ReadWriteWeb

Google Street View has made a few headlines at RWW lately - once for getting itself into hot water in Europe and once, notably, for bringing Street View's photo-tour features into retail outlets.

Now, we've learned that Street View will also begin to feature user-submitted photographs. According to a recent Google Lat Long blog post, "We began integrating user photos into Street View last year. User photos allow you to view locations from entirely new perspectives, whether through the eyes of a talented photographer with a knack for capturing architectural detail, or simply taken from locations we couldn't get to... We're making it easier to navigate through these images in a way that should feel similar to how you're used to exploring within Street View."

What do you get when a Christian pastor, an atheist, a grad student and a lawyer set up a website to criticize churches?

I swear, this isn't a bad joke. It's a very real site, ChurchRater, and it allows anyone with an Internet connection to identify and review church services around the world. Is the site inspiring frank conversations about worship and religion, as its creators intended? Is it allowing sometimes closed or cliqueish communities to see how they appear to outsiders? Or does it, as some users wrote, "trivialize the deep dimensions of spiritual experiences" and "bolster the notion that church is a consumer-oriented proposition"?

A year ago, I wrote a magnum opus three-part post that attempted to chronicle some of the underlying changes happening in the economy and how this would impact web technology ventures. "Useful, but too long" was a recurring comment. So, here is a one-year update, much shorter. And hopefully a bit clearer, seeing as we are further into this transition.

In our recent article "When User-Generated Content Goes Bad," we highlighted the challenges that companies face today when delving into marketing campaigns that revolve around user-generated content. To combat potential problems, some businesses employ professional tools to monitor the conversations, but others are just now discovering the necessity of doing so. One company that can help with this is Visible Technologies, who has just launched a new version of their TruCast product, TruCast 2.0.