Jimmy

Remember the mid 1990s, when the World Wide Web was first hitting it big and we were all learning how it worked?

Apparently Craig skipped the section on search engines and how they work. Similarly, Connie seems to have missed the memo going around over the last few years that bloggers are not, in fact, out to get her and her job. (Although I think the New Media movement needs new terms for web publishers, because the term “blogger” can apply to everyone from emo kids with Live Journals to tmz.com writers to extremely knowledgeable college-dropouts to credited journalists writing online at newspapers or even on selfhosted sites. I fully admit that a large percentage of that group can not be taken seriously to report fact-based news. I also know for a fact that there are many people who proudly describe themselves as bloggers who do original research and news-gathering. To imply that that isn’t true is to admit a profound misunderstanding of Web 2.0 and New Media in general.)

Check out this interview from Monday night’s Late Late Show (the good stuff lasts no more than 2 minutes and starts about 1:15 in):

So much happens in those short minutes that Connie and Craig take to disparage bloggers and search engines that my head nearly exploded when I first saw it.

The thing that grates at me most is Craig’s bold and unilateral pronouncement that search engines are publishers and as such should be held accountable for any illegal activity on the pages they index and link to. While I suppose this is not an entirely unreasonable assumption for someone who’s never used the internet to make, it is very surprising coming from the likes of Craig Ferguson, someone who, while professing to not understand “The Tweety,” seems to know at least what the Internet and WWW is and also seems to have fairly good judgment about when to back off on a subject. This was obviously not one of those times. News flash, Mr. Ferguson: Google or Yahoo or Bing are not publishers by any stretch of the imagination. They are catalogs, analogous to a library card catalog: they simply tell the user where to find what he or she seeks, having no power over what that information is or who wrote it. The farthest (farthest) you could take your argument is that search engines should de-index a website that is illegal in some way. But to say that Google or Yahoo should be held accountable for the content of the pages they link to (content that can change at any time by no knowledge of the search engine until the search bot passes through the page again) shows such a stunning lack of understanding of the basic workings of the Web that I’m actually kinda sick.

And Ms. Schultz. “Bloggers…tend to take our work for free…” Let’s focus on that one quote for a moment. Could you be a little more specific? Who? What? When? The aforementioned emo kids are mostly blogging about their own lives, (something that could be considered original reporting, btw); the aforementioned tmz.com bloggers, well again, the paparazzi might be annoying to celebrates, but I’d have to go with “original reporting” for tmz-type blogs, too; college (or highschool, for that matter) dropouts, OK, that might be your crowd. But still, I’ve seen many an insightful post from such folks and rarely have I run across something that looks like stolen journalism to me.

OK. I should back up, admit that I’m being highly cynical here and admit that I understand (I think) what Ms. Schultz is saying: bloggers often “break” news stories on their blogs that newspaper journalists have already written and published, but to my mind, unless the blogger doesn’t cite/link to the original source (e.g. plagiarizes the article, such as it seems the company that Ms. Schultz references being in a court battle with the AP was doing) that is not “taking for free” it is simply spreading the news with proper citation. Further, my understanding of how most news bloggers operate (including myself) is that we pull in information from several different sources and present it in a (hopefully) unique way. If journalists want to take up the mantle of doing what unpaid (for a lot of us) people with laptops are doing, then be our guests. But I’m guessing there will never be enough journalists to do that, and there shouldn’t be. Journalists hold a certain place in our society, and I don’t for one moment wish less journalists in the world. What I do wish for is an understanding of the new ways of news gathering, analyzing and reporting. We still absolutely need news and information quality control, and that’s the next challenge of Web development, but especially in the new ways of news processing. Twitter, YouTube, Blogs. All are changing the way that we see and think of news, but a lot of it is not checked, and we absolutely need to find a model where all the news (or even most of the news) flowing around the web can be channeled through credible people, be it respected and trusted high-school dropout bloggers, or PhD’ed journalists. The old centralized news model of all reporters being AP certified and all news coming through the TV and newspapers is dying. Rather than lumping all bloggers with a company that was plagiarizing from the AP, journalists should be working with the blogging community to find the best way to help the news that is flowing around the new, seriously decentralized news model that is the Web, pass through credibly filters (the AP, trusted bloggers, etc.). But I think you will find, Ms. Schultz, that just lashing out at “bloggers” and talking gleefully about count wins over us is no way to win friends in the model that is the future. The way to change the way news is processed is not through court battles. It’s through cooperation and forward-looking thinking. Otherwish, the old journalist community is gonna be left in the dust, and the world will be a little worse off.

I’ve ranted for 1000 words now. I’ll quit now and go to bed. I hope my 6am post-Harry Potter watching rambles make sense.

Cheers,
-j

I love Google. I’m not one of those people that worries about privacy issues with my searches or emails as I believe that Google actually follows, for the most part, it’s motto of “Don’t Be Evil.”

So naturally I’m really happy this evening to hear that Google is entering the Operating System Wars with Google Chrome OS which seems, at first blush, like it might actually take a good-sized bite out of Microsoft’s OS market share and therefore make the world a better place. (Setting aside my personal thoughts about Windows for a second, I don’t think any company, be it Microsoft, Google, Apple or any number of Linux companies, should have a 90%+ market share in any market.) Google Chrome OS seems like an awesome step into the future of computing, and while I think that it will probably never achieve majority market share, I do think it will do reasonably well, especially if Google pulls it off, which seems likely given the company’s past successes.

But for the first time ever, tonight I am worried about Google becoming too large. I like everything the company does, but just like I don’t like Microsoft on the principle of Windows owning the OS market, I worry about Google owning over 80% of the search market and making inroads into so many other markets as well. If Google does manage to pull off getting Chrome OS onto millions of Netbooks over the next few years and the OS catches on and starts pulling market share from Windows, will anything be different? My hope is that Chrome OS (which is built on the Linux kernel) will help pull down Windows’ market share and open the door for Mac OS X and other flavors of Linux to rush in, as well as Chrome OS, but I fear what it would mean if Chrome OS pulling market share away from Windows is all that happens. So if Microsoft’s Bing takes off and pulls searchers away from Google and Chrome OS pulls users away from Windows, nothing will have changed: two huge companies will still control the vast majority of OSes and web searches. Big deal.

I’m not an expert on monopolies and antitrust issues, but I finally think it might be time for someone who is to take a hard look at Google, its products, projects and goals and to see if Google might just be getting a little too big for its britches. If not, I’ll be happy. If so, well, I won’t be surprised.

Here’s to Chrome OS taking Windows down a peg or two*, and lifting all the second-tier OSes up in its place.

Cheers,
-j

*Say, 20-40%? That’d give Windows a still very healthy 50%-70% share of the market.