Not long ago in a supermarket not so far away…

I think Destination Net is in danger of turning into a Star Wars blog!

                              

I thought I had seen it all….

… I was wrong!!!

                              

Google will have to turn over every record of every video watched by YouTube users, including users’ names and IP addresses, to Viacom, which is suing Google for allowing clips of its copyright videos to appear on YouTube, a judge ruled Wednesday.

Viacom wants the data to prove that infringing material is more popular than user-created videos, which could be used to increase Google’s liability if it is found guilty of contributory infringement.

Viacom filed suit against Google in March 2007, seeking more than $1 billion in damages for allowing users to upload clips of Viacom’s copyright material. Google argues that the law provides a safe harbor for online services so long as they comply with copyright takedown requests.

Although Google argued that turning over the data would invade its users’ privacy, the judge’s ruling (.pdf) described that argument as “speculative” and ordered Google to turn over the logs on a set of four tera-byte hard drives.

The judge also turned Google’s own defense of its data retention policies — that IP addresses of computers aren’t personally revealing in and of themselves, against it to justify the log dump.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has already reacted, calling the order a violation of the Video Privacy Protection act that “threatens to expose deeply private information.”

The order also requires Google to turn over copies of all videos that it has taken down for any reason.

Viacom also requested YouTube’s source code, the code for identifying repeat copyright infringement uploads, copies of all videos marked private, and Google’s advertising database schema.

Those requests were denied in whole, except that Google will have to turn over data about how often each private video has been watched and by how many persons.

                              

A warning for Digital Point forum members. Don’t change your e-mail address…

… unless you want to lose your account that is.

A technical issue means that if you change your e-mail address your account gets put into a moderation queue that the moderators can’t see.

There are warnings posted in Digital Point about this problem but I’d never seen them and I’ve been a member for nearly a year. In my opinion it’s a serious problem that should be dealt with as soon as possible.

Only administrators on Digital Point are able to correct this problem and restore your account. I only counted 3 administrators for the whole forum, none of which had been online recently. One did not accept PMs and another’s profile said he would not reply to user PMs.

One of those admins is forum owner Shawn Hogan but he’s as illusive as the spiney puffer fish of the upper congo.

So the result of a simple e-mail change in the user control panel has now essentially doomed my DP account to an early demise. Nearly 1000 posts, reputation and iTrader built up over the past year wiped out for simply changing my e-mail address. It sucks… really really sucks.

                              

If you haven’t heard of FriendFeed you must be living in a small space tent on the dark side of the moon. FriendFeed is flavor of the month in the Internet startup world. It launched on February 25th, announcing $5 in funding at the same time.

So what exactly is FriendFeed? It is essentially a place to follow what people are doing on the Internet.FriendFeed aggregates information from many other sites like YouTube, Flickr and more.

The user interface is clean and simple to use. This isn’t surprising given that the company was created by ex-Googlers. Many seasoned web users are saying that FriendFeed is the most amazing thing they’ve seen in years.

Make your own mind up by visiting FriendFeed and trying out the service today.

                              

Ever wanted a simple and fast way to check your IP address?

Whats My IP provides a simple way to get your Internet IP address along with some other useful information like your longitude and latitude, ISP, City & more!

The site will be adding new features in the coming weeks, so it’s well worth bookmarking!

                              

You can get ten free ebooks from BuyNowDeal.com right now. All you have to do is join their mailing list and you get all ten ebooks totally free.

Sounds like a good deal to me!

                              

Impossible Is Nothing, originally uploaded by destinetics.

A little inspiration in case you’re stuggling to get motivated out there…

“The defining factor is not resouces it is resourcefulness.” - Tony Robbins

“The only thing worse than doing the wrong thing is being so afraid of doing the wrong thing that you do nothing.” - Anonymous

“Whatever you believe or dream you can begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.” - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“A determined person doesn’t find it hard to succeed. They find it hard to stop trying.” - Allen Steble

and finally…

“if you do nothing else, do something” - Me! LOL

                              

Google Airlines, originally uploaded by destinetics.

I wonder if Matt Cutts can actually land that plane?

                              

You may have heard the saying that “content is king”. Nothing could be truer in the SEO world right now. Every website lives or dies depending on the quality of its content. Effective copywriting is essential to any successful site and it is going to stay that way for the foreseeable future.

SEO copywriting is the art of not only writing compelling content for the reader, but also writing content which the search engines will love too. Gone are the days where you can simply stuff a page full of keywords and ride high in the search engines.

It’s now all about providing high quality content for the user but at the same time giving the web copy a light dusting of the right keywords. SEO copyrighting is all about weaving a thread through the page content that the search engines can pick up on, but that doesn’t leave your user confused.

If you’ve ever visited a really spammy webpage you start to realize that perhaps you were not the target of the writing. How many times have you read an article that goes something like this…

“Blue widgets are available everywhere, but when buying blue widgets you should look for the best blue widgets and the cheapest blue widgets available. I recommend buying blue widgets from Blue Widgets Inc. as their blue widgets are really good.”

Can you guess what the targeted keyword was?

Perhaps the example was a little extreme, but I do see a lot of people still stuffing a particular keyword or just a few keywords into their copy. It doesn’t look natural to the reader and it certainly doesn’t look very natural to the Search Engines.

English is such a complex language. Every word can have different meanings and many related words or synonyms.

Why then is it that people still think they can repeat the same word over and over in a webpage and get a high ranking?

For anyone who feels they are in the dark about writing effective SEO copy, you can download this free 16 page guide. It’s not meant to be an extensive guide but it is an excellent start and hey, did I mention that it’s totally free!

Download Free SEO Article Copywriting Guide