That’s going to be interesting … I mean …. this …. Google Is Taking Questions (Spoken, via iPhone); whatever you want to say about Google … they keep innovating Search - they just pushing the boundaries.  The other day they released data showing how Google Uses Searches to Track Flu’s Spread and just yesterday Google Exploring Old Rome Without Air (or Time) Travel.

I haven’t seen the iPhone application yet, it’s going to be available today.   It’s hard to say how much I’ll use it - but the fact they pulled something like Google Is Taking Questions on the iPhone is fantastic - beyond the scope of what anyone else could do.   Even the Google Earth for iPhone application is a stunning interface.   From The New York Times:

Users of the free application, which Apple is expected to make available as soon as Friday through its iTunes store, can place the phone to their ear and ask virtually any question, like “Where’s the nearest Starbucks?” or “How tall is Mount Everest?” The sound is converted to a digital file and sent to Google’s servers, which try to determine the words spoken and pass them along to the Google search engine.

The search results, which may be displayed in just seconds on a fast wireless network, will at times include local information, taking advantage of iPhone features that let it determine its location.

The ability to recognize just about any phrase from any person has long been the supreme goal of artificial intelligence researchers looking for ways to make man-machine interactions more natural. Systems that can do this have recently started making their way into commercial products.

And there’s been other innovations that I haven’t checked out yet, not so much from Google, but what Microsoft is doing where Microsoft Beats Yahoo and Google to Social Inbox 2.0

Thursday, Microsoft announced a complex new version of the Web sites and PC software that use the Windows Live brand. Over the next two months, the company will introduce dozens of upgraded features involving its e-mail, instant message, calendar, blogging and other services. It will also add some entirely new functions, including group collaboration and photo sharing.

A lot of the effort has gone into weaving the functions of social networks throughout many of these services. For example, the service has a “what’s new” feed, modeled after the Facebook news feed, that can publish short comments by users as well as links to when they take certain actions, like publish new photos. The feed will be displayed on the instant message client and on new profile pages for users. And after you send an e-mail to people who use the new feed, you will see their most recent updates.

Microsoft is also reaching out to draw in information from other sites.

I guess, what I’m saying is that Search is getting interesting again - no so much for the act of searching - but how one can search and also receive information - a lot of innovation happening - it’s almost like that innovation is coming in waves.

Was quoted by Valeria Maltoni on How to Measure Attention recently; it’s interesting how and idea grows, takes flight, and evolves.

As I sat in at a DoubleClick vendor session today at SMX East about Spotlight tags and how they could be used to track cross channel conversons (and have been, for the last 10 years, or so) I keyed into Valeria’s response to a reader where she writes:

“…Google tracks a lot of movement online. It would be fascinating to see how and if the information converges between Analytics for blogs, DoubleClick for ads, gmail, maps, and all sorts of other products they have. I had a demo of the maps capabilities at a recent conference and was blown away at the interactivity one can build in 3D.”

Google, via DoubleClick would be able to tell that an visitor who came to a site (cars.com) and did a site search and then came back again and did another, more detailed search, for example, according to Valeria, the person would have engaged with the site:

“….if the same searcher came to Cars.com and put in the search “new sedans” then later, came back and put in the query “reviews of new silver sedans” that searcher is engaged, she is definitely paying attention with an action in mind.”

I suspect, and I may be wrong here, that DoubleClick handles what happens to a visitor till they arrive at the landing page (in this case, the site search page) and then, site analytics, such as Google Analytics, tracks past this point to the final destination pages on the site.  If so, there may be a missing link between what DoubleClick picks up and what Google Analytics sees - and if we had that gap bridged, we’d be able to do, for sure, what Valeria suggests.

Getting back to the physical representation of “attention”, there’s only on platform that actually shows it much the way I suggested, only it does it for sites, not keywords (hey, that’s an idea, maybe Compete.com should adapt the idea they apply to sites and make it work for keyword phases).

Compete.com considers the measure of attention as  “….all the time we collectively spend online and then determines what percentage of that time was spent on a given site.“   But what if we changed that definition to “…all the time visitors collectively spent on a website and then determined how much time was spent on a given keyword phrase“. Then we might have something.  Unfortunately, we can’t do it via visitor yet - but Google Analytics, were it to use the DoubleClick data, depending on how the data from DoubleClick is used, could track individuals coming to my site, searching and then searching again.   I’ll do the next best thing and talk about site behavior as a whole.

So…let me try it - just playing around - my site, www.webmetricsguru.com had 5,964 visits last month (September 08) at an average visit length of 45 seconds per visit.  Taking 5964 * 45 = 268360 seconds were spent on my site, in total, by all visitors in September.

Taking the keyword “Radian6″ as my start point with 15 visits last month and an average visit length to my site of 31 seconds = 15 *31 = 465 seconds.

So, what percentage of all the time spent on my site last month was spent on the keyword “Radian6″?  (465/268360 = 0.173%)

So, if we wanted to calculate “attention” for a keyword phase (which is part of what Valeria is talking about) we’d take that same formula and apply it to that same keyword, but in August, July, June, May, and then make a chart, for example, and see if the slope of that attention is up, or not.

August = (188/92870 = 0.202%)

September = (465/268360 = 0.173%)

There wasn’t much activity in August and July and June haven’t been tracked this way, so according to this example, the attention might be going down for that term.

Also, even at this level, Google Analytics does not show you other keywords used as a result of “radian6″, though it seems that data ought to be pull able.

So… we can’t actually go all the way with this example Valeria Maltoni came up with because we’d need additional tracking.

I’ll be at SMX East on Tuesday Morning, October 7th, and I’ll try to make it for the morning Keynote on with Google’s Tim Armstrong, who is President of Advertising and Commerce for Google, Inc.

I also plan to attend Search & The US Presidential Campaign, Personalized & Customized Search and the Paid Search Analytics sessions.

I’m also attending the NYC Tech Meetup on Tuesday evening and a SMX East party bash later on Tuesday evening.

Meanwhile, there are some good posts by others I wanted to mention, including one by Shawn Collins who did an Affiliate Summit Social Media Recap for the conference I missed last Sunday; I also wanted to go and had a ticket, I just had the problem of not being able to be in two places at once - I opted to attend WordCamp instead of Affiliate Summit.  Fortunately, Shawn’s post gives me much of the information I missed.

Also, Michael Arrington is plugging LeWeb3 in Paris this year - Get Yourself A Ticket To LeWeb and writes about it in TechCrunch- I attended LeWeb3 last year but am on the fence this time, awaiting a Press Pass though I really wanted to speak, instead.  However, SES Chicago is happening at the same time, and I have a shot of speaking at it, redoing my San Jose panel, so if I had to choose I’d probably pick the Conference I can speak at over one I can’t.

On the other hand, at the rate the global economy is collapsing, I am wondering if going to Europe now is such a good idea.

I also briefly saw SEOmoz show me his new SEOToolKit - SEOmoz Crawls Web To Expand SEO Toolset.

Honestly, I’m not all that impressed, and many SEO tools are hard to use and don’t add much value; we’ll see.

That’s enough for tonight, going to sleep now.

I briefly met Nicolas Carr earlier this year at a Search Conference, I think, back in March, and have a copy of The Big Switch somewhere at home, but never read actually read it - who has time - I get a lot of books and find I can’t really get into that many of them - I just don’t have the bandwidth anymore - I guess I’m skimming - just like a lot of us do now - and according to Nicolas Carr, we’re starting to think like the tools we use - namely Google.

I don’t think thinking like Google is necessary a bad thing - but as this clip from the Colbert Report shows, many typically are processing information so quickly that we can only know a little about a lot of things or a lot about a few things.

It’s kind of one way, or the other - there is not that much middle ground here - because there’s so much information hitting us at any one moment - that we have had to learn to “skim” through it do decide what we want to focus on.

Does it get us to the point where we can’t focus on anything meaningful?  Is that what Google is doing to us, for example?

Or is Google and other search engines just creating for us that which we want, anyway - sorta like a cat chasing it’s tail (or is it a dog chasing it’s tail - forgotten).

I bet we can chart, and this is where the analysis comes in, the amount of information (”messages”) bombarding us over time, say in the last 30 years, against attention span, and come up with a downward slope - that’s my premise - what I’d expect to find if I did take a closer look.  Using the same “skimming” that Google now makes possible, by the way - here’s an interesting chart I came up with, or should I say, mashed up with my post here.   In other words, I gave up something, and I got something in return - the question is how you use that information, not if the trend, itself, is good or bad:

” ..By running a regression analysis across this data we can model a response curve to show how the effectiveness drops off with the increasing number of messages. It can immediately be seen that this is not a linear relationship – the effectiveness drops off quite sharply after the first few messages. Each additional message serves to negatively affect the overall delivery, with the greatest ‘damage’ occurring when there are relatively few messages to begin with.

This chart doesn’t really address the time span, but it does address attention span - we can’t take in too much information at once - and that fact has been  used, quite successfully, to blinsight us, particularly in Electoral Politics (ie: for example, John McCain’s campaign invites medical doctors in for 3 hours to examine 1000’s of papers about his medical history - that are almost impossible to process - without the ability for doctors to take any notes, or just massive barriages of information that are meant to mislead and confuse us - so we can’t actually get the nuggets of real information from the noise that bombards us).

We’ve put up filters to tune out noise, and often, good information is in with the noise, and we tune that out too, and as I’ve maintained, some campaigns exist just on that - flood us with information that gets us to the point of being stupid - so we can’t process anything new - even though we should and new to.

From the same Measurement Matters blog post - I came up with another chart that ties in the number of information, stories that media can track well:

We brought together data from more than 200 organizations to see if there was a correlation between the number of messages that were tracked and how successfully those messages were conveyed in the media. While we were expecting some kind of pattern, we were surprised about how definitive the relationship was. Organizations with six or fewer messages were more than twice as likely to see those messages delivered as those with more. For those organizations with even fewer messages (one to three) it was even more profound – message delivery was on average three times more effective than those with more.

Put it another way, the reason Republican’s have won more consistently is that their messages have tended to be fewer, more primal, more focused then Democrats (it has nothing to do with weather the messaging is correct or fair, it’s often not), that had much larger constituencies - communicating what you stand for is harder when there are a lot of voices talking -especially when there there is so much “noise” to filter out.

Even in the debate last night, McCain sought to emotionally connect and stay on just a few themes - it just so happens he’s on the wrong side of most of them - but that has not prevented candidates   from winning - especially if they can exploit the overloads of information.

However, the same trend that decreases our attention span also enables us to have a lot more information to think about, to write about, too.

I think, having so much information at our disposals, provided you have a point of view, should make it fairly easy mash up information, come up with new insights, that could not have happened, otherwise.

What I have noticed, however, is that there’s been a proliferation of information that is essentially duplicated, with little added value.

For example, if I look at information on a prescription I’m taking - or even a herbal medicine, you can often find the same thing repeated, but with almost no added information.

The News is often that way too - last night I watched the first Presidential Debate and got a headache - The Next Day, a New Debate on Who Won and I feel that i could have passed on it - I already know who I’m voting for but for all the talk - little information from either candidate that was new, even on the eve of the largest financial bailout in history, the largest back failure in history, the beginning of a long recession, perhaps a depression, little information from either candidate.

And when you look online, the situation is not much better - what’s in the New York Times and Washington Post, about the same stuff, and cable / tv news is just repeating every couple minutes, the same things.

And even with all the 1000’s of cable channels which I can now choose from, on Time Warner - or for that matter, almost any cable provider - there’s often nothing to watch.

Why is that?

I think I know why; relative to consumers of information (all of us)  there are not that many people that produce it, and many of those who are, are looking at each other for information, there’s actually little original.

And here’s where Google could help, but doesn’t - this would be the positive side.  Yes, Google did try to suppress duplicate information for some time, but ….. due to the nature of using textual data and links (and some metadata) they can’t really distinguish the quality of information independant of the backlinks/reputation and text in a page/site.

In order to make Google and other search engines better, they’d need to be more “Social” and process the information from your friend and community - to resurface the information - and they’ve been working on it, Google has, I know they’re experimenting with a “Friendfeed” type of interface - that will allow for commenting on search results, will rerank search results, etc.

So I think, it’s possible that what we’re coming to is not a bad thing - we’re losing individual concentration and knowing a little about a lot of things, but not that much about much of anything - but … our “group” can, our “friends” can - and that’s what I think we’re moving into - that, to me, is the Big Switch, and technology can now enable that to happen, globally, where it could not have, in the past.

I wrote three good posts today but haven't had a chance to write anything here - so I'll talk about the Analytics Guru posts.  In

Microsoft BrowseRank favors Social Networks

I keyed into Aaron Wall today - and noticed he had a writeup on BrowseRank that tests it and finds it's better for Social Networks, and probably not that good for Google, which favors links over search behavior.

Then I read another post about

The Bloggers guide to SEO looks pretty good

..from SEObook, and decided to write about that … with the goal of not overusing these strategies - because, let's face it, if you do it too much - you'll bring down a penalty from the big G.

And then

house content is favored by the Google algorithm - further proof that Google stacks the cards in their own favor

….  talks about Google Knol and how it's ranked over duplicate content that was created somewhere else (off of Google).  I think this post is quite revealing.

It's Google, and there's trouble again, this time with "virtual tresspassing" - take a look

I like the graphic associated with the post in Google Operating System - The Unlikely Integration Between Google News and Digg - it's hard to see where Digg would be used to re-rank Google News once Google acquires Digg.

More likely, the real reason Google is buying Digg is ….to interface it with Google's organic search results - though you'd think, in true Google fashion, if they were going after Digg's success they'd just copy/clone Digg instead of buying it.

Perhaps there is a patent issue involved here - or something that limits what Google can do with it's new Search Interface - Future of Search Engine Optimization - Google’s New Search Interface.

BTW, I wrote about …some other news the other day and I'd like everyone who reads this blog to also subscribe to www.theanalyticsguru.com RSS Feed, for the reasons I outlined in that post.

Read an interesting post on Smackdown about Why The Google Keyword Tool Is Useless For SEO, Even With Exact Numbers :

'"..if I am only concerned about getting traffic from AdWords, of course. The thing is, if I rely on this data for my SEO efforts I will at best be most likely wasting my time. At worst I will be seriously wasting my time. By analyzing the referrers on the clicks generated during this test we can easily see why this is so."

Recently, I wrote the current crop of Keyword Tools are almost useless for Social Network, user conversations, viral marketing - because they don't really target conversations, or what's really hot.

Meanwhile, Search Engine Roundtable is of the opinion The Google Keyword Tool is Useless for SEO, and Here's Why

Michael VanDeMar wrote an interesting post on his blog about the uselessness of the Google Keyword tool for SEO. He explains that while we reported that the tool is showing keyword numbers, it still isn't helpful. His rationale is that the numbers refer to PPC search behavior only, not overall Google.com search behavior, and then he explains how past research has given him this perception. He writes:

For instance, for [birthday poems] the tool gave a number of 27,100 (which would be an average of 903 searches per day) and bidding on that keyword for 3 days gave me 2,411 impressions (or 803 impressions per day). This is fine and dandy if I am only concerned about getting traffic from AdWords, of course. The thing is, if I rely on this data for my SEO efforts I will at best be most likely wasting my time.

I've noticed that a keyword's demand and/or position in Search Results, esp on Google, rarely generated anywhere near the traffic I expected.   On the other hand, when I happened to write about something interesting and provocative, and it was a subject in the news anyway - I recently got several hundred visits to my Webmetricsguru.com blog an hour.

That doesn't happen any more though - Google took care of that …. they don't like anyone getting too much traffic - in this case, they penalized the entire Know More Media network - but it was never explained, officially, why (there were "unofficial explanations, though).

But at any rate, the idea of publishing actual keyword search numbers in the External AdWords Keyword tool is not about accuracy - it's about convincing people to run advertising.

I've been thinking about a presentation I'd like to do at Search Engine Strategies someday - not this time, in San Jose, but maybe the next time I get to speak, about all the things in "border-color: initial; background-image: none; background-repeat: repeat; background-attachment: scroll; -webkit-background-clip: initial; -webkit-background-origin: initial; background-color: transparent; font-family: serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; font-size: 100%; line-height: normal; position: static; text-align: left; text-indent: 0pt; text-transform: none; color: green; text-decoration: underline; cursor: pointer; background-position: 0% 0%; border-width: 0pt; border-style: none; padding: 0pt; margin: 0pt" id="gtbmisp_83">algorytms Search that don't work - stuff the search engines do try to get better results often backfire.

I wrote a post about that last week - Reputation and what we associate with it where I examined how Google's way of evaluating TrustRank, based partially on who a site links to, was wrong.

But… I didn't explain my point as fully as I'd have liked to.  What I meant to add, was - much of the way we deal with bits of data is based on the way we deal with objects in a 3D World - based on direction (closeness/distance/proximity), direction, size, and so on - yet data that is used to evaluate ranking is really of entirely different dimensions and qualities - using algorithms based on our physical reality often give results that are garbage (I guess I do have a can of garbage next to food - see the photo below)

To me, the computer scientists who work at Search Engines, I believe, are using methods to sort and qualify data based on concepts honed in the physical world we all live in- but the analogies don't work that well - putting my food next to a garbage can surely makes me not want to eat it anymore - but it doesn't make the food bad - but according to Google, linking out to sites it thinks are "bad" makes yours more likely to also be "bad" and you may find your ranking much lower in Search results because of this.

The point of this post is that tools Google gives us and tools they use to decide the quality of your content - are based on what they believe, what easiest for Google to handle - it's not necessary created to make your life easier - even if it appeared to be done for that reason - like the AdWords External Keyword Tool - which gives you data that isn't really useful for Search Optimization - not the way you think it would be.

And maybe, that's the way Google wants it.

I was thinking about how Google penalizes websites when they link out to other sites that have a poor reputation (what I think of as Google TrustRank), and according to SeoBook's Aaron Wall (in his TrustRank Algorithm Post)

• Good pages rarely link to bad ones. Bad pages often link to good ones in an attempt to improve hub scores.
• The care with which people add links to a page is often inversely proportional to the number of links on the page.
• Trust score is attenuated as it passes from site to site.

But that's still an abstract idea, not that hard to visualize, but still, not real.  This is more like it (see my photo, below):

This photo is more real - and explains what TrustRank really is - though I doubt Google would agree with me.

I was half thinking about having a sandwich at work, there's often food around - but when you put it next to a garbage can, the food becomes garbage, at least, in my mind, it does.

Besides my own mood and needs, it's the context that objects are in that make them attractive, or not.

I think, and this is where Google goes into error - that you can apply physical ideas like association and reputation (ie: one color next to another, changes both - simultaneous contrast) or hang out with criminals, you become one - to links coming from a website (especially if they're "paid links").

But what I think is wrong - that we're using links as a way of evaluating a site - I think that's wrong - but that's still a big part of Google's Pagerank algorithm.

Getting back to my photo, the food in the table didn't change - it's my conception of the food that changed - because it's next to a Garbage Can.

You may argue that people should not put food next to a garbage can if you want it to be eaten, or you should not link to offending sites if you want Google to rank your site - but that's all based on the idea of CONSUMPTION.

I think the reason why search results aren't that good anymore is the that links are used to determine much of the value of a site and it's reputation - when it no longer makes any sense to do so - it did, 10 years ago, but it doesn't, any longer and I think it's time for the Pagerank algo to be retired and replaced with something else.

Sure, I don't want to eat that sandwich - but I don't think Google should be my alter ego and decide, what is appealing and deserves to be shown, vs, what is not, based on it's own self serving idea of consumption.   I don't think we can evaluate the true value of anything just by what it is next to - what it links to - that's why the Search Results, in my opinion, are getting worse, not better.

I think Social Networks do offer a solution - and that appear to be the relationship of how information is used, not just what you link to, but how you interact - the whole Social Graph thing - that is much more meaningful than just looking at a bunch of links.

In fact, I'm reminded of ideas I've had about works in Museums, and how art is shown, or in fact, how a meal is prepared.  When you put a Van Gogh next to a Rembrandt, one of the paintings is going to suffer, probably the Rembrandt, it will look darker and older - and yet, if you put two similar paintings next to each other, they will probably enhance one another. Same thing with a meal - certain dishes don't work so well with each other - it's hard to appreciate everything when it's all mixed in on one plate.

And I think, it's the same thing with websites and search engines - that we need to look beyond what links to what - and more at what does one entity does with something else - not just what kind of links are on a page - but what do visitors do when they transverse that link.

But here's a problem - Google might have the technology to track all of this - but in order to do so, that data could easily invade our privacy, and it's a can of worms to track to track and evaluate sites based on behavior of visitors clicking on links - yet we have to move away from an "link economy" - a term that Jeff Jarvis likes to use a lot - to an action based economy - not what we link to, or who links to us, but we do with the information.

I wrote about the Viacom lawsuit against YouTube (Google) last year when it first was filed last March (see Viacom Sues Google, YouTube for $1 Billion); at that time, Mark Cuban was openly musing that Google's aquisition of YouTube was a mistake.

Now, I think we've moved past that issue (aquisition a mistake or not) so there's no point musing about that - but it appears Google LOST to Viacom (B.L. Ochman has a post on this topic that I like - Worried About the YouTube Order? You Didn't Have Any Privacy Anyway):

A federal judge in New York, presiding over Viacom's $1 billion copyright suit against Google, has ordered Google to give Viacom a three terabyte database showing every clip users have watched on Google-owned YouTube, the Internet's largest video site. Here's a YouTube video that explains it all to you, with musical accompaniment.

U.S. District Judge Louis Stanton, an 81 year old Reagan appointee, issued the order, renewing concerns among privacy advocates that Internet companies like Google are collecting unprecedented amounts of private information that could be misused or be obtained by third parties.

Judge Stanton ordered Google to provide Viacom with records revealing the users' log-in identities and the Internet addresses for their computers. Both companies say discussions are underway to anonymize the logs.

Here's a YouTube video that explains the debade, made last year, at that, when the lawsuit from Viacom was first brought against YouTube/Google.

I decided to use Radian6 to probe the Viacom - Youtube story and see what else I could find - setting up a profile with the following keywords

I typically set the default measurements to give more emphesis to on topic posts and on topic inbound links, as I always do - this makes sense to me and it one of the unique features of Radian6 that many of the other platforms I've looked at recently don't have - see Social Web Analytics EBook - print it out and read it.

Here's where it gets interesting - as what I find out via Radian6 is a much more "balanced" view of the news - all coming into one dashboard - something that RSS Aggreators should do - but don't actually do. 

Here's a list of the Influentials on the Viacom-YouTube lawsuit from Radian6's New Influencer Widget:

Also, you can hover over the graphs in the Media Viewer (for each post) and get a count of the number of comments at any point in time (on the chart) - an intersting feature for those who need to follow the development of a story and it cascades in the news.

For example, the TechCrunch post was viewed as the most "engaging" and influential of the latest news on the Viacom -YouTube lawsuit -with Judge Protects YouTube’s Source Code, Throws Users To The Wolves with the Judge allowing Google to protect itself at "our" expense - something that doesn't quite show up in the news the way it's typically read:

"…If the data is actually released, the consequences could be far more serious than the 2006 AOL Search debacle."

That was a pretty serious thing AOL did …. and TechCrunch says this could be much worse - meanwhile - Google gets off scot free:

"…Meanwhile, the judge denied Viacom’s request that Google turn over YouTube’s source code as it could “cause catastrophic competitive harm to Google by sharing them with others who might create their own programs without making the same investment.”"

So what's the deal here … "user beware" of Social Media?  You use it, you buy it?  I don't know, but I find an interesting thread here - and Radian6 pointed out the "User Engagement" by noting the extreme number of user comments that were from unique IP Address - which is an Engagement Metric.

But what the TechCrunch post is really saying is that the Judician System may not be equiped to pass Judgement on Technical Issues of Privacy - in this case, the Judge, Judge Stanton, might be too old and out of it ….. just might not be up to date on what is really involved here:

"…I can understand why Judge Stanton, who graduated from law school in 1955, may be completely and utterly clueless when it comes to online video services. But perhaps one of his bright young clerks or interns could have told him that (1) handing over user names and a list of videos they’ve watched to a highly litigious copyright holder is extremely likely to result in lawsuits against those users that have watched copyrighted content on YouTube, and (2) YouTube’s source code is about as valuable as the hard drive it would be delivered on, since the core Flash technology is owned by Adobe and there are countless YouTube clones out there, most of which offer higher quality video.

YouTube&
rsquo;s core value is in it’s network effect - the library of content along with its massive user base.

The privacy fallout of this ruling is spectacular. The EFF has already chimed in, noting that the order is highly likely to be in violation of federal law."

 

The idea of "justice" is that people who understand the issues being brought before them, make an impartial judgement - but what if those making the judgement calls are incapible of understanding the issue in the first place - is that what we've ended up having - a goverment run by incompent and out of touch polictial and legal appointees?  Is appears so.

We've seen what that does in the Executive Branch - I don't have to elucidate - the evidence is all around us - in our world, which appears to be "falling apart".  According to TechCrunch:

 "…Viacom’s core stated concern, which is to understand the popularity of copyright infringing v. non-infringing material. Viacom has asked for far more data than that, and there’s only one use for that data: to sue individual users (or shake them down via the threat of lawsuit, which has been perfected by the RIAA) who have watched a few music videos or television shows on YouTube."

I say this with the utmost respect, but Judge Stanton is a moron. And Google simply cannot hand this data over without facing a class action lawsuit of staggering proportions."

Engagement, as I've defined it, using Radian6, also picked out the top news sources from the River of News, as it's termed in Radian6.

From a Search Persecptive, I could see writing a post that picks up on the Keywords that are being "talked about" the most around the topic of a profile, in this case being the "Viacom - YouTube" issue that I'm focusing on, today.   

For that, the New Topic Cloud Widget is most helpful, and I'll adapt the keywords and title of this post to be in allignment with that teh Topic Clould finds are the main keywords:

The phrases I'd use here are "Youtube Infringment", "Viacom copyrighted video information ruling" with "Viacom", "Video", "videos", "information" "watched clips", "youtube infringement, etc - but this is not so much for a keyword volume standpoint, as "contextual" targeting - because this is what people are "talking about" in Social Media - and therefore - we're focusing on who the influentials are who are talking about relevent issues surrounding at topic.

Also, when we're looking at a target topic, like Viacom - Youtube, once we've isolated the keywords that stand out, via conversations, we can look at the frequency they appear over a specific time period (like the last two days) and this may be useful to figure out how to respond to the developing story (depending on who you are, in this case) by using the New Comparitive Topic Monitor: