Will Google be a benign foster-parent? Don’t bet on it

Posted on by

When you think about the way the academic world allowed itself to be hooked by the scientific periodical racketeers, it makes sense to be wary of any commercial outfit that looks like acquiring a monopoly of a valuable resource. The obvious candidate du jour is Google, which is busily scanning all those orphan works (i.e. works whose copyright owners cannot be found) in libraries in order to make them available to a grateful (academic) world. Some people are (rightly) suspicious and are going to challenge the legal settlement which Google negotiated with publishers in the US. At the JISC ‘Libraries of the Future’ event in Oxford last Thursday, Robert Darnton of Harvard (pictures above) said some perceptive things about the potential threats ahead. So it was interesting to see this piece in this morning’s NYT.

These critics say the settlement, which is subject to court approval, will give Google virtually exclusive rights to publish the books online and to profit from them. Some academics and public interest groups plan to file legal briefs objecting to this and other parts of the settlement in coming weeks, before a review by a federal judge in June.

While most orphan books are obscure, in aggregate they are a valuable, broad swath of 20th-century literature and scholarship.

Determining which books are orphans is difficult, but specialists say orphan works could make up the bulk of the collections of some major libraries.

Critics say that without the orphan books, no competitor will ever be able to compile the comprehensive online library Google aims to create, giving the company more control than ever over the realm of digital information. And without competition, they say, Google will be able to charge universities and others high prices for access to its database.

The settlement, “takes the vast bulk of books that are in research libraries and makes them into a single database that is the property of Google,” said Robert Darnton, head of the Harvard University library system. “Google will be a monopoly.”

Yep. I’ve always thought that Google will be Microsoft’s successor as the great anti-trust test for the Obama Administration. I hope the DoJ is tooling up for it.

Colloquialisms

Posted on by

“If you use a colloquialism or slang word or phrase, simply use it; do not draw attention to it by enclosing it in quotation marks. To do so is to put on airs, as though you were inviting the reader to join you in a select society of those who know better”.

Strunk & White, Elements of Style, page 34.

Mea culpa. This is an abiding sin of mine. I will try to do better in future.

It’s a Depression, stoopid

Posted on by

From Robert Reich’s Blog.

Every lost job has a multiplier effect throughout the economy. For every person who no longer has a job and can't find another, or is trying to enter the job market and can’t find one, there are at least three job holders who become more anxious that they may lose their job. Almost every American right now is within two degrees of separation of someone who is out of work. This broader anxiety expresses itself as less willingness to spend money on anything other than necessities. And this reluctance to spend further contracts the economy, leading to more job losses.

Capital markets may or may not unfreeze under the combined heat of the Treasury and the Fed, but what happens to Wall Street is becoming less and less relevant to Main Street. Anxious Americans will not borrow even if credit is available to them. And ever fewer Americans are good credit risks anyway.

All this means that the real economy will need a larger stimulus than the $787 billion already enacted…

The downside of URL shorteners

Posted on by

Very thoughtful post by Joshua Schachter.

The worst problem is that shortening services add another layer of indirection to an already creaky system. A regular hyperlink implicates a browser, its DNS resolver, the publisher’s DNS server, and the publisher’s website. With a shortening service, you’re adding something that acts like a third DNS resolver, except one that is assembled out of unvetted PHP and MySQL, without the benevolent oversight of luminaries like Dan Kaminsky and St. Postel.

There are three other parties in the ecosystem of a link: the publisher (the site the link points to), the transit (places where that shortened link is used, such as Twitter or Typepad), and the clicker (the person who ultimately follows the shortened links). Each is harmed to some extent by URL shortening.

The transit’s main problem with these systems is that a link that used to be transparent is now opaque and requires a lookup operation. From my past experience with Delicious, I know that a huge proportion of shortened links are just a disguise for spam, so examining the expanded URL is a necessary step. The transit has to hit every shortened link to get at the underlying link and hope that it doesn’t get throttled. It also has to log and store every redirect it ever sees.

The publisher’s problems are milder. It’s possible that the redirection steps steals search juice — I don’t know how search engines handle these kinds of redirects. It certainly makes it harder to track down links to the published site if the publisher ever needs to reach their authors. And the publisher may lose information about the source of its traffic.

But the biggest burden falls on the clicker, the person who follows the links. The extra layer of indirection slows down browsing with additional DNS lookups and server hits. A new and potentially unreliable middleman now sits between the link and its destination. And the long-term archivability of the hyperlink now depends on the health of a third party…

I hadn’t thought of this, and indeed have been cheerfully using bit.ly without thinking about the consequences. And then I came on this perceptive post by Om Malik on the business model underpinning bit.ly:

Yesterday, New York-based startup incubator Betaworks raised $2 million in funding for its URL-shortener project, Bit.ly, and spun it out as an independent company. The funding raised some eyebrows, with some speculating if Bit.ly, one of the dozens of link-shortening services, was worth a rumored $8 million. I fall in the camp of those who think Bit.ly is worth the money.

Here’s why: The most important aspect of Bit.ly is not that it can shorten URLs. Instead its real prowess lies in its ability to track the click-performance of those URLs, and conversations around those links. It doesn’t matter where those URLs are embedded — Facebook, Twitter, blogs, email, instant messages or SMS messages — a click is a click and Bit.ly counts it, in real time. Last week alone, nearly 25 million of these Bit.ly URLs were clicked.

By clicking on these URLs, people are essentially voting on the stories behind these links. Now if Bit.ly collated all these links and ranked them by popularity, you would have a visualization of the top stories across the web. In other words, it would be a highly distributed form of Digg.com, the social news service that depends on people submitting and voting for stories from across the web. Don’t be surprised if Bit.ly formally launches such as an offering real soon. This will help them monetize their service via advertising…

The rise and rise of the Netbook

Posted on by

NetBooks now account for 10 per cent of all PC sales. That’s having a serious impact on Certain Monopolists, as this NYT report suggests.

In its last quarter, Microsoft posted the first sales decline in its history for the PC version of Windows. It blamed netbooks for the drop. On average, Microsoft charges computer makers $73 for Windows Vista, the version of Windows used in desktop and high-powered laptop PCs. That is triple what it receives for a sale of Windows XP for a netbook.

For Intel, the Atom chips represent lower-profit products, which could turn into a major sore spot if consumers become comfortable with netbooks and start to view them as replacements for standard computers.

In his recent report, Mr. Sacconaghi speculated that 50 percent of consumers could get by with an Atom-based computer for their everyday tasks. PC makers like H.P., Acer and Dell, which face razor-thin profit margins selling laptops, could use the rising competition to place more price pressure on both Microsoft and Intel, Mr. Sacconaghi said…

Lessons of Three Mile Island

Posted on by

Bob Cringely was on the Presidential Commission that investigated the accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant. He’s just published a fascinating blog post looking back on it.

The folks at TMI did not really know how to manage the technology of a nuclear power plant, and that led to a huge mess. The same thing has now happened to our economy. Congress changed the banking and mortgage lending rules without regard to their purpose. Many firms bought derivative securities without the slightest thought to the math behind them or the risk they were incurring. Nuclear power plants run on a chain reaction process of atomic decay. Our government and investment community created a chain reaction of economic decay.

Chemical plants were better designed than nuclear power plants in part because Congress did not legislate how the chemical industry designed their plants. But more importantly most chemical firms of that era had CEO’s with engineering degrees. They had respect for the technology and the risk of misusing it. But that doesn’t make the chemical industry blameless. With the off-shoring of manufacturing a lot of chemical production is now being done in places where there is little respect for the dangers of technology. The chemical industry’s TMI was Bhopal. There will be more Bhopal’s coming because those companies are now being managed by bean counters, not engineers.

M’learned friends

Posted on by

From yesterday’s Irish Times:

“The rules of Portmarnock Golf Club do not state it excludes women but rather say that membership is limited to men, counsel for the club has argued before the Supreme Court.

That is not discrimination within the meaning of the Equal Status Act 2000, and there must be an equal right to associate with persons of one’s choice, Donal O’Donnell SC submitted.”

The Justices reserved judgment on the ‘preliminary issues’ in the case.

The stakes are high. Section 8 of the aforementioned Act provides for the suspension of the registration of a discriminating club, which means that it could not get a licence to sell alcoholic beverages.

Flann O’Brien, where are you when we need you?

Domestic bliss

Posted on by

Lovely tweet from one of my Twitter buddies last night:

“Have just realised missing husband is at wembley. Excellent. Remote control all to myself for maybe another hour.”