Google has reached a settlement with the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers in a lawsuit that dates back to 2005, according to paidContent.org.

Google will pay $125 million into a fund for authors. The Money "will be used to set up a Book Rights Registry that will let U.S. copyright holders register their works so that they can get a cut of any resulting online retail and ad sales." Google scans books and makes them available through its book search, http://books.google.com/.

Many observers expect that Google and the book industry will now start to work cooperatively to place copyrighted works online and charge for them.

"We're trying to create a new structure where there will be more access to out-of-print books, with benefits both to readers and researchers and to the rights holders of those books - authors and publishers," Richard Sarnoff, chairman of the publishers association, said Tuesday in an interview with the Associated Press.

According to the Associated Press, Google will now to contribute $125 million to the fund, including about $34.5 million for "a nonprofit Book Rights Registry that will store copyright information and coordinate payments." Google will also pay $60 per completed work for the millions of copyrighted books already scanned. It will also pay legal fees for the Authors Guild and publishing association. Finally, income from the scanned books will be divided up, with 63 percent going to the copyright holders and 37 percent going to Google.


Photo courtesy of iStockphoto, Roel Smart

By adding the options for its advertisers to target users within cities and zip codes, Yahoo has provided more detailed advertising options to users of its Panama Platform

An excerpt from clickz

Yahoo's new Zip code targeting comes with an interactive mapping interface marketers can use to choose cities and Zip codes. The city menu includes about 3,500 municipalities in the U.S and Canada.

Both Google and Yahoo use IP targeting to identify audiences by region, and both offer disclaimers that mention the approach's imperfect accuracy. Yahoo's campaign targeting notes, "Geo-targeting accuracy is not guaranteed and may vary depending on the level of targeting selected, as well as other factors."

Google is making the Profiles of the users of its various services searchable and also a standard across many of its services. So far there were different profiles being created for Orkut, Maps etc. With a centralized profile, Google may be gearing up to provide a set of services based around easing the usage of their various services.

An excerpt from Google Operating System

The new Google profiles are already available in Shared Stuff, Google Maps, Google Reader and will be added to other web applications. For example, in Google Maps you'll find the link to your profile at the top of the page.

Profiles are public and contain basic information about yourself: a nickname (the real name is displayed only to your contacts), your occupation, your location, a list of links, a photo and a short description. They are embedded as iframes in pages that showcase user-generated content (personalized maps, shared bookmarks).

Yahoo had announced earlier that part of its new strategy was to provide a social network encompassing all its services. It seems that in many ways Google is also looking to do a similar thing with its services.

The Semantic Web is a grand initiative to make the whole of the Internet machine readable. At the Web 3.0 conference & Expo the discussions were more in tune with how Semantic web would be profitable

Advertising is the main source of income for services on the web and one aim of Semantic Web enthusiasts would be to make advertising more relevant and context based. Its no surprise that most users of the web find advertisements annoying and would love to have their services ad-free. The aim of the Semantic Web could be to bridge that gap between acceptance to annoyance.

Making content more understandable to machines makes it better to crunch more information that could ultimately help in pushing more relevant ads.

An Excerpt from InternetNews

Google is best known as the world's biggest search engine, but it wouldn't have achieved anywhere near it's level of success without its keyword advertising system that delivers relevant, contextual text ads next to search results, while providing a steady revenue stream. Amiad Solomon, CEO of Peer39, a developer of Semantic advertising services, said advertising will also be key to driving Web 3.0's growth.

The concept of Wikipedia when applied to Search does make sense, but add in the fact that you have a whole business domain around search rankings and the results are difficult to guess. In its attempt to make the choice of community shape a search engine, Wikia announced the Wikia Intelligent Search Extensions.

An excerpt from BusinessWeek

How would WISEApps work? The Washington Post WISEApp, for instance, lets people who type in "Barack Obama" or "John McCain" get Post news stories directly on the Wikia Search results page. Or if you search "JFK to LAX," the travel search service Kayak.com will provide a small search box near the top of the results that show a list of fares between New York City and Los Angeles. Other Web publisher partners include AccuWeather.com, the user-driven news aggregation site Digg, and news service Thomson Reuters, among others.

The concept is based on the fact that ultimately its the choice of users that would weigh in the rankings of results and spammers would not have a long term impact. The model has been successful across Wikipedia. But in search, there is little tolerance towards inapt results.

Following APIs to embed media in a website, Google has released API that makes it possible to embed Books into webpages. The books are available via Google Book Search.

An excerpt from Google Operating System

"As on the Book Search site itself, you can search within the book, zoom in and out on the page, and browse up to 20% of the book," explains Inside Google Book Search. The new widget is already used by online catalogs like WorldCat.org and social book sites like weRead to preview books.