The perils of Search Inside

I’m still coming to terms with Amazon’s amazing ‘Search Inside’ technology. So is my friend and colleague Quentin, who did a ‘search inside’ on himself and found that he appears (as a hapless extra, I hasten to add) in Frederick S. Lane’s book Obscene Profits: Entrepreneurs of Pornography in the Cyber Age. Q should cheer up — there are worse fates. For example, I’ve discovered that I appear in Colin Jarman’s The Nasty Quote Book! [I described Radovan Karadzic, the infamous Serbian politician as “a rambling, inconsistent, sentimental, bouffanted crook”. Nasty, perhaps; but also true.]

Ten ways in which weblogs differ radically from conventional journalism

Very good insightful list by Jay Rosen. The ones I particularly like are:

5.) Whereas an item of news in a newspaper or broadcast seeks to add itself to the public record, an entry posted in a weblog engages the public record, because it pulls bits and pieces from it through the device of linking. In journalism the regular way, we imagine the public record accumulating with each day’s news– becoming longer. In journalism the weblog way, we imagine the public record “tightening,” its web becoming stronger, as links promotes linking, which produces more links.

6.) A weblog can “work” journalistically — it can be sustainable, enjoyable, meaningful, valuable, worth doing, and worth it to other people — if it reaches 50 or 100 or 160 souls who like it, use it, and communicate through it. Whereas in journalism the traditional way, such a small response would be seen as a failure, in journalism the weblog way the intensity of a small response can spell success.

7.) A weblog is like a column in a newspaper or magazine, sort of, but whereas a column written by twelve people makes little sense and wouldn’t work, a weblog written by twelve people makes perfect sense and does work.

Chinese government decides to invest in Linux

According to Reuters, “The Chinese government plans to throw its financial weight behind Linux-based computer systems that could rival Microsoft Corp.’s Windows in one of the world’s fastest-growing technology markets, an official said on Wednesday.

China would build a domestic software industry around Linux — a cheaper software standard that can copied and modified freely — said Gou Zhongwen, a vice minister at the powerful Ministry of Information Industry.

“Linux is an opportunity for us to make a breakthrough in developing software,” he was quoted as saying on the ministry Web site www.mii.gov.cn. “But the market cannot be developed on a large scale without government support.”

Gou did not give details on the amount of planned government investment in Linux.

China’s information technology market is growing at 20 percent a year, with software sales expected to reach $30.5 billion in 2005, according to research house International Data Corp.”

Microsoft goes into the bounty business

BBC Online story: “A $5m reward fund has been set up by Microsoft to help track down people who unleash damaging computer viruses.

The first rewards on offer will give payments of $250,000 to anyone with information about the creators of the MSBlast or Sobig viruses.

Both these viruses struck earlier this year and wrought havoc on home and business internet users.”

Er, shouldn’t that read “home and business internet users running Microsoft software”? Still, from Microsoft’s point of view, $5 million is a lot less than it would cost the company to write more secure software.

Putting things in context

Surprisingly good survey article in the NYT about the oncoming disaster of global warming. Sample extract:

“The heart of the problem is carbon dioxide, the main byproduct from the burning of fossil fuels. When the atmosphere is rich in carbon dioxide, heat is trapped, producing a greenhouse effect. Most scientists believe the billions of tons of carbon dioxide released since the start of the Industrial Revolution are in part to blame for the one-degree rise in global temperatures over the past century. Carbon dioxide concentrations are now 30 percent higher than preindustrial levels.

With rising living standards in developing nations, emissions of carbon dioxide are increasing, and the pace of warming is expected to speed up, too. Unchecked, carbon dioxide would reach twice preindustrial levels by midcentury and perhaps double again by the end of the century. That could force temperatures up by 3 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100, according to computer models.

Because carbon dioxide is colorless, odorless and disperses immediately into the air, few realize how much spills out of tailpipes and smokestacks. An automobile, for example, generates perhaps 50 to 100 tons of carbon dioxide in its lifetime.

The United States produces more carbon dioxide than any other country by far. Each American, on average, generates about 45,000 pounds of carbon dioxide a year. That is about twice as much as the average person living in Japan or Europe and many times more than someone living in a developing country like Zimbabwe, China or Panama. (Even if the United States achieves President Bush’s goal of an 18 percent reduction in the intensity of carbon dioxide emissions by 2012, the output of an average American would still far exceed that of almost anyone else in the world.)”

Nothing will happen, of course — at least not with the current Junta in power in the US. But it does rather put other things in perspective..

British Library will now archive UK websites

According to this BBC Online story, “the British Library is now able to store web pages and e-mails in its archive after a legal change.

The library had pushed for electronic items to be included because of the rise in web-based publishing.

“This new legislation will now mean that a vital part of the nation’s published heritage will be safe,” said MP Chris Mole, who supported the move.

The archive will comprise selective “harvesting” from the 2.9 million sites that have “co.uk” suffixes.

The new law was given royal assent on Friday.

The library already has six legal deposit archives which hold a copy of everything published in the UK since 1911. The new formats – which also include CD-Roms – will join these archives, and be available for future study.”

Some people don’t like Amazon’s ‘Search Inside’

The Seattle Times has a report that trade book authors (many of whom do pretty well out of Amazon) don’t like the new Search Inside facility because it might enable users to get the key piece of information they are seeking without having to buy the book. “The feature is particularly troubling to reference-book authors who think they may lose a sale if a user can find “the best place to hike in Chaco Canyon” or “where to find the best airfare to Cuba” by using Amazon’s search feature instead.

The new feature may have other problems: Each search allows the user to see the full-text of the page where the keyword appears, plus two pages forward and two backward. But savvy searchers can actually read more of the book.

In an e-mail to its members, The Authors Guild, the country’s oldest and largest society of published authors, said it was able to print out 108 consecutive pages from a best-selling book by using key search terms.

An attempt to use the method yesterday successfully called up more than 150 pages of a travel book.”

Yeah! And I can also dig my garden with a teaspoon.

Update:According to Wired, “Amazon.com’s new book-searching feature does not allow users to print pages from within books, soothing authors who feared the tool could give users too much free content at the expense of book sales.”

Microsoft trying to buy Google?

Yep. The NYT is reporting that “According to company executives and others briefed on the discussions, Microsoft – desperate to capture a slice of the popular and ad-generating search business – approached Google within the last two months to discuss options, including the possibility of a takeover.”

There will be a lot more of this as Google moves towards a stock market flotation. The obvious thing to do is for Google to auction its shares to Internet users rather than going down the usual corrupt route of letting merchant banks corner huge blocks of shares — enabling their clients to make easy killings and control of the company to pass to Redmond in due course.

Lovely piece in today’s Economist about Google. Nice cartoon too.

Image (c) The Economist 2003, naturally.

Why does an audio CD hold 74 minutes’-worth of music?

Must be some technical reason for it, surely? Not at all says the NYT:

“In the early 1980’s, Sony was helping to develop a new digital music technology. Mr. Ohga, then the company’s president, insisted that no matter what else, the new format had to be able to play Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony without interruption. Mr. Ohga, you see, had been a classical vocalist before getting into electronics.”

A lovely trick — from Tim O’Reilly

From a Wired report. Quote:

O’Reilly said the old idea of stand-alone software — the unconnected word processor or spreadsheet — is becoming passé. Even the idea of making a distinction between software platforms — Mac, Windows and Linux — is starting to no longer make sense.

“The platform is no longer the box sitting at your desk,” O’Reilly said.

To illustrate his point, O’Reilly asked how many people in the audience of Mac OS X programmers were Linux users. Several raised their hands. But when O’Reilly asked how many used Google, there was a unanimous show of hands.

“Ah,” O’Reilly said, “you’re all Linux users.” Google is a Linux application running on the world’s largest Linux cluster, he explained.

What a wonderful rhetorical trick. Must use it sometime soon in a lecture.