Central Desktop announced today a new collaborative framework that allows people to open, save, edit and co-author files stored in the cloud directly from Microsoft Office.

Adding to the services are new features that allow multiple people to co-edit and co-author Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents. Central Desktop maintains that the added features eliminate the need to upgrade to Microsoft Sharepoint or Microsoft Office 2010. The new features will be available in June.

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We see Central Desktop as part of a new wave. Co-editing is the next step to real-time collaboration, fitting with activity streams, co-commenting and such services as the ability to create individual rich profiles.

Co-editing served as a hallmark feature of Google
Wave upon its introduction. Novell Pulse offers integration with Google Wave to offer the co-editing capabilities.

Cubetree may best express the value of enriched co-editing. Yesterday, SuccessFactors bought the startup for a deal valued at $50 million.

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This morning I caught up with Chris Tolles, CEO of news aggregation service Topix. I’ve been following Topix since it began, back in 2004, so it was interesting to find out how the service has evolved. Originally, as the name suggests, Topix was focused on being a news site that categorized its content into topics. Nowadays Topix is very focused on localized news, particularly for small towns across America. Tolles said that 44% of their traffic comes from rural areas, rather than metropolitan areas.

Topix has also seen rapid growth in mobile access over the past year, from about 1% of their total traffic to 10% now. Tolles told me that 70% of that mobile traffic is coming from the iPhone.

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When Topix began in 2004, just 10% of Topix’s channels were local. But soon after, Tolles told me, they noticed that about 45% of their traffic was coming from those local channels. Topix then embarked on a journey to “own local news” for towns. By 2007, Topix was focusing almost exclusively on local news. It aimed to become the “home of local voice on the Web.”

Small Town News

Topix is about discussion, rather than traditional journalism. Tolles explained that they use a community approach to get people to participate and add news for their town. The content on the site is largely driven by community discussion. Tolles said that small towns often don’t have enough news, so “discussion is what fills this out.”

According to Tolles, Topix can be a substitute for traditional press in some small towns – especially if there’s no local paper (or if there is one, it’s not daily but, for example, a weekly publication). Given its focus on discussions, Tolles said that Topix is the place to go “if you want to throw rocks at your mayor.”

As noted, Topix does well in small towns. The southeast of the U.S. is currently working very well, said Tolles, with some small towns attracting thousands of comments a day. However, by his own admission Topix does poorly in big metropolitan cities like New York City and San Francisco. Tolles attributes this to increased competition in those places, but also in smaller cities or towns locals often “have axe to grind” and so that fosters discussions.

I asked how Topix markets itself to towns. Tolles replied that the biggest way Topix is discovered is through Google – for example, people searching for their town’s news. He said that 40% of Topix’s traffic comes from Google, but that 50% is organic – meaning that people come via the URL or a bookmark. That means that a solid percentage of Topix’s traffic is return visitors. Tolles noted that when people first visit Topix, they are attracted to the comments.

Mobile Usage Dramatically Increased

Probably the most interesting factoid I discovered about Topix today is that mobile usage is increasing at a rapid rate. Tolles said that in just one year mobile traffic went from 1% to 10% of the site’s total traffic. Most of these are iPhone users: 70% of mobile traffic, as noted above.

What’s more, mobile users are good commenters, too. Tolles said that about 30% of mobile users leave comments on Topix, which is a high ratio when you consider how difficult it is to leave comments via a mobile device.

Tolles noted that Topix has an iPhone app, which was released almost two years ago. However, he said that most of the mobile traffic comes from a mobile browser. Topix supports 38,000 towns or cities, all of which are available via mobile.

Mobile is by far the fastest growing aspect of Topix currently, said Tolles. He also remarked that advertising space in mobile is an open field. Topix monetizes well on the Web, at almost $4 per CPM. However, the mobile side is not quite so high currently. He expects this to grow, but he isn’t sure if it will be Google, Apple or another company that will provide the optimal mobile advertising platform.

Discuss

YouTube still claims to be the second largest search engine in the world. Just think about that for a minute. If you produce online video and it’s not on YouTube, you’re probably missing out on a great deal of potential viewers. If you’re not producing video at all, you’re missing out a lot of searches.

Do you consider YouTube important to search marketing? Let us know.

However, just uploading content to YouTube is not going to be enough. Like with any other form of search engine, content needs to be optimized to be found. At SXSW in Austin back in March, WebProNews spoke with Margaret Gould Stewart, who leads YouTube’s user experience team. She talked about some reasons a lot of content producers are missing out on some tremendous opportunities when they use the world’s most popular online video site.

"When you’re building a sustained audience, you have to continually create great content that connects with your audience," says Stewart. "I think the secondary part is understanding your audience – understanding who you want to reach, and proactively cultivating a relationship with the people in your audience. And on YouTube that means not just creating great content and uploading it to the site, but actively building your subscriber base, so that you can be in direct and regular interaction and conversation with those people."

"We find that video producers who are really active in the conversation, whether it’s comments or uploading ‘how this video was made’- you know, kind of the behind-the-scenes – people are really fascinated by that stuff, and we see some our most successful partners really having that, again, kind of ongoing conversation – not an arm’s length relationship to the audience, but very engaged," she adds.

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"We sometimes see content producers not investing enough time in attaching great meta data to their content, because like I said, YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, and we all know that for Google, it’s important to think seriously about search engine optimization, because you can have the great content, and ideally the cream will float to the top, but there’s definitely things you can do to help yourself along, right?"

"Good clear, direct titling of your content, putting the right kinds of tags…because the fact is initially when content goes viral, people may discover it through search engines, or embed it in blogs, but then it reaches that really exciting word-of-mouth status, where I just may mention it to you person-to-person, and then what most people do is just go to YouTube.com and they search for it," she continues. "So if you’re not indexed well in the search engine because you haven’t attached great meta data to your content, you’re going to miss out on that audience."

"The other thing that is really important is enabling embedding," notes Stewart. "It’s probably the number one most important thing, because what we see in videos that become very popular, very quickly and take on that kind of life of its own, a lot of that initial traffic in the first 48 hours happens actually off-site."

Note: This actually plays to a point I made about Twitter embeds as well.

If you want more success from your online video endeavors, read 35 Ways to Improve Your Online Video Performance, and Tips For Ranking Higher On and With YouTube, which features an interview with YouTube Product Manager Matt Liu. If real-time, live video is your thing, check out 8 Tips for Real-Time Video Blogging.

By the way, YouTube is renting movies now, and while it’s not exactly taking over Netflix at this point, I would expect this to grow significantly and get more people spending more time at YouTube, where there is a YouTube search box very close by, and relevant related video suggestions served to viewers constantly.

Is YouTube a significant part of your marketing strategy? Comment here.

Rather than just announce some partnerships, or even parade a few unfinished prototypes across a stage, Google may share some rather important information regarding its TV software with developers at Google I/O.  Enough info for developers to start making apps, perhaps.

Jessica E. Vascellaro and Don Clark reported this morning, "Google Inc. is planning to introduce Android-based television software to developers at an event in May, according to people familiar with the matter."

Then here’s a key additional point: "The decision to address developers suggests that the Internet giant may be hoping to kick-start a race to build applications for its TV platform, much in the same way that Google, Apple Inc. and others have courted developers for smartphones."

It’s not hard to imagine that there would be a lot of interest in these apps.  Something that could level out the volume differences between commercials and regular programming could become popular, for instance, and an IMDB app would qualify as a must-have.

We’ll just have to see how much information Google provides to developers.  Stay tuned for reports and live video straight from Google I/O, as a WebProNews team will attend the conference.

On Twitter, there are just five degrees of separation between you and almost everybody else on the service. After analyzing over 5.2 billion friend and follower relationships on Twitter, social media analytics and monitoring firm Sysomos determined that nearly everyone on Twitter is just five steps away from each other and about half of all the people on Twitter are separated by only four steps.

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The famous six degrees of separation also still hold true on Twitter. These six steps cover 98% of all Twitter friendships. The most common friendship distance on Twitter, however, is just 4.67 and if you visit all of your friends and friends of friends up to a distance of five steps, chances are that you will see about 83% of all Twitter users.

The Power of Retweets

This also highlights the power of retweets. A retweet really doesn’t have to propagate very far to reach a very large number of people. Of course, chances are that not all of your friends and friends of friends will retweet your message – and even then, appearing in a Twitter user’s stream doesn’t guarantee that your message will actually be seen.

The Sysomos team also looked at how far Twitter users would have to roam to meet a follower of their own. According to the company’s data, it only takes 3.32 steps on average (standard deviation is 1.25 steps) before you will find someone who is already following you. As Sysomos’ Alex Cheng notes in the report, this means that “there are many small, circular connections on Twitter.”

Discuss

For a lot of us, the Internet has made it possible to work from anywhere and connect to work at any time. Without a doubt, this 24/7 connectivity is both a blessing and a curse. According to a new survey by web conferencing firm InterCall, 30% of workers in the U.S. who use technology to do their jobs feel the need to stay connected to work 24/7, even during weekends, breaks and holidays. One in two workers also say that taking time off is becoming increasingly challenging.

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Clearly, the current economic climate isn’t helping employees to relax. Almost 40% of all respondents noted that they are doing the job of two people because of the impact of the economic recession on their company. Today, 25% of workers think that their supervisors expect them to be online and connected to work after hours and that their job security depends on this. Almost 15% of respondents say that they plan to attend at least one work-related call or web meeting during their next vacation and 17% say that it is frowned upon if they don’t connect to work during their vacations.

Given all of these pressures, it would seem natural for most of these workers to feel at least some resentment towards technology in the workplace, but 72% of respondents argued that technology helps them to do their job better and 81% say that technology makes them more productive.

Do You Stay Connected to Work During After Hours, on the Weekend and on Vacation?

What about you? Do you feel the need to constantly check your work email while on vacation? Do you feel like you are expected to do so? Do you get anxious when you can’t check your work email? Or do you just check out, head for the beach and sip Mai Tais?

Discuss

In the UK, consumers are spending more time with digital and traditional media. According to the second KPMG Media and Entertainment Barometer, the average monthly consumption of traditional media climbed from 11 hours and 40 minutes per month in September 2009 to 12 hours and 13 minutes in March 2010. For digital media, the increase was more dramatic. Consumption of digital media rose from 6 hours 14 minutes to 7 hours 28 minutes per month. At the same time, however, consumers now spend less on digital and traditional media. Even though more newspapers are putting their content behind pay walls, the number of consumers who paid nothing for accessing online news actually increased over the last few months.

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People Spend More Time with Digital Media…

With regards to new media, a growing number of consumers now spend time on social media and blogging sites (up from 47% in September 2009 to 50% in March 2010) and watch TV online (up from 19% to 24%). KPMG also found that younger Internet users in the UK between 16 and 24 are more likely to engage with new media. Those Internet users who use social media and play online games also tend to spend more time online than others.

… But Pay Less

When it comes to paying for online content, most consumers in the UK continue to pay nothing (88%), though publishers will be happy to hear that younger Internet users between 16 to 24 are slightly more likely to pay for online content than older users. Today, only 3% of Internet users in the UK pay for an online subscription to digital content and about 7% pay for digital content.

The number of Internet users in the UK who paid nothing for digital content actually increased slightly over the last six months. Only about 10% of these users who are currently paying nothing for content indicated that they would be likely to buy a paid subscription to online content in the next 12 months. This, according to KPMG’s analysts indicates, that the market for paid subscriptions is “unlikely to grow greatly over the coming 12 months.” KPMG also found that the average spend on digital media in the UK fell from £1.99 in September 2009 to £0.98 in March 2010.

Some People Simply Prefer Traditional Media

This doesn’t mean that all consumers prefer to access media content online, however. Only about a quarter of respondents preferred online media over traditional media. Most of these users (89%) cited a preference for “reading something physical” over reading on a computer. About 60% of respondents also noted that they simply prefer the experience of traditional media over consuming digital content.

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A consortium of companies including Google, Yahoo, MySpace, Meebo and more announced tonight that it will launch a new system on Monday that will let website owners discover which social networks a site visitor uses and prompt them automatically to log-in and share with friends on those network. The system is called XAuth and serves to facilitate cross-site authentication (logging in) for sharing and potentially many other uses.

Facebook and Twitter, the dominant ways people share links with friends outside of email, are not participating.

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Consortium leader Meebo emphasized that it doesn’t see this as competition with Facebook’s system for letting users share links from around the web, but it’s hard to see it any other way. Facebook desperately needs more competition. Either way, XAuth is a good move that people excited about online innovation should support.

What XAuth Delivers

The gist here is that XAuth will make it easier for sites around the web to find out what social networks you are using, let you log in to those easily, access your permitted information from those networks in order to better personalize your experience on their site and easily share their content back into your social network. It’s like Facebook Connect, but for every other social network. Any website can register as an identity provider with XAuth, too.

Google’s Joseph Smarr, recently hired because of his high-profile work on distributed identity systems across the web, says that XAuth is a provisional solution to the limitations of the cookie system. If you visit ReadWriteWeb, for example, our servers aren’t allowed to check the cookies left on your browser by the social networks you use because they are tied to URL domains other than ours.

XAuth will provide a single place that participating websites can ping to request information about you, the user. The social networks that are participating in XAuth will have reported to the central XAuth hub that you are using their service (Google, Yahoo, Meebo, Disqus, Gigya). If ReadWriteWeb is sporting XAuth, we would check in with the central hub, find out where you network and prompt you to log-in through that service and share your account information, social connections and more with us.

And yes, there are privacy implications to exposing where you network, even if your personal info beyond that isn’t exposed until you log-in. “Broadcasting where you log-in,” says online identity community leader Kaliya Hamlin, “gives away things about yourself you may not want to give away.” Hopefully specialty networks will be selective about whether they participate in XAuth or not, but any time there is an opt-out model like this it’s dangerous.

Once you’re logged-in to your favorite social network, there are many things the website you are visiting could do. Think of all the things Facebook Connect lets you do. XAuth will enable to do that type of thing with any other participating social network, on any participating site. On the Huffington Post, you can see what your friends from Facebook are reading across that sprawling site. On CNN during the Presidential Inauguration, Facebook Connect let you comment on the live video with your real identity and see what your friends were saying about it at the same time.

It’s really easy, Facebook Connect is, and the huge audience that can be shared with makes publishers salivate as they install Facebook Connect.

Facebook is not participating in XAuth, though the companies behind it say they hope it will soon. That seems unlikely. For Facebook, sharing and identity start and end with Facebook. The giant social network spreads its Connect system around the web with an imperial vision. It might participate in XAuth later, as might Twitter (who calls another authentication system XAuth and generally communicates poorly with other companies), but only because they want to be everywhere. They won’t be sending out invites to publishers to attend any XAuth parties though. They already own the most dominant cross-site authentication system the world has ever known.

Above: Robert Scoble interviews Meebo’s Seth Sternberg about XAuth

Google’s Smarr says that XAuth is just a work-around until the browser itself reports to websites what social networks a user uses. He says he’s working with the Google Chrome team and Mozilla has been working on making Firefox a hub of identity for some time. Everyone has something to fear from Facebook.

Will Someone Please Stop Facebook?

You do too, as a user. Facebook is a fabulous service for communicating with friends and family, for sharing links, thoughts and feelings. It’s also too big, too centralized and too susceptible to making drastic changes that have terrible consequences in the real lives of users (hello, privacy policy).

Facebook needs meaningful competition. XAuth could help breathe more life into a constellation of other social networks to provide that competition.

It’s hard to say what will work against Facebook, though, because that’s where the most precious resource in the online world is hoarded – your friendships. The prospect of a large number of people and websites coming together to use a technology that discovers social network use across everywhere but Facebook and Twitter isn’t likely to excite very many publishers focused on their short-term interests.

It’s a very frustrating situation. Facebook just keeps getting bigger and bigger. The experience there just keeps getting more and more compelling. No information gets out without flying the Facebook flag. Your friends probably don’t use much else, so switching would come at a heavy social cost. And we grow more and more under Facebook’s thumb every day. December’s radical changes to Facebook’s privacy policy are likely to be just the beginning.

Google’s Smarr points out that just a few years ago it would have seemed inconceivable to people that MySpace would come tumbling down from the top of the social networking heap, that the future is still wide open and Facebook’s total domination can’t be presumed unstoppable. He would say that. Facebook is smarter and much, much better than MySpace ever was, though.

I love using Facebook, I use it every day, but something needs to be done. There needs to be a variety of interoperable, viable social networking options. Imagine if there was one super-dominant cell phone network provider and it didn’t allow you to call people on other networks. It wouldn’t matter how good that service was, that would be a bad situation. Social networking is a huge part of the world we live in today. It’s far too important to leave in the hands of a near-monopoly, even if that monopoly seems relatively benign today.

I hope that XAuth today and browser-based identity management in the future can help other social networks gain more traction. This may be a part of the solution. It’s a nice move, but we’ll see how effective it is.

Discuss

Google has just started sharing more detailed data for each individual search query in the Top search queries feature in Webmaster Tools.  Google used to just report the average position at which your site’s pages appeared in the search results for a particular query. Now users can click on a given search query to see a breakdown of the number of impressions (number of times your site’s pages appeared in the results for the query), as well as the amount of clickthrough (number of times searchers clicked on that query’s search results to visit a page from your site) for each position your site’s pages appeared at in the results associated with that query. Google also shows a list of your site’s pages that were linked to from the search results for that search query.

Is the new data being provided by Google of use to you? Tell us what you think.

How This New Data Can Help Site Owners

WebProNews spoke with industry veteran Jill Whalen of HighRankings about how this new data can help site owners. "In the past, I haven’t found the data in Webmaster Tools all that helpful other than the occasional finding of a crawl error," she says. "Some of the information they provide isn’t quite accurate, such as when they say that certain Meta descriptions are duplicates when they actually aren’t. These inaccuracies cause people to wonder what they’re doing wrong and in some cases they even panic or waste time ‘fixing’ things that were not broken in the first place, just because they believe everything that comes out of Google."

"This new data–assuming it’s accurate–provides a new layer of information beyond that which we can typically get elsewhere," Whalen continues. "As far as I know, there’s no other way to know the actual number of times an organic listing in Google is shown to people for a given keyword phrase. That’s pretty interesting and important information!"

"Where I see some real value, however, would be in conversion optimization–trying to increase the clickthroughs for your existing organic listings. Just knowing what your clickthrough conversion rate actually is, is a whole new set of data that we never had before."

Another industry veteran, Aaron Wall of SEOBook, tells me, "For years Google has provided some mystery meat data of marginal value and so I typically have not recommended registering with their webmaster tools. But this is the first tool they have offered which flips that recommendation on its head, as these stats give you new insights into how you are doing in search – data that is not easy to get anywhere else." He’s got an interesting post up about it himself.

How Accurate is the Data?

Google’s addition of the new data has been met with a great deal of enthusiasm. Comments on Google’s announcement are overwhelmingly positive. That’s not to say, however, that there isn’t some amount of skepticism.

"As I said, this data will be very useful if it is indeed accurate. There’s been some Twitter buzz from other SEOs whose data doesn’t match up with their Google Analytics," says Whalen. "For our High Rankings website, the clickthroughs for any given keyword phrase didn’t exactly match what my Google Analytics showed for the same keyword phrases, but it was fairly close. For instance, my top two Google organic keyword phrases showed 3,020 and 1,193 visits when using Google Analytics. Via Webmaster Tools, the same keyword phrases show 2900 and 1300, respectively. That’s pretty close. Perhaps they’re sort of just rounding off (in a strange kind of way!).  Other phrases had similar differences in the numbers."

Regardless of how precise the information is, webmasters have some new numbers to sink their teeth into, and assuming that many more share similar views to Whalen’s this might make Webmaster Tools a great deal more useful to a lot of site owners. In fact, a lot more site owners may soon be using Webmaster Tools for the first time. Google also just announced a new deal that will insert Google Services for Websites into the latest version of the Plesk Panel, which is said to be used by millions of site owners. Webmaster Tools is part of that Services for Websites package.

Will you find this new data from Google useful? Let us know.

About a year ago, Google launched real-time search suggestions that were tailored towards users in different countries. Today, Google is taking this one step further and is launching an improved version of Google Suggest that also takes larger metro areas into account. Now, Google Suggest will offer different suggestions for users in New York City and Portland, OR, for example. For the time being, this feature is only available in the U.S.

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Smarter Spelling Correction for Names

In addition, Google is also rolling out smarter corrected spellings for names. As Google notes, people often search for names, but don’t know the exact spelling. Now, whenever you add a person’s profession, affiliation or other related keywords to an approximation of this person’s name, Google will offer better suggestions and more useful spelling corrections.

This feature, too, is currently only available in the U.S., though Google plans to roll it out in other parts of the world within the next few months.

Auto-Correction for 31 Additional Languages

Google is also rolling out auto-corrected spellings for 31 additional languages. These auto-corrections kick in whenever a user misspells a common word. For uncommon misspellings, Google will still give you a link to the corrected search results behind a link that says “Did you mean: ReadWriteWeb.”

Whenever Google feels confidents that the auto-corrected version is what you were really looking for, the search engine bypasses the link and just drops you off on a search results page that is based on the correct spelling.

Discuss

Google Buzz, which still seems to be struggling to catch on with any sort of mainstream audience (or even a sizable niche one), has been given another opportunity to connect with people.  Blogger users will now be able to promote their posts with the new-ish product.

Chang Kim, a Blogger product manager, explained on Blogger Buzz late yesterday, "[W]e’re excited to announce that Blogger has made it easy to share to Google Buzz via the Share button in the Blogger navigation bar.  Just click ‘Share’, choose Google Buzz, and you’ll be able to customize your message before posting to Buzz."

Then one more interesting comment followed.  Kim wrote, "We are committed to make the sharing experience better on Blogger: more updates are on their way, so please stay tuned."

Anyway, it should be interesting to see if Buzz gets a boost in popularity thanks to this development.  To be fair, the move isn’t an illogical one.  As the above picture shows, Blogger users could already promote their posts through Facebook, Twitter, and Google Reader; it would almost be stranger if Google didn’t add its latest "social" product to the list.

This step follows a pattern that involves pairing Buzz with Google Apps and Gmail for mobile, too.

Although securing and promoting your company’s brand is an important step when starting a business, and although protecting that brand can be an ongoing concern, the question of what it means to associate a person with a company brand is a lot more complicated – a fact made obvious in light of Tiger Wood’s sex scandals. The companies that featured Woods in their advertising had sought to latch onto Tiger-Woods-as-a-brand – an image crafted to suggest his tenacity, reliability, skill, and success.

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The gulf we now see between Tiger-Woods-as-a-brand – “the perfect role model” – and Tiger Woods as a flawed human being points to some of the potential dangers in associating your company’s brand with a person. Of course, few startups are in the position to build a brand based on a celebrity’s image or reputation. Instead, if there is a person associated with the startup’s brand, it is likely someone from within the company.

Tiger Woods serves as a cautionary tale, obviously for the businesses who endorsed him but also for individuals who seek to promote themselves as a brand. Despite concerns about people as brands (branding is, after all, what we do to cattle), the power of brands continues to be a way to quickly identify a product or service or idea with your business.

For many entrepreneurs, developing a brand isn’t merely a matter of creating a company brand, but of also crafting a personal brand. The idea of a personal brand is hardly new, often traced back to a 1997 article by Tom Peters, “The Brand Called You”: “To be in business today, our most important job is to be head marketer for the brand called You.”

It may be that some of the fallout from the Tiger Woods scandal has made the idea of personal branding seem trickier – people are people, after all, not objects and not cattle. As Doc Searls has argued in two recent blog posts, brands are “boring” at best and “bull” at worst.

Technological innovation has made personal branding easier, in some regards. Registering a domain name under your own name has become an incredibly straightforward and inexpensive process. Having a domain name is a simple step in helping make sure that content you produce is readily associated with your name. And services like Google Alerts can be useful to monitor the Internet for mention of your name. The rise of social media has made creating an online presence quite simple, but signing up for social media networks or having a LinkedIn profile for example, is not necessarily sufficient or suitable for crafting your personal brand. As the information available online about all of us increases, it is likely that our ability to create and maintain personal branding will become more difficult.

Undoubtedly, building trust is fundamental to business success. Maintaining reputation is crucial, whether or not you want your name to be synonymous with a product, a service or a company.

What are your thoughts on personal branding? Has it become impossible? Or has it become ubiquitous?

Discuss

Google has introduced some new Buzz buttons for content providers to use. There are buttons to allow users to share content through Buzz without leaving the site they’re on, and buttons that easily allow a reader to follow a publication on Buzz.

So far, sites have had to make their own buttons, which have been tied to Google Reader, but now anyone can go here and simply create their own Buzz Buttons that Buzz user can use (even if they don’t use Google Reader).

"A number of sharing platforms, including ShareThis, Meebo, Shareholic, AddThis and AddtoAny have also incorporated the Google Buzz button into their sharing functionality, so you’ll see Buzz listed as a choice when you go to share something on many other sites around the web as well," notes Product Manager Mussie Shorek.

If you want to create a "Post to Buzz" button, you can pick the style (choose from three options), location of post count (top or side), language, URL to post, and image to post (can be customized). Google will then give you the proper code to add.

You can then test the button by reloading the page you put it on, making sure it shows up, and clicking to see the posting box users will see. You can also customize the parameters in the URL that shows up for the landing page.

For the "Follow on Buzz" button, just plug in your profile URL, and you’ll get the code to add it.

The release of these buttons could actually be a significant factor in keeping the "buzz" going around Buzz. If more site adopt them, which they likely will since they don’t have to create them, more people are going to see them and it could be huge for the branding of the service. Buzz could probalby use that. Some people are already calling it a flop.

It’s been about five months since Rupert Murdoch first claimed that he would block search engines from News Corp. content, and even if not a lot’s happened as a result, Murdoch hasn’t let the matter slide.  He issued another warning yesterday while at the National Press Club.

Do you think Murdoch will follow through on his threats?  Let us know by commenting.

"We are going to stop people like Google or Microsoft or whoever from taking stories for nothing . . . there is a law of copyright and they recognise it," Murdoch said according to Paul Harris.

The chairman and CEO of News Corp. later added, "They take [news content] for nothing.  They have got this very clever business model."

Of course, Murdoch didn’t make any fresh announcements regarding News Corp. content and pay walls, or establish any sort of timeframe for when he might do so.  So if these statements have any effect at all, they might weaken his position by highlighting the fact that Murdoch hasn’t taken action so far.

It’s possible that these comments will draw out a few more supporters, though, giving Murdoch a more defensible stance if he ever does flip the switch.  The situation will bear watching.

Tell us in the comments section what you make of Murdoch’s position.

UPDATE: In a new WebProNews video, Abby Johnson provides a good perspective on the conflict between publishers and search engines, citing recent events and cutting to an interview with Danny Sullivan.  You can watch the video below.