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So we have a new Congress, due to start its possibly more bipartisan ways (or alternatively, its vengeful rollback of Bush policies) in a few short weeks. And of course we still have in the meantime those same weeks to spend with the old Congress, now inescapably labeled a “lame-duck”.

Did you know, by the way, that the unkind phrase for such truncated power comes originally from my old home town’s (London’s) Stock Exchange – soon to be possibly swallowed up by its transatlantic modern-day successor, NASDAQ? In the genuinely old days, a stockbroker whose credit was entirely used up, but who still tried to deal despite his bankruptcy, was given that unflattering description.

But our current lame duck could still, according to the activist group, the Center for Democracy & Technology (http://www.cdt.org) create some sever and lasting damage. And it has issued a warning (http://www.cdt.org/legislation/2006watchlameduck.php) on some dangerous internet-connected laws that the session may attempt to pass, and that will need resistance.

The Center argues that these proposed legislative changes threaten Web users and publishers, either by jeopardizing privacy or imposing burdensome restrictions on Web site owners. One of the bills, a mandatory data retention law, would require Internet Service Providers to retain information about users for at least one year.

The bill endangers users’ online privacy for at least two reasons, according to CDT. One is that the government could seek information about individual users’ search history or other Web activity for all sorts of investigatory purposes – and as is often the suspicion with government, it need not necessarily be legitimate. The other consideration is that if an ISP is thus empowered to collect and store vast volumes of data, in order to comply with governmental requirements, this same provider could also leak this data, either deliberately or not.

If that sounds too conspiracy-theorist to you, there is a disturbing precedent on record already, in fairly recent history. The lobbyists of CDT don’t overtly refer to it in their current warning, but industry watchers like those hawk-eyes at MediaPost.com (mediapost.com) readily point to the AOL debacle of summer 2006.

You’ll recall, I am sure, how an AOL employee quite intentionally put out publicly online (with a minimum of “anonymizing”) the search histories of 650,000 users, which had been conducted over a period of months. When a large, public company finds itself – compromising its users’ privacy even if only temporarily – till they were shamed within days into taking the offending material down – we are all left (conspiracy-theorists or not) to contemplate the potential for massive error by accident or omission.

The CDT also points out, on another self-interested level for users, that legally requiring ISPs and other companies involved in connectivity to retain vast amounts of data will be costly -and that the consumer will ultimately have to carry that increased cost.

The three major search engines have endorsed a new XML based standard for sitemaps under a new organization, www.sitemaps.org. This is great news for the search industry and shows that the three major search engines can work together to the benefit of the whole industry.

If you have been involved with SEO for the last couple of years you know that making a sitemap part of your site is an accepted SEO method to make sure the search engines spiders find all the pages on your site. The next step the search engines took was to provide a format, again in XML, that you create and give the search engines access to; you can find information about Google’s sitemap in their Webmaster Help Center.

Using the Sitemaps.org protocol doesn’t guarantee that web pages will be included in search engines, however it will give the web crawlers a better chance of finding more of your pages. You can also be sure to see the software vendors of sitemap generators quickly add support for this new format. If you have an active Ecommerce site the format may also prove to be a good way to help the search engines keep up with product line changes.

My, my … the ups and downs that giants may have to endure when they buy a smaller entity.

If you ever wanted to feel sorry for Larry Page and Sergey Brin, owners of Google, be prepared to feel so now. They hare finding life after buying youTube for $1.65 billion a lot more difficult than they expected, and certainly more so than they are publicy admitting now. The search engine goliath has gone to CBS, Viacom, Time Warner, NBC Universal, News Corp. and others offering tens of millions of dollars in upfront money for the right to broadcast their video content legally on YouTube.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt maintains, with great professional calm, that:

“so far people like [our] message; they are now trying to figure out what to do about it – should they, should they not, under what terms, and those sort of things.”

The fact is, though, that Google needs to agree terms with these particular “people”, as desperately as a fish needs water – or else its expensive video-carrying acquisition will turn out to be as attractive a piece of property as Napster after it was crushed by Big Music litigation.

Traditional Big Media companies are feeling their position of power here. But they’re also being canny – YouTube’s size and loyal user base still strikes them as awesome, and a bit frightening. The industry is reeling over the impact of just one piece of video in particular posted on YouTube. It’s just an ad, designed as such, by ad agency Ogilvy and Mather’s Toronto shop for Unilever’s Dove soap product, but it’s taken off virally with all the energy of a runaway train (or an influenza epidemic, if you object to mixed metaphors).

The 75-second video is pure fantasy, showing a young woman “evolving” – but VERY fast, – into a gorgeous supermodel after using Dove – and it has driven so much traffic to Dove’s site CampaignforRealBeauty.com, that the traffic measurement firm Alexa.com assesses it as three times more effective than the expensive television ad for Dove that aired during last year’s Super Bowl last year,

So YouTube repeatedly demonstrates its reach, but content-providers feel they remain king, and one executive has described to the Financial Times the blackmail-type weapons they are prepared to use, saying:

“The fact is that in three to six months every media company’s going to decide that their stuff gets taken down or that they get paid for it.” It’s like “a big chessboard,” he added.

Oh, the ups and downs, steps forward and back in this kind of e-deal. They’re maybe proving too much for some. Buyers’ remorse sounds like it has set in at NBC Universal, who made a similar acquisition, though not quite as massive as googles’, In march this year they bought iVillage, the women’s networking site pioneered by the doyenne of New York’s Silicone Alley, Candice Carpenter. They paid the then big-sounding number, $600 million – this after having put money into iVillage once before and then withdrawing. This time around they are wondering all over again if it’s worth it.

Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of NBC’s owners, candidly told employees earlier this week:

“You know, we probably overpaid for iVillage,”

I can be a bit glib, and even flip, sometimes. I admit it.

My confessional mode is brought on by Microsoft’s ad campaign starting today (Friday Oct 27, 2006) trying once again to boost their search engine capacity. And what I have to confess is that in a recent article. I dismissively referred to MSN Search as appearing really low on the totem pole of engines, especially when it comes to directing traffic toward internet shopping sites. My fine editors here at E-Commerce Partners rightly answered my own cheap rhetorical question “does anyone remember MSN as a search engine? – at all?” with a resounding “Yes. We do”.

The editors expanded by saying:

“Since we are partly a search marketing company we are well aware that MSN is part of the big 3 of search, though a very small part”

Quite right. And now Microsoft is trying hard to increase that “very small part” at the expense of the other big Two, Google and Yahoo.

Its ad, created by the advertising agency McCann WorldGroup, is promoting Windows Live, which formally launched in September and is intended to eventually replace MSN Search — itself less than two years old — as Microsoft’s flagship in the search business.

They have a ways to go. Despite a massive, expensive campaign last year – said at the time to be the company’s biggest media-buying effort since the launch of the MSN “Butterfly” branding in 2000 – MSN Search just hasn’t been able to gain any real traction with consumers. Last month, Microsoft sites garnered 11.9% of searches — down from 15.6% the year before, according to the digital ratings-measurement company comScore. Google, meanwhile, was satisfyingly growing its market share to 45.1% last month — up from 37.6% one year ago.

Microsoft and McCann have decided to place the ad, in full-page form, in influential opinion-shaping print venues such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Seattle Times, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the San Jose Mercury News.

They take pains to emphasize features like Windows Live’s image search, local search, and mapping tools. Frankly, these don’t add up to too innovative a package to me.

But the confessional mode is what caught my eye most – and prompted my wanting to report on it. The ad says openly:

“Before we begin, let us state the obvious. We’re late to the game. We admit it. But instead of shrugging our shoulders and becoming a footnote in search history, we’ve decided to write a few new chapters.”

I guess it could work. Avis car-rental has made a fairly successful fetish out of being No 2. Can Bill Gates win out by admitting to being No 3?