The Digger wants to give up Googlejuice.

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Funny to see the Dirty Digger and arch-libertarian Henry Porter climbing onto the same mattress, but life’s like that sometimes. History’s littered with strange alliances. Here’s Forbes.com’s take on it:

Rupert Murdoch threw down the gauntlet to Google Thursday, accusing the search giant of poaching content it doesn’t own and urging media outlets to fight back. “Should we be allowing Google to steal all our copyrights?” asked the News Corp. chief at a cable industry confab in Washington, D.C., Thursday. The answer, said Murdoch, should be, “Thanks, but no thanks.”

Google sees it differently. They send more than 300 million clicks a month to newspaper Web sites, says a Google spokesperson. The search giant is in “full compliance” with copyright laws. “We show just enough information to make the user want to read a full story–the headlines, a line or two of text and links to the story’s Web site. That’s it. For most links, if a reader wants to peruse an entire article, they have to click through to the newspaper’s Web site.”

Later in the piece Anthony Moor, deputy managing editor of the Dallas Morning News Online and a director of the Online News Association is quoted as saying:

“I wish newspapers could act together to negotiate better terms with companies like Google. Better yet, what would happen if we all turned our sites off to search engines for a week? By creating scarcity, we might finally get fair value for the work we do.”

Now that would be a really interesting experiment. If I were the Guardian and the BBC I’d be egging these guys on. It’d provide an interesting case study in how to lose 50% market share in a week or two.

UPDATE: Anthony Moor read the post and emailed me to say that Forbes’s story presented an unduly simplistic version of his opinion:

Just to clarify, I’m not one of those who think Google is the death of newspapers. Quite the contrary, I emphasized to reporter Dirk Smillie that search engines are the default home page for people using the Internet, and as such, direct a lot of traffic to us. That traffic is important. I don’t believe Google is “stealing” our content. And I was being a bit tongue-in-cheek about “turning off” to Google. We don’t matter much to Google. I was musing about what might happen if all news sites turned off for a week. What would people think? Would they survive? (Maybe.) I wasn’t suggesting we block Google from spidering our content. That wouldn’t test the “what if digital news went dark” hypothesis. In any case, none of that will fix our own broken business model.

Google organizes the Web. Something needs to do that. My concern is that they’re effectively a monopoly player in that space. Oh sure, there’s Yahoo, but who “Yahoos” information on the Web? I understand and recognize the revolutionary nature of the link economy, but I’m concerned that it’s Google which defines relevance via their algorithms. (Yes, I know that they’re leveraging what people have chosen to make relevant, but they’re still applying their own secret sauce, which is why we all game it with SEO efforts) and that puts the rest of us in a very subservient position.

I wonder if there isn’t another way in which the Web can be organized and relevance gained that reduces the influence of Google and returns some of the value that Google is reaping for the rest of us? I predict that someday there will be and all this talk of Google’s dominance will be history.

STILL LATER: At the moment, there’s a very low signal-to-noise ration in this debate : everyone has opinions but nobody knows much, and it’d be nice to find some way of extracting some nuggets of hard, reliable knowledge on which we could all agree. An experiment in which major news sources turned off their online presence for a week or two might be useful in that context. And it might enable us to move on from the current yah-boo phase. It would enable us to assess, for example, the extent to which the blogosphere is really parasitic on the traditional news media. My view (for what it’s worth) is that the relationship is certainly symbiotic, but that the blogosphere is more free-standing than print journalists tend to assume. The experiment would shed some light on that.

802.11e?

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Where ‘e’ stands for embarrassment. Further to my post about the ingenious Eye-Fi card, Bill Thompson (whom God Preserve) emailed me with this lovely story:

I was at a conference in Florida last year chatting to someone from [company] who had an eye-fi card in his digital camera and loved it. But he pointed out a potential problem… a friend of his had asked to borrow his camera, and he had forgotten to mention the wifi link, only to be somewhat surprised later that day to find pornographic images of the friend’s partner appearing on his laptop as the card had found an open wireless network and was doing its job…

Saving Thunderbird

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Thoughtful article by Glyn Moody.

Email is dying. Time and again I come across comments to the effect that people have given up on their email inbox, and simply junked their messages. Increasingly, people are turning to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn as their messaging medium. It’s not hard to see why. These are opt-in services: you get to choose who can contact you, unlike email.

This has led to the scourge of spam, which now represents 94% of all email, according to Google’s Postini subsidiary. A classic Tragedy of the Commons has resulted, whereby a few selfish individuals exploit and ultimately destroy a resource used by all. Sadly, it looks like the battle against spam is lost; even though services like Gmail offer extremely efficient filtering in my experience, it’s a poor substitute for a messaging service that can assume that you want to see everything that is sent to you, because only people of interest are allowed to contact you.

The more Facebook and Twitter spread, the more people will be turning to these opt-in networks for their communications; email, as a result, will dwindle in importance, turning into a kind of digital wasteland inhabited mostly by those too poor, uninformed or lazy to move on, and by spamming parasites who prey on them. I don’t imagine that Thunderbird wishes to become the software of choice for either…

This makes sense. As our communications ecosystem evolves, so too should the software. From now on we will need comms clients wwhich do everything — including email. I guess that’s where Tweetdeck et al are headed. Maybe that’s how Thunderbird should evolve?

Eye-Fi

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Hmmm… If I’d come on this on April 1 I’d have thought it was a good spoof. But it seems to be real.

The Eye-Fi Card stores photos & videos like a traditional memory card, and fits in most cameras. When you turn your camera on within range of a configured Wi-Fi network, it wirelessly transfers your photos & videos. Better yet: you can automatically have them sent to your computer (PC or Mac), or to your favorite photo sharing website – or both!

As far as I can see, the Eye-Fi to Flickr link only works in the US. (It’s a bit like the Amazon Kindle in that respect.) But it still looks like a really neat idea.

Thanks to Rory Cellan-Jones for the original link.

The consolations of ignorance

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It’s always agreeable to find idiots talking nonsense. But it’s depressing to find good people doing it. Henry Porter has done great work in defence of liberty in Britain, but he’s written a truly idiotic rant this morning about Google. I was particularly struck by this passage.

One of the chief casualties of the web revolution is the newspaper business, which now finds itself laden with debt (not Google’s fault) and having to give its content free to the search engine in order to survive. Newspapers can of course remove their content but then their own advertising revenues and profiles decline. In effect they are being held captive and tormented by their executioner, who has the gall to insist that the relationship is mutually beneficial. Were newspapers to combine to take on Google they would be almost certainly in breach of competition law.

Then he invokes (who else?) Why, our old friend Thomas Jefferson:

In 1787 Thomas Jefferson wrote: “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate to prefer the latter.” A moment’s thought must tell us that he is still right: newspapers are the only means of holding local hospitals, schools, councils and the police to account, and on a national level they are absolutely essential for the good functioning of democracy.

Well, up to a point, Lord Porter. I’m be all in favour of newspapers that perform that noble function. The only problem is that 95% of them haven’t performed it for decades, if ever. Mostly they operated by printing as much crap as could fit between the advertisements. When Craigslist took away the ads they were left with only the crap — for which, oddly enough, customers are reluctant to pay.

The annoying thing about Porter’s piece is that there are really good grounds (e.g. these) for being worried about Google. But they have almost nothing to do with its impact on print newspapers, which would have withered of their own accord because of the way the Internet dissolved their value chains. Google is a monopoly that will present the Obama administration with its first serious anti-trust headache. If they thought that General Motors was too big to fail, just imagine what they will face when the time comes to take on Google.

Beeb haters: be careful about what you wish for. You might just get it

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Lovely column by Marina Hyde.

Only this week The Wire’s own Dominic West said that British TV lacked high-end contemporary drama but did costume drama brilliantly – a statement swiftly spun and used as a stick to beat the BBC by the very people who would like nothing more than for most of the corporation’s output to be bonnet- and corset-wrapped. Fortunately, by yesterday morning the mother of all anti-BBC bandwagons was fully operational again, as Ofcom finally handed down its fine to the BBC for the Russell Brand/Jonathan Ross Sachsgate business, allowing Beeb bashers to once more swarm the airwaves and internets to rail against the monstrous licence fee.

Have any of these people seen the likes of Moment of Truth, one wondered idly, in which our hero Mike Darnell hooked up semi-witting participants to lie detectors, whereupon they were asked “Do you really care about starving children in Africa?”, or questioned about their porn-watching habits?

Whether or not it is a fact capable of being grasped by those who wish to destroy the BBC, this is what their telly will look like if and when they succeed. Not necessarily immediately, but give it a couple of years and we’ll be slinging nymphomaniac dwarves on to an island with the worst of them.

The reason we are forced to make do with BBC shows such as Blue Planet or Little Dorrit, or indeed acclaimed programmes on commercial channels, is that rival broadcasters cannot compete with the BBC for funding. They therefore have to compete for quality, an arrangement that in the good times raises standards across the board. In these grim economic times for commercial broadcasters, the licence fee might be the only guarantee that programmes will be made at all…

Great stuff. Every time I have an American guest and they listen to Radio 4 or see BBC4 or 2, they shake their heads in wonderment that such things are still possible. And yet there are lots of folks around in the UK (not to mention in the Daily Mail) who would like to destroy it.

The Wikipedia ‘debate’: time to move on

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This morning’s Observer column.

Unwillingness to entertain the notion that Wikipedia might fly is a symptom of what the legal scholar James Boyle calls ‘cultural agoraphobia’ – our prevailing fear of openness. Like all phobias it’s irrational, so is immune to evidence. I’m tired of listening to brain-dead dinner-party complaints about how ‘inaccurate’ Wikipedia is. I’m bored to death by endless accounts of slurs or libels suffered by a few famous individuals at the hands of Wikipedia vandals. And if anyone ever claims again that all the entries in Wikipedia are written by clueless amateurs, I will hit them over the head with a list of experts who curate material in their specialisms. And remind them of Professor Peter Murray-Rust’s comment to a conference in Oxford: “The bit of Wikipedia that I wrote is correct.”

Of course Wikipedia has flaws, of course it has errors: show me something that doesn’t. Of course it suffers from vandalism and nutters who contribute stuff to it. But instead of complaining about errors, academics ought to be in there fixing them. Wikipedia is one of the greatest inventions we have. Isn’t it time we accepted it? Microsoft has.

Speak up, man, speak up

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Hmmm… In the old days, the only risk to one’s hearing from playing golf came from listening to 19th Hole bores. But things have moved on, as I discover from this interesting column by a prof at my old university.

The coefficient of restitution (Cor) of a golf club is a measure of the efficiency of energy transfer between the golf club head and the golf ball. The upper Cor limit for a golf club in competition is 0.83, which means that a golf club head striking a golf ball at 100km per hour will cause the ball to travel at 83km/h. The thinner faced titanium clubs, such as the King Cobra LD, have a greater Cor and deform more easily on impact – the “trampoline effect” – not only driving the golf ball further, but producing a louder noise than the stainless steel golf drivers. The King Cobra LD had a Cor greater than 0.83, but I understand that the current King Cobra drivers are allowable in competition and have been tuned to reduce noise.

The BMJ paper describes a man aged 55 who presented to an eye, ear, nose and throat clinic with tinnitus and reduced hearing in his right ear. He had been playing golf three times a week for 18 months using a King Cobra LD titanium club and he described the noise of the club hitting the ball as “like a gun going off”. He found the noise so unpleasant he was forced to discard the club. After detailed examination it was concluded that his hearing impairment was due to the noise of the golf club hitting the golf ball.

The researchers did an internet search of reviews of the King Cobra LD club. Typical comments were: “It can be heard all over the course, it is mad!” and “This is not so much a ting as a sonic boom which resonates across the course.”

Buchanan and colleagues measured the sound levels produced by six different titanium golf drivers and six standard thicker- faced stainless steel drivers, at a distance of 1.7m from the point of golf club impact with the ball, the average distance between the golfer’s right ear and the point of impact. The thin-faced titanium clubs were all louder than the stainless steel clubs. The King Cobra LD was not the loudest – that distinction went to the Ping G10.

The BMJ paper concludes: “Our results show that thin-faced titanium drivers may produce sufficient sound to induce temporary, or even permanent, cochlear damage in susceptible individuals. The study presents anecdotal evidence that caution should be exercised by golfers who play regularly with thin-faced titanium drivers to avoid damage to their hearing.”