The Homburg factor, contd.

Mary Riddell, writing in today’s Observer about the way the female vote is beginning to slip back to the Tories.

It is a minor tragedy that Brand Gordon is so difficult to sell. No modern politician has a better record on doing good things for women and children. Unlike Cameron, he has a proven track record on social justice, child poverty, SureStart and daycare. Up close, he is engaging, good fun and heartfelt in his attachment to his family. All my female colleagues and friends prefer Brown’s policies and saturnine style to Cameron’s porridge-cooking, apron-wearing, PR-driven smarm.

But we may be in a minority. If women are going Dave’s way, then what is Gordon to do? The usual answer is that he will have to lighten up. That, though, may be neither possible nor prudent. Brown might be much too leaden, but he is never going to win a levity contest with a man liable, if he sheds any more Tory ballast, to shoot heavenwards like a helium balloon.

Page’s rank

Well, well. If I’m reading this SEC form correctly, Google’s co-founder Larry Page grossed $149,569,511 between April 19 and 17 May 2006 by selling some of his shares. Wonder what he’s buying with the loot?

First Amendment 1: Apple nil

Hooray!

SAN FRANCISCO, May 26 — A California appeals court ruled Friday that online reporters are protected by the same confidentiality laws that protect traditional journalists, striking a blow to efforts by Apple Computer to identify people who leaked confidential company data.

The three-judge panel in San Jose overturned a trial court’s ruling last year that to protect its trade secrets, Apple was entitled to know the source of leaked data published online. The appeals court also ruled that a subpoena issued by Apple to obtain electronic communications and materials from an Internet service provider was unenforceable. In its ruling, the appeals court said online and offline journalists are equally protected under the First Amendment. “We can think of no workable test or principle that would distinguish ‘legitimate’ from ‘illegitimate’ news,” the opinion states. “Any attempt by courts to draw such a distinction would imperil a fundamental purpose of the First Amendment.” The ruling states that Web sites are covered by California’s shield law protecting the confidentiality of journalists’ sources…

[Source: New York Times report.]

Good news — of a sort

According to the Pew Research Center,

At the moment, the American public strongly prefers non-military approaches to dealing with Iran’s nuclear technology program. Only three-in-ten (30%) favor bombing military targets in Iran, while 37% support efforts to overthrow Iran’s government, according to a new survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. Among Republicans, support for these two options is greater but less than a majority (46% back bombing, 49% favor trying to unseat the Iranian government). However, the public is evenly divided (46%-46%) on the option of giving Iran energy-generating nuclear technology in exchange for the abandonment of any efforts to develop nuclear weapons.

Scan This Book!

Kevin Kelly published an interesting paen to Google Books in the New York Times recently. Sample:

When Google announced in December 2004 that it would digitally scan the books of five major research libraries to make their contents searchable, the promise of a universal library was resurrected. Indeed, the explosive rise of the Web, going from nothing to everything in one decade, has encouraged us to believe in the impossible again. Might the long-heralded great library of all knowledge really be within our grasp?

Brewster Kahle, an archivist overseeing another scanning project, says that the universal library is now within reach. “This is our chance to one-up the Greeks!” he shouts. “It is really possible with the technology of today, not tomorrow. We can provide all the works of humankind to all the people of the world. It will be an achievement remembered for all time, like putting a man on the moon.”

And unlike the libraries of old, which were restricted to the elite, this library would be truly democratic, offering every book to every person.

But the technology that will bring us a planetary source of all written material will also, in the same gesture, transform the nature of what we now call the book and the libraries that hold them. The universal library and its “books” will be unlike any library or books we have known. Pushing us rapidly toward that Eden of everything, and away from the paradigm of the physical paper tome, is the hot technology of the search engine….

This is typical Kelly hyperbole, and it attracted a lot of attention in the blogosphere. Including some perceptive criticism from here.

Of course, the difference between now and then is that doing gives a single company – Google – enormous market power.

And if history is any guide, not once has a firm with absolute power – Standard Oil, Microsoft, you know the score – been anything less than evil.

Google is, in a very real sense, profiting enormously from the utopian naivete of the Valley. And though Kevin’s article is a great read – and I’m a huge fan of his new work – this flaw makes his conclusion – a utopian vision of ubiquitous, “free”, information totally invalid.

Has Kevin used Google Scholar? If you haven’t, try a simple query like this.

That screen is the polar opposite of ubiquitous, free information – it is a set of links which send you to walled gardens built by academic publishers who want to charge $20, $50, or $100 or more for a single article.

But it is the future the Googleverse leads to. It’s the inevitable result of handing informational market power over to Google – just like physical distribution economies (and price hypersensitive consumers) inevitably lead to Wal-Mart. Either one is just as evil as far as consumers are concerned.

Kevin argues that we should scan books because there is a “moral imperative to scan” – a moral imperative to make information free, essentially.

Are you kidding? That’s like saying there’s a moral imperative to buy gas, or to buy the cheapest goods possible – because this so-called moral imperative has a single economic effect: to line Google’s pockets, handing market power over to it.

Take books – what we’re talking about here. The so-called moral imperative is only valid if there’s a level playing field for scanning; if the scanning market can be made competitive.

Of course, it can’t – it’s a natural monopoly; who scans the most wins, because the average cost is always falling.

And this – profiting from the natural monopoly dynamics of information – is, make no mistake about it, exactly Google’s game – not creating some kind of Gutopia.

The Google Scholar example is very compelling. This guy is sharp.

Google flaws

Apologies for all the Google posts, but there’s a lot of stuff coming out. Here, for example, is GMSV reporting that Google is only dominant in one of the areas in which it operates.

According to the latest monthly numbers released by analysis firm ComScore Networks, Google’s share of the Web search market among home, work and university Internet users climbed from 42.7 percent to 43.1 percent from March to April of this year — significantly more than rivals Yahoo and MSN, which claim 28 percent and 12.9 percent respectively.

But, observes GMSV, the company’s dominance ends there.

In fact, according to these metrics from HitWise, it’s a laggard in most of its other businesses. Yahoo News (6.9 percent market share) is beating the fundamentally flawed Google News (1.9 percent market share); Yahoo Maps’ 20.5 percent handily beats Google Maps’ 7.5 percent. And what of Gmail? Well, contrary to what we’ve been hearing, not everybody uses it. Yahoo Mail is furlongs ahead of Google’s upstart service, claiming 42.4 percent of the market to Gmail’s 2.54 percent. Conclusion: Google’s services may get a lot of buzz, but they don’t always get the traction they need to succeed.