This might very well turn into a reality. Google Google has been granted a patent named “Claiming Real Estate in Panoramic or 3D Mapping Environments for Advertising,” detailing “techniques for identifying groups of features in an online geographic view of a real property and replacing and/or augmenting the groups of features with advertisement.”

The idea is ingenious, really. Most of those obsolete ads on billboards serve very little purpose in the virtual world of Street View, but if one could replace them with up-to-date advertisements, they could be another source of income for the giant from Mountain View.

Of course, there’s a jungle of legal obstacles that Google would have to solve before actually going through with this. Who owns the virtual billboards? And what about the companies who paid for the original ads on them? ReadWriteWeb points out some of the possible issues, but one thing is certain: Google’s strategy of amassing virtual real estate will pay off one way or another.

via Real-Time Ads Coming to Google Street View?.

As the number of services that let us share our locations increases, it’s apparent that most of the more popular one use a gimmick that encourages us to let everyone know where we currently are.

Just look at Foursquare’s leaderboard and mayor deals, Gowalla’s collectable items and Waze’s ‘Road Goodies’. Most of the big names in geolocation are using games to get us used to sharing.

It’s understandable that these gimmicks are required – very few people are comfortable with publicly sharing where they currently are. Give someone the chance to become ‘Mayor’ of their local corner shop and they’re more likely to open up to the idea to broadcasting their location.

The trouble with the current crop of location-based games is that they’re quite unsophisticated. Collecting items around a real world map or becoming the ‘mayor’ of somewhere just because you go there a lot are hollow victories. Sooner or later people will get bored of Foursquare, Gowalla and their ilk. What happens then?

Certainly there will be another generation of more advanced location-sharing games in time, but will people ever get used to just sharing their location without the sweetener of gaming glory?

Pure location-sharing services like Brightkite and Google Latitude have yet to gain traction and very few people have as-yet started using Twitter’s geolocation service regularly to tag their tweets with their location. At the time of writing, of the past two hours of tweets from the 1300 early adopters and geeks that I follow, none of them are location tagged. Many of these people are using geolocation-enabled apps like Tweetie 2 or Twidroid – they’re just not using the feature.

While the technology is there to let people know where we are at all times, will we ever actually want to do that unless it’s part of a game? It would be a pretty significant change in human definitions of privacy to be confortable with people knowing where we are at all times. What could kickstart a change in that direction?

A post over at TechCrunch recently suggested that Facebook will change everything.When Facebook finally gets around to adding location-sharing features it will open up the possibilities to a much more mainstream audience than start-ups like Foursquare and Gowalla can currently touch.

The question is this: even if location sharing is easy to do with Facebook, will users ever get over the lingering fear that they’ll be stalked and killed or that their house will be burgled while they’re out? They’re both reasonable fears and I believe we’ll get over them in time, but don’t expect your Great Aunt Maude to be sharing her location online this time next year… unless she wants to become mayor of the old folks’ home.

via Is location sharing just a game?.

Here is an interesting view on how the new live search results will effect Google search results in the future.  It really changes the search model from SEO driven sites to making sure that your community is talking about your brand and linking back to your site…  I think we are seeing a real shift in what brands are going to have to do to make their brands show up in search.

Lady Gaga – Google Search.

Update:

Here is a screen capture of this post showing up in the live stream:

via Interview: Andy Berndt, Managing Director, Google Creative Lab: Bridging Digital And Traditional | paidContent.

Lick the Skillet: Tour Dates.

Bill Young Productions serves the concert and touring industry as the
leading provider of advertising media products: Radio, TV, Print,
Animation, Multi-Media and Web Based Media.
Facebook | Bill Young Productions.

Now, a lot of content that was previously available on the site leads to pages that tell you that the content you are trying to access is no longer available. They have also gone and removed some of the RSS feeds on the site and replaced it with a big fat RSS feed of the top stories. So now you can no longer get an individual feed for a topic you might find interesting, you can now only get the main RSS. FAIL.

Today, I made the mistake of following a link to the site and saw this at the top of the page:

“This site is best viewed with Internet Explorer 7+, Firefox 3, Safari 4 and Chrome 2. Click here to upgrade.”

Seriously? What year is this? And by looking at the page, I see their problem, JavaScript. Whoever has developed the JS navigation menu or wherever they purchased it from doesn’t support FireFox 2.

Really? I think that means that you are alienating a bunch of visitors by presenting them with a broken (embarrassing) looking site and giving them a borken navigation structure which is a big FAIL. They need to either fire the developer or find a new software package. JS isn’t that hard these days to get it to be cross-browser compliant and there are plenty of people that are willing to do competent work…

original article:

Football – Newsday.

Site seen with FF2:

Update: I was going to post a comment on that article and then also found:

Which is another big time FAIL because they are not properly displaying their terms of service…