There have been lots of announcements coming from Google lately, as usual.  Incidentally, you can get a ton of good news about Google and Google AdWords, by simply setting up an alert for “google” and “adwords.”  I usually start out my day browsing the latest news about them and Yahoo!, as well as cruising the blogosphere.  Here’re a few Google announcements I’ve encountered over the past week:

1. Google is investing in Pixazza.  This is a startup company that enables web publishers to receive revenue by including advertisements on images in their sites.  Pixazza allows site visitors to see products displayed inside larger images that are available for purchase.  The buzz is this could be an AdSense-for-images type venture.  AdSense has been huge for Google.  This and using links to determine rankings were the two big things Google has come up with that have made the company huge (besides giving the company the name “Google” – so I guess that’s three big things if you want to count that).  It makes sense that they’d continue their quest to make the Internet more of an ad-based medium with images.

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We’ve all been there: You go to a website, you like what you see, and when it comes time to get in touch with the company and tell them you’re interested or ask for help, all you see is an email address.

That website just left you hanging.

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We’ve all witnessed the darker side of use the web at the personal level, from the clouds of foul language surrounding forum conversations, to disturbingly blunt, or other times sparse, profiles on social networking sites, to the massive music and video free-for-alls. The marketing-in-disguise ‘Friend me’ messages that find us through Myspace and Facebook, or random plugs for businesses that pop-up mid forum thread, can be more or less offensive depending on how you define ethical when it comes to the web. In either case though, a valid question has been posed as to whether morals as we know them really do distort themselves when we engage online, either with personal or business motivations?

Pure Visibility co-founder Catherine Juon argues that this is not the case in an article on Social Media ethics posted on last Thursday’s Ann Arbor Business Review. She suggests that at least when it comes to business, our ethical codes are not compromised when we engage with social media.

Here’s a short list of some of the quandaries that arise when we use social media on behalf of our companies:

Difficulty to separate business use from personal, for example, when we ‘run into’ someone we know on twitter and a non-work related conversation begins.

Lifting of statistics, facts, or theories found online in preparing deliverables for work. For example a report may require the rationale for a design change, and in writing we stumble across an eloquent explanation in someone’s blog post on the topic. Do we cite the author?

Contradiction of a business value in the context of our personal, non-work use of social media. For example, we write a blog post that slams one of the businesses strategies.

Or, pretending to be someone we are not, such as posting or replying via social media on behalf of a busy CEO.

I would suggest that for many individuals, ethical boundaries become easier to cross in certain situations like those above. The easiest way to figure out if this is the case is to imagine a parallel situation that might occur offline, for example comparing one’s feeling of obligation to cite a blogger to the obligation to site the author of a book.

In some cases, this exercise might suggest that we are seeing may be different ethical challenges, rather than a new trend towards ethic-abandonment. A parallel situation to spam ‘Friend me’ messages from some business is the sort of cloaking that advertisers do when they send us marketing material in unmarked envelopes. Businesses have always gone to what some would consider inappropriate lengths to get their message out, and the web presents new ways of doing that.

I think the most interesting ethical boundary that gets crossed is also perhaps the one many cross most easily. For example, I personally feel at least some obligation not to engulf the web, and thus the people’s attention, with useless information. But how many Wikipedia entries of sketchy corporate-motivated worth exist on that site? How many business owners thought twice about posting them?

To state an example, most of us do not realize that ‘pure visibility’ actually refers to the basis of nineteenth century art-theorist Konrad Fiedler’s theory of a level of fundamental aesthetic forms similar in abstraction to the gestalt principles. After all, how would we find out? The ease of social media content creation (combined with the general ease of web content creation) have together completely buried beneath social networking profiles, news items, and blog posts the few references to this theory that do exist online.

Does anyone else care?

YouTube Now 25 Percent Of All Google Searches.* Link Below

Pure Visibility is getting ready to launch videos on a couple of our client’s websites as well as our own site. I have a background in film, so I have fallen into the role of “video guy” and have the task of helping clients get their videos online. Even though I am a directed and produced many independent films, creating and posting website videos is a different challenge.

Some of the questions I encountered were: How should the content differ? Where should I host the video? Where should I place it on the website? How can I measure the effectiveness? We are just getting started in the world of video and I have not answered a lot of these questions, but I am starting with what I know about online advertising by starting with identifying goals.

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The web is awash with alarmingly bad copy, and equally reprehensible lists of the ingredients of ‘good copywriting’. I personally find the fact that there are entire blogs devoted to this topic a bit alarming – as a former writer, I consider the communication of insight to be writing’s primary objective, and believe that (outside of say, experimental dissections of poetic form) the time we spend devoted to the discussion of writing guidelines and elements of form should be minimal compared to that devoted to the practice of creating such writing. Today, though, I found an exception to that rule in Mandy Brown’s thoughtful post on web writing on her blog A List Apart.

I like the idea of abandoning the over-used emphasis on conversion actions as the ultimate goal of website visits, in favor of creating and then preserving a space for reading. Brown has excellent ideas on how to do so, such as increasing the font size of the more weighted first paragraph, and increasing the whitespace padding on each side of the text (the usefulness of this second pointer is easily verified through comparing the experience of reading the post on Brown’s blog to this one).

The only point I’d like to add to Brown’s discussion is a further emphasis on being transparent on who the writer in cases where you’d like readers do more than just skim. Brown describes reading as a solitary process, but I tend to believe that as alone as we may be, reading is a practice of empathy and identification with a writer who is anonymous only in that they are unseen. Our sense of the author is one of the primary classificatory principles we use to judge what we read, and our ability to intellectually connect with writers is what makes reading an undeniably pleasurable experience. This echoes the empirical findings on the importance of establishing the credibility of an online source.

Without a strong sense of author, we are more likely to hesitate when it comes to abandoning ourselves to the experience. Add this to the hesitancy that is by now bred into the experience of online writing for many of us, thanks to a long history of horrendous web writing. As Brown says, designing a web page that reads well is by no means easy.

I welcome thoughts on the more specific aspects that now remain open to discussion – such as, how do such ideas apply differently to blogs, versus personal sites, versus company websites, versus informative sites?