Why we should be afraid of Google StreetView. StreetView just launched in Australia. And it’s creeping a lot of people out. If you want to understand why “Joe Sixpack” might feel uneasy about Google StreetView, you need to do something that rarely happens in the IT industry. Instead of turning to the mirror, we need to imagine the world from Joe’s point of view, with all his irrational likes and dislikes. — APC

Can an Olympic Sponsorship Really Help Your Image? With a flailing economy haunting nearly every industry and shaky consumer confidence, corporate sponsors have almost as much at stake in Beijing as the athletes vying for gold. Ad Age takes a look at some of the major marketers invested in the Olympics, their advertising strategies, and where they stand in the ever-elusive grid of consumer perception before entering the arena.– Advertising Age

Photography as a weapon. As almost everyone knows by now, various major daily newspaper published, on July 10, a photograph of four Iranian missiles streaking heavenward; then Little Green Footballs (significantly, a blog and not a daily newspaper) provided evidence that the photograph had been faked. Later, many of those same papers published a Whitman’s sampler of retractions and apologies. For me it raised a series of questions about images.[1] Do they provide illustration of a text or an idea of evidence of some underlying reality or both? And if they are evidence, don’t we have to know that the evidence is reliable, that it can be trusted? — New York Times

Team Obama. Senator Obama getting foreign policy advice from George Clooney manages to be simultaneously sensational and run-of-the-mill. Two of Obama’s biggest negatives are the extent to which he is coasting on his celebrity status, and the alarming and sordid connections with anti-Israel propaganda and activists. So the Senator has managed to combine those two negatives in what is, well, a “perfect storm” of bad judgement. — Red State