ICANN Becomes More Independent

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the body responsible for managing Internet domain names, has announced it will no longer be controlled by the U.S. government.

ICANN and the U.S. Department of Commerce signed an agreement today supporting the model of international multi-stakeholder governance of the global Internet addressing system.

ICANN was created in 1998 to manage the Internet's addressing system such as top-level domain-names and IP address space. The group has been criticized for being too influenced by the U.S. government.

"A decade ago the US government was a catalyst for a global discussion on how to coordinate the vital resource that is the Internet's unique identifiers," said Peter Dengate Thrush, ICANN's Chairman of the Board.

"They understood that it needed to be coordinated not controlled. That vision has been affirmed in the model of private sector leadership that ICANN represents."

The European Commission, which has called for reform of ICANN since 2005, sounded support for the latest changes.

"I welcome the US administration's decision to adapt ICANN's key role in internet governance to the reality of the 21st century and of a globalised world," said Viviane Reding, European Commissioner for Information Society and Media.

"Internet users worldwide can now anticipate that ICANN's decisions on domain names and addresses will be more independent and more accountable, taking into account everyone's interests. External review panels will periodically evaluate ICANN's performance. If effectively and transparently implemented, this reform can find broad acceptance among civil society, businesses and governments alike."

Under the agreement, the U.S. will join ICANN's Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC), a group that advises the corporation on publicly policy issues related to the Internet.
 

Google Wave Invitations Roll Out

Update: It has been discovered that someone is selling an invite on eBay, with the price steadily rising (over five grand right now). I would be surprised if this doesn't get shut down, and there's no telling how many bids on here are legitimate anyway.

Original Article: Google is sending out over 100,000 preview invitations to developers who have been participating in the developer preview, the first users who signed up and offered feedback on wave.google.com, and select customers of Google Apps.

"Some of you have asked what we mean by preview," says Google. "This just means that Google Wave isn't quite ready for prime time. Not yet, anyway. Since first unveiling the project back in May, we've focused almost exclusively on scalability, stability, speed and usability. Yet, you will still experience the occasional downtime, a crash every now and then, part of the system being a bit sluggish and some of the user interface being, well, quirky."

The company also says there are some key features that have yet to be fully implemented, such as removal of participants from waves, defining groups of users, and permissions configuration. These things will be rolled out in the coming months.

According to Google, over 27,000 developers have been prototyping with the Google Wave APIs since Google I/O where it was introduced. "Amazingly, these developers persevered, found work arounds, and advocated for new features when our APIs didn't do what they needed," says Google Wave Product Manager Stephanie Hannon.

Google is featuring a few extensions that are ready to use today. These include extensions for Sudoku puzzles, telephone conferencing, real-time video chat, maps, and weather forecasts.

Google tells sandbox developers that they will get Wave accounts tomorrow at wave.google.com. They will get instructions for logging in from their sandbox accounts. They will also get invitations to bring on people they want to "wave" with. Below are some prototypes of extensions from SAP, Salesforce, and MediaWikiWave:

 

 

Mobile Advertising Guidelines Get an Update

The Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) has released a new version of its Global Mobile Advertising Guidelines, which serve as a source of global formats, guidelines, and best practices for the implementation of mobile advertising campaigns.

"The updated guidelines reinforce the MMA's longstanding pledge to provide its members and the wider industry with reliable standards and increased awareness of mobile advertising globally. MMA's Global Mobile Advertising Guidelines will serve to simplify the deployment of mobile advertising campaigns whilst increasing their effectiveness," said Mike Wehrs, MMA President and CEO.

"The globalization of the mobile applications specifications in the latest edition of the guidelines is particularly important for the constantly growing and evolving mobile marketing industry to address," he added.

Key revisions of the guidelines include:

- Global requirements for Mobile Application ad units
- New advertising units and definitions across channels
- New length requirements for Mobile Video & TV ad units
- Recommended future mobile web banner ad requirements

The guidelines (pdf) are released every six months to ensure that they are up to date and reflect industry standards and feedback. They have been publishing the guidelines since 2005. They began globalizing them last year.

The MMA's Mobile advertising committee members include AdMob, AT&T Mobility, Fox Interactive Media, Microsoft, Orange NSM, The Weather Channel, and Verizon Wireless, to name a few.

AOL Points Finger At Google Over Truveo Failure

The AOL-owned video search engine known as Truveo isn't doing so well.  The cause of the site's poor performance isn't a mystery to its president, however; in a very interesting statement, he quite bluntly placed the blame on Google.

Two days ago, Silicon Alley Insider published an article titled "AOL Ventures is Killing Truveo."  The piece documented a recent massive drop-off in traffic.  Truveo President Pete Kocks responded to say, "AOL Ventures isn't killing Truveo - Google is."

Kocks later continued, "Starting June 16th, 2009, Google began removing all references to Truveo.com from Google web search and consequently our traffic took a substantial hit.  At that time, we were almost completely excluded from Google results  -- not even the contact page on Truveo.com was available via web search.  The reality is that Truveo uses a number of industry standard techniques to increase traffic from web search and that Google is treating us differently than our competitors."

Compete statistics sort of back up Kocks's claims, too.  Obviously, Truveo is having a traffic crisis.  Then, if you look closer, you'll notice that Google doesn't even appear on the list of Truveo's top referral sites, whereas it's number one where YouTube, DailyMotion, and Blinkx are concerned.

So did Google blacklist AOL's video search offering out of spite?  Or did Truveo's president overlook some sort of SEO-related reason for the change?  Have your say below.  A key point: either way, Kocks seems to have admitted that something's killing Truveo.

Next Page »