Fire and Knowledge

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?

This is an interesting story about how Google never forgets by Seth Godin:

A friend advertised on Craigslist for a housekeeper.

Three interesting resumes came to the top. She googled each person’s name.

The first search turned up a MySpace page. There was a picture of the applicant, drinking beer from a funnel. Under hobbies, the first entry was, “binge drinking.”

The second search turned up a personal blog (a good one, actually). The most recent entry said something like, “I am applying for some menial jobs that are below me, and I’m annoyed by it. I’ll certainly quit the minute I sell a few paintings.”

And the third? There were only six matches, and the sixth was from the local police department, indicating that the applicant had been arrested for shoplifting two years earlier.

Three for three.

Google never forgets.

Two lessons there: (1) make sure you lock down your social networking profile so that only friends can see it and (2) never put anything on the internet that you don’t want your future employer to see.

Wake up later gives 10 Useful Tasks for Slow Times for freelancers.

Scientists have created a method where keys can be copied from a photo — from any angle or distance as long as the details can be made out:

“We built our key duplication software system to show people that their keys are not inherently secret,” said Stefan Savage, the computer science professor from UC San Diego’s Jacobs School of Engineering who led the student-run project. “Perhaps this was once a reasonable assumption, but advances in digital imaging and optics have made it easy to duplicate someone’s keys from a distance without them even noticing.”

(via)

If you’re into productivity blogs, be sure to check out What’s Best Next. The author, Matt Perman, was my boss for four years — and he’s the most organized guy I know.

Malcolm Gladwell has an interesting article on “late bloomers” in The New Yorker. He argues that some artists have their best works young, and others when they are old — two kinds of geniuses.

I guess that means some of us have a second chance!

The Chicago Tribune has endorsed Obama for President — the first time they have endorsed a democrat in its history. The endorsement is worth reading.

The NY Times has a good comparison guide on Obama and McCain on various election issues. What I found most helpful is it has quotes from the candidates, so you hear where they stand from their own words.