The corporate website is the home of a new white paper (PDF) released on Monday that announces a new AA|RF technology called SOFA - Search Optimized Flash Architecture.  This paper is well worth a read, especially for developers and those interested in SEO-friendly Flash website design.  According to its development team in the New York offices, led by Ray Velez, the paper offers the following SEO-related solutions to “search engine ‘indexability’” problems that plagued Flash sites in the past, discussed in SMTrends Issues #20 and #32. 

Michael Scafidi, AA|RF Senior Presentation Layer Architect and the main author of the paper, feels that the primary benefit of SOFA is that “the Flash website can be indexed by search sites and can support both accessibility standards and users without Flash (installed on their computers).”  SOFA alone should not be misunderstood as being equal to SEO - the now-crawlable content will still need to be optimized in order to get desired results within search engines; but SOFA should be an industry-changing technology, and may soon be considered by the SEO industry as being the “next generation” of solutions, like Scalable Inman Flash Replacement (sIFR) and the XHTML Search Engine Friendly Flash Site (SEFFS) methodology.  Again, find the SOFA PDF file within the AA|RF Points of View papers.

Last Thursday, YouTube co-founder Steve Chen wrote for the Official Google Blog, clarifying what the video identification testing mentioned in the Wall Street Journal and by Reuters would actually encompass. For those unfamiliar, YouTube is a Google-owned website that allows user-generated videos to be uploaded and viewed by millions of people across the globe. In a similar vein as Napster, there has been a proliferation of video content taken from television, movies, and music without the express permission of the copyright owners. As YouTube becomes more and more popular, since the videos are uploaded by countless users, it becomes increasingly difficult to monitor what content is an original work and what constitutes a copyright infringement. Some big players, such as Viacom, have already gone as far as taking legal action against Google for not being proactive enough in this area.

Although content owners can manually request removal of video infringing their copyright, this is simply not scalable over the long term. YouTube Partner Development Director Chris Maxcy has stated that audio fingerprinting, courtesy of Audible Magic, has already been in place since the beginning of the year and actually allows identification of songs within video clips. As videos are uploaded, they are matched against an audio fingerprint database, and any matches with copyrighted material are automatically identified. Copyright owners can either license the music in return for a share of the ad revenue on that page or have the video blocked. A very similar process will be put in place if video fingerprint testing is successful. In fact, videos that have been flagged for removal already receive a unique hash to prevent future re-uploading.

While Chen is excited about current progress, he did not guarantee in the blog post above that video fingerprinting will succeed. Various groups, including Disney and Time Warner, are working with YouTube to aid in testing throughout the coming months. Video has become a hot medium for Google and there is an obvious push to make YouTube even more prominent, as evidenced by its addition into Google Universal results, following the upcoming election buzz via You Choose '08, and making things even more accessible with YouTube Remixer & YouTube Mobile. While getting more content is relatively easy, making sure that YouTube doesn't infringe copyrights is not just a walk in the park.

Google and eBay Posturing in Boston – From the soap opera department: In a move that amounts to a loss of $25 Million per quarter for Google, eBay has pulled its ubiquitous search ads from the portal, claiming they were concerned that Google scheduled a party in Boston during the same week as the eBay live conference, also in Boston. Full coverage is available at Search Engine Land.

Yahoo! Makes Major Change to Content Ads’ Click Cost Structure (Part 2) – last week in Issue #48, SMTrends started a series on Yahoo!’s new Quality Based Pricing structure for ads hosted within the search and contextual networks at Yahoo!. The series will now conclude next week instead of this week.

Reminder and Discount: “Searchnomics” on June 27 – As introduced in Issue #48, WebGuild will be hosting their one day conference, “Searchnomics,” at the Santa Clara Convention Center on June 27. The conference organizer has provided an additional $200 discount to attendees that sign up after registering for the WebGuild site on this page. Use the code "wa200" when registering for the conference.