Category Archives: Google

I Google, therefore I forget

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This morning’s Observer column…

To judge from the volume of commentary that has followed his article, Carr has touched a nerve. He was ‘flooded with emails and blog posts from people saying that my struggles with deep reading and concentration mirror their own experiences’. Various über-bloggers such as Andrew Sullivan, Jon Udell and Bill Thompson took up the theme, adding their own twists. And prominent newspaper columnists such as Leonard Pitts (Miami Herald) and Margaret Wente (Toronto Globe & Mail) also revealed their private fears that addiction to cyberspace, and online media generally were, in fact, rotting their brains.

What’s surprising in a way is that people should be surprised by this. The web, after all, was designed by a chap (Tim Berners-Lee) who was motivated to do it because he had a poor memory for some things. Add powerful search engines to what he created and you effectively have a global memory-prosthesis. Who won the Ascot Gold Cup in 1904? Google will find it in a flash – and remind you that the race that year was run on 16 June, which is also the day in which all the action takes place in James Joyce’s Ulysses. What was the name of Joyce’s father? A quick Google search turns up the DNB entry, which reveals all. And what was the name of the woman who proved to be Parnell’s downfall? Ah yes, here it is: Kitty O’Shea… and so it goes on.

The combination of powerful search facilities with the web’s facilitation of associative linking is what is eroding Carr’s powers of concentration…

Mcdonalds outsourcing burger manufacture to Burger King

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Well, that’s what one observer said when he heard about the Yahoo-Google agreement. I also wrote an Observer piece about the deal. Excerpt:

Since Icahn has eaten other corporate boards for breakfast, it would be foolish to underestimate him. Especially as he’s claiming that Yahoo!’s standoffishness has destroyed ‘shareholder value’. Yahoo!’s leadership then looks for ways to undermine his campaign and ensure a Microsoft-free future. Since the date with Google seemed to go okay, they reason, why not ask them for a live-in partnership? Not a conventional marriage, you understand, but still the kind of relationship that makes you feel good at the end of a long day in the markets. Google may be awkward in an adolescent way, but it’s fabulously rich and successful. And it scares Microsoft to death.

Last week’s episode involved Yahoo! and Google signing their prenuptials…

Q: Where has Obama spent $3.5 million so far this year? A: Google ads

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From ClickZ…

Barack Obama’s campaign spent at least $3.47 million on online advertising related purchases between January and April. The biggest recipient of the Democratic Presidential hopeful’s online ad dollars was Google.

The search giant scored over 82 percent of money spent on online media buys for the Illinois Senator’s campaign this year through April, according to information compiled from Federal Election Commission filings. More than $2.8 million was paid to Google, as listed by Obama for America in its itemized FEC reports.

After spending about $640,000 in January on online advertising, the campaign pumped its online ad budget up to over $1.9 million in February. Expenditures tapered to about $888,000 the following Month. Filings show spending of only around $234,000 in April. However, previous monthly reports suggest more April online ad payments will be reported in the future; Google didn’t even appear in April spending data supplied by the campaign…

Android

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The Google-led project is much more advanced than I had realised.

It looks like it might give the iPhone a run for its money. And it’s open rather than closed. Hmmm…

Al Gore’s viewing figures

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In papers filed in support of its copyright infringement case against YouTube (prop. Google Inc.) Viacom claims that Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth (the rights to which are owned by Viacom) had been viewed “an astounding 1.5 billion times”.

Wow! Only the Zapruder film of the JFK assassination comes close. I’d have thought that represented real success for the Viacom brand. But that’s not the way lawyers think.

Chatter in Cyberspace

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This morning’s Observer column…

Q: WHAT DO Cyberspace and Cranford have in common? A: Both are places capable of being driven wild by rumour. Viewers of the landmark BBC1 series will recall how the most trivial aside could instantly be transformed into an incontrovertible fact. When it was rumoured that the railway would be coming to Cranford, for example, Eileen Atkins exclaimed with horror that this meant that the Irish were coming, and promptly expired at the prospect.

I was reminded of this while listening to the chatter of the blogosphere on Thursday night…

Down on the server farm

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Interesting piece in this week’s Economist about the environmental impact of cloud computing.

Internet firms, meanwhile, need ever larger amounts of computing power. Google is said to operate a global network of about three dozen data centres with, according to some estimates, more than 1m servers. To catch up, Microsoft is investing billions of dollars and adding up to 20,000 servers a month.

As servers become more numerous, powerful and densely packed, more energy is needed to keep the data centres at room temperature. Often just as much power is needed for cooling as for computing. The largest data centres now rival aluminium smelters in the energy they consume. Microsoft’s $500m new facility near Chicago, for instance, will need three electrical substations with a total capacity of 198 megawatts. As a result, finding a site for a large data centre is now, above all, about securing a cheap and reliable source of power, says Rich Miller of Data Center Knowledge, a website that chronicles the boom in data-centre construction.

The availability of cheap power is mainly why there are so many data centres in Quincy. It is close to the Columbia River, with dams that produce plenty of cheap hydroelectric power. There is water for cooling, fast fibre-optic links, and the remoteness provides security. For similar reasons, Google chose to build a new data centre at The Dalles, a hamlet across the Columbia River in the state of Oregon.

Such sites are in short supply in America, however. And with demand for computing picking up in other parts of the world, the boom in data-centre construction is spreading to unexpected places. Microsoft is looking for a site in Siberia where its data can chill. Iceland has begun to market itself as a prime location for data centres, again for the cool climate, but also because of its abundant geothermal energy. Hitachi Data Systems and Data Islandia, a local company, are planning to build a huge data-storage facility (pictured at top of article). It will be underground, for security and to protect the natural landscape…

Microhoo: the verdict

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Rory Cellan-Jones’s verdict…

So Google played a blinder, Yahoo was more adept in defence than in previous games, and Microsoft bottled it in front of goal. But I’ve a sneaking suspicion that we may get a rematch before the year is out.