YARO

A lot of online activity this morning regarding the alleged Street View image showing a woman giving birth to a baby on the street.

However, according to Google, the image is a fake. Too bad, it would’ve made a really cool addition to the rest of the interesting Google Street View sightings.

Here is the faked image:

You can see a woman on the ground with her legs spread out, while two other women try to comfort her and the bystanders enjoying the show.

But according to TechCrunch, this is a fake. That’s because when you go to the actual coordinates of the location on SV (Wilmersdorf, Germany), the houses in the background are all blurred out and no woman is seen sprawling on the sidewalk.

I think this is a publicity stunt of some kind. Perhaps it is even related to the recent reports of German Google fans egging the homes of those folks that have intentionally told Google to blur out the images of their residences in Street View.

It has been a few weeks since Google announced their newest advertising product for local businesses: Google Boost. The new program is essentially designed to make it very easy (a caveman could do it ) for a non-ppc savvy local business owner to create and launch their own pay-per-click advertising campaigns right from their Place Page account. As Google describes it, Boost is

a quick and easy way for local businesses to market themselves and connect with potential customers in their area. Based on the information you’ve already provided on the Place page for your business, we provide a suggested ad description, a web or Place page, your business categories and a monthly budget. Once you’ve confirmed these four simple elements, our system automatically creates an ad campaign. Your ad may start appearing almost immediately when people in your area search online for products and services related to your offering. And what’s more, you’ll only pay when a potential customer actually clicks on your ad. To be clear, the ranking of Boost ads in the “Ads” section of the Google.com and Google Maps search results pages are based on relevance and quality factors; and Boost ads do not impact the ranking of your free, organic business listings.

At the time of that announcement, this simplified Adwords advertising feature was only available in San Francisco, Chicago, and Houston. As of today, Google is making the feature also available in:

• San Jose
• Seattle
• Wichita
• Charlottesville (VA)
• Atlanta
• Chapel Hill
• Orlando
• Washington D.C.
• Boston
• Cross Plains (TX)
• Portland (ME)
• All local businesses in Illinois.

To try out Boost, simply log into your Place Page account and if the feature is available, you will see an invitation in your account to start using it. Everyone else who is located outside of the cities listed above can fill out a form to be notified when Boost is available in their area.

If you’re a fan of both Google Calendar and Chrome (who wouldn’t be?), you might like the new extension Google has just released for the browser. Essentially, it allows you to preview am agenda drop-down of your Google Calendar without having to visit the full calendar website.

The cool thing about the extension is that it allows you to add events right from any website where the hCalendar microformat is used (or a derivative thereof).

From Google’s extensions site:

Get a button on your browser toolbar that you can easily click to see upcoming events from Google Calendar, without ever leaving your page. And if you’re on sites like Facebook or Evite, you can click the button to instantly add events to your calendar. The button shows a green plus sign whenever there are events on the page you’re viewing that can be added to your calendar.

The extension detects events on any site that uses the hCalendar microformat or derivative microformats like hResume. Event detection on Facebook is not 100% reliable because the page markup keeps changing frequently.