Update: So far, Google has referred me to the same response they gave Stay, but I’ve inquired further. We’ll keep you posted.

Original Article: If you were under the impression that the controversy surrounding Google Buzz was starting to die down, think again. So far, we’ve mostly heard about privacy issues, which Google has publicly addressed. They’ve also made changes based on user feedback. Now, we’re hearing about possible copyright issues. Google appears to be republishing full articles without permission, and stripping out any ads that may be in those articles.

One can easily see why any blogger or publisher wouldn’t be very pleased with this scenario. Not only are they serving up full articles that others have written without sending authors the traffic or even ad clicks, but if a user reads the article through Buzz within their Gmail account, they will likely see the ads Google itself serves.

Blogger Jesse Stay of Stay N’ Alive brings the subject up in a post, claiming that this is exactly what is happening to his content. However, Google did respond to him, saying they would “have the ad scraping issue fixed by next week.” That would solve one problem, but presumably, this doesn’t change the fact that they are showing full article text, which is an interesting choice on Google’s part, considering the controversy surrounding how Google News aggregates publishers’ content.

That is a different situation entirely, because Google News does not publish full articles (unless they come from one of their partners). They simply provide a title, small snippet, and link to the original source, hence driving traffic to that source. Based on Stay’s story, Google will not likely be driving much traffic by showing full articles in Buzz. We’ve contacted Google for comment on this (we’ll post when we receive it).

One might compare reading an article through Buzz to reading one through a feed reader, like Google Reader. Sometimes you can read a feed in its full text, but the author has the ability to prevent this. With Buzz, the full-text articles appear to be coming simply from people sharing the articles, which is out of the author’s control (we asked Google if their is a way authors can prevent this…again, we’ll post a response when we receive it).

Related posts:

1. Does Google Buzz Deserve All the Criticism It’s Gotten?
2. Will Google Buzz Change the Social Media Game?
3. Monitoring Your Reputation with Google Buzz

Clearly a lot of people still care. If you fall into this category, you may be interested to know that YouTube will be streaming his press conference today live at 8am PT at YouTube.com/citizentube.”We’re experimenting with a live-streamed press conference on YouTube,” YouTube’s Chris Dale tells WebProNews. “Anyone in the world can watch the Tiger Woods press conference.”

Regardless of whether or not you will be tuning into the Tiger Woods press conference, the larger picture is that YouTube has simply become a legitimate news source (they do supply non-celebrity news as well). It has grown a lot since its launch. It used to be considered a great place to upload silly cat videos, and while it still is, it is also now a place to get breaking news as it happens.

This is not the first time YouTube has offered live streaming of a press conference. For example, back in April, they offered an Obama press conference on his first 100 days in office.

YouTube is the second largest search engine on the web, so a lot of people are bound to be watching Tiger’s words there. The more events YouTube streams live, the more people are likely to consider it as a go-to news source.

It is worth mentioning that a variety of other sites will be providing coverage as well, but considering the size of YouTube’s user-base, I’d say it has an advantage.

Related posts:

1. How Press Releases Can Be Great For Search
2. Iraq Comes to YouTube
3. YouTube Partner Program Turns Two

Is LinkedIn part of your strategy? Comment here.

We asked Howes why he thinks people don’t generally associate LinkedIn with driving traffic like they would with other social networks like Facebook or Twitter. “Their perception of LinkedIn is of a resume, or a way to get a job, but they don’t see all of the powerful tools within LinkedIn that allow you to drive traffic back to your site,” he tells WebProNews.

LinkedIn has announced that it is now being integrated into Microsoft Outlook, in one of the numerous convergences of social media and email that are increasingly taking place.

“Anytime you can increase the size of your network on LinkedIn, it will give you the opportunity to distribute your content to more people, therefore driving more traffic back to your site,” says Howes. “The Outlook integration is a way to connect more with your current LinkedIn contacts, and also help you grow you network as well.”

In some ways, LinkedIn traffic may even be more valuable than traffic from other social networks and sites. This is simply due to the generally professional nature of LinkedIn itself.

“You need to take into consideration that LinkedIn has the highest average household income per user over any other social networking site (even NYTimes.com and BusinessWeek.com readers),” Howes tells us. “That being said, these are business decision makers you are targeting with your traffic from LinkedIn. The network is for real, and it will only continue to grow in time as there are currently 60 million professionals.”

Now consider that LinkedIn could be one of your top traffic sources if you put enough effort into cultivating it as such. On a scale of 1-10, Howes says he’d rank it as a 7 or 8 on importance level for using it. “For me it is always one of the top 5 referring sites that drives traffic to my blogs,” he says.

Howes went through ten steps in a post at ProBlogger.net. While the post is geared at driving traffic to your blog, you may find the advice helpful for other types of sites. In summary (he goes into much more detail about each of these in the post), the ten steps are:

1. Complete your profile.
2. Increase you connections.
3. Customize your website links.
4. Answer questions.
5. Update your status.
6. Join niche groups.
7. Post comments in groups.
8. Add RSS feeds to groups.
9. Create a group.
10. Add the blog application to your profile.

Now that LinkedIn can be integrated into Microsoft Outlook, I would suggest looking at getting that set up as well (steps here), if you want to get serious about including LinkedIn in your traffic strategy.

Of course there are plenty of other ways to use LinkedIn as a tool to increase the success of your business. As Howes lists, you can sell products, find new clients/employees, generate leads, receive funding, obtain sponsorships, sell tickets to events, as get press coverage to name a few.

Have you considered LinkedIn’s potential as a significant traffic source? Do you already get significant traffic from LinkedIn? Let us know.

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3. Driving Traffic with MapQuest and its New Search Engine

Klau says Buzz monitoring is “definitely” as important as monitoring another critical component of reputation management,  Google Blog Search. “As a product manager on Blogger, I regularly monitor Twitter and Buzz in addition to blog comments to look for users having problems or sharing interesting ideas,” he tells us. “It’s important to go where the users are – otherwise you’ll miss out on conversations that are happening, and miss the opportunity to help solve a problem, learn about an issue that needs attention, or share a tip that deserves a broader audience.”

“The real-time nature of tools like Buzz, along with the ease with which users can share and redistribute info, makes the amplification of information even more powerful than it was before,” adds Klau. “News has the opportunity to spread virally, very quickly.”

“That’s great if it’s good news, but potentially damaging if it’s bad news,” he says. “That’s why it’s so important to both look for conversations happening about topics that matter to you, and to engage where appropriate. When users know you’re listening, and in a position to help, they can go from angry to appreciative pretty quickly.”

Klau discusses Buzz monitoring in more detail in a post on his personal blog. In it, he provides more information about specifically how he uses Buzz for monitoring purposes, and provides steps to do it like he does.

First, he says to enable Gmail’s “Quick Links” tab, which puts a box below Labels in Gmail. Then he says to go to Buzz, type in a query, and click “Add Quick Link” in the Quick Links box. This creates a bookmark to the query, allowing for easy access to the latest “buzz” on a query.

Are you using Google Buzz as part of your reputation management strategy?

Related posts:

1. Does Google Buzz Deserve All the Criticism It’s Gotten?
2. Google Buzz Draws New Content-Scraping Controversy
3. Introducing Google Buzz

Original Article: Yesterday at about 2pm PleaseRobMe went live. PleaseRobMe is a site set up by a few developers who want to spread awareness about how easy it would be for people to rob your home if you share too much information about yourself online, specifically your location…even more specifically through Foursquare. The site displays a list of messages asking people if they know the whole world has access to their location. All of these are drawn directly from the PleaseRobMe Twitter account.

We asked Boy Van Amstel, one of those developers if they were concerned that followers of PleaseRobMe’s Twitter account could actually be interested in robbing people. Van Amstel responded, “With just the information [from] pleaserobme.com it would be almost impossible to do so. However as people share more information about themselves, such as their home address, it might become a possibility. We think it’s important to think about that and what it means if you share location information on services like Twitter…it’s very easy to get it, even directly from Twitter’s search page.”

So far, Van Amstel says Foursquare is the only service it watches to determine who is sharing their location with the world. “It’s not about the service, it’s about the information that’s being shared. We think it’s important to realize that something you post on Twitter isn’t necessarily private. Everybody is able to read it, unless you protect your messages.”

One can only assume that FourSquare isn’t entirely pleased with the launch of PleaseRobMe. That’s the second time the service has had a not-so-positive light cast upon it this week. Earlier in the week, there were reports of Foursquare cheating. This could have an effect on the decisions of businesses to give Foursquare users special offers, a practice that is becoming more commonplace.

Regardless, PleaseRobMe bluntly delivers an important reminder to socially active people that just because they’re using the “virtual” world, that doesn’t mean it can’t potentially have real-world consequences.

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2. Google Lets Users Find Results Based on Location
3. Facebook Users Set Up Fan Group(s) for Suicide Pilot

Original Article: By now, you’ve probably heard the news that Joseph Andrew Stack intentionally flew a plane into an IRS building in Austin, Texas. He appeared to have left a rant at EmbeddedArt.com before he did it, but the site has since been taken offline, and replaced with the following message:

This website has been taken offline due to the sensitive nature of the events that transpired in Texas this morning and in compliance with a request from the FBI. To see an archived version of the original letter, please go here: http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2010/0218102stack1.html. Please visit our forum if you wish to discuss anything related to this incident: Texas crash pilot left suicide note on Web site – embeddedart.com.

Regards,
T35 Hosting – www.T35.com

Stack has already had a Facebook Fan Group set up in his “honor” by people admiring what he has done. At the time of this writing, it already has over 160 fans. Some on the page are praising what he did, while others are calling him and his fans names. Social media at its finest.

On an interesting side note, Google doesn’t appear to be displaying its real-time search results for “Austin” or “Texas”. I just find this slightly odd, being how it is one of the day’s biggest news stories. To be fair, the results do show up for queries like “IRS”, “plane”, and “crash”. This shows another example of where the feature still has some room for improvement.

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The Google Buzz team has had quite a week. Their new product quickly lived up to its name, though mostly for the wrong reasons, generating buzz about its own privacy issues. Calling the original Google Buzz privacy settings lax would be a gross understatement. It created a storm of complaints, best put in perspective by Harriet Jacobs in her F*ck You, Google piece.

In short, when you logged into your Gmail account Google simply took all of your frequent contacts and mashed them up into an active social network without much input from people they were connecting. If you exchanged a lot of emails with your editor and your under-cover sources from the same Gmail account, now they were connected through your public profile if you didn’t happen to catch the Buzz opt-out checkbox. Or what about using the same Gmail account for emailing your husband and your boyfriend? Well now they’re introduced – you’re welcome.

Yes, sounds like a pretty naïve and reckless way to implement a major feature but Google protested that they just wanted to help and meant no evil. After all, their CEO Eric Schmidt had an interesting take on expectations for privacy online: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place”. That was said nary two months before Google Buzz launched – I guess people like Harriet Jacobs and her abusive ex-husband just didn’t listen.

Oops, Our Bad: Thanks For All the Users…

Since the launch, Google has done an amazingly quick about-face and pledged to do better. The latest set of changes make signing up for Buzz a tangibly more transparent experience, probably what it should have been at launch time. The press has mostly applauded their quick response and patted Google on the back for their responsiveness and keen focus on Gmail user experience.

But let’s see what Google’s naiveté about privacy issues meant for Google Buzz:

• 9 million posts and comments
• 300,000 mobile check-ins per day
• Buzz already rivals Twitter for sheer network size

Those are some pretty impressive numbers for any online launch, but to achieve this in under three days is just unheard of. Actually, there are businesses that do generate this level of interests from their prospects in that short of a time-frame and Gmail deals with them on a daily basis: spammers.

The ‘9 Million-Post’ Question

The question is did Google simply make a “mistake” and not consider these fairly serious privacy issues, or did the massive amount of spam Gmail churns through each day actually demonstrate effectiveness of a new business model?

The former is hard to believe when you consider the army of privacy lawyers Google has and their job to review privacy considerations in revenue-generating AdSense programs. This is especially critical in Gmail, where you are shown ads based on emails you exchange. Gmail achieves this by reading through all your email and matching you up with advertisers interested in addressing your daily struggles. After the initial outrage over this concept a few years ago most users have resigned to trust Google that they have their best interests in mind.

Your Trust, Google’s Toilet Paper

Google Buzz violates this trust in a serious way. In light of Google’s experience in this field, it is hard not to take Google’s mea culpa with a huge dose of skepticism. After all, if Google had made Buzz an opt-in service – something that users had to enable rather than be tricked into joining – they would be just another social network trying to compete with Facebook and Twitter.

Leveraging millions of Gmail users was a shortcut simply too tempting to avoid. The fact that Google decided to revise Google Buzz activation process over the weekend is simply a red herring: they only needed a few days to convert some of the hundred million plus Gmail users into millions of Buzz users, and become the de-facto Twitter competitor over a single long weekend.

Google “fixing” this privacy snafu a few days later is equivalent to spammers adding an “Unsubscribe” link to an email that’s already done its damage.

The strong impression from the last few days is that Gmail users were a pawn in a very cynical game: Google trying desperately to become a player in the social networking space, after the Orkut launch and their acquisition of a handful of other companies in this space failed to produce results.

We’re Not Evil

This is a tough act to pull off when your motto is Don’t Be Evil. It’s been said that eventually Google’s shareholders will push it to make product moves and decisions that end up hurting its brand in a quest for monetization. It will be interesting to see if Google comes out of this with their motto intact.

Related posts:

1. Does Google Buzz Deserve All the Criticism It’s Gotten?
2. Google Buzz Draws New Content-Scraping Controversy
3. Introducing Google Buzz

Google

Google allows you to take a virtual tour of the Olympics in 3D. They recently released updates in Google Earth’s 3D Buildings layer, which showcase Olympic venues (54 buildings). Models range from downtown event centers to ski lifts and spectator bleachers. The Official site for the Olympics uses the models itself.

Vectoral Elevation has “an interactive artwork” that allows users to direct light beams and transform Vancouver’s skyline until the end of the month using a custom interface built on Google Earth and Map APIs. It lets users design big light sculptures by directing 20 robotic searchlights located around English Bay.

Google has also taken Street View to Olympics country:

Bing

Microsoft launched a new Bing Maps application that pulls photos from Flickr, associates them with Bing Maps Streetside photos, and overlays them stretching the photo to form fit where in the world it belongs. The app is currently available in Vancouver (among several other places).

Bing actually has a Winter Olympics-specific Maps app as well. “In coordination with NBCOlympics.com, get up to the minute information about the 2010 Winter Olympics in everything from venues to news,” says Bing’s Chris Pendleton. “Click the Venues bar on the left to see the different venues where the events are taking place. Click the Medal Count bar to see every country mapped out with the number of bronze, silver and gold medals awarded to the respective country. Click the Winter Games News and Blogs to get the latest information about the Winter Olympic Games from news sources and bloggers on site. Finally, check out the Winter Games Tweets which filters information from our Twitter Maps application specific to the Olympics.” Bing talks about more Vancouver apps that feature Bing Maps here.

Bing is also giving its home page some Olympics love. It will be updating it with various photos from the events. “And while we’ll show some winners, this won’t be the standard parade of medalists,” says Bing’s Stephanie Horstmanshof. “We’re out to show the great moments from the games: the alpine skier from Ghana, the debut of Ski Cross as an Olympic event, anything to do with curling—all with the stunning imagery that you’ve come to expect on the Bing homepage.”

More ways that Bing and MSN are involved in the Olympics are discussed here.

Yahoo/Flickr

Yahoo has a games-dedicated site, as well as a new Olympic mobile site at m.yahoo.com/olympics. This will provide coverage with live results, upcoming events, medal counts, photos, news, commentary, etc.

Yahoo also has a Yahoo Sports Olympics Coverage app for My Yahoo, that gives you more such information.

On Yahoo’s Flickr, the IOC, the official governing body of the Olympics, has set up their official Olympic photo group for people to share their photos of the events and of Vancouver.

Facebook

The IOC also has an official Olympic Games Page on Facebook. “Through the page, you can stay updated on activities and events at the Games, while sharing your own stories about what the Olympics mean to you,” says Alex Huot, head of social media for the IOC. “You’ll even be able to stay updated on future games even after this year’s Winter Olympics end.”

Alex also encourages people to use Facebook to become a fan of athletes and Olympics teams, play the Vancouver 2010 Official Minigame, and share photos.

Twitter

Twitter has a list of verified athletes from the Olympics who will be tweeting. Fans will of course be tweeting non-stop about things that happen at the Olympics throughout the events.

These are just a few of many ways fans of the Olympics can engage with the events on the web. How are you planning on staying connected?

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The study found 55 percent of consumers felt positively when companies responded to a social media posting, with only 5 percent reacting negatively and 40 percent remaining neutral.

Twenty-two companies consisting of Fortune 500 and Fortune 100 companies, provided information on their social media policies to see how it compared with their consumers’ expectations. The study included feedback from 27,000 consumers about their use and impressions of social media.

“This is a significant finding for the 22 companies and reinforces the value of monitoring social media sites,” said Richard Shapiro, CEO, TCFCR.

“However, it’s critical for companies to be aware of the fine line between using social media to connect with customers versus being in a constant selling mode.”

Other key highlights include:

• 60% of consumers engage in social media sites (62% women, 57% men).
• While the overall social media usage averaged 60%, the percentages by age closely mirrored the general population with 35 year olds and younger using it 80% of the time or more and 36 to 50 year olds using it an average of 60% of the time. Of those consumers in their 70’s and 80’s, 21% are visiting social media sites.
• Slightly more than 85% consumers utilize on Facebook, where all the participating companies have a presence, 38% on YouTube, 19% on MySpace, and almost 13% on Twitter.
• One in ten consumers who did contact consumer affairs departments from the 22 companies polled posted dialogue to a social media site. 58% percent of the women posted a positive comment, compared to 49% for men. 35% of the males posted a negative comment versus 26% of women.

Related posts:

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2. Is Social Media ROI Unmeasurable?
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“Once launched to users, the dashboards will serve as a personalized destination on Facebook for users to interact with their favorite applications, discover news ones and receive application updates related to recent activity,” a spokesperson for Facebook tells WebProNews. “For developers, the Applications and Games dashboards will provide new opportunities for communication with users, as well as discoverability of their applications.”

On the Facebook Developer Blog, Jordan M. Alperin outlines the following features:

• Recently used applications and games: The top section of the dashboards will prominently display applications that a user has recently interacted with, making it easy to reengage with the applications they use most often. This section will also include a link to a page where users can see all of the applications they have interacted with, whether or not they have been bookmarked.
• News items: Applications will have the ability to display news stories, giving you the ability to communicate with your users and alert them to news related to your application, such as, “It’s your turn in a game against Jared” or “The leaderboard was reset 6 hours ago, come play!” You’ll have the option to set global news items, which will be visible to all users, or personal news items, which target a specific user. The news component will appear as a text field next to each application in the dashboard.
• Mentioning Users: Using simple syntax, you can render users’ names and links to their profiles in news and activities.
• Your Friends’ Recent Activity: The dashboards will display some of the applications that a user’s friends are using along with information about relevant activities within the application. You’ll set these activity stories via the Dashboard API.
• Your Friends Play: Another way we’ll help users discover new applications is by showing them a number of their friends who frequently use applications, and the applications those friends use.
• Directory: The Directory section of the dashboard will show the applications that currently appear in the “Applications You May Like” section of the Application Directory. We will also link to the Application Directory in this section.
• Suggestions: On the right hand side we’ll have a Suggestions area where Facebook will highlight applications we think users might like, based on the applications they and their friends are using.
• Counters and home page placement: “Games” and “Applications” links will appear on users’ home pages and will link to the dashboards, once the new home page launches to users in the coming weeks. Bookmarked applications will also have prominence on the home page, and can be accompanied by Counters that you can set to let users know there are actions for them to take within your applications.

Here is what the Games Dashboard looks like:

Earlier this week, Facebook announced that users can receive notifications from apps in their email. Also, they will phase out updates from apps in the notifications channel on Facebook.

Related Articles:

> Respond to Facebook Comments From Your Email

> Pingdom Names Facebook “Most Engaging Social Network”

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