Google's gone all in on its preparation for the Winter Olympics in Vancouver, augmenting its information page with something nobody else has: Street View vantage points of the slopes.

The company equipped a snowmobile with the ubiquitous 360-degree Street View camera, and shot up the mountain at Whistler, home of the alpine competitions. Views include the top of 7th Heaven chairlift on Blackcomb, the peak of Whistler, the top of the Dave Murray downhill (home of the start for men's alpine skiing) and the Peak 2 Peak gondola.

(As a bonus, the company added 3D models for all nine competition venues to Google Earth. As an additional added bonus, from Feb. 12-28 the Google logo will be Olympics-centric.)

(As a bonus, the company added 3D models for all nine competition venues to Google Earth. As an additional added bonus, from Feb. 12-28 the Google logo will be Olympics-centric.)

Google has jumped feet-first into the social media game, unveiling a product this morning they call Google Buzz. They're not explicitly saying that they want to take a chunk out of Facebook, but then again, they don't need to.

Built off the Gmail interface, Buzz is designed to integrate social sharing functionality to the e-mail experience, especially video and photos. It will add tabs to the Gmail template, with which users can easily do things like check status updates and view video and photos.

It will start showing up on users' accounts today, and should be fully integrated within a week.

Said Google Buzz project manager Todd Jackson: "Organizing the world's social information has become a large-scale problem, the kind that Google loves to solve."

As delineated in its presentation, Google focused on five primary areas when building the service:

Auto-following: Gmail will automatically have you follow the people with whom you already communicate the most.

Public/Private settings: A simple toggle allows one to send messages to the public (all of one's followers, plus a post on one's Google profile) or to individual users or predetermined groups.

In-box integration: Comments on your posts appear in real time, within the body of the Gmail frame in which you're viewing them.

Best buzz: You'll be notified when people comment on your posts, and on your comments about the posts of other people. In any comment field you can use the @ symbol to send messages directly to a contact's in-box.

Just the good stuff: If your contacts are commenting on other people's posts, those posts will show up on your screen, even if you weren't following them originally. This, keeps users from missing out on content that's popular among their crowd. You can also like or dislike status updates to affect future displays of updates from that person.

New rich-media options allow one to embed and view videos, photos and links in-frame, expanded from thumbnails, without leaving the Gmail interface. When one links to a Web site, the option to pull images from that site as part of the post is automatically generated.

In addition, Google Buzz has a mobile application that integrates geotagging for status updates using GPS. The program, eerily reminiscent of Facebook's existing mobile product, will be available on Android-based phones and the iPhone (via a Web app).

The rejiggering continues. Yahoo says it's closing down Yahoo! Tech as a standalone site and folding its content into Yahoo! News. As of March 11, tech.yahoo.com won't exist anymore. Instead, all technology news will be bundled under news.yahoo.com/technology.

Yahoo has been taking a hard look at its content operations since CEO Carl Bartz took the helm a year ago and has been making investments in its News site, which is the traffic leader in its category.

"As part of Yahoo!'s ongoing effort to build products and services that deliver the best possible experiences for consumers, we are increasing investment in some areas while scaling back in others," a Yahoo spokesman told us by email. "After careful consideration, Yahoo! will no longer maintain its standalone technology site (tech.yahoo.com)."

"Continuing to provide our users with the best technology content is a priority," she added. "Yahoo! will continue to work to offer comprehensive and engaging tech editorial from our team of bloggers and media partners on news.yahoo.com/technology."

Yahoo! Tech was launched in April 2006. Yahoo! says no employees will be affected by the rejiggering.

Watch out later today for what's rumored to be a significant foray by Google into social media. Its tool of choice will be Gmail, and the new functionality, says The Wall Street Journal, will integrate rolling status updates and file-sharing capabilities through YouTube and Picassa.)

Google's been on the periphery of the phenomenon for some time. Using Gmail as the platform will offer a built-in user base, as opposed to other Google initiatives like FriendConnect and OpenSocial, which haven't captured significant market share.

Gmail itself already has a status update feature, but it offers only a fraction of the functionality of its counterparts at Facebook and Twitter.

Watching social media companies acquire an increasingly large share of new-user eyeballs was likely enough to spur today's announcement.

A press conference has been called for 10 a.m. at Google's Mountain View headquarters, in which the company says it will unveil "innovations" in two of its offerings.

Update: Watch the proceedings live, here.

Incoming Bay Area News Project editor-in-chief Jonathan Weber has been writing a periodic column on small business for The Big Money (the WashingtonPost.Newsweek Interactive Co site covering economics and business). Today he writes about his decision to say goodbye to New West, the new media company he founded in Montana five years ago.

New West has not been easy, he says. "We've been trying to do something inherently difficult—develop a new business model for quality journalism." And, he adds, "for the last two years we've been doing it in a terrible economy."

On the journalism side, Weber says he thinks he's done "a pretty good job with the product vision, the editorial, and the conferences, and I'm very proud of the team we have put together." That bodes well for BANP.

On the business side, though, Weber says he struggled with his "own weaknesses as a CEO": "I've learned that I am not a very good sales manager, and the marketing side doesn't always come easily either."

At BANP, those duties will fall to incoming CEO Lisa Frazier, which Weber told BayNewser when we interviewed him a couple of weeks ago was one of the attractions of the new gig.

As for New West, San Francisco-based Internet media executive Lynn Ingham (Interactive One, Community Connect, SustainLane, Ad Age Group) is pulling a reverse Weber and heading back to her native Montana to become the company's new publisher.

The Commonwealth Club is hosting a noon-time panel next week on the topic "California Media in Crisis: Who will hold California Institutions Accountable?" Speakers include:

Score one for the new media kids. Digg Dialogg, the periodic Internet video forum that interviews big machers using questions submitted by and voted on by Digg users, got a live interview with Toyota CEO Jim Lentz today.

The interview aired this afternoon at 5pm ET (2pm PT) on Digg and on San Francisco-based Internet TV network Revision3. Digg users submitted over 1,300 questions after Digg announced the interview Friday morning. Lentz answered the top ten.

Traditional media scratched their heads at the top two questions, which were completely unrelated to the crisis at hand: "What [kind of car] do you drive?" and "How far along is Toyota on moving into some truly gas free cars in the future?"

"Democratic journalism doesn't always get to the point immediately," the Christian Science Monitor wrote. But then it tipped its hat to the new way of doing things: "There were hard-hitting questions that were more authentic than anything from an investigative journalist." Specifically: "I was a General Manager of one of your largest dealerships in the US. I was aware that this problem dates back to 2004. In fact, there was a death involved in a sudden acceleration incident at an Atlantic City Hotel in a Camry that our dealership sold. At this point is Toyota's position going to change as to the dates involved?"

It turns out that Google isn't the only one to use its keyword search functionality as the basis for an ad.

Of course, Slate V didn't air theirs during the Super Bowl. And it's not so much an ad as a parody. Still, highly worthwhile.

(Via Valleywag.)

Just prior to the Super Bowl, the Los Angeles Times offered an interesting look at a passionate subset of football followers. Their interest in the game, however, had little to do with team allegiances or even football in general.

It's a group that, as the game unfolded, bid on keywords for the right to appear atop the list of sponsored links on a given search engine, whenever that keyword was searched.

Some terms, like "football" and "Miami" are obvious. Others -- like "Tracy Porter," the relatively unknown defensive back whose interception return for a touchdown sparked New Orleans' victory over the Colts -- wouldn't make sense until something specific happened during the game.

Hit it right, and the buy can end up being a bargain, with fees determined by the number of clicks on a given ad. Depending on bidding, prices can range from pennies to dozens of dollars per click.

Denny's Corp., which purchased airtime for three broadcast commercials during the game, got in on the action, purchasing the keywords for, among others, "Dennys" and "free breakfast" on Google.

Search-engine spending was up 8 percent last year reported the Times, despite flat overall online ad spending and a depressed general ad market. Super Bowl-related searches are up 40 percent, year over year.

Update: Google has released its list of the most popular search terms surrounding the Super Bowl:

If you think Facebook's just a great new way to stay in touch with friends, or, from a professional point of view, a way to spread links to the content you're creating, you're missing at least half of the value it's creating: The aggregate information. Collectively, Facebook users are essentially creating a massive database about who they're connected to and what they care about.

Take this analysis by Los Angeles-based programmer Pete Warden, for example. By cranking the data on 210 million public Facebook profiles, Warden has come up with insights into how closely connected people in different parts of the country are to the people who are geographically near them. Not surprisingly, the data shows that geographic ties are closer in smaller centers in the middle of the country than in larger urban areas on the coasts. For example, people in Cincinnati are most closely connected with people in Columbus, Dayton, Lexington.

Whereas people in San Francisco tend to have friendships that extend more rapidly to points further afield, like Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago.

What else he's discovered, after the jump.

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