The NY Times reports today that Google acknowledged it had violated people’s privacy during its StreetView mapping project. Thirty-eight states had brought a case against Google on the grounds that the project resulted in people’s passwords and other personal information being unknowingly recorded by the search giant. Google has agreed to settle it by paying a $7 million fine as well as by becoming more aggressive in ensuring that its employees’ efforts don’t violate privacy and informing the public about how to avoid having their privacy compromised.

In its discussion of the settlement, the article brings up that the way now is paved for another privacy battle, this time over Google Glass. Concerns are that Google Glass eyewear also can be used to record photos, videos and audios of the wearer’s surroundings, without the permission of the individuals featured in those surroundings. With Google Glass, users can use their voice to input commands to take a picture or make a video, as well as to take steps less likely to compromise privacy, such as search for facts about landmarks or events.

How that privacy question plays out is yet to be seen. But concerns aren’t stoping the project – which was demonstrated at last week’s SXSW conference – from moving ahead. Google yesterday announced that the glasses will accommodate frames and lenses that match users’ eye prescriptions, for example.

Getting Google Glass to respond to voice commands and searches appears to leverage capabilities it has developed for its Voice Search App for Android, as well as its semantically-driven Knowledge Graph database of hundreds of millions of entities and billions of facts, and their relationships to each other.

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Dusten Carlson of SocialNewsDaily reports, “Gamer social startup gamesGRABR has been selected as an alternate finalist in the Entertainment and Gaming Technologies category of this year’s SXSW Accelerator competition… gamesGRABR is a social network created for both casual and hardcore gamers, and is dedicated to gaming culture. The network is built around direct links to retail goods as well. Think of it as Pinterest-meets-Amazon for gamers… Over 500 companies submitted to present at the marquee event for SXSW Interactive Festival’s Startup Village, which hosts 56 finalists showcasing some of the best new tech innovations to a panel of hand-picked judges and a live audience.” Read more

Need another reason for bringing semantic smarts to your web site? Maybe you can find it in a post at Search Engine Land, which includes a piece of a podcast from an SXSW session, and a transcription of it, featuring Google’s head of webspam team Matt Cutts (over this way).

At the session, Cutts noted that Google has been working in the last few months to level the playing field so the advantage doesn’t go to those more focused on overusing search engine optimization vs. producing great content and sites. Over the next months or few weeks it plans to announce something about this, that will involve what it’s been doing to “make GoogleBot smarter, make our relevance better, and we are also looking for those who abuse it, like too many keywords on a page, or exchange way too many links or go well beyond what you normally expect. We have several engineers on my team working on this right now.”

Take that plus the past year’s developments around the schema.org Google-Microsoft-Yahoo-Yandex collaboration (see stories like these here and here and here), and the latest playing up by Google of its continuing semantic search technology efforts (see here), and it seems there’s more and more reason more closely on semantic markup as part of a solid and truly helpful SEO strategy.

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In 2005, I started learning about the so-called Semantic Web. It wasn’t till 2008, the same year I started my PhD, that I finally understood what the Semantic Web was really about. At the time, I made a $1000 bet with 3 college buddies that the Semantic Web would be mainstream by the time I finished my PhD. I know I’m going to win! In this post, I will argue why.

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ComScore this week issued a report that wasn’t particularly flattering to Google Plus. It noted that users spent just 3.3 minutes on the social network in January compared to 7.5 hours for Facebook. Much discussion revolved around the fact that Google last month touted that the service had grown to 90 million users from 40 million in October.

Google Plus, as The Semantic Web Blog reported here, informs the personalized results that are delivered through Search Plus Your World, such as the Google+ photos and posts users have shared or that have been shared with them through the social network.

One question raised by the ComScore report is what impact the slow takeup might have, if any, on Search Plus Your World. Shortly after Google Plus’ debut, The Semantic Web Blog published a post by Christine Connors, principal at TriviumRLG LLC, discussing why, as she has put it, the service is “one of the subtlest and most user-friendly ontology development systems we’ve ever seen.” Of the ComScore data , she says, “that’s an ‘average’ number. Which means that millions of folks who’ve signed up haven’t used it, and far fewer millions spend hours on it every month. What that says to me is that for some people Search Plus Your World would be almost useless, and for those who use G+ regularly SPYW has a decent and always improving personalized algorithm and index behind it.  Take out the privacy concerns and the people using G+ will have an increasingly positive sense of satisfaction with Google for Search and more.  Problem is, taking out the privacy concerns is very troublesome.”

Speaking of privacy: Today, of course, is the date that Google’s privacy policy changes.

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On Friday, March 18, a group of Semantic thought leaders from around the globe met with their host and colleague, Paul Miller, for the fourth installment of the Semantic Link, a monthly podcast covering the world of Semantic Technologies.

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Not to go all metaphysical on you, but what is the ontology of good? At South by Southwest this week, DailyFeats will present its new social platform that plays off the idea: It lets people check in and be rewarded for their positive actions, via  the web, SMS, email, Foursquare and Google Talk.

In private beta the last few months (and don’t you wish you knew about it before your new year’s resolutions were just memories), co-founder and CTO Vinay Gidwaney says a conscious decision was made to classify the good, in order to assess into what categories to group a positive action and how various behaviors add up to rewards like badges. A veteran of the MIT Media Lab that launched the ConceptNet common-sense reasoning toolkit, Gidwaney explains that DailyFeats can parse out the feat to be recognized from an SMS message such as trudged a garbage bag full of old clothes to Good Will today to respond appropriately with Awesome – you did give it away.

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