As a photographer I don’t really agree with this amendment which came into force on the 16th February (bold text mine):

A person commits an offence who—

1. elicits or attempts to elicit information about an individual who is or has been—
   1. a member of Her Majesty’s forces,
   2. a member of any of the intelligence services, or
   3. a constable,
   which is of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism, or
2. publishes or communicates any such information.

A person guilty of an offence under this section is liable—

1. on conviction on indictment, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 10 years or to a fine, or to both;

Now what about Street View? I won’t publish this picture but this link should take you to a page on Street View.

Note that Google may edit the image after I’ve posted this but right now the left hand policeman is clearly visible and happens to be standing outside the residence of a well known politician.

Does this fall foul of the Terrorism act?

[Edit: that was quick, they have already removed the image but you can move up and down the street to still get a clear image of the other policeman.]

First I read this and now I read that... Then laughed my socks off at how blatant a PR tool the Google Blog is. C'mon guys at least allow comments and make it a conversation.

I've been having a quick look at Google's Open Social... They really need to get better documentation so I'm not exactly sure about the fine detail. There are a few bits on developing widgets but nothing at all on hosting them which is a big chunk to be missing in my opinion. Maybe they are holding off publishing to stop a proliferation of social sites popping up and competing with their "launch partners"?

Some other random thoughts:

• You need to implement your widgets as Google gadgets
• All the samples are based on Orkut so it's not clear if a Google account is required - if it is then that's bad
• There doesn't seem to be any sort of download available, probably as the JavaScript is hosted by the Google gadget system

They have been quite clever calling it "Open" Social instead of "Google" Social but it still sounds like a lock-in to the Google gadget system.

The API is really about building widgets to host in existing social web sites - in all not that exciting. What I would prefer to see is a system that allows me to access my social data from anywhere in applications I write - e.g. my blog, Outlook and my phone...

[Edit: having read around a little, Dare Obasanjo says much the same thing but slightly more coherently.]

I have 5 Gmail invites to give away... I'll give them to the first 5 people to leave a comment telling me why they read this blog and what content they want to see in the future.

[Edit: They keep giving me more so check back here to see if I have any spares. Current count: 0... All gone for the moment, but if you add your name then I'll send you one as soon as I get some more.]

I thought my name was pretty unique... But when trying to Google for things I've written I have to wade past pages of Harry Potter related stuff. In Google groups the top hit for "Jim Snape" is pretty offensive and not related to me. Is this slander/libel? What if a prospective employer were to use Google to try and find background on me?

For reference, the best way to get the good hits is filter out the rubbish. The following work reasonably well:

This works, but there are quite a few other Snape's out there...
google: "Jim Snape" -webmaster -page-zone -admin.net -potter

This one brings back nearly all my newsgroup posts without any irrelevant pages.
google groups: "Jim Snape" -webmaster -page-zone -admin.net -potter