MySpace recently now announced an exciting project: its own digital music portal competing with current market leaders iTunes and Amazon.com’s MP3 store. They are currently negotiating with major record companies such as Warner Music, Sony, and Universal. According to reports, the pricing is “going to be very competitive.” Also, many of the music downloads will come without any digital rights management technology, so that the users will be free to copy and use the music on any device.

This venture is almost certain to succeed since MySpace is the most popular social networking site among the huge and important demographic of North American teens, and has over 110 million registered users, 30 million of which regularly use the site’s built-in music features.

So how was the George W. Bush “miserable failure” bomb finally removed from Google search results?

There are two reasons: first, in 2007, Google changed their algorithm so that it could no longer be abused by pranksters, and ensured that the “miserable failure” search term would not point to the Google bomb, but rather to discussions, news articles, and commentary about the Google bomb project. The first result is now an article about the “miserable failure” Google bomb itself. Google’s official statement on this change was:

Over time, we’ve seen more people assume that they are Google’s opinion, or that Google has hand-coded the results for these Googlebombed queries. That’s not true, and it seemed like it was worth trying to correct that misperception. So a few of us who work here got together and came up with an algorithm that minimizes the impact of many Googlebombs.

Also, the White House web team got smart and redirected the link that used to point to George W. Bush’s biography; it now points to the page of the current president, which means that after Bush’s successor is elected, those old links would now point to that person’s page. On second thought, I’m not sure that was a completely smart thing to do.

From 2004 to 2006, if you typed in “miserable failure” on google.com, the first result you get would be George W. Bush’s official page on the White House website. This is the most popular example of a Google bomb, which manipulates search results based on the fact that Google’s page ranking algorithm places a high premium on incoming links.

According to Google, they didn’t manually edit search results for Google bombs such as these because:

We’re reluctant to alter our results by hand in order to prevent such items from showing up. Pranks like this may be distracting to some, but they don’t affect the overall quality of our search service, whose objectivity, as always, remains the core of our mission.

Quality content is very important, especially content that people will link to and discuss on their blogs. The number of incoming links to your site is a big factor in bumping up your site to the top of the results page. Many people write controversial topics, or opinions on news articles, for the purpose of getting incoming links and making their site more visible not just for readers but also for the search bots.

The main content should also contain your keywords not just one time but several times, preferably formatted in special ways such as bold or italics. However, using the keywords too much will backfire because your site may be blacklisted as spam.

A business gets astounding results from reaching the top of the results pages of various search engines. Bloggers also get more advertisers and therefore more revenue through increasing their page rank. The art of configuring your site and content to achieve this goal is called Search Engine Optimization.

First of all, the content should be both understandable to human readers and to search bots (programs used by search engines to crawl the world wide web and index sites). To achieve this, each page on your site should have meta tags with keywords and descriptions, especially the title tag which should contain your most important keyword. Each page should preferably be optimized for one or two keywords or phrases only.

To be continued…

Medical staff in the Philippines who allegedly videoed a man having an operation to remove a perfume canister from his anus and then posted it on the Internet risk getting fired and having their licenses revoked, a Department of Health official said on Wednesday.

“We have to investigate first to determine the facts. If true, the staff concerned should of course be made answerable to (the) full extent for violating the patient’s right to privacy and confidentiality,” said Health Undersecretary Alexander Padilla.

The video, which was posted on YouTube but then removed, showed medical personnel from a hospital in the central Philippines holding their cell phones and pointing them at the patient’s anus to take pictures while a doctor removed the canister and the other staff in the room laughed and cheered.

75-year-old Sigbritt Lothberg in Karlstad, Sweden, has the world’s fastest internet connection. Her 40 gigabits-per-second fiber-optic connection is believed to be the fastest residential uplink in the world, Karlstad city officials said. Experts say that in less than 2 seconds, she can download an entire movie to her home computer. Unfortunately she only uses this connection to read newspapers online.

The connection was set up by Hafsteinn Jonsson, head of the Karlstad city network unit, and Lothberg’s son, Peter, a networking expert based in California. The speed is reached using a new modulation technique that allows the sending of data between two routers placed up to 1,240 miles apart, without any transponders in between.

Recently Mozilla released an early prototype the mobile version of the popular Firefox browser, codenamed Fennec. Firefox fans have been eagerly downloading and testing it. However Opera announced that its Opera Mini Browser has been released for the Google Android platform. Opera Mini has 40 million users worldwide and is also used in the Nintendo Wii console and in numerous other portable devices.

According to Opera CEO Jon von Tetzchner, “Opera Mini will be able to empower users of Android-based handsets with access to all of their favourite Web sites with popular features for smooth effects and scalable, tailored viewing.”

To make things more interesting, Microsoft is set to release an update for their own mobile browser. Stay tuned to see who will win this war.