Google Street View Still Unwelcome in English Village

Broughton, Buckinghamshire, England, has found a way to get on the map—by staying off the map. Back in April, an angry mob defeated a Google Street View car by forming a human chain, and apparently this is news to UPI.

It was a good thing the villagers acted when they did—the search giant is so powerful that merely by thinking about mapping the village, they caused a spate of burglaries! Thankfully, the villagers’ diligence will prevent future . . . wait. . . .

So we’ve covered this story for five months, but I’m not really buying it this time around. Let’s look at the facts: Broughton is a neighborhood of less than 1500 people (2001 census). It’s considered part of nearby Milton Keynes, and the metro area has a total population of nearly 200,000—but nowhere else in that metropolitan area is part of Street View. On this map, Broughton is marker A, and this is the lowest/closest zoom level that has any Street View available (red circles added to highlight Street View enabled areas):

However, it does seem unlikely that Google cars were just passing through: Broughton is off the main road, and unless the Google driver was hungry, tired, or looking for a bathroom (and none of those things ever happen!), s/he probably wouldn’t have just wandered off the highway. Right?

No matter what Google’s intent, the fact remains that the villagers did stop the Google car, despite the fact that Google is well within EU privacy laws. Maybe they were so discouraged, they decided not to photograph anywhere in Milton Keynes.

UPI notes that European Street View projects have taken much longer because of privacy concerns. And yeah, England, Germany, Switzerland and Greece have objected—but so have Japan, Australia and even America.

Despite years of privacy complaints, Google continues to map new cities in new countries. Although not required by law, they’ve blurred faces and license plates and will even remove images from Street View if you feel uncomfortable with your exposure.

But even that may not be enough to keep you off the Internet. Maybe Broughton residents ought to get up in arms about Flickr and Panoramio:

Photos by stone40

What do you think? Is not wanting people or companies to photograph your house from the street a legitimate concern, or something well covered by case law?

Twitter Conferences Are In

As part of the Internet marketing industry have you done the conference circuit? Have you been to SES, SMX (put cardinal direction here), Adtech, PubCon etc, etc? On a yearly basis how many of these trips can you justify or get away with? Well, with shrinking budgets everywhere now you have to add the new spate of Twitter conferences to your hit list of things you absolutely have to do to get out of the office learn more about the industry.

TechCrunch tells us of the growing list of conferences that are starting to sprout up as a result of the use of (or confusion around the use of) Twitter for business purposes.

It looks like the trend of Twitter conferences is growing, with more events popping up around the country. As we’ve said in the past and will continue to say, there are tremendous opportunities for businesses, brands, non-profits and individuals to use Twitter as a tool for customer support, fund raising, brand management, advertising, job search and much more.

I have not attended one but I can imagine they must be pretty quiet because everyone is likely to be talking to everyone but those right in front of them. I gotta tell ya that when someone tweets that they are talking to someone I wonder if they are even listening to them or concentrating on their 140 characters of brilliance they are allowing the rest of their audience to ingest.

Of course, if you attended the 140 Character Conference in New York in June the venue itself (which was literally underground) forced Twitterheads to actually listen to others since there was practically no connectivity for the attendees.

Twitter is so fascinating in that it appears that so many folks are finding ways to monetize the service without the service monetizing itself. At least with Google (which face it, is why most of these conferences exist in the first place) makes money and knows that these conferences will only help it make more.

So if you are tired of the usual shows and you need more opportunities to ‘network’ then think about these:

• TWTRCN 09 DC- for non profits and government types. October 22 in Washington, DC.
• 140 Twitter Conference / LA – Endorsed by Biz Stone. Need we say more? September in Los Angeles (for those who didn’t get the LA part of the title).
• 140 Characters Twitter Conference – Jeff Pulver’s deal goes west coast on October 27th in Los Angeles.
• Cool Twitter Conferences- Apparently this is a traveling road show that has stops scheduled in Boston and San Francisco.

So don’t miss your chance to blow off work get out and learn more about Twitter and the future of communications. Hotel bars in the areas of these meetings can’t wait to serve you!

WSJ Embargoes Embargoes

It’s been eight months since TechCrunch announced that they would no longer honor embargoes, with several other sites jumping on that bandwagon in the interim. One of the issues here was undermining the credibility of the blogosphere at large. As Trisha Lyn Fawver put it,

A lot of the complaints that real journalists have about blogs is that they don’t adhere to the same ethics and standards as real journalistic endeavors do, or real reporters.

This is just another one of those things that proves them right :/ It makes bloggers in general look bad in my opinion.

No worries, folks! Now, the mainstream media is joining in—the Wall Street Journal has a new anti-embargo policy for its editorial staff. Rather, like TechCrunch, they’ll accept exclusives, and honor embargoes when the story is big enough.

I have to assume that means the WSJ will agree to embargoes only when they’re the only one getting the story or that the story is too good to pass up for some silly little policy. And even then, it almost sounds like they would prefer you to query with the story’s hook and the embargo terms for them to choose.

Unlike TechCrunch, the WSJ is NOT saying that they will agree to an embargo and go back on their word as a policy. Instead, paidContent reports, WSJ reporters are encouraged to . . . you know, do actual research. While expensive in an industry that’s struggling to adapt, in some respects, this could actually be good for the WSJ and MSM at large. PC explains:

In general, WSJ reporters will no longer be part of a herd of journalist briefings, which results in a spate of stories from various outlets all at the same time. If PR professionals approach them on a story, then they can refuse and go around and hunt down the story if they want to.

paidContent also looked at the policy in action: recently with the Yahoo homepage relaunch story, both Jessica Vascellaro and Kara Swisher went around the embargo by talking directly to sources—though, as PC points out, they did so with varying degrees of success/credibility/violating the embargo. As I said in December, “the practice of sending a full release with the headline ‘embargoed until such-and-such EST on such-and-such’ is taking your life in your hands.”

What do you think? Does talking to independent sources after learning about a story through an embargoed release and going live early violate an embargo? Will the WSJ’s new policy affect other MSM outlets? Is this the death of the embargo?

Stop Saying Sorry, Start Getting Really Social

With the recent spate of companies such as United Airways, Domino’s  Pizza and Habitat UK, being hit by negative publicity online, one could be forgiven for thinking that social media can be used as a cure-all for such issues. But in fact, social media will only ever be a band-aid for such problems, unless it’s [...]

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Facebook Working to Amp Up Ad Opps

Facebook has been a little quiet as of late. Apparently if you aren’t a search engine moving in on the flagship product of your sworn enemy or you’re not the media darling with apparently little or no security in your fiefdom it’s just not news.

Well, it looks like Facebook has been keeping their heads down and their noses clean and doing something that they have deemed pretty important; finding ways to make money. The Inside Facebook blog tells of three new additions to the ad network offering that make it easier for advertisers to target folks within Facebook. These additions come on the heels of some other improvements that are almost flying under the radar but the numbers are starting to show some progress. Considering that these actions are around actually doing business it’s a breath of fresh air as compared to the speculation and drama that is in the Internet industry news.

The recent spate of enhancements to Facebook Ads is continuing today with several new ways to target Facebook ad campaigns. Last week, Facebook turned on time scheduling, and this weekend, ad editing. Today, it’s enabling three new features: connection targeting, multiple country targeting, and birthday targeting.

Here’s a quick summary of three new enhancements

Connection Targeting

This allows advertisers to hit specific groups within their network of connections. This targeting allows an advertiser to directly put ads in front of fans of any of their pages, users of any of their applications, members of any of their groups and attendees of any of their events.

Basically, Facebook wants to make it easy for business and brands to increase engagement with any users they’re connected to on Facebook through Facebook Ads, using it as a paid notification or cross-promotion channel. You can also target users who are connected to one of your Pages/Groups/Apps/Events but not to another in order to do more specific cross-promotions.

Multiple Country Targeting

Now rather than having to create individual ads for each country, advertisers can now create one ad for up to 25 countries so the benefits of this offering are obvious.

Birthday Targeting

While I don’t pay much attention to my own birthday, many folks on Facebook really do. Facebook sees that and is allowing advertisers to target these folks at a time that they may be so giddy that they’ll buy something.

The expectation is that Facebook is going to be adding enhancements pretty rapidly in the near future. When you have over 200 million ‘members’ it can be incredibly powerful to slice that group into more and more targeted segments so advertisers will have success without breaking the bank. Should be interesting to watch. Remember that $500 million in revenue number that was floating around recently? There will need to be innovation to get there and maybe Facebook gets it.