“As you can see from the unedited interview, my comments were made during a fairly long back and forth on privacy. I clearly misspoke. If you are worried about Street View and want your house removed please contact Google and we will remove it.”

– Google CEO Eric Schmidt on his suggestion that folks concerned about the company’s Street View service “just move“

PREVIOUSLY:

• Google CEO’s Advice to the Street-View Shy: The Video
• Schmidt: Don’t Like Google Street View Photographing Your House? Then Move.

• Google CEO’s Advice to the Street-View Shy: The Video
• Google CEO Apologizes For Street View Quip

“The problem with Google is that Eric Schmidt is creepy….The industry is filled with eccentric CEOs–billionaires who, say, wear a wardrobe that consists of nothing but identical black shirts and Levi’s 501 jeans, or who dress as a samurai warrior, including swords, at their home. But Schmidt doesn’t seem eccentric (or at least not merely so). He seems creepy.”

– John Gruber, Daring Fireball

Google CEO Eric Schmidt says the company’s “policy is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it.” And while that may be true of Google, it’s clearly not true of Schmidt, who lately has been happily high stepping across the creepy line like the grand marshal of the Tone-Deaf Technocrat Parade.

In the past year alone he has:

• Addressed criticisms of Google’s stance on privacy by saying, “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”
• Claimed people want Google to “tell them what they should be doing next.”
• Said of Google, “We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about.”
• Said this: “One day we had a conversation where we figured we could just try to predict the stock market. And then we decided it was illegal. So we stopped doing that.”
• Suggested name changes to protect adults from the Web’s record of their youthful indiscretions.
• Said this: “What we’re really doing is building an augmented version of humanity, building computers to help humans do the things they don’t do well better.”

Nice selection of remarks with which to begin a Bartlett’s Unsettling Quotations From Powerful CEOs, right?

And Schmidt’s far from done. Appearing on CNN’s “Parker Spitzer” program last week, he said that people who don’t like Google’s Street View cars taking pictures of their homes and businesses “can just move” afterward to protect their privacy. Ironically, he said this on the very day that Google admitted those cars captured more than just fragments of personal payload data.

Interestingly, CNN has since edited that quote out of Schmidt’s segment. Did Google ask CNN to remove it? Who knows. Perhaps the company has finally realized that Schmidt’s penchant for indulging in this sort of pedantic dorkery doesn’t do much for its public image.

Freaking people out with asinine power-tripping pronouncements might be great fun for Schmidt, but it isn’t a wise PR strategy, particularly when Google is a company about which the public and government are increasingly concerned.

Schmidt really should know this.

Actually, it’s hard to believe he doesn’t.

Which is just…creepy.

UPDATE: Here’s Google’s official comment on Schmidt’s “just move” remark as given MarketWatch: “The point Eric was making is that our Street View service provides only a static picture in time, and doesn’t provide real-time imagery or provide any information about where people are. Of course, we also allow users to request that their home be removed from Street View.”

UPDATE: CNN says Google did not ask that Schmidt’s remark be removed from the broadcast version of the show. “Producers routinely make editorial decisions about what sound bites to include in their shows,” a spokesperson told me via e-mail. “In this case, the clip was posted on cnn.com and disseminated to other media outlets and was widely available.”

Microsoft chairman Bill Gates may be wealthier than you or I, but he’s not wealthier than Warren Buffett. The Berkshire Hathaway boss has overtaken Gates as the world’s wealthiest man.

According to Forbes, Buffett is worth $62 billion. Gates is worth just $58 billion, which puts him in third place on the publication’s billionaires list behind Mexican telecom mogul Carlos Slim Helú (but 782 billionaires ahead of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg–YAY!). Interestingly, Gates might have remained richest man in the world had Microsoft not made its hostile bid for Yahoo. (Damn you, Jerry Yang.)

Anyway … for Gates, who’s never really been comfortable with his ranking in Forbes’s annual encomium to obscene wealth, this is likely a welcome dethronement. Asked once if he would be upset if someday he were no longer the world’s richest man, Gates replied, “I wish I wasn’t. There’s nothing good that comes out of that. You get more visibility as a result of it.”

Corporate maneuverings are the stuff of our days and nights here at AllThingsD.com. So SAP’s retreat today from its hard line on fighting a copyright infringement suit brought by Oracle caught the eye of Digital Daily’s John Paczkowski (right), who found it curious that Henning Kagermann, SAP’s chief executive, backed down so suddenly after vowing “We have no intention to settle.” You can read about the probable reasons for the reversal in John’s post or by watching his video, which can also be viewed below.

Google’s decision to buy GrandCentral Communications proved interesting to John on a couple of levels, not the least of which might be the search engine leader’s interest in controlling your voice data.

And he was intrigued as well by the Russian government’s gambit of closing down AllofMP3.com, a digital music storefront that sold songs for pennies due to a loophole in Russian law, while opening a similar service.

Finally, John found a certain irony in the news that Mexican telecom tycoon Carlos Slim had overtaken Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates as the world’s richest man–a crown that sat uneasily on the head of the software billionaire, by his own admission.

Posted by Associate Editor John Sullivan.

Actually, it’s almost as if I never left. When I started this column, which originally appeared weekly in the print edition of The Wall Street Journal and debuted on Feb. 28, 2000, I chronicled a heady dinner at the TED conference, the annual get-together of smarty-pants people in Monterey, Calif. My first paragraph:

Like a lot of things in the frothy Internet world, it didn’t take long for an annual get-together at one of the industry’s trendiest conferences to show mind-boggling growth–in this case a change in its name from the Millionaires’ Dinner to the Billionaires’ Dinner.

Good lord. Thank goodness, that’s over.

Ok, it’s not, but at least the focus–save for an occasional idiotic magazine cover, like this recent one shown below–has changed a bit more to dwell on less silly stuff and instead highlight the ceaseless and insistent march of Internet technologies into the mainstream.

That is what we will be trying to do most of the time here, attempting to figure out what is happening in the digital space and explaining it in a way that is clear and cogent. Back in this column’s early days, I definitely had a lot of material to work with, from Bill Gates’ eternal quest to convince the world that the tablet PC was going to dominate (still waiting for that to happen) to various schemes to create a sustained entertainment “hit” on the Net (still waiting for that to happen, too, and, as amusing as its stuff can be, JibJab does not count) to the Perils of Pauline saga of AOL (and, of course, we are all still waiting for that perpetual train wreck to end).

But, with all that is going on today, I think there has never been a better time to observe this arena. Whether it be the continued hypergrowth of social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace or the struggles of the Web’s old guard like Yahoo and eBay to remain relevant or, most of all, the instant proliferation of video and audio, as evidenced by the recent horror show produced in QuickTime by the obviously deranged student who killed dozens at Virginia Tech last week that was ubiquitous instantly (pardon me for not linking to his self-absorbed rant, but you can find it on your own without my help), the story of the Web remains riveting.

So I am glad to revive BoomTown and take it from its print deep freeze to the warmer climate of the blogosphere. I hope it can thrive here. Much like the Web, which I predicted would recover from its seemingly fatal swoon, back in a BoomTown column on Dec. 31, 2001, when I wrote:

Don’t count tech out. It has managed to bounce back reliably many times before and will again. The Web, for example, is neither dead nor the most important thing ever. Start to think of the Internet like electricity and you’re on the right track. It’ll be everywhere and necessary, but invisible.

I hope I don’t become invisible, though it’s definitely nice to be back in any form.

But enough looking back: On to the next thing.