Weekly Roundup #4: LinkedIn adds a news reader as Google announces it will shutter its own, sharks and ships in distress, and more.

Here's this week's selection of interesting stuff for busy marketing and communications pros. I share most of these links over on Google+. Let's connect there, or on LinkedIn.

• LinkedIn continues its push into the content publishing with the acquisition of the news reader Pulse. Hard to tell what LinkedIn is up to just yet, but they have been adding premium bloggers to publish content directly on LinkedIn's site, and now Pulse is the another piece to the puzzle they are putting in place.

• Speaking of news readers, Google its shutting down its reader service July 1, to the dismay of many journalists and communication pros. Feedly says it will import your RSS feeds seemlessslyfrom Google Reader. If you don't like Feedly, Danny Sullivan has other alternatives.

• Shel Holtz has an excellent post this week on the importance of cultivating brand ambassadors as part of your social media strategy. As Facebook and other services make it more difficult (read: more expensive) to reach your whole audience via your corporate brand pages, employees will be needed as part of a more diffuse reach strategy.

• It's PR crisis time at K-Mart after a shark dies on the set of a commercial shoot.

• Speaking of PR trouble, the crisis team at Carnival is put on another pot of coffee after a ship left Tampa, had engine issues, and had to start a return to port.

• Carnival continues to do an excellent job with news updates on its Twitter feed, setting the gold standard. (Though I bet the team would admit they've had too much practice lately.)

• Samsung revealed its new Galaxy S4 smartphone with a press event that included a dance number and other oddities. And what phone announcement shouldn't have musical and dance accompaniment?

• The new phone allows you scroll your screen with your eyes. It's about time. As Americans, it's just too physically taxing for us to actually touch the screen. We need our hands free to eat french fries and stuff.

• Ben Woods at CNet says it is getting hard for phone manufacturers to create and message points of differentiation. But that doesn't excuse a Samsung event that was "shockingly sexist," says Molly Wood, also of Cnet.