Do Privacy Policies Help Establish a Site’s Trustworthiness & Other Daily Finds for March 27, 2008

Here are some great and newsworthy posts I came across today including a look at whether having a privacy policy on your site or not helps to establish trustworthiness in the eyes of search engines and YouTube is now offering statistics for user submitted videos.

Do Privacy Policies Help Establish a Site’s Trustworthiness? (Search Engine Land)
Bill Slawski wonders whether or not search engines might care whether a web site has a privacy policy or not. Is the content of a page less relevant or more relevant if there’s a link on it to information about how any data collected about visitors might be used? Is it possible that a search engine might consider that the source of content is more trustworthy, and more authoritative if it does include such a page? There is also some good discussion going on over at Sphinn.

YouTube Now Offering Video Statistics (TechCrunch)
YouTube users will now have access to in depth statistics for their videos. Stats include how often videos are viewed in different geographic regions and how popular they are relative to all videos in that market over a given period of time. The lifecycle of videos is tracked, including how long it takes for a video to become popular, and what happens to video views as popularity peaks.