One of the challenges for video search engines is requiring that the videos include descriptive metadata to organize the content. When submitting a video to Google, the company describes how to include metatags, but doesn't offer recommended tags.

Hopefully the "professional" content providers as well as indie vloggers will agree upon and use a single set of metatags that will simplify search. If online video is to continue its momentum, we need to agree on a single format for genre, subject matter, people, length, and date information.

The video search engines are getting competition from startup multimedia indexes such as FireAnt that organize content from vloggers and podcasters. FireAnt offers a video directory (better than Google, but far from perfect) and has posted a list of recommended tags. Lets hope that big and small media will play well together.

A while back our man Evan wrote about his frustration with Expedia for not fulfilling reservations that he paid for in good faith. Because the post references Expedia several times, Yahoo's ad server decided to place Expedia ads alongside his derogatory musing.

This confluence of events gave readers who were similarly unhappy with Expedia the chance to click on their pay-per-click ads, thereby costing Expedia money (not that we would ever condone doing so). Yahoo eventually stopped placing the Expedia ads on the page, which still gets a fair amount of traffic.

We imagine that this isn't the first time this has happened ads adjacent to text that slams the advertiser, so there's probably an opportunity for assessing the context within ads appear. Also, an ad server tool that quickly alerts the advertiser to dramatic increases in the click throughs from a specific domain would help to eliminate the click fraud that can put a hurting on a company. Since Google gets the overwhelming majority of its revenue from PPC ads, one might think that they would be paying more attention to this problem.

Recent efforts by local and federal law enforcement agencies to tap into online actions suggest that Big Brother ain't just a TV show. As we've all heard, the Justice Department is badgering AOL, MSN, Yahoo, and Google for data about the search terms being entered by millions of people. Even though the data being provided (Google alone has defied the request) doesn't say who is searching, the DOJ says the data is necessary to fight online child pornography. (You can see Jimmy Kimmell's take on it here).

It's hard for me to connect the dots between the search terms of the global population and how that will help defend the predatory actions of the few miscreants in cyberspace. I would think that searching the hard drives of those who have already been convicted would be a surer method than filtering through the 99 percent of unrelated data, unless the government has other motives.

I agree with analyst firm ABI Research that the government is overreaching in asking the search engines to turn over the data.

Google, the world's leading search engine, has been unfairly subpoenaed by the Department of Justice, as part of a lawsuit to which it is not a party... Federal prosecutors are clearly overreaching in subpoenaing Google for this information.

The defendant in the COPA case -- the government -- would like to use the million website addresses to simulate the World Wide Web to test the effectiveness of some of the filtering programs it is developing....

Technological innovators could invent solutions that do not undermine the First and Fifth Amendments...

There are several stories (including here) and here about how police in different communities are searching social networking sites such as Facebook to find youths who take drugs and drink alcohol.

A George Washington University student decided to turn the tide on police, posting information about a campus party where police were surprised to find students only getting a sugar rush from cake. Telling a chatty Cathy about illegal activity is ill-advised, posting your picture doing it is just plain stupid.

Teen-oriented sites and those who use them can not expect any more or less privacy than the rest of the web. However, the companies that host these sites as well as marketers should respect the differences between the age groups and operate under guidelines similar to those governing television advertising geared towards those under 18 since use of these sites is largely an unsupervised activity.

Just a quick update for those advertisers who are eagerly awaiting the launch of MSN's Adcenter program, that Microsoft will be announcing that in June of this year, they will no longer be showing Yahoo/Overture Ads and will be showing MSN only ads.

I believe this period will still have AdCenter in beta, so I will keep you posted as to when I hear of a public go live date for the platform and if I hear of any killer tools to help you get started with AdCenter :)!