pimg class="float_right" src="/~~/f?id=4924142414b9b9e500c150b3maxX=400maxY=266" border="0" alt="rick-wagonercheezy.jpg" title="rick-wagonercheezy.jpg" width="400" height="266" /The (Not So) Big Three, General Motors (GM), Ford (F), and Chrysler, feel that the major media is not sympathetic enough to their plight. So they're taking their case to AdWords and YouTube./p p style="padding-left: 30px;"a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122843938180981627.html?mod=article-outset-box"WSJ:/a Ford Motor, General Motors and Chrysler have launched campaigns on several Web sites, including a href="http://online.wsj.com/public/quotes/main.html?type=djnsymbol=goog"Google/a and its YouTube video site, various blogs, Facebook and the social-messaging site Twitter, trying to make their case for a bailout as quickly and widely as possible -- on the cheap./p p style="padding-left: 30px;""The auto makers in general have gotten a black eye in the media, and we didn't feel like we were getting a fair shake," said Scott Monty, global digital and multimedia communications manager at Ford./p p style="padding-left: 30px;""With digital media, it lives on for a long time. It's picked up in Google searches, people pass it along and share messages they care about with blogs and their social networks of choice," he said./p pAnd it's not just Google ads. In fact, if the car companies were as good at building cars as they appear to be at creative Internet marketing, they might not be in this pickle:/p p style="padding-left: 30px;"Ford went into crisis-communications mode around the middle of last week, assembling a digital push to differentiate itself from GM and Chrysler, anchored by a Web site, TheFordStory.com./p p style="padding-left: 30px;"Timed to the release of its business plan to Congress on Tuesday, Ford launched the site, posted videos on YouTube and starting buying Internet search ads to appear when Web surfers enter bailout-related keywords. For instance, a Google search for such terms as "auto bailout," "Ford bailout," "9 billion loan" and "cash flow" brings up a link to TheFordStory.com./p p style="padding-left: 30px;"Ford also is buying display ads on news sites, including those of The Wall Street Journal and CNN -- as part of its "Myth Busters" campaign./p p style="padding-left: 30px;"To save money, Ford is also reaching out to consumers directly through blogs and other social media. The company has enlisted members of its staff to respond to blog postings and messages on Twitter. Ford's Mr. Monty said he has exchanged dozens of messages with Twitter users, ranging from questions about the company's business plan to whether Ford is selling its corporate jet./p p style="padding-left: 30px;"The company used technology from social-sharing site Scribd.com that allows visitors to download its business plan, rate it and pass it along to friends. In addition, the TheFordStory.com site includes links that let visitors contact their representatives in Congress./p p /p p /p pMore on a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122843938180981627.html?mod=article-outset-box"GM and Chrysler efforts at WSJ /a/p p object width="480" height="295" param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/xSADVo-PInohl=enfs=1" / param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" / param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" /embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="480" height="295" src="http://www.youtube.com/v/xSADVo-PInohl=enfs=1" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true"/embed /object /p pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/h6_eHpBTrvI_dsluoeDq6O1U6IM/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/h6_eHpBTrvI_dsluoeDq6O1U6IM/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=W3SZzolt"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?i=W3SZzolt" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=cpb9VTx6"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=52" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=o6LNx6UR"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=80" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=AzedMBRk"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?i=AzedMBRk" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=F2o5jKSI"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=131" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=xLAiLOBt"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=336" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=MssB1lid"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=WJJMeUUl"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=50" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider/~4/983nM6iURtE" height="1" width="1"/

Pas de chance quand on a "don't be evil" comme charte de fonctionnement: après Google lui-même qui véhicule des pubs Adwords pro-terroriste, c'est maintenant sa filiale Youtube qui va servir de vecteur. En effet, le Monde écrit: "un membre d'un forum islamique prônant la guerre sainte (jihad) a app...

Google added an option to their photo gallery app Picasa Web Albums offering you to lock albums. The option is named “Sign-in required to view,” meaning only people you share the album with are meant to access it, after signing in with their Google account. The pictures themselves – like this image from a sign-in album – are still technically public, though the URLs are probably cryptic enough to stop people from simply guessing them (it might still be better to password-protect even the image URL itself).

In the past, Google already offered (and continues to offer) what they call “unlisted” albums, but those were troubled with privacy issues from time to time. For instance, in the beginning you could simply try guessing the album title (say, a title like “Private”) to get to the unlisted album. Recently, Google fixed a vulnerability with how outgoing links were potentially passing on the unlisted album URL’s authentication key to third-party sites due to the referrer field. Also, sometimes sharing just a single photo caused you to potentially share access to the whole album. In fact, this issue remains even for “sign-in” albums: when you select “Share Photo" for a single photo in a sign-in album, the recipient will be able to view your full album.

In other news, Google Picasa software product manager Mike Horowitz has left Google to join Fetch Technologies.

[Hat tip to Brinke, Wonder and Louis Gray!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Locked Picasa Web Albums | Comments]

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