I’m on something of a mission.

According to the New York Daily News, Google made the decision following a ‘torrent of slams’ from Twitter users while Mashable published its own post citing the NY Daily News’ story - ‘Google Pulls Olympic Luge Logo After Backlash’. So far, Mashable’s post has been retweeted almost 1,000 times.

To a less sensationalist extent, ZDNet was also in on the act.

The problem is, I am not convinced that the story is true.

By coincidence, I’d planned to write a post about the fine editorial line between what public taste considers ‘OK’ and ‘Not so OK’ based on the alleged ‘backlash’ against Google’s choice of homepage image.

So I was scouring web tools like  Social Mention, Topsy, Tweetmeme, Bing and Google to trace the timeline of the story.

Having tried to discover all the tweets I can — and I admit that I’m not necessarily using all-singing-all-dancing analytics applications here — there is precious little evidence of an alleged  ‘backlash’ against the Google homepage at all; certainly not enough to claim Google had cracked under pressure.

Yes there were plenty of exclamations of surprise at the choice of illustration, but retweets of Mashable’s story outstrips these relatively neutral mentions by at least 10 to 1.

So I am not convinced that Google did make a decision to withdraw the image as the NY Daily News — and subsequently Mashable — claim in their headlines.

I am all the more uncertain because of the final paragraph in the New York Daily News article which reads:

“Google did not respond to an e-mail about the logo on Saturday, when the search engine turned up 121,000 matches for the late luger’s name.”

Put that statement at the top of the story and the story should fall flat on its face.

So this appears to be a claim by the New York Daily News citing a handful of tweets and with no statement from Google to either confirm or deny that they made a decision to withdraw the homepage image. The claim has been repeated by Mashable and — subesequently — by close to 1,000 people on Twitter.

Why am I so bothered about it?

Just imagine if it was an individual’s reputation — your reputation — that was subject to the same experience rather than a huge brand like Google.

Maybe Google did make a decision. But where is evidence?

I’ve no idea about the reputation of New York Daily News, but Mashable — which is generally good at labelling rumours rumours — is an important source of news for the social web community. It is important that editorial brands like these safeguard their own reputations by respecting the reputation of others — no matter how newsworthy.

Both should forfeit the clicks by sticking to the principle that comment is free, but facts are sacred.

Craftily controversial headlines often disappoint with their dry status quo conclusions — but not Bud’s. This is a really sharp opinion piece about the future of the ad agency model and its relevance in a fragmenting media world. Well worth a read.

Err. That’s it.

Despite its title, I’d argue that Marci Ikeler’s slidedeck on trends in advertising — a pick of the day at Slideshare last week - articulately makes the case for the prosecution on the future of marketing communication in general — for any business of any size.

There are a lot of presentations and opinions swirling around the web that bang on about the technology, but not that many which are sufficiently insightful to help you understand the consequences. For me, that’s what distinguishes a strategist who ‘gets’ the tactics from the rest. (But then, that’s why Marci Ikeler is director of digital strategy at Publicis New York isn’t it?)

Picture: Geoff Sowery

The political effect — as well as the effect upon brands — of socialised media has been a source of constant fascination for me over the course of the past 18 months. I’ve pasted below an excerpt from a post I published last July that alluded to the topic.

The post’s content is relevant because, today, Google has delivered an absolute blinder of a case study, the consequences of which may be pored over by generations to come.

By declaring that it will no longer censor search results Google (a ‘virtual’ state) and China (a ‘nation’ state) are at loggerheads over territorial encroachment.

If you read Google’s statement, just note its tone.

This isn’t a brand speaking; it’s a supra-national organisation that is leveraging its power to make a diplomatic point by rapping the civil liberty and political conduct knuckles of a global military and economic superpower.

Despite the fact that Google is dwarfed by the perceived scale and power of the Chinese state, that doesn’t prevent it from trying out its developing diplomatic muscles, and nor does it lessen its chances of bringing its diplomatic influence to bear. (After all, the United Kingdom has been disproportionately influential in global diplomacy for generations despite it being a small island without an empire as pervasive as Google’s.)

That’s the point I made in my original post excerpt; and that’s the the significance of Google’s move today. ‘States’ are ‘imagined communities’ with populations. In China’s case, it’s inhabitants of a physical area; in Google’s its users — and not ‘consumers’ — in an imagined space. What’s more, Google’s population of users is likely to be considerably higher than China’s.

Naturally, Google will benefit from the backing of world governments over its stance, but it won’t be represented by them.

That is because Google’s currency is realisable knowledge which transcends national boundaries in a way that physical branded products simply cannot. So, while Google may have been founded in the United States, its cultural roots and population is worldwide. If Coca Cola made a similar stand, it just wouldn’t muster a fraction of the global gasp that Google’s announcement has caused.

Here’s what I wrote back in July:

What’s really going on: The new socialism

What’s really happening, though, is fascinating and takes me back to one of the few books I read at university which struck me as interesting.

It was called ‘Imagined Communities’ by a guy called Benedict Anderson. It was about political nationalism, but his thesis still stands today – in fact, it’s probably more pertinent – because he suggested that the media (print) had been the primary dynamic enabling the concept of ‘nations’ to thrive. It follows that, if the media becomes fragmented but easily accessible to most people, then there’s a corresponding fragmentation and proliferation of ‘imagined communities’.

It’s why nations like China are paranoid about the power of Google to spread ideas that have the potential to create dissonance between compli­ance to the state and pursuit of personal ambition – Uighurs/Han Chinese unrest may be an early indication of this.

It’s also why sects do weird things – because their imagined community transcends the consensual imagined community of most of the people around them.

Your imagined community shifts and changes throughout the day, depending on context. So you might be part of a work-based community right now, or a member of a profession this afternoon, a commuter at the end of the day, an actor in amateur theatre tonight, a father, a sister or brother or friend. If you’re in the UK, its unlikely that you’ll be English or British, unless events take a remark able turn, but you may well be a towny, villager or seasider.

So what’s happening has been described by Kevin Kelly at Wired as a ‘new socialism’; technology is enabling people to realise the potential of social connections, of whichever hue, for all sorts of different reasons and outcomes.

So we’re living through an ism, but it’s not ideological; it’s sociological.

And I think it’s brilliant because the desire to apply rational segmentation models to deeply unpredictable human beings is being challenged by the diversity and accessibility of media.

Here’s the original post (you”ll need to scroll down to see where the excerpt featured)