These are my links for January 8th:

• Apple Seizes 16 Domain Names From A Guy In One Fell Swoop – When you own domain names associated with the trademarks of a large company, more often than not, they’re going to file a complaint with the ICANN UDRP (Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy). And more often than not, they’re going to win control of the name. Such was the case yesterday with 16 names related to Apple that one man happened to own.
• Pioneer to Bring Pandora to Your Car Radio … For $1,200 – Pandora and Pioneer — manufacturer of car audio systems — are partnering to bring Internet radio to your car.
• Qualcomm Chip to Power Verizon iPhone [RUMOR] – Qualcomm’s CEO Paul Jacobs has openly expressed interest in inserting a Qualcomm chip into Apple’s popular iPhone. New rumors reported by TheStreet.com indicate that Qualcomm’s endeavors were successful: A Qualcomm chip will power a new version of the iPhone on Verizon in the summer.
• DASH: Sony Reveals Pocket Internet Device – Sony has revealed details about their Internet device at the CES – Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Read on find out more.
• Vimeo to Launch Support for 1080p – In case 720p wasn’t enough for your gorgeous, transcendent works of motion picture art, Vimeo will begin hosting 1080p videos by the end of this month.
• The Rise of Digital Music & The Return of the Record – According to the report, sales were up 2.1 percent in 2009 from 2008, with consumers snagging 1.16 million digital tracks (an 8.3 percent increase from ‘08) and 76.4 million digital albums (a 16.1 percent bump). In fact, 40 percent of all music purchases in 2009 were digital.
• Tweetdeck Infiltrates the News Room – Sky News — a 24-hour UK news site owned by News Corp. — is changing up their entire newsroom to focus more on Twitter.
• Boxee Beta Goes Public and Boxee Box Specs Revealed – Today on the company blog, Boxee revealed the specs for the Boxee Box and announced that the Boxee Beta is now officially open to the public.
• Near Me Now: Google’s Mobile Homepage is Location Aware – Go to Google.com in your iPhone or Android browser and you’ll see a small new addition to the homepage: a tiny Near Me Now option below the search box. The new functionality turns your location into an automated search query and makes finding or learning about places in your immediate vicinity a no brainer.
• Bra Color Facebook Status Updates Go Viral, But Why? – Facebook is quite the colorful place today. An odd meme — bra color status updates — has made its way around the network, but no one really knows how or why the what-color-is-your-bra meme took off.

Search Engine Land quotes three Google employees, one being Matt Cutts, they all downplay the effect of registration length on ranks but none of them definitively say that it doesn’t affect the rankings.

Google employee John Mueller suggesting in a Google Webmaster Help forum thread that Google doesn’t look at the length of a domain registration:

A bunch of TLDs do not publish expiration dates — how could we compare domains with expiration dates to domains without that information? It seems that would be pretty hard, and likely not worth the trouble. Even when we do have that data, what would it tell us when comparing sites that are otherwise equivalent? A year (the minimum duration, as far as I know) is pretty long in internet-time .

But let’s look at some more evidence. Earlier this year, Danny spoke with Google’s Matt Cutts about a variety of domain/link/SEO issues. In light of the claims from domain registrars that longer domain registrations are good for SEO, Danny specifically asked “Does Domain Registration Length Matter?” Matt’s reply:

To the best of my knowledge, no search engine has ever confirmed that they use length-of-registration as a factor in scoring. If a company is asserting that as a fact, that would be troubling.

/…/

So we have, essentially, three recent Google statements about the length of a domain registration and its impact on search rankings. None of them specifically say, “No, it doesn’t matter at all.”

Ultimately, the full SEO power given to the registration length of a domain probably doesn’t affect the rankings that much. But does it hurt to register a domain for longer? I don’t think so. Regardless of the SEO juice, I feel that it is important to have your domain registered for multiple years, especially if it’s your main domain.

Goldstein Media owns quite a few domains, some we’re using for testing landing micro-sites,. other domains were bought for an idea that went by the wayside. For the domains that we’re experimenting with, we usually register for only 1 year. The more important domains, ones dealing with our brand and such, we have them registered for 4-5 years. The main reasoning behind the longer registration is less for SEO than for the fact that we don’t want to risk losing our identity online.

Below is the video done by Matt Cutts for the Webmaster Center channel on Youtube:

This is the Daily Link Report for August 13th

Please feel free to post your thoughts in the comment section below

To see all of our links please visit our Delicious page at Delicious.com/goldsteinmedia

• 30 Creative Illustrator Logo Design Tecniques and Tutorials : Speckyboy Design Magazine – Do you need some creative ideas for logos. Check these 30 designs out!
• 10 Things You Must Do to Earn Your Audience’s Trust – On social media trust doesn't come easy. Here are 10 things you can do to earn the trust of your audience
• 15 Tools for Testing your Website – A great resource of tools to make sure your Website is up to par
• Sex Offenders Banned from Social Media Sites – Illinois Governor Pat Quinn signed into law a bill that bans all registered sex offenders from using social networks. Though this sounds like a good idea, you have to remember that often states classify people as sex offenders for much lesser crimes than just rape and molesting (like peeing in public in some states). This law could possibly be unconstitutional. Read more click on the link.
• A Closer Look At Local Search Ranking Factors – Does local search help? In my opinion yes. Click to read the article
• Facebook Usernames: 50+ Million Claimed and Counting – People on the social media networking site haven't stopped claiming vanity urls since they first went live a few months ago.