UK tabloid newspaper The Daily Mail, has decided to raise the issue of Google’s influence on the UK government, after uncovering the fact that Conservative Party ministers have held meetings with Google an average of once a month since the General Election two years ago. There have been 23 meetings between Tory ministers and Google since June 2010, with Prime Minister David Cameron meeting Google three times and George Osborne – who as Chancellor of the Exchequer is supposed to meet with business leaders – four times in two years.

The story needs to be a seen in a wider context. The Conservatives have recently come under fire for having too close a relationship to another powerful entity, News Corporation (as did the Labour party during its tenure). A huge inquiry into Press standards has in large part focused on the ties between Rupert Murdoch’s media giant and the Conservatives.

But what the report buries way down in the article, is the number of times the newspaper itself has met with the Government. A Google spokesperson told us: “It’s absolutely right that governments speak with companies about issues that affect their citizens. The British Government makes the list of those meetings publicly available – including the Daily Mail’s 34 meetings over the same period.” In other words, the Daily Mail has met with the Government almost one and a half times a month (on average) since they entered office – that’s quite a bit more than Google has. It’s likely those were high-level meetings, not editorial ones.

That said, the issue does raise the question of Google’s closeness to the UK government and its ability to grab the ear of the Government on a number of topics. It’s the kind of access a lot of companies would be envious of.

Culture minister Ed Vaizey has met the firm seven times. Culture Secretary boss Jeremy Hunt has held four meetings. In David Cameron’s first months as party leader in 2006 and 2007 (though not yet Prime Minister), he spoke to the annual Google Zeitgeist conference.

Three senior figures have moved between the Tories and Google in the last few years. Rachel Whetstone is Global head of communications and public policy at Google and is married to David Cameron’s former chief of staff, Steve Hilton. Naomi Gummer was formerly adviser to Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt, but is now a public policy adviser to Google. Amy Fisher Was a press officer for Google, and is now a special adviser to the Environment Secretary Caroline Spelman.

On Hilton, the right wing Daily Mail newspaper has rarely missed an opportunity to attack his more radical attempts to shake up government thinking about technology and its effect on society. But it’s more likely that the Conservatives – in part driven by Hilton’s thinking – have realised that the world has moved away from the green-screen, big-IT projects which used to fill the coffers of the likes of EDS and others, towards embracing a more open standards approach. On the ground this has fed into attempts to open up government data, and led also the innovative project known as Gov.uk, which is taking a startup approach to government online, employing many of the UK’s best engineers and tech stars.

It’s also quite something to see a sentence describing Hilton as the “shaven-headed son of Hungarian immigrants” – a phrase which betrays the Mail’s antipathy to alternative thinking.

In March it was announced that Mr. Hilton was going to take an academic post at Stanford University in California to be near his wife who works at Google. He plans to return next year, though it’s not yet clear whether he will re-join the government.

Of course, back in the real world, these West Wing-like moves of advisers between big business and governments go on literally all the time. We don’t currently have the equivalent figures for meetings with Microsoft or Cisco, or Facebook, IBM or other companies, but I’d be amazed if there were not similar factoids waiting to scurry forth if someone someone decided to lift a few rocks. Indeed, Microsoft, Cisco and many other large tech companies have appeared several times at the government’s ‘Tech City’ meetings.

So quite why the Daily Mail has decided to home in on this issue is a little bit of a mystery. It may be that the story was placed as an attack by the Labour Party. Their health IT scheme to store patients’ records failed spectacularly just before they left office, so they would have smarted at the suggestion by Cameron that a company like Google could probably do a better job.

The newspaper quotes Helen Goodman, Labour’s media spokesman, who says “Of course it is important for ministers to listen to business, but a meeting with Google every month does look like the sort of privileged access that small businesses can only dream of.” Unfortunately, she neglects to mention the numerous tiny tech startups that have been invited to Number 10 Downing Street over the last couple of years as part of the government’s Tech City initiative, and its purchase of an entire building – Campus London – in East London which is housing small tech startups that have have nothing to do with Google. (As disclosure, I’m co-founder of a co-working space that’s a tenant in that building, but frankly, I’d point this out even if it wasn’t).

Then again, Google doesn’t help its own cause. In Europe it does not have a great record on tax. As Goodman points out: “Ministers must disclose what they discussed. Did they challenge Google over their repellent tax avoidance, which was uncovered by the Daily Mail?”

It’s here that criticism could land a big punch. Google has been oft criticised for paying tax on less than a quarter of its UK income. In 2010 it generated £2.1 billion in the UK but with its international operations based Ireland, where corporation tax is much lower than the UK, it escapes a great deal of tax.

And Google hasn’t always helped its own cause.

Last month Google executive Naomi Gummer, until recently a Conservative minister’s political adviser, caused a furore in the press when she implied (not unreasonably?) that it was the job of parents to stop children seeing adult content online, not Internet companies. Currently a debate rages in the UK about creating an ‘off switch’ at ISP level to block porn, allowing parents baffled by content settings or Net Nanny software to simply order a ‘clean’ version of the Internet direct from their ISP.

A Conservative Party spokesman told the Mail: “All these meetings have been properly declared and it is normal for relevant ministers to meet with a company of this size.”

Ultimately the Mail’s story does raise questions of perceptions over-all but as a major UK tech player, it would be extremely odd for it not to meet with whoever was in power fairly regularly. Neither Facebook not Twitter, for instance, have anything like the huge engineering bases and offices Google has in the UK. Do we want our politicians to remain in a worldview of tech dominated by the desktop and ‘licenses’ or one where developers, startups and apps can thrive? I’d hazard not.

“Entering terminal count autosequence. 60 seconds to engine fire. #DragonLaunch,” tweeted Elon Musk as his space company was less than a minute away from it’s historic flight. But the launch didn’t happen. Nothing happened as longtime NASA commentator George Diller counted down the seconds, “3..2..1……We’ve had a cutoff. Liftoff did not occur.” Musk tweeted 11 minutes later at 5:06am EDT, “Launch aborted: slightly high combustion chamber pressure on engine 5. Will adjust limits for countdown in a few days.”

The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket was literally a half second away from launching. NASA is still inspecting the engine but early reports, tweeted by both Musk and NASA, state that the chamber pressure on engine 5 was abnormally high, causing the rocket’s on-board computer to abort the launch.

SpaceX was on the cusp of making history and becoming the first privately owned institution to dock a capsule with the International Space Station. Only governments, the US, Russia and Japan, have so far accomplished this task. SpaceX is hoping to take over the transport duties from NASA starting first with cargo but eventually shuttling personnel between terra firma and the ISS.

This isn’t SpaceX’s first space rodeo. The company has been launching its Falcon rockets since 2006 although the first flight of a Falcon 1 failed a few seconds in. The rocket on the launchpad today, a Falcon 9, saw a successful first flight in 2010.

Today’s launch, while cut short, will likely (hopefully) just be a footnote in SpaceX history. The company is set to try again in the coming days. The next launch attempt will come on May 22 but it could be pushed to May 23 according to some reports.

Editor’s note: Oliver Roup is the founder and CEO of VigLink, a service that makes it easier to use affiliate programs on your blog or website.

When an email hits our inbox, we know not only who it’s from but their entire web imprint. LinkedIn can point out the profile of the woman you interviewed for a sales role last week and the gentleman you spoke with earlier in the year at a conference.

And rest assured that the dining room set you checked out over the weekend at CrateAndBarrel.com will haunt your online experience for the forseeable future.

Data — its collection and manipulation at scale — has revolutionized how we interact online. Homepages, banner advertisements and what we see in our Facebook timeline are all tailored-to-fit the reader, and we don’t give it a second thought.

But the hyperlink, the key feature that distinguishes hypertext from text has remained largely unchanged since Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the web.

Websites generally, and search and online advertising specifically, would be barely recognizable today by their younger selves. But hyperlinks — their structure, how they’re authored and how we use and track them — have barely changed in 20 years. Consider:

• Inserting links by hand is a labor intensive process and has few tools. How about a recommendation engine to augment our own efforts? (Note: companies like Zemanta are a first step in this direction.)
• If a link is never clicked (i.e. 0% of the world finds it useful), why does it remain in content, distracting from meaningful / useful links indefinitely?
• Keywords in referrer logs have been mined to great effect by companies like BlueKai. (Although Google is slowly but surely taking that information away.) Isn’t where a user clicked out to just as informative? Why are we almost always ignoring it?
• Why do website visitors in Asia see links to online merchants in North America they are unable to purchase from, let alone access?

Hyperlinks, in many ways, are dumb. And as a result, harming your user experience and potentially bleeding money from your company — when they could be a tool for better engagement, increased revenue, and deeper analytics.

Now, there are a cluster of companies innovating by recognizing the power of the link — Omniture, Vibrant Media and Yieldbot, to name a few. But, this isn’t a problem companies can hold off on thinking about until the perfect tech pops up to solve it. There was a time when SEO was considered a “pro-tip” — a way for startups to get ahead of the game. Today, it’s standard best practice — and companies that don’t think strategically about the way search engines view their sites are at a strong disadvantage.

Hyperlink optimization is similar. While link optimization might be a “pro-tip” now, it won’t be for much longer. Companies that aren’t thinking strategically about link placement, closely tracking results, and taking subsequent action, will find the companies that ARE doing these things at an advantage.

The most critical areas to spend time on are tracking outbound hyperlinks, building a linking strategy, and refining it based on results. Let’s briefly dive into each.

Track your Outbound Hyperlinks

The first step to optimizing a site’s outbound traffic is to understand what that traffic looks like. Where do visitors go when they leave your site? What do they do on those other sites?

While there is still a lot of room for growth within the outbound analytics space, Omniture (paid) and Google Analytics (free — but requires a modification to the standard Analytics code you add to your site) both offer tools to help you understand what happens when a reader leaves your site. VigLink (disclosure: I am the CEO there) also offers an outbound analytics suite as part of its content monetization solution.

Build a Hyperlinking Strategy

What do you want your outbound hyperlinks to do for you?

Do you want them to earn you revenue? Do you want them to serve an SEO purpose? Be purely informational? Should they be scarce (keeping readers on your site)? Or abundant (allowing readers to exit as it is helpful)?

Once you’ve answered these questions, you’ll have a plan for when your team includes a hyperlink, and when it does not — opening up opportunities for a better reader experience, and deeper engagement.

Refine, Refine, Refine

Combine a plan with data to track that plan’s performance and you’ve got a gold mine on your hands.  Notice a link that is never clicked and your plan requires that links must be useful to readers? Take it out. Or, a heavy percentage of links pointing to non-eCommerce properties, and your goal is monetization? Incorporate fewer links to those non-commercial sites. Refining your hyperlinks will improve reader engagement and overall site performance.

Do It, and Make the Web Better

Hyperlinks should make the web better — more connected, easier to navigate, and intelligent. Hyperlinks should make your site better — more actionable, insightful and profitable.

Today, hyperlinks are falling short. They’re static and largely untracked. Sometimes useful — but often not. As the web becomes ever more crowded, and an organization’s site optimization toolkit begins to produce diminishing returns, the hyperlink is obvious low hanging fruit.

What that means to site owners:

• It’s time to plug the outbound data leak. Implement a tool today that will track your outbound traffic.
• Choose a hyperlinking strategy and share it with your team. This is at least as much a human problem as a technology one – deciding what you want is always the first step.
• Be on the lookout for technology that addresses these issues. There are already solutions to track your outbound clicks and the value they deliver but 2012 is going to be the year the hyperlink gets smart.

Editor’s note: Scott Brave is the CTO and co-founder, Baynote.

We’ve all watched from the sidelines as companies have come out in a burst of glory, and then, two years later, spent their venture capital, lost their user base, and failed to monetize. This begs the question – what are the factors that drive a company’s survival, differentiate it, and ultimately make it a winner? In today’s online world, personalization is increasingly making or breaking companies. The companies that win are the ones making personalization a key company value – not just a feature.

In the early days of the web, consumers were happy just to gain access to information. However, as technology became more sophisticated, and as more consumers and companies came online, we quickly moved out of the access age and into a state of information overload, often leaving consumers frustrated and confused. Companies that helped consumers cut through the clutter to reveal relevant information had a critical and sustainable competitive advantage in their respective areas. The concept of relevance is critical to the success of Google, for example.

Personalization is not new. Popularized by Amazon and Netflix more than a decade ago, personalization is the practice of tailoring information to people based on what they are looking for, what they have found interesting in the past, what their friends have engaged with, or based on explicit inputs like their interests. Personalization has gotten a lot of positive attention recently because it can be used to great effect to organize the web’s information overflow into relevant, meaningful experiences.

Winning companies approach personalization as a core value of how they do business – a “customer-centric” philosophy – rather than an add-on “feature.” As proof, here are some examples of companies that have built their businesses around personalization and the competition that they left in their wake.

News: Flipboard vs. Yahoo! News

In 2001, Yahoo! launched Yahoo! News, providing a repository for news articles that became the first-ever most-emailed page on the web. However, Yahoo! News neglected to treat personalization as a core value – and in so doing missed out on the opportunity to tap into the social graph of personal information to personalize and curate content for users based on their interests. With Yahoo! treating personalization as a feature and not a core value, by 2010, consumers moved on to new, more personalized content curation services that were specifically designed for consuming media. One example of such a personalized news source is Flipboard, which works across Apple devices, and allows users to “flip” through their social networking feeds and feeds from partner websites to find the news articles that are most interesting to them.

Within a year of its founding, Flipboard had amassed a $200 million valuation. Today, the company’s valuation and user base continues to skyrocket, while Yahoo!’s continues to hemorrhage. Flipboard won because it applied personalization to consumer choice for news articles that other news providers hadn’t accounted for, sparking the beginning of the content curation boom. Interestingly, Yahoo! recently announced plans to eliminate many of its online properties in order to focus on its most popular ones and make the content on those sites personalized to the user. It seems Yahoo! has finally caught on to the fact that users like personalized content and will engage with brands and services that provide content tailored to their interests.

Music: Pandora vs. Internet radio

This example seems counter-intuitive – wouldn’t people want to listen to their favorite radio station online? This just never took off. Why? Internet radio contained way too much content – it wasn’t focused or specific enough. Consumers had to work too hard to find the music they liked. Once consumers were introduced to a better way to curate and listen to music, they were never going back. When Pandora allowed users to input their music preferences through both explicit selections and implicit actions to help shape their content stream, it changed the listening experience. Pandora made listening to music online personal. After Pandora, just listening to the radio online seemed like a waste of time.

Dining: Alfred (Google) vs. Opentable

OpenTable provides a free service that lets users make reservations online. The company first came on the scene in 1998, and has steadily built up its business – today over 25,000 restaurants are signed up with the service. While OpenTable provides restaurant recommendations along the side of the screen based on location, it is a feature rather than being core to the experience. Alfred, on the other hand, is a mobile app developed by Clever Sense (purchased by Google in December) that delivers dining recommendations based exclusively on your inputs and your Facebook check-ins and profile. By offering recommendations for restaurants that are personalized to consumer’s inputs and behavior Google could become a leading provider of time-critical dining data, and a big player in the multi-billion dollar restaurant industry.

These examples have all shown how companies that embrace personalization as a core value, and not just a feature can win. In today’s consumer-driven society companies that don’t pay attention to what people want most at any given moment risk losing significant market share to competitors that have built a culture around delighting customers with a highly personalized experience at every turn.

SpaceX, the private space exploration company founded by PalPal and Tesla Motors co-founder Elon Musk, is ready to boldly go where no private company has legitimately attempted to go before: The International Space Station. (Live video of the rocket at Cape Canaveral in Florida is embedded above.)

In just a few hours at 1:55am Pacific Time (which is 4:55am Eastern time) Saturday morning, SpaceX will attempt to make the first ever privately-funded launch to head to the International Space Station from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The launch will be made with its Falcon 9 rocket, which is set to deploy its Dragon capsule. As SpaceFlightNow has very clearly reported, this is a risky and unique proposition in many ways:

“SpaceX aims to launch its privately-built Dragon capsule Saturday aboard a Falcon 9 rocket, fly the craft to the International Space Station, and deftly approach the complex for astronauts to grab the free-flying satellite with a robot arm.

It is the first time a private company has attempted such a feat.”

Obviously it is a super ambitious and expensive endeavor, but the SpaceX company is very keen to remind people that this is still an experiment. After all, this is the first time that a non-government US entity has made a move to land on the International Space Station.

As SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell told SpaceFlight Now: “We know this has been touted as a huge mission. We keep trying to say it’s a test. Nonetheless, it’s a big job.” The company has repeatedly emphasized to the press that this is “just a test flight.”

Indeed, it is possible that we could watch the Falcon 9 go down in flames. But of course, the smart people at SpaceX have clearly taken great care to make sure that is not the case here on Saturday’s launch. In any case, we’ll have to wait and see to be sure — and the high stakes are a part of the excitement of it all.

In a slightly larger lens, there is the hope that some of the newly-minted Facebook affiliated folks who acquired millions on Friday will opt to invest in projects that are nearly as interesting as Elon Musk’s endeavors. One can dream, at least.

Some of you are probably reading this post with ad blocker right now — and to be honest, I don’t blame you. Sure, there’s the occasional amusing or genuinely useful ad, but not terribly often, so why not install a plugin and avoid the whole mess? Of course, those ads make money, so if ad blockers become widespread enough, it could be a real problem for online publishers (who have enough problems already).

Israeli startup ClarityRay says it’s not something looming in the misty future — it’s happening now, and it’s only going to get worse.

In a recent study (download PDF), the company claims to have looked at “over 100 million impressions across several top-tier publishers in the US and Europe” finding that 9.26 percent of all impressions were blocked. The likelihood that someone is using an ad blocker varies significantly by browser — Firefox users are the most likely to use a blocker, followed by Safari (the desktop version) and then Chrome. The report goes on:

The combined market share of Chrome and Firefox is only increasing. Moreover, the great popularity of ad-blockers points to a strong public need; as awareness increases, a free, widely available solution that is one-click away on every platform is bound to increase its consumer adoption. It is, therefore, our estimate that ad-blocking will double within 20 months.

The company’s logic, at least as presented here, didn’t quite convince me that ad blocking will double, but I’m not debating the larger points. Naturally, ClarityRay is offering a solution.

“We believe ad-blocking today is a lot like how pirate MP3s were before iTunes: they point to a valid consumer need, but do so in an unsustainable manner business wise,” says co-founder and CEO Ido Yablonka.

In other words, Yablonka wants to provide an alternative that addresses the complaints of the “ad intolerant” while allowing publishers to make money. To that end, the company offers two complementary products — one that bypasses ad blockers, and another that allows publishers to offer subscriptions for an ad-free version of the site. So if you’ve installed an ad blocker and you visit a ClarityRay customer, you’ll still see a single ad, Yablonka says. Don’t want to see it? Then pay.

At the same time, Yablonka acknowledges that each publisher has its own audience and its own needs, and he says ClarityRay customizes the program for customer based on crowd analysis.

Even though the company hasn’t received much coverage from the press, Yablonka says it’s already live with several large publishers, totaling 2 million unique monthly visitors. (Yablonka says he can’t disclose any customer names publicly, but he did point me to a couple of sites where I could see the technology live and working.) ClarityRay has also raised $500,000 in funding from Saar Wilf who sold his company Fraud Sciences to eBay for $169 million, and is now serving as the company’s chairman.

Facebook’s IPO was obviously the single most discussed topic on Twitter today. The good folks over at social media data platform DataSift monitored what Twitter users were saying about the IPO throughout the day and came up with some interesting conclusions. Turns out, the ups and downs of how Twitter’s users felt about the stock pretty much mirrored the price of Facebook’s stock as the day progressed.

Basically, DataSift notes, every time the volume of negative chatter on Twitter increased, Facebook’s stock price dropped within 20 minutes. “So if people had traded based on signals today to buy/sell Facebook stock,” the company told us,”they might have done quite well.”

To create this graph, DataSift recorded 95,019 interactions from 58,665 authors over a period of 6 hours. Most interactions, of course, took place right during the early hours after Facebook’s stock started trading (and took an immediate dive from $42 closer to $38). The company also saw a second and much smaller uptick in interactions toward the end of the day as well.

For the most part, of course, this is just a fun exercise in tracking Twitter data. It’s worth noting, though, that quite a few recent studies that looked into the connection between Twitter posts and stock prices found that there is at least a slight correlation between Twitter sentiment and volume and stock prices.

You can find a bit more of DataSift’s data, which also takes a closer look at the total volume of posts about the Facebook IPO, here.

Just after the markets closed on its first day of public trading, Facebook amended its S-1 with a complete prospectus detailing how much stock each underwriter got to sell. Morgan Stanley, the lead-left bank, received 162.1 million shares ($6.15 billion worth) followed by J.P. Morgan with 84.8 million ($3.22 billion), and Goldman Sachs pulled down 63.1 million shares ($2.4 billion).

E*Trade and Itaú got the short end of the stick, receiving just $80 million in stock. That’s less than any of the other underwriters despite being listed in the middle of the pack in the previous versions of the prospectus. But none of the banks made too much on the Facebook stock. FB shares closed just $0.23 above its IPO price this morning. That means Facebook maximized the amount it raised in the offering, but its underwriters didn’t receive the massive cash windfall many expected.

While Mark Zuckerberg rang in Facebook’s first day as a publicly traded company back in Silicon Valley, TechCrunch TV was in New York City to report on the scene from the NASDAQ stock market’s Marketsite building in Times Square. The opening bell and initial trades were a bit anti-climactic in person, as we’ve written — NASDAQ is a digital exchange after all, so there’s not too much to see visually.

But it was a great opportunity to check out the NASDAQ “floor” in person, and talk all things Facebook with David Kirkpatrick, the NYC-based founder of Techonomy, Fortune Magazine alum, and bestselling author of the book “The Facebook Effect — The Inside Story Of The Company That Is Connecting The World.”

You can watch our whole chat with Kirkpatrick at the NASDAQ Marketsite in the video embedded above, which I’d recommend because he gives a pretty compelling interview. Below I’ve included a few of his insights, just to whet your appetite (and perhaps inspire you to endure all 30 seconds of that pre-roll video ad):

Why it seems like everyone has come down with Facebook IPO fever:

“People are realizing the extent to which technology is changing everything in modern society, and Facebook is kind of the most prominent symbol of that. I think that’s one of the reasons why this is so obsessively watched.”

A chicken in every pot, a Facebook stock in every portfolio? It could happen:

“There may be a surprising number of new investors who buy shares in Facebook and were not stock investors previously. Whether that might make them more willing to buy other kinds of stocks, I don’t know. Frankly I doubt it. But I think that a lot of ordinary people who are likely to buy Facebook stock are people who are going to do it because they love Facebook so much. And they’re not just Americans, they’re people all over the world.

…The thing about Facebook is it has more passionate users than any product I’ve ever heard of. And that is an odd thing for a public company, and it could mean it’s a very widely held stock.”

Why Zuck stayed home in California:

“I think it was in order to symbolically say, things aren’t going to be that different we’re going to stick to our knitting. That’s why they had a hackathon last night. It was very symbolically chosen… it’s the same thing as wearing the hoodie to the investor presentation.”

How Facebook’s IPO could finally make jeans and hoodies acceptable in business, once and for all:

“I think business in general is stuffy, and slow-moving, and needs a jolt of Red Bull, really. I don’t know why businesspeople always have to wear suits — it’s stupid, it’s idiotic, it doesn’t even look good, and it’s not very contemporary.

…If Facebook continues to retain this degree of prominence in the market economy, I think it will begin to have an influence that the CEO of that company doesn’t wear a suit.”

GameStop is hurting. Same store sales fell 5%-11% and revenue was down 17% to $2 billion. Profit fell to $72.5 million. Arguably, those are still huge numbers and presumably a new console refresh should push the company out of the doldrums. But what the company has just launched – a new MVNO called GameStop Mobile – is almost inexplicable.

GameStop Mobile is, in short, an unlimited data and voice offering for $55 a month (down to $20 a month for pay-as-you-go plans.) GameStop is just selling SIM cards and service and is running on AT&T’s network with some notable dead spots.

The stores actually do take trade-in electronics so, potentially, the company could begin selling unlocked GSM phones to customers who come in for games. Because of the intended audience – kids and the adults who bring them as well as a few die-hards who aren’t yet into PC gaming – it makes some sense for this service to exist.

The synergy also opens AT&T to new markets and, more important, places GameStop right at the nexus of mobile and gaming – a place it absolutely needs to be once future consoles stop accepting optical media.

However, with revenue down and hard-core gamers moving to services like Origin and Steam, there is little impetus for folks to trek out to the local GameStop for titles. Here’s hoping this latest attempt at monetizing the audience works as well as their midnight launches of Diablo III.