* [YouTube & Warner Strike Music Licensing Deal](http://www.searchenginejournal.com/?p=3801)
YouTube and Warner Music have announced an advertising revenue sharing deal with will distribute and license Warner Music Group Corp’s copyrighted songs and other material through YouTube. Under the deal, Warner Music has agreed to license its songs to the people who upload their videos to YouTube. Meaning that any video producer can now legally use Warner Music in their videos as theme or background music, or even produce alternative videos for Warner songs.

I’ve always been a big fan of BMW and if you’ve ever had the pleasure of driving or owning one you know why. Last night I was watching TV and a commercial for the new BMW 3 series coupe came on, since I also had my laptop handy I decided to hop online to see more. I went to Google and searched for “bmw 3 series coupe” and this is what I saw…

One of the reasons I love trading emails is that I’m often inspired to blog about an idea that comes up. In a recent email swap with David, from the [Social Media Optimization blog](http://www.social-media-optimization.com/), we started talking about SMO strategies and how to target the different channels. With SEO it’s easy, you pretty much want to rank on every possible search engine there is, anytime someone performs a relevant search you would want to show up. Right? SMO is different, most social websites have their own unique communities. For example, if you’re a ["cooking" social network](http://www.bakespace.com/) then Digg is the wrong site to optimize for, [Chowhound](http://www.chowhound.com/) or some of the other recipe sharing websites might make more sense for you.

Social Media Optimization (SMO), if you haven’t heard already, is a term that was recently coined by Rohit Bhargava which refers to the process of ensuring that a website is easy to link to by utilizing the different social media sources including but not limited to, blogs, bookmarking websites and media sharing websites. There are a lot of similarities and differences between SEO & SMO. Because of this, and the idea that one cannot take over the role for the other, it is important to know when and why to use each optimization technique.

Ask.com announced a new Germany research and development center to be headed up by Eric Heymann, former head of technology at Seekport, as director of global content acquisition today. The German R&D center will work closely with the Pisa, Italy, Campbell, Calif., and Piscataway, N.J. locations. Apostolos Gerasoulis, VP of search technology at Ask.com, said, “the expansion of our European research and development team will allow Ask.com to continue to develop and scale our world-class search.”

[Steve Rubel](http://www.micropersuasion.com/) recently conducted a [study](http://www.micropersuasion.com/2006/09/study_wikipedia.html) that compiled the [top 100 advertisers](http://adage.com/datacenter/datapopup.php?article_id=110575) on AdAge, then he entered each of them in Google and tallied the results. What he found is that [Wikipedia](http://www.wikipedia.com) is showing up most of the time for brand searches, this will come as no surprise to any SEO or anyone else that spots trends in search results. But Steve finds a quite a few interesting things, one particular find is…

A couple of days ago I was asked the following question; What do you see as the main obstacles that Social Media Optimization needs to overcome in order to become a more mainstream marketing strategy? Social Media Optimization is still very much in its infancy. Although most of the concepts have been used for awhile, the phrase was just recently coined and through the community, the rules and concepts are just beginning to take shape.

YouTube has taken a step in the serious direction of fortifying its management team and monetization efforts with the recruitment of Gideo Yu, Yahoo’s Treasurer. Yu is now the Chief Financial Officer at YouTube.

SEO is far from dead; in fact it is still one of the best ways to drive targeted traffic to a website. Normal people don’t read technology blogs so they aren’t going to hear about your company that way. You need to find a way to get in front of them in their own territory, which is through Google. Unfortunately most startups don’t realize this; instead they would rather focus all of their attention on getting bloggers to write about them. Don’t get me wrong, it is important to create buzz through the blogoshere but the majority of people won’t find you that way. The echo chamber does not equal revenues but search terms do.

Google has deployed the first pieces of its upcoming Office suite. They’ve launched Google Apps for your Domain, a set of Google services targeted to small and mid sized companies. With the new service, companies can use Gmail, Talk, Calendar and Page Creator under a single control panel. Applications and data will be hosted by Google, for free, with ad support.