Mike Blumenthal

We don’t frequently get to peak at what Google plans are for local and local content. There have been a number of signals that all point to the obvious direction of Google wanting to increase the granularity of local information world wide and thir desire to control that information themselves. Google has been: •Including more …

Portland web designer and search consultant, David Mihm,  is heading to SES NY next week to speak. He was exploring Google Maps and he sent me this search: Morgan Library at 225 Madison Ave, NYC that he had looked up in anticipation of his trip. David noted to me that he “was looking forward to seeing the new …

Last week I made fun of blackhats that had mapjacked a listing for a hotel with the worst of reviews in an effort to rank high on locksmith related searches.  The screenshot from that incident shows that the blackhats had 7 of the 10 pack listing using a combination of illicit techniques on the phrase …

Google has been distributing ads more widely on all of its properties of late. I noted a certain discomfort with their intrusive nature deep inside the bowels of the business listing details when it was roled out in mid February in Maps. At the Maps help forum a business owner asked (caps are his and …

Gate Keepers, Digital Gazetteers and Folksonomies – Part Four and Gate Keepers, Digital Gazetteers and Folksonomies – Part Five – Mike Dobson, Exploring Local Mike Dobson has been running a great series on Google use of user generated content to create maps via their MapMaker product. In Part Four, he discusses the strategic role of …

A number of weeks ago Google announced that they had closed one LBC security hole that allowed mapjackings, last week they indicated that they had closed yet another. Yesterday I highlighted a prominent mapjacking of The Plaza Hotel that Google almost immediately remedied. Kudos to Google for all these moves. But are they enough? Today …

Twitter and UK newspaper websites – Robin Goad,  Hitwise UK. Last week (w/e 14/03/09) Twitter.com was the 54th most visited website in the UK, up from 66th the week before. One consequence of Twitter rapid rise up the rankings is that the micro-blogging service has now overtaken most of the UK newspapers online. As the chart below illustrates, last week Twitter …

Update I am happy to note that The Plaza has been returned to its rightful glory as of this evening (3/16/09). Unfortunately the spammers domain 24x7locallocksmith.com still has 229 entries in the index across the US. The Plaza Hotel in NYC has been an important, even iconic, location for events real and imagined in American …

In the past I have written extensively about how Google was indexing KML & RSS files and integrating that information into Maps and why that made having your own kml information and geo sitemap important. At the LatLong Blog, Google has announced that this user generated map content will now be more fully integrated with …

Yesterday in my post making fun of Locksmith Hijackers picking inappropriate targets to hijack, I made a geeky Maps log joke that was so ludricous on all levels that I could not conceive of even one person taking it at face value…I was wrong both as to the potential humor and to the fact that …