Google is planning to rename two of its popular services soon: Blogger will become Google Blogs and Picasa will become Google Photos. That's according to Mashable, which says the changes are due in the next six weeks. Google's YouTube property will not be included in the company's rebranding efforts, but other products beyond Picasa and Blogger could be. We reached out to Google for more information, but the company told Search Engine Land it would not be commenting on the report. The last time Google rebranded one of its existing and established properties (i.e., not a new or recent [...]

Related Topics: Google: Blog Search | Google: Blogger | Google: Picasa

Anyone who has found that their content has been stolen (or scraped) online faces the decision of either letting it go (and using best practices that help Google rank things correctly) or dealing with the cumbersome task of filling out a DMCA  infringement notice. Those who are falsely accused of copyright violations have to deal with the equally cumbersome counter-notice process. Today, Google announced on their public policy blog that they'll be launching improved tools for both to make these processes easier and to better protect copyright online (beginning with Blogger and Web Search). T [...]

Related Topics: Google: AdSense | Google: Blogger | Google: Web Search | Legal: Copyright

Color me tired. I got a report of a site that reprinted one of our articles without permission. Checking it out, I discovered that miserable combination of someone making money off content they don't own, paying nothing to host that stolen content on Google's Blogger service and earning off that content through Google's AdSense ads. And reporting the infringement is oh so easy. Not. So here's the fun loving site: The most current article shown comes from Search Engine Land. It's reprinted in its entirety, without permission. There's even a credit line shoved in at the end: New [...]

Related Topics: Features: General | Google: AdSense | Google: Blogger

Blogspot.com cited as the No. 1 host for malware from News.com reports Google's Blogger accounts "for nearly 2 percent of all malware hosts." Sophos, an antivirus vendor, published a report showing the state of malware injections and attacks throughout the web. Specifically, hackers can set up "malicious blogs" on the Blogger service, plus they can inject dangerous web links and content into Blogger blogs. The Google web search team takes malware attacks seriously. They have reviews in webmaster tools and they label malicious web sites in web search results. So isn't it ironic that Googl [...]

Related Topics: Google: Blogger | Google: Security | Legal: Security

My day started reading about how Google was reportedly censoring anti-Barack Obama blogs by shutting them down on Google-owned Blogger. I quickly did some debunking in a comment on our Sphinn site -- but still, Google probably needs to do more to ensure its Blogger spam reporting tools aren't being abused -- especially given how it says these "can't be manipulated by angry mobs." Right now, it looks like they can. NewsBusters has the best write-up of the charges I've seen, covering how a number of anti-Obama blogs received emails recently from Google saying they were unable to pub [...]

Related Topics: Google: Blogger | Google: Web Search