, they’re getting flagged or tagged or something. So Digg is basically trying to cut down on the number of people who digg by title or description alone. I’m sure a lot of the Digg mob is upset about the change in policy. But it really is for the best. If you want to provide readers with real content worth reading… the folks making things popular need to actually… you know… READ them.

Google turns the page… in a bad way [OpenDNS Blog]

Google and Dell are buddies. Google gets to put its software on all Dell computers and Dell gets to share in advertising revenue from what some people are calling a spyware-like approach to getting ads in front of customer’s faces. The OpenDNS blog has an excellent write-up on the situation (along with screenshots). I saw this monstrosity first-hand on my parent’s new laptop a couple of weeks ago. I was going through the computer and uninstalling all of the garbage that comes on a new PC. It took me a while but I finally figured out how to get rid of this mess. And then I installed Firefox and forbid mom and dad from using IE anyway. But as with most of Google’s “anti-don’t be evil” moves, I have to ask: are we really surprised? Big G is in it for the same quick buck that Dell is. Put the two together and it’s an even bigger nightmare than either company separately. Danny Sullivan has more information at Search Engine Land and the OpenDNS Blog talks about how to uninstall and/or circumvent the “spyware-ish” GoogDell advertising machine.

Until tomorrow folks… have a great night!