Unlike last time, there’ll be no snafu about whether the time is right to reveal the new MSN Homepage–it’s now officially live for all.

New features include:

• TrendWatch – Highlights the day’s top trends and movers on Twitter
• Hyper-local Tweets – Uses the power of Bing to highlight tweets from your location, available on the new Local Edition
• My Cities – Personalize MSN Local Edition and save up to 3 cities to follow – making it easy to keep up with your friends or family across the entire country

You should already see the new design at MSN.com or you can head here: http://www.msn.com/preview.aspx

Thoughts?

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Flying under the radar with your affiliate income is about to get a lot harder for US tax payers. Starting next year, the IRS will be tracking all online payments made through credit, debit and electronic payment processing like PayPal. The new 1099-K form will be provided by any bank or payment settlement company operating in those areas.

Even better, these forms will include only the gross amounts—i.e. the payments made excluding any fees these companies or other intermediaries may charge—or returns, chargebacks or refunds.. As most of us well know, a payment of $100 often doesn’t translate into a profit of $100, so it will be on the merchants’ shoulders to report all fees among other business expenses.

Naturally, the IRS is worried that online merchants aren’t reporting their income, either through ignorance or willful tax evasion. Reporting forms like the W-2 and other 1099s help tax payers to know what they have to pay taxes on (um, everything) and exactly how much they earned. (It’s a heck of a lot easier than going through your records yourself, but you might still have to to get the fees.)

According to Barbara Weltman for Auction Bytes,

All merchants who accept payments through credit cards, debit cards, gift cards and PayPal will receive information returns telling them – and the IRS – the gross amount of the merchant card transactions. This will be broken down month by month. While the form uses the word “card,” the IRS has made it clear that this is interpreted broadly to include third-party network transactions (i.e., PayPal).

There is at least one loophole: if you’re just not that good an online merchant. Small merchants, making $20,000 or less in 200 or fewer transactions, will not require 1099 reporting.

Ultimately, there probably won’t be an effect if you’re already reporting your online income accurately. Will the new laws affect you?

We are SO not tax lawyers or accountants, it’s not even funny. Please consult someone who is to learn about your tax responsibilities.

Facebook and Eventbrite already have a relationship—Facebook tapped the event site to sell tickets to its f8 developer conference, as confirmed by TechCrunch last week. A TechCrunch reader then noticed that facebook.eventbrite.com was up and working:

So, TechCrunch speculates, might Eventbrite and Facebook be partnering to make Facebook (and Eventbrite, of course) money on the 3.5M events posted on the social site? When Facebook added the Events feature, plenty thought this would spell the death of dedicated event or invitation sites. However, most of these events (that I’ve seen, anyway) are personal-level things—with free admission. But I’m Eventbrite would be happy to help Facebook expand into event ticket sales for everything from fundraisers to concerts. (Eventbrite also coordinates free tickets, for free.)

Says TechCrunch:

Like the F8 event, this is set up on Eventbrite’s site, and it seems likely that Facebook will send users there that want to monetize events, have them log in via Facebook Connect, and finish the process.

It’s possible that this could just be Eventbrite’s implementation of Facebook Connect, apart from Facebook’s input (“partnering with Facebook” is being overused like that often). Facebook declined to comment on this effort.

What do you think? Is this the beginning of a beautiful friendship? Or is Eventbrite striking out on its own?

According to a new study being published this week by Unica, European marketers trail their American cousins, when it comes to the adoption of social media marketing.

While, 58% of marketers in North America are already engaged in social media marketing, only 34% of Europeans can say the same.

That’s likely to change in the next 12 months:

Some quick math suggests that this time next year, 76% of American marketers will be knee deep in social media marketing, with an impressive game of "catch-up" played by European counterparts–hitting 64% adoption.

So what’s keeping Europe from making this a photo-finish? Well, the biggest set-back is the 20% of European marketers that don’t want anything to do with social media. Not, "we’re more than 12 months out" or "we not sure yet" but flat out "we have no plans for social media marketing."

I’d love to know what industries those marketers represent because I’d go and steal their lunch money!

Being a resident of North Carolina I have had the experience of watching the state government take away an income stream for people in a time when income streams can be little more like a trickle. It did this through imposing a tax on Amazon affiliate sales in the state and Amazon essentially said “No problem, we’ll just remove the program from your residents reach”. I marveled at what can only be seen as utter stupidity on the surface (I say on the surface because that’s where I sit and have no other details) as the government pulled the rug out from under its own citizens thus removing dollars from the North Carolina economy over a dispute about the tax on those transactions. The state essentially threw out the baby, the bathwater and the tub. Way to go NC state government!

Now we have another state that is entering the Pantheon of short-sightedness: Colorado. Techdirt reports

You may remember last summer that Amazon shut down its affiliate programs in North Carolina, Hawaii and Rhode Island in response to new laws being put in place in those states, which would effectively make any Amazon affiliate an “official” representative of the company in that state, thus requiring that Amazon start collecting sales tax. This followed a similar mess in New York the year before. This is really short-sighted on the part of the states, pushing for additional tax revenue (of course). But it stretches the definition of what it means to have a physical presence in a state to the point where someone who is running an ad for you (all that an affiliate really is) is treated as an employee.

I don’t know what to make of this quite honestly. I would need to hear the entire argument from each states’ side to see if there is any kind of logic here. You are essentially telling your citizens who may not have other viable income that they can’t perform their job in our state. The state is telling them, “If you are doing this as a significant part of your income please get up and move away because your money is no good here”. Huh?

What are your thoughts on this kind of jockeying between states and Amazon? Is there a way that this could turn against Amazon? What if there is suddenly a slew of states who enact the same rules? Does Amazon keep removing itself from these states? Will Amazon affiliates need to secede from the Union or start their own state? How does Amazonia, the 51st state sound?

I will let you in on my new system for posts. If the post title has a question mark there is good reason to suspect that it will fall in the realm of rumor. In this case, the source of the information, The Wall Street Journal, tends to report on things that are as “real” as they can be. On this one, however, there was enough evidence that while Google may be up to something it’s not ready or prime time.

What gave it away? This line in the WSJ article

A Google spokeswoman said the company doesn’t comment on rumor or speculation.

That was easy. OK, now that we have that out of the way let’s talk about what Google may or may not be doing with TV search. The Business Insider tells us a little more as well

Google is testing a new TV search service with Dish Network, the no. 2 U.S. satellite TV provider, the WSJ reports.

The service lets you search TV shows and Web video, including YouTube videos
, the WSJ’s Jessica Vascellaro reports. The service runs on set-top boxes “using elements of Google’s Android operating system,” and is currently being tested by Google employees and their families, according to the WSJ.

Google TV search makes sense of course because if anything can be searched then it can be better managed. Also, Dish Network is the perfect candidate for this kind of service because their battle with DirecTV is heating up. Dish has troubles because DirecTV owns the sports side of the ledger so if Dish could create a more compelling experience overall then it has something to battle with.

So what’s the net-net of this? Well, it’s apparently that Google is doing what it always does which is to expand its horizons and to get into more areas to make money. You gotta figure that not all of the 20,000 employees at the Goog are working on search right? Something is always brewing. I guess the lesson to learn here is that if you can be friends with the right Google employees you may get to be part of their informal product tests.

I absolutely love doing my online reputation management workshops. An entire day of me sharing just about everything I know about reputation management. Not only do I enjoy them, but the feedback has been amazing–just about everyone that attends walks away a reputation management expert!

So, I’m going international and bringing my workshop to Australia and New Zealand in May!

Thanks to a collaboration with Bullet PR, I’ll host my Auckland workshop on May 18th, then jump on a plane and host it again in Sydney on May 20th!

This one-day master class is the only way to get hands-on reputation management training from me, without paying my normal consulting day-rate. In fact the Auckland workshop is priced as low as $595+gst, while the Sydney one is just $550 for PRIA members!

Here’s what our day together will cover:

• Introduction to Online Reputation Management (ORM)
• The Art of Generating Buzz
• Get Five Stars at Customer Review Sites
• Blogging for Brand Control
• Social Networking Meets Reputation Management
• Own the First Ten Links in Google
• Building a Reputation Monitoring Safety Net
• A Blueprint for Fighting a Reputation Attack
• Your Seven-Step Action Plan

This will probably be the only time I host my online reputation management workshop "down under"–simply because it takes soooo long to fly there! So hurry and reserve your seat today!

Register for Sydney

Register for Auckland

Google’s big talk on pulling out of China appears to be in “perpetual beta,” as AllThingsD’s John Paczkowski jokes. According to his report, the Chinese government both confirms and denies that they are currently in talks with Google over Internet control/censorship.

China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) Vice Minister Miao Wei of told Xinhua, China’s state-run news agency, “[Google] never informed the ministry that it was planning to withdraw from China, [nor has it] filed reports over alleged Internet regulation and cyberattacks to the ministry or requests for negotiations.”

And, as AllThingsD points out, that’s especially interesting considering the day before, MIIT Minister Li Yizhong (ie Miao’s boss) told Reuters they are in negotiations with Google. AllThingsD’s sources say that both are right—Google’s in unofficial, informal talks, but hasn’t made a move to file the necessary paperwork.

Surprise, surprise, given what we’ve seen thus far.

Google’s initial promises of action were predicated on the principle that the Internet is a primary source of freedom of expression, and the Chinese government had finally gone to far in its efforts to censor how (and who) used the Internet. However, those attitudes may be uniquely American, according to data from a BBC Worldwide poll.

87% of the Chinese surveyed (vs. 78% worldwide) felt that Internet access was a “fundamental right”. (Nearly half the nearly 28,000 respondents to the survey were not Internet users.) Only 35% of the Chinese felt they could cope without the Internet (compared to 55% worldwide).

Meanwhile, 78% of those surveyed worldwide felt the Internet gave them more freedom, though only 48% felt safe in expressing opinions online, similar to the 42% of the Chinese who agreed with that statement. The PDF of the data states that “Although they are less likely to agree that the Internet should never be regulated by the government (40%), Chinese respondents are much more likely than those elsewhere to cite state censorship as their main concern related to the internet (29%).”

On some level, many of the Chinese do support the government’s censorship/control/regulation (or were afraid to say otherwise over the phone).

What do you think? Will Google pull out of China if pressed, or is this all a lot of hot air?

The verdict on the Italian YouTube court case verdict seemed pretty clear: sentencing Google execs to jail time for an invasion of privacy in a video posted (by someone else) on the UGC site was, well, “absurd,” as we said two weeks ago.

But some new evidence is coming out that may just justify at least the “guilty” verdict from the Italian court—since that’s all the Italian judge released (i.e. he didn’t publish his reasoning). According to TechDirt, there are now reports that Google may have ignored a takedown notice on the video.

…Oooooor not. While Google Translate is woefully inadequate in translating the Italian article intelligibly, it appears that the takedown requests in question (if they exist) might actually be from users—i.e. people without legal standing—via the site’s feedback form. Although that could certainly alert the company that inappropriate content had been submitted by a user, it’s a far cry from an official legal filing.

It’s also hard to tell because Google hasn’t apparently responded adequately to requests from the prosecution to provide copies of any legal takedown notices (although I believe the article says they have provided a copy of one such filing: “Google Inc. has sent not only evasive replies on the comments made [on the video page] but also on removal requests (having produced only one on that SB)”). Furthermore, the EU has no guidelines on what constitutes a sufficiently fast response to a legal takedown notice (or even a clearly defined process for filing takedown notices).

Still, it hardly makes sense to sentence executives who probably never saw any takedown notices (whether or not they were filed), didn’t abuse the child in question, didn’t tape said abuse and didn’t post the video, to jail time for invasion of privacy. TechDirt points out a fine for ignoring (or losing) a takedown notice would be a far more appropriate penalty.

What do you think? Did Google receive a takedown notice? Who should be punished, and how?

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I don’t remember what Microsoft’s search engine share was, when I left the UK in the summer of 2000, but I’m pretty sure it was a lot better than the current anemic 3%.

According to the Guardian, Microsoft would love for Bing to recapture those glory days and is willing to spend the rest of its natural life next 3 months trying to claw it back.

The three-month campaign, which includes three TV ads created by the agency JWT, starts on Wednesday and uses the strapline "Bing and decide". The ads aim to show that Bing simplifies the "information overload" that accompanies the results of many searches.

The TV campaign will run solidly for a month and then in two-week bursts until mid-June. It will be backed by a digital campaign across Microsoft’s network and on media including social networking websites.

Three whole months, huh? Way to lay it all on the line Microsoft. You lose market share over a 10-15 year period and expect to win it all back by reaching consumers while they’re watching Coronation Street?

Of course, I know that Bing’s ad campaign won’t run for just 3 months–just this particular push–but consider this: Google achieved 90% share in the UK via word-of-mouth. Bing has been available to UK users–albeit in beta–since June. If they felt that Bing was truly revolutionizing search, they would have pushed the needle already. Right?