GoDaddy is sometimes hard to take seriously; its marketing department seems to be run by the same bunch of teenage boys in charge of Axe commercials. But GoDaddy is still the world's largest domain registrar, and it's poised to help Twitter with a new step in its registration process.

GoDaddy seems to have made the assumption that anyone wanting to create a website will also want to establish a presence on Twitter. Adam Ostrow reports that it's actually "integrated Twitter registration into its domain manager, allowing you to see if the Twitter username that matches your URL is available, and if so, register it."

This says a great deal about how important Twitter has become to the people at GoDaddy (and indeed, you can find GoDaddyDeals, GoDaddyJobs, and GoDaddyGuy Twitter accounts, with that last one being rather popular and putting out about ten tweets per day).

It says something about what GoDaddy thinks its customers want, too.

And since every single GoDaddy customer probably hasn't been switching back and forth between the domain registrar and Twitter while trying to name a company, this development may introduce Twitter to a lot of new people.

Today a group of key trade groups released comprehensive privacy principles for use and collection of behavioral data in online advertising. These are self-regulatory principles to protect consumer privacy in ad-supported interactive media that will require advertisers and Web sites to clearly inform consumers about data collection practices and enable them to exercise control over that information.

Groups involved are the American Association of Advertising Agencies (AAAA), the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), the Direct Marketing Association (DMA), the Council of Better Business Bureaus (BBB), and of course the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB).

"Consumers deserve transparency regarding the collection and use of their data for behavioral advertising purposes. I am gratified that a group of influential associations – representing a significant component of the Internet community – has responded to so many of the privacy concerns raised by my colleagues and myself,” says Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Commissioner Pamela Jones Harbour.

What Google Has to Say

Google recently testified in Washington regarding privacy and advertising. Highlighted in the testimony were three main topics:

- Google's main advertising products and the benefits Google believes online advertising brings to advertisers, online publishers, and individual Internet users

- Google's approach to privacy, specific steps that the company takes to protect users' privacy, and the release of interest-based advertising

- Ideas and recommendations for how to better protect Internet users' privacy with respect to advertising, as well as more generally

You can read the entire testimony here (pdf).

In a post on Google Public Policy Blog today, Google Managing Policy Counsel Pablo Chavez talked about the principles and Google's own behavioral-based or "interest-based" advertising.

"When we launched our own interest-based advertising product in March, we worked hard to include several innovative features to give users more control and information -- including ads labeled 'Ads by Google,' a tool called the Ads Preferences Manager (which lets users view, add, and remove the categories that are used to show them interest-based ads), and the choice to opt out of interest-based ads altogether," says Chavez.

"One of the key strengths of the principles is the fact that they apply to a broad range of companies participating in online advertising -- advertisers, publishers, and ad networks," adds Chavez. "Of course, for any self-regulatory effort to be effective, there has to be some kind of enforcement process. Between now and early 2010 -- when the principles are expected to be implemented -- the Better Business Bureau and Direct Marketing Association, two of the groups involved, will work to set up that process to make sure it has real teeth."

The Principles

So what are these principles? There are seven of them:

1. The Education Principle
2. The Transparency Principle
3a. The Consumer Control Principle
3b.The Consumer Control Principle (applies to service providers)
4. The Data Security Principle
5. The Material Changes Principle
6. The Sensitive Data Principle
7. The Accountability Principle

I won't get into all of the specific details of each one here, but you can read the entire document here if you are interested. Either way, it is good to see that these organizations are taking consumer privacy this seriously.

Google and Bing have both talked about site architecture issues lately on their blogs. Site architecture is an important part of search engine optimization, and crucial to ranking.

"You can have great content and a plethora of high quality inbound links from authority sites, but if your site’s structure is flawed or broken, then it will still not achieve the optimal page rank you desire from search engines," says Rick DeJarnette of Bing Webmaster Center.

If you have time, and site architecture is not your strong suit, I would suggest reading both Microsoft's post and Google's, but to sum them up, here a few tips from each of them.

Bing's Tips

1. Use descriptive file and directory names

2. Limit directory depth

3. Limit physical page file size

4. Externalize on-page Javascript and CSS code

5. Use 301 redirects for moved pages

6. Avoid JavaScript or meta refresh redirects

7. Implement custom 404 pages

Google's Tips

Google starts out by talking about some site architecture myths, and also shares a couple slideshows (they talked about the topic at SMX London).

Finally, they offer these tips:

1. Check that your robots.txt file has the correct status code and isn't returning an error

2. Keep in mind some best practices when moving to a new site and the new "Change of address" feature recently added to Webmaster Tools.

3. Review the settings of the robots.txt file to make sure no pages -- particularly those rewritten and/or dynamic -- are blocked inappropriately.

4. Make good use of the rel="canonical" attribute to reduce the indexing of duplicate content on your domain.

As I said, Google and Microsoft both have plenty more to say on the topic in their respective posts. The Bing post is actually the third installment in a series.

Nearly 55 million Americans visited an entertainment news site in May 2009, representing a 7 percent increase over the previous year, according to a new report from comScore.

Online video has also played an increasingly important role for content in the category, with the number of videos viewed growing 53 percent in the past year.

"With more than one out of every four U.S Internet users visiting an entertainment news site each month, it's clear that following entertainment and celebrity culture has become a popular online pastime," said Jack Flanagan, comScore executive vice president.

"What's also interesting is that Americans are feeding their hunger for celebrity gossip by 'snacking' on these news updates throughout the workday. In fact, nearly half of all time spent on entertainment news sites comes from work computers."

Overall, Americans spent more than 893 million minutes or 15 million hours on entertainment news sites, with 44 percent of the total time spent during work.

More than a quarter of Internet users visited an entertainment news site in May. omg!, Yahoo's celebrity focused site, proved most popular with 20.6 million visitors, nearly doubling its audience in the past year. TMZ landed in the second position with 9.9 million visitors (up 7% over a year ago), followed by People with 8.2 million visitors.

Significant gains were seen by Usmagazine.com, up 325 percent to 6.5 million visitors, Entertainment Weekly, up 64 percent to nearly 4 million visitors, and The Insider, which grew 215 percent to 2.5 million visitors.

"May was one of the heaviest months on record for entertainment news consumption, but it will almost certainly be surpassed in June with the shocking news of Michael Jackson's death driving high volumes of traffic to these sites," added Mr. Flanagan.

"While most entertainment news sites will see gains in June, TMZ is primed for an especially big month as the first outlet to report the news, which generated thousands of inbound links to the site."

In April 2009, 34.8 million videos were viewed on entertainment news sites, an increase of 52 percent compared to a year ago. TMZ led the category with 2 million video viewers and 10.3 million videos viewed. More than 1.7 million viewers watched 3.8 million videos at omg!, while ETOnline attracted 1.5 million viewers who watched 3.9 million videos.

The Online Publishers Association (OPA) announced today a group of brands that have started using its new larger ad units across OPA member sites.

The new ad units were originally announced in March with the goal of boosting creative advertising online that meets the needs of marketers by better integrating their messages.

A total of 37 OPA member companies are making the units available, up from the 24 originally announced.

Pam Horan

The OPA ad units include:

The Fixed Panel: 336 wide x 700 tall, remains constant as the user scrolls to the top and bottom of the page

The XXL Box: 468 wide x 648 tall, opens for seven seconds to 936 wide x 648 tall with 1/24x frequency

The Pushdown: 970 wide x 418 tall, opens to display the advertisement and then after seven seconds rolls up to 970 wide x 66 tall, with 1/24x frequency.

Some of the brands implementing the new OPA ad units include Bank of America, which will run the Pushdown ad on CNN.com and Time.com. The Cleveland Clinic is running the Fixed Panel ad on NYTimes.com and Mercedes-Benz will run various OPA units on FOXSports.com, Retuers.com, and The Wall Street Journal website.

"The new ad formats really struck a chord with the industry because they represented a change in the way marketers and agencies think about digital ads and new ways of delivering engaging brand campaigns," said Pam Horan, president of the Online Publishers Association.

"The caliber of the brands actively leveraging the new formats is impressive and our members are working hand-in-hand with agencies and marketers to provide the right tools for them to connect effectively with their readers."

In May 2009, the 37 publishers had a combined reach of 132.1 million visitors, or 68 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience.

The way of the web has become very social, as you are more than likely aware. Fortunately, this makes for more widespread conversations about any and all issues that are deemed worthy of discussion by anyone on the Internet.

Unfortunately, it also opens up many pathways for abuse including spam, which can quickly turn a positive user experience into an ugly one.

As the web continues to become a more social animal, more and more webmasters find ways to make their own sites more social. Essentially, this makes for a web full of little social networks. A webmaster that is going this route may run into some of those spam issues right in the profile pages of his/her so-called users.

Jason Morrison of Google's Search Quality Team has posted an interesting article on the company's Webmaster Central Blog. Within this article are 8 tips for dealing with this social profile spam.

The tips are:

1. Make sure you have standard security features in place

2. Use a blacklist to prevent repetitive spamming attempts

3. Watch out for cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities

4. Consider nofollowing the links on untrusted user profile pages

5. Consider noindexing profile pages

6. Add a "report spam" feature to user profiles and friend invitations

7. Monitor your site for spammy pages

8. Watch for spikes in traffic from suspicious queries

Morrison elaborates on each of these, but I think you get the gist of it. "Google is constantly under attack by spammers trying to create fake accounts and generate spam profiles on our sites, and despite all of our efforts some have managed to slip through," he says, citing the tips as ways to make spammers' lives more difficult.

It would appear that spam (in any form) just isn't going to go away. All you can do is use the tools and strategies that are at your disposal to minimize it and try to maintain a positive user experience. That's what Google does.