Hopefully you haven’t been doing anything on YouTube that you don’t want a federal court to find out…

In it’s ongoing legal battle Viacom over copyright, a judge has ordered that Google must do the unthinkable…

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.

This according to an article in Wired Magazine.

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

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 Court’s erroneous ruling is a set-back to privacy rights, and will allow Viacom to see what you are watching on YouTube.

So let’s just breathe and see what happens…

There is a great article in the new Fast Company Magazine all about the do it yourself social network “”Ning”.

The article begins by letting us in on a little secret:

Here’s something you probably don’t know about the Internet: Simply by designing your product the right way, you can build a billion-dollar business from scratch. No advertising or marketing budget, no need for a sales force, and venture capitalists will kill for the chance to throw money at you.

The secret is what’s called a “viral expansion loop,” a concept little known outside of Silicon Valley (go ahead, Google it — you won’t find much). It’s a type of engineering alchemy that, done right, almost guarantees a self-replicating, borglike growth: One user becomes two, then four, eight, to a million and beyond. It’s not unlike taking a penny and doubling it daily for 30 days. By the end of a week, you’d have 64 cents; within two weeks, $81.92; by day 30, about $5.4 million.

Yeah we all remember that little game, “I’ll give you $1 Million today or one single penny and double everyday for a month, which would you rather have?

Me? I’ll take the “Viral expansion loop” - but I want to call it the “Viral Spiral”.

This article goes on to explain how the viral loops (spirals) work as an accelerant for internet businesses - take Google, PayPal, YouTube, eBay, Facebook, MySpace, Digg, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Flickr as good examples.

So where does Ning fit in?

Well they use this concept on steroids! What they’ve got going is a “double viral loop”.

Only Ning, Andreessen declares, benefits from a “double viral loop,” which spreads two ways, because every network creator is a user and any user can become a network creator. Say someone sets up an Angelina Jolie net with 10 members, which grows as each person draws in others. Then an adoption site breaks off, a Jon Voight hate group rises up, and a Brad Pitt love club forms. Meanwhile, a Lara Croft nostalgia net launches, spawning a legion of soft-core cyberporn spin-offs. Soon you have 2, 3, 10 networks — all expanding simultaneously. Meanwhile, the original group is attracting even more users. Ning swells like a river fed from an ever-growing number of tributaries.

You can read the rest of the article here

I have had a running argument on one of the popular search engine optimization and blogging forums about whether or not Google favors posts in its Blogger blog platform in search engine results. Now, that’s neither here nor there, what I’m going to talk about today is just how damn cool Google really is.

Did you know that Blogger has its own channel on YouTube? I LOVE IT! The folks at Google, who own both Blogger and YouTube, have saved me the trouble of building my own Blogger tutorials. Talk about Good luck!

If you haven’t heard this from me before, Google is so loaded with great, free resources: From Gmail, to Webmaster tools, to Google analytics, to add words, and now these great blogger tutorials.

Blogger is such a great tool. Here’s how you work it. Create a blogger blog, making sure that you name the blog using the keywords you are targeting. Add a handful of relevant ARTICLES ( blog posts). Make sure that you use your keywords in the body of all the posts on this blog. Using the keyword method of linking, link that keywords or key phrases to the relevant page on your site. Not only are you getting “backlinks” you are getting back links from a site with relevant content using relevant keywords leading to a page with more relevant content.

What a great strategy to use.

As a little primer, here is a tutorial explaining how to set up your first Blogger blog.

What are you waiting for, get your blogger blog today. Here’s the link to the blogger tutorials.

In March 2007, Google announce that they were “going greener”.  In his Ars Technica blog post, Nate Anderson wrote on March 29, 2007:

Google’s commitment to “green” means that the company sources carpet and sofas made without PVC, paints without volatile organic compounds, and cafeteria food from local growers. It’s not surprising, then, that they would roll out the largest commercial solar deployment in the US—a 1.6MW installation that covers most of the buildings at Google’s campus and extends even to shaded parking spaces. At the ETech conference in San Diego this week, Google’s Anthony Ravitz explained how Google did it, and why.

The move to solar made sense for Google, and not just “hippie Gaia-loving” sense. Ravitz said that Google will earn its investment back in 7.5 years, after which it will continue to enjoy inexpensive power for decades. With the company sprawled across a large campus of many low buildings, roof space was easily available. Solar also has the unique property of pumping out more energy when power is the most expensive—peak afternoon hours. When air conditioners across California kick into action on sunny days, Google generates the most power.

On November 28th, 2007, news comes out that Google is going into the green energy business.  Google has been pouring investment money into this sector. Besides investing in solar, wind and geothermal companies, Google will create its own research and development group “to look very aggressively at what we think are some promising technological pathways,” said Bill Weihl, Google’s green energy czar.

Google said that it’ll spend “tens of millions” to research clean-energy alternatives to coal-fired power plants and “hundreds of millions” to cut the costs of this power.

The goal is to produce 1 gigawatt of power from clean power sources - enough to light up a city the size of San Francisco - at a cost that’s the same as if the energy came from low-cost, high-polluting coal.

How soon? “Within years, not decades,” Google co-founder Larry Page wrote in a Web post.

Not much to do with marketing on the web, but good for the earth, don’t you think?

Google may have just come out of nowhere and checkmated Facebook in the social networking power struggle. Oh really. . .

MySpace and Six Apart will announce that they are joining Google’s OpenSocial initiative. Silicon Alley Insider reported the MySpace rumor earlier today. We’ve confirmed that from an independent source, as well as the fact that Six Apart is joining. Per the update below, Google has also confirmed Bebo is joining.

This according to Tech Crunch

Facebook is publicly saying they have not officially talked to Google about OpenSocial. Although sources say that that Facebook and Google have been talking about OpenSocial…including today. So pleading ignorance won’t last as a strategy for dealing with the OpenSocial movement.

You gotta love it. . . intrigue running rampant. Personally, I think it’s so cool that Google is developing this platform! Remember my previous post and my theory about Google’s bid attempt (?) for that coveted piece of Facebook. . .

I’m gonna have to learn how to build apps!

Part of me loves a renegade until they hack into my servers and create an email bomb. . . bastards.

Just ran across this great blog: Tech Crunch and a great article written by Michael Arrington

Today there is a story about a developer who goes by the alias “theharmonyguy” and describes himself as “just an amateur” who evidently hacked into the RockYou OpenSocial application on Plaxo called emote.

At this stage I think it is pretty good to discover vulnerability in these apps. Better now than later!

I really like the idea of OpenSocial. I think the cross platform ability of these apps to perform is a pretty nifty idea. This gets me thinking. . . Google didn’t conceive of this idea after losing a bid against Microsoft to acquire a bit of Facebook, methinks. . . Maybe they just forced up the price increasing the (pre) value of Maka Maka. . .

Ah. . . I deviate. . . Oh yes, OpenSocial hackers. . .

Read the story from Tech Crunch here