Catching up on some RSS feeds (it’s been a busy week!), I came across this Tech Crunch attack on the ‘Team Cyprus Video’ – and I’m so annoyed.

If you haven’t seen it yet, the video (below) was created in Cyprus by some techies on vacation.  Those involved work for some of the biggest names in the industry – Google, Facebook, Blip.tv, etc – and that’s the problem that Techcrunch has with it,

“The video was released just as Silicon Valley really began falling apart and the UnParty began in earnest – eBay’s 10% layoffs, Google’s stock nosedive, Yahoo’s self destruction, VC’s bunkering down, etc. And more than a few people thought the ostentatious partying was a little, ahem, tasteless in light of the meltdown back home.”

Ok, so here’s the video:

I’m not quite sure why Michael Arrington thinks it’s so ‘tasteless’ (he may have said, “more than a few people thought it was tasteless”, but let’s be honest, he’s projecting his own feeling here) – All I’m seeing is a bunch of young people having a good time on vacation. In fact I wish I had been there myself. They’re not bathing in champagne or lighting cigars with $100 bills. Just singing, drinking beer and having fun.

Sure the markets are in meltdown, but are we all supposed to be donning the hairshirts and sitting around watching the talking heads on CNBC tell us how the world is going to end any minute? I’ve already posted this week about optimism, but I think this article goes even beyond that. This isn’t simply being pessimistic, it’s an attack on fun, and includes this ridiculous hyperbole:

“fair or not the video video will always be associated with the end of Web 2.0″

What does that even mean?! If Web 2.0 means the social web, how does a funny Youtube video which has spread virally through blogs prove the end of that?

I’m not sticking my head in the sand over the current financial crisis – I got my daughter’s Future Scholar statement this morning, I know how things are – but can’t we allow a little room for having a good time?

I think if you have to say something about this video, it should be to praise the production values – I mean, really, it’s a single cam tracking shot right up there with the club scene in Goodfellas, the pool party in Boogie Nights or this from Soy Cuba:

Who’d have thought that, from a bunch of tech geeks?

To anyone paying attention, it is quite clear that businesses have to be a lot more engaged these days in managing their reputations online.  Yet I’m still amazed at the number of people who have still failed to grasp this fact.

The world has already changed. You have a problem with a company’s customer service, you’re not limited to bad-mouthing them to a couple of friends anymore, you can blog about it, Twitter, put up a rant on YouTube, etc, etc and have your complaint heard by millions. At little or no cost to you at all.

Some people are catching on, and unsurprisingly, those in high-tech industries are quick to adapt. Here’s an example I loved this week, showing with humor how to turn the tide from negative to positive:

A couple of years ago, games maker EA Sports released the 2007 version of the popular Madden Football game. It contained a bug which caused your quarterback to throw the ball backwards. Not a big deal, but pretty funny – one fan’s video has had over 300,000 views on YouTube since he put it up.

Then this week, another game from EA Sports, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08 had a similar bug. With a certain shot you could make Tiger walk on water and play the ball from a floating spot. Again, a fan video generated over 250,000 views.

This time though, EA Sports was on the ball (so to speak). They responded with their own video, featuring the real Woods ‘really’ walking on water to play the shot from the game:

At the time of writing, this has had just shy of a million views. In a week. That is an enormous amount of free publicity, and an even better example of how to manage your online reputation.

I’m a little late picking up on this, but it seems that Google Minus Google is garnering some major attention.

The site utilizes Google’s own Custom Search Engine, which allows you to tailor your search to specific sites, topics and so on, to remove all the Google-owned sites from the results.

So searches on Google Minus Google will not show any results from YouTube, Blogger, Knol, Orkut and others, removing the potential bias that some are suspecting may be going on behind the scenes.

I wrote previously that I was skeptical that Google would allow Knol pages to rank artificially well, but I may have been too hasty. Much has been made in the search engine community during the last week of some results that are doing exactly that. At the time of writing, for instance, a search for ‘buttermilk pancakes‘ has a Knol page as the top result.

Is that page really the most useful one to be found throughout the whole Internet? Better than all the recipe sites which have been around for years, all the manufacturers, How-To sites and Wiki pages? Perhaps, perhaps not. What is more important, to paraphrase Lord Hewart, is not that Google be impartial, but that that Google is seen to be impartial.

Much has been made of Google’s ‘Don’t Be Evil’ policy. Something which initially helped establish the company as trustworthy and set them apart from the Big Business types at Yahoo and Microsoft has become something of a millstone around their neck. Every controversial move they make now is analyzed to a greater degree than perhaps it would be otherwise, and Google really needs to be careful.

There have been questions raised about Google’s role in shutting certain political Blogger accounts, silencing controversial videos on Youtube and skewing Google News results in China, among other things. All of which Google has answered with seemingly reasonable explanations.

The problem will be when there are so many questions raised about ethics, along with eyebrows raised at the search results, that people will begin to look elsewhere for their search. Google Minus Google is not going to be the answer, but it is a warning sign that Google would do well to heed.