Newspapers have a love/hate relationship with Google. They love the traffic it brings, but hate that it seems to be destroying their print profits. Consider what Robert Murdoch said:
“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.’ “
Danny Sullivan gives the solution that’s been around for over a decade:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
That little bit of code would stop Google from indexing their site. Their complains would be over.
But they don’t really want Google to stop “stealing their copyrights,” do they?
Google can now “accurately estimate current flu levels one to two weeks faster than published CDC reports” based on search terms. Take a look at Google Flu Trends to see the results.
Google acquired Feedburner over a year ago. Since then, innovation there has appeared to stop. It would seem like being acquired by a company with virtually unlimited capital (monetary and intellectual) would give more resources to increase innovation, but instead it seems to have been the death knell of innovation. The service became completely free, but often buggy and without support.
If this continues, someone will soon come out with a Feedburner killer. Or does it already exist and I don’t know about it?
Here is a video showing Mozilla Lab’s new project, Ubiquity. It’s a mashup command line for the web. It’s really impressive — I’m sure this idea will go far.
Update: I installed it and it works pretty well for an alpha release. I created a simple “dg-search” command (now available from the DG homepage) and was impressed with how quickly development goes. I found a few bugs and reported them, but I think this is going to change the way people use their browser.
Fire and Knowledge aims to be thoughtful and challenging through quotes, links, commentary and essays.
Topics include science, religion, politics, literature, history and technology. As someone said, there are no uninteresting subjects, only uninterested people.
