Late Tuesday night, Google announced and simultaneously sort-of-launched its latest push into the social networking game, the fairly simply named Google Buzz.

Of course, as with many of Google’s other, more interesting ventures, it wasn’t made widely available immediately, likely for fear that something on the technical side might not be able to support all of Google’s Gmail users deciding they’d like to see what the new service was all about. Still, despite the fact that some estimates yesterday put the total number of Gmail accounts with access to Google Buzz at around the 1% mark, it seems that those who wanted access to the service found a way to get access.

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Rupert Murdoch’s stance against news aggregators has kicked up a notch with news that his own company, News Corp, is now actively blocking links from UK-based aggregator NewsNow.

Seems like a dodgy idea to us Rupert...

Strange as it might seem, the Guardian is reporting that News Corp is now refusing traffic from the popular news aggregator. It’s curious stuff, though Murdoch’s own, oft-stated view that news aggregators steal traffic from content producers seems to be the reason behind the new block on links. Perhaps most interesting isn’t just that all of this is happening, but that the aggregator in question, NewsNow, has decided not to take things lying down.

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