We all enjoy getting schwag at trade shows, through the mail or wherever else you get it from. I know going to conferences I try to snag up as much free goodness as possible. With that being said, Tamar Weinberg from SERoundtable has started a new site dedicated to all her freebies with photos called Schwag Addict.

Google just launched a new feature for webmasters called Google Video Sitemaps. For the longest time you were forced to add your video to YouTube or Metacafe so this is definitely a big step in Google being able to index video. If you want the video on your site to be searchable via Google Video then you’ll want to create one of these. Google can crawl all of these file types: .mpg, .mpeg, .mp4, .mov, .wmv, .asf, .avi, .ra, .ram, .rm, .flv. Below are the links from Google on common questions and steps.

• What are Video Sitemaps?
• How can I create a Video Sitemap?
• How do I submit a Video Sitemap to Google?
• What does Google do with my Video Sitemap after I submit it?
• Where do I place my Video Sitemap?
• I submitted a Video Sitemap but it is not appearing correctly. Why?

I’m only posting about this 4 days after the announcement but its better late than never I suppose. The latest news out of the ever expanding Google is the launch of a new project coined “Knol”. With the launch of Knol, Google is adding another weapon to its arsenal of being a publisher and the first and foremost spot that people visit when asking a question.

Basically Google Knol allows anyone to create a page on any topic where people can comment and rate the article. (Sounds like Squidoo to me) Right now it’s private and by invite only but Google does have a screenshot up and a post on their blog about it. Authors will have the option to run Google ads and share the revenue.

In the past sites like this have been targets of spammers so it’ll be interesting to see how Google combats this. With duplicate content issues and added competition in the search space, many black hats will certainly be looking for exploitation opportunities. More importantly I wonder what this will do to sites that are already ranking well like Wikipedia and Yahoo! Answers.

With each new product that Google either purchases (like YouTube) or develops on their own, you see their prominence in the SERP’s including News, Images, YouTube, and Books as of late.

When Google launches Knol how will the results for a search for “Jim Tressel” compare with that of Wikipedia which currently shows up number 1? Wikipedia typically ranks on the first page of Google for most searches and with the launch of Knol I really don’t see how both Wikipedia and Knol can both rank for what I assume will be similar content. With the direction that things are heading, would you be surprised if the 1st page of results on Google for many searches were Google affiliated results?

I know that Google isn’t going anywhere and honestly there’s no better search but if there’s a lack of diversity in Google search results pages do you think this provides an opportunity for sites like Yahoo! who used to be the dominate search engine before people even knew of Google, to step up and claim a piece of lost market share? I know it’s a long shot but certainly not impossible.

Google has been sending out their gifts as of late and today I saw I had a box from them. To my surprise it was an awesome Flip Video Ultra. I’ve already started playing around with it, and its really slick. It shoots up to 30 minutes of video at high quality. I’ve got a picture of it below. Thanks Google!

I came across this video on Andy Beal’s site and thought it was great. This stuff is so true.