Newspapers have never made money from news

“Newspapers could save a lot of money if the primary access to news was via the internet."

That's the opionion of Google's chief economist Hal Varian speaking to a workshop on the changing economics of the newspaper industry. (via Techcrunch)

He continues by saying that

“The fact of the matter is that newspapers have never made much money from news, They make money from “special interest sections on topics such as Automotive, Travel, Home & Garden, Food & Drink,, and so on.” The problem is that on the Web, other niche sites which cater to those categories are a click away, leaving the newspapers with sections which are harder to sell ads against, such as sports, news, and local.

European privacy threatens American freedom of expression

An interesting take from the New York Times' Adam Liptak on the Italian google ruling earlier in the week.

He writes that whilst in

one sense, the ruling was a nice discussion starter about how much responsibility to place on services like Google for offensive content that they passively distribute.

in another,

it called attention to the profound European commitment to privacy, one that threatens the American conception of free expression and could restrict the flow of information on the Internet to everyone.

Italian ruling threatens Internet freedoms

Yesterday's ruling in Italy could be regarded as a threat to internet freedom or another step in trying to curb the power of Google.

Three Google executives were convicted of violating privacy laws by allowing disturbing footage of a disabled Italian boy being bullied to be posted on the internet.

The decision stems from back in September 2006 when footage was posted of an autistic teenager and who was being bullied by four other boys, at a Turin school.

It remained online for two months before being taken down but the event was prior to You Tube being taken over by Google in Italy.

Google's defence was that it was nigh on impossible for individual videos to be checked due to the sheer volumes being loaded on a daily basis.


America's ambassador to Italy, David Throne said of the ruling that

This founding principal of internet freedom is vital for democracies which recognise freedom of expression and is safeguarded by all who take this value to heart.

Google executives pledged to appeal, saying if the verdict was allowed to stand, "the Web as we know it will cease to exist."

They added that

"If intermediaries like Google or the person who hosts your Web site can be thrown in jail in any country for the acts of other people and suddenly have a legal obligation to prescreen everything anyone says on their Web site before putting it online, the tools for free speech that everyone uses on the Net would grind to a halt.

The net in 2020-how twitter will be on your reading list and how google will make us cleverer

Pew have released another report into the future of the internet based on a survey of 900 Internet stakeholders.

It reveals some new perspectives on how the Net is affecting human intelligence and the ways that information is being shared.

The majority believe that that the Internet and search engines will enhance human intelligence by 2020.

Far from the saying that Google will make us stupid,many believe the ooposite.

The smartest person in the world could well be behind a plow in China or India. Providing universal access to information will allow such people to realize their full potential, providing benefits to the entire world."

that quote not surprsingly comes from Google.

As to the twitter effect,I liked this from Gene Spafford,

Most writing online is devolving toward SMS and tweets that involve quick, throwaway notes with abbreviations and threaded references. This is not a form of lasting communication. In 2020 there is unlikely to be a list of classic tweets and blog posts that every student and educated citizen should have read."

China and Google-a cartoonist's view

As seen by Jeff Danziger, political cartoonist syndicated by the NYTimes worldwide

And not before time

After four years of peaceful co existence with the Chinese government it appears as thoogh Google is finally having second thoughts.

The incident that has provoked it was according to a Google spokesman that it had detected a “highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China”.

It transpires that this sophisticated attack was the hacking of Googlemail accouns of known human rights activists.

Back in 2006,Google agreed to the Chinese government's request to censor the web creating a version of its search engine bearing China’s web suffix, “.cn.This meant that only information deemed fit by the Chinese authorities could be found in the search engine.

It has been a criticism of Google since but the company has always maintained that it was a small price to be allowed to operate in China effectively bringing its population into the global internet market.

Quite whether this incident may be a justification for pulling out,we must wait and see

Tax on Google proposed by the French

An interesting idea from France who has proposed a "Google tax" on online advertising revenues to fund subsidies for musicians and newspapers struggling in the digital era.

Interesting in that it was rebuffed by the sector and yet maybe this is one way of cross subsidising the media.

Google after all are profiting from essentially using free content.

According to the Independent

The report recommended ways to boost the availability of cultural material online while also protecting artists' and the media's intellectual property.
It suggested taxing online advertising as well as Internet providers and using the revenue to aid creative sectors, such as the music industry, which are struggling to adapt to the age of downloads.

Tax avoidence for Google in the UK

Google is managing to avoid paying tax in Britain.

According to a story in this morning's Sunday Times,it did not pay any tax on its £1.6 billion advertising revenues in Britain last year.

Instead

The firm, which has a substantial presence in London, diverted all its advertising earnings from customers in Britain to its Irish subsidiary.

It paid according to its Company House accounts,£141,519 which was tax on the interest generated by its cash pile in UK bank deposits.

Google hypocrisy in play over Adsense

According to Mark Cuban,Google is unquestionably the best at selling advertising on line.

So he asks

why isn’t Google taking advantage of this unique opportunity ? Why not just offer a specially tailored version of AdSense for Newspapers ? They do what they do, create content. You do what you do, generate content and sell ads ?

and the reason

Google hypocrisy in play. This argument is no different than the same argument they made with Youtube and the music and film industries. All those movies, tv shows, music videos on Youtube were GREAT PROMOTION. The music and movie industries shouldnt blame Google if they don’t know how to monetize all the billions of views and impressions Google and Youtube provided the content industry.

Ht-Adrian Monck

Google offers an online dictionary

Google has had a great deal of exposure in the press and the blogosphere this week but some good news and publicity for it in the Indy this morning.

It has

quietly rolled out an online dictionary offering the meanings of words in more than two dozen languages.

The dictionary service offered definitions of words in 28 languages and to translate terms from or into English.

Paywalls continue to grow

The news that Google is to limit the amount of free articles that a user can download from its search engine will be seen as another step towards the building of paywalls.

The announcement follows a sustained attack by News Corp and Rupert Murdoch in particular over the service essentially living off the back of free access to online information.

Google announced the move on its blog overnight and according to Josh Cohen,its senior Business Product Manager,

One way we overcome this is through a program called First Click Free. Participating publishers allow the crawler to index their subscription content, then allow users who find one of those articles through Google News or Google Search to see the full page without requiring them to register or subscribe. The user's first click to the content is free, but when a user clicks on additional links on the site, the publisher can show a payment or registration request.

Of course as Guardian media point out

It remains to be seen whether this will placate Murdoch, who told the US Federal Trade Commission workshop yesterday: "Producing journalism is expensive. We invest tremendous resources in our project from technology to our salaries. To aggregate stories is not fair use. To be impolite, it is theft.

So look out for the registration page

Murdoch is flawed -there is no such thing as scarcity in the 21st century media

While we are into predictions,Harvaad business school's Umair Haque has paid short shrift to the Murdoch Microsoft attacks on Google

The simplest flaw in the MicroFox's strategic logic? MicroFox is trying to create artificial scarcity instead of value. That might have worked in the 20th century, but in a hyperconnected world, creating artificial scarcity kills orthodox businesses dead. That's because though MicroFox can block Google, there's no way to block people from using Google to find stuff that doesn't suck. Artificial scarcity is usually a one-way ticket to oblivion, as people simply defect to better alternatives.

Ht-Martin Stabe

News Corp and Microsoft ganging up on Google

The latest attempts to destablise Google over the weekend have come from a comination of Microsoft and News International.

The former has

had discussions with News Corp over a plan that would involve the media company's being paid to "de-index" its news websites from Google, setting the scene for a search engine battle that could offer a ray of light to the newspaper industry.

According to the FT

The impetus for the discussions came from News Corp, owner of newspapers, ranging from the Wall Street Journal of the US to The Sun of the UK, said a person familiar with the situation, who cautioned that talks were at an early stage.

It's a Google day

Yesterday was certainly a google day across the world.

The organisation announced that it had agreed to acquire AdMob, the fast-growing mobile advertising start-up, for $750 million.

Ad Mob,it may not surprise you is one of the leading developers of mobile apps in the US and its acquisition could help establish Google as an early leader in the small but rapidly expanding mobile phone advertising business.

Meanwhile the compnay was on the end of a tirade from Rupert Murdoch who threatened to remove stories from Google's search index as a way to encourage people to pay for content online.

According to Guardian media,Murdoch said that

newspapers in his media empire – including the Sun, the Times and the Wall Street Journal – would consider blocking Google entirely once they had enacted plans to charge people for reading their stories on the web.

However as Charle Arthur points out

The threat to exclude Google from News International websites won't have caused much lost sleep over in the search engine's headquarters in Mountain View in California.

adding that his threat

is akin to a runner at a sports event threatening to shoot himself in the foot: the ticket-seller, noting that all the other entrants aren't making the same threat, isn't going to be worried.

How the web will look in 5 years time

So according to Google CEO Eric Schmidt,the internet will be dominated in five years time by Chinese charactors and social media.

Read Write Web have handily summarised his 45 minute interview including

1.that today's teenagers are the model of how the web will work in five years - they jump from app to app to app seamlessly.

2.Within five years there will be broadband well above 100MB in performance - and distribution distinctions between TV, radio and the web will go away.

3.people will listen more to other people than to traditional sources. Learning how to rank that "is the great challenge of the age." Schmidt believes Google can solve that problem.

The remnents of a digital library

A rather cautionary tale of digital neglect as Kevin Poulsen visits what he describes as Google’s Abandoned Library of 700 Million Titles.

A few geeks with long memories remember the last time Google assembled a giant library that promised to rescue orphaned content for future generations. And the tattered remnants of that online archive are a cautionary tale in what happens when Google simply loses interest.
That library is Usenet, a vast internet- and dial-up-based message board system erected in 1980. Though moribund today, for decades Usenet was the paper of record for the online world, and its hundreds of millions of “newsgroup” postings chronicle everything from the birth of the web to the rise of Microsoft, as well as more trivial matters.

Future of news or future of Fast Flip or "tormenting ants with a magnifying glass"

I have to admit that yesterday's RSS and twitter feeds seemed to be all about Fast flip and I hadn't a clue what they were on about.

Anyway I discover that it is Google's latest device to give users a new way to browse newspaper sites and blogs on their desktops and mobile devices.

And the verdict doesn't seem that good.

This from Read Write Web

Google Fast Flip simply isn't a very good product and that it feels more like a step backwards than the future of news.

and concluding that it is

a disappointing product. The cooperation with content producers is interesting, though we wonder if a single AdSense unit on the site will really make newspapers any money. Google Reader or personalized applications like my6sense on the iPhone or feedly on the desktop just seem far more interesting and usable than browsing through a series of screenshots.

Paul Bradshaw describes it as a cruel joke on the industry asking

why are the web-native minds of Google wasting time on such an analogue-mindset concept?

and adding that

it is proof that Google are prepared to cash in on the blind panic of the news industry in the midst of a crisis. Add in their recently mooted micropayments system and it’s almost as if Google are having a bit of fun tormenting ants with a magnifying glass.

An Image problem not a PR problem for google?

I tend to agree with Jeff Jarvis' comments on Google.

Google has an image problem – not a PR problem (that is, not with the public) but a press problem (with whining old media people). Google is trying hard – too hard, perhaps – not to argue with the guys who still buy ink by the barrel. Google is only causing them to buy fewer barrels. And newspaper people will use their last drops of ink to complain about Google’s success and try to blame it for their own failures rather than changing their own businesses.

Human shoppers might be turned off by the tricks of Google rankings

Staying on the subject of online advertising,a study by Engine Ready, an Internet marketing company,suggests that

visitors who get to retail sites through sponsored links are more likely to buy than those who click on organic results. They also spend more; the average order of a paid linker was $11 higher, at $117.06.

It suggests that

human shoppers might be turned off by the tricks that make a site show up higher in Google rankings. In particular, Google’s Web trawling software is lured by pages with lots of material. “When we’re optimizing for search engines, content is king,” Mr. Smith said. “But less is more when engaging a visitor.”

via New York Times

Who will meet the challenge?

Ray Marcano writes his thoughts about what he calls the newspaper renaissance

We should find out, in the next 12 to 18 months, who accepts the challenge of change, and what steps they take to meet the challenge.

he writes

Amongst his ideas?

1.The Kindle comes to the fore

They'll enter into partnerships with cell or cable companies for information distribution.

2.Companies that own more than one information outlet (newspapers, radio, television, cable) in the same city will start rapidly combining them into one operation that can provide news at a lower cost

3.some newspapers will stop sending news to Google, reasoning that the mostly out of market referral traffic isn't valuale to their local advertisers.