Mike Blumenthal

Update 6:00 pm 10/15/08 Maps Guide Jen has commented below: Looks like the team was able to get a fix through faster than expected. Most people who were experiencing this error should find that it’s resolved. There may be some people who are still seeing a server error. Those people should file a reinclusion request …

Searchengineland has published my newest installment in the ongoing series on hijackings at Google Maps: Problems Continue With Google Local Business Listings. The same hijackers that hit the florist industry hijacked the local listings of major brands like Mariott, Hertz, Avis and Thrifty changing location, url and business name. The change of business name was such …

Steve Espinosa has some interesting preliminary research on the relative click thru rates of a #1 listing in the Local 10-Pack and a simultaneous #1 listing in organic. The organic listing showed 1.6x the click thru of the the Local 10 Pack listing. As it is preliminary research and only looked at click thru not …

This posting from yesterday’s Google Maps Business Owners Group was of interest to me. The Local Business Center has been broken for several weeks, preventing many business owners from updating listings. There have been numerous reports in the Groups of this problem. As noted in the comment, when a business attempts to update an LBC …

In Friday’s InformationWeek there is an article detailing “bug that could let hackers use Google Maps to infiltrate Google, Google Mail, or Google Apps accounts“. According to the article, a frame injection attack could be used to phish login credentials from Google users via Maps: The Butler Group Adrian ‘pagvac’ Pastor, a security researcher with …

I received the following phishing email: From: reactivation@google.com Subject: Please Update Your Billing Information. Date: October 11, 2008 12:44:39 PM EDT To: mike@blumenthals.com Hello, Our attempt to charge your credit card for your outstanding Google AdWords account balance was declined. Your account is still open. However, your ads have been suspended. Once we are able …

Piper Jaffray: 8% of teens own an iPhone, 22% will – 16th Semi-Annual Piper Jaffray ‘Taking Stock With Teens’ Study In addition, 8 percent of students indicate they own an Apple iPhone (up from 3 percent in fall 2007), while 22 percent of students expect to buy an iPhone in the next 6 months (up from …