The Digital Week

Welcome to Porter Novelli’s weekly-and-a-bit digital news post. Apologies for the tardiness of this week’s collection of digital morsels; we’ve been working flat out on the Omnicom Haiti Fundraiser charity football match, which you can attend at Dulwich Hamlet FC tomorrow by buying a ticket here.

“It sets a chilling precedent.” So said Google’s chief legal officer David Drummond, one of three Google executives convicted in Italy of violating the country’s privacy laws. Along with Peter Fleischer and George De Los Reyes, Drummond was handed a suspended six-month sentence by Judge Oscar Magi for allowing a video of an autistic teenager being bullied to be uploaded to Google Video.

According to TechCrunch, Google removed the happyslapping video within hours of being notified. So what exactly did the three convicted Googlers do wrong? They allowed the web community to upload video content, and then removed objectionable content upon notification and worked with the police to identify the user responsible. How absolutely DARE they?!

Judge Magi’s ruling is beyond belief and Google is understandably unhappy as it prepares its appeal. The consequences could be dire. Firstly, the user-generated web in Italy would effectively be neutered by the over-the-top moderation necessary for the likes of Google to fully protect its employees from litigation. And secondly, privacy is a serious issue and should not be marginalised as the domain of the heavy-handed because of a frivolous case such as this.

Real-time search racks up the deals

You just can’t keep Google out of the news at the moment, but at least it usually involves progress and innovation. Following December’s launch of real-time search, the internet giant has taken a huge step with the tool. Already covering search results from Yahoo! Answers, Twitter, blogs, news sites and, since last week, MySpace, Google Real-Time Search will now return results from Facebook pages when you use the search engine.

IoW blogger banned from court

The Coroner’s Court in Newport, Isle of Wight, made a controversial decision recently which has rather unfairly called into question the position of bloggers in the justice and media process. VentnorBlog, a local blog authored by a group of local news enthusiasts, has covered news across the island for four years and is recognised by the National Union of Journalists.

Coroner John Matthews declined to recognise the blog as a member of the press and told the site’s representative that they were not welcome in the court. The blogger was then refused entry as a member of the press, and threatened with eviction from the court by security.

With the local news media in its current state, the value of local or hyperlocal bloggers is to be admired, not ignored. That includes in spaces traditionally occupied by print media no longer capable of fulfilling its role in the political, legal or news-gathering processes.

Twitter developments

It’s no surprise, but Twitter’s getting bigger – at least in terms of tweets. 140Char reported last week that Twitter is now servicing a mind-blowing (and numbing?) 600 tweets a second, adding up to 50 million messages a day. It’s a great achievement for the site but it might be worth noting that the amount of spam on Twitter is large and growing, if anecdotal evidence is anything to go by.

And while Twitter is of value to real-time search and other forms of integration into better established areas of the web, it’s also becoming ever more attractive to advertising folk. At the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting, Twitter’s head of product management and monetization didn’t exactly quash chatter of an advertising launch from the site.

I think the official endorsement of an advertising service on Twitter is inevitable – but have you seen any clandestine ads already? Let us know!

Take me down to Partenope City

People do some really cool stuff online, and it can still be seen as a real force for good. Partenope City is an online community of people who use geo-tagging technology to populate a Google Map of the historic and charistmatic city of Naples, Italy.

The city’s founder, Claudio Agrelli, wants Partenope City to reflect the values he believed in existed in the real city in its previous incarnation of the same name. In a nutshell, everyone’s really well behaved.

But the pie-in-the-sky moral compass of Partenope is far less interesting for the likes of me (apart from the ‘town hall’ forum, which is supercool) than its innovative approach to news consumption and sharing. Using the Google Map, the 2,000 ‘inhabitants’ of the city can drop in content, most notably blog posts and items of news. It doesn’t get more hyperlocal than that.

Even better, the online city “produces a daily online newspaper bringing together local news and views from the online community”. If I had the time, I’d do one for Tooting!