71–80 of 156 posts
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What a great article. So brief, yet so much justice. Ok, ok, also a little bit of schadenfreude.
>so much justice I suggest the "careful what you wish for" lesson applies both ways. "Justice" implies that Google can and should get away with a lot of things under threat of removing your content from their index.
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yes. They dont want to block google or other crawlers. They still want their traffic, but they also want to get paid for getting crawled and listed.
@ChuckMcM That sounds right, but to entertain another perspective for a second, maybe the point being made is that the amount of power Google has over publishers is unhealthy. The Publishers seem to think that search engines should be fighting for their business, not the other way around. Its hard to tell what such a drastic change in the system could do, but maybe it doesn't have to be bad. I for one believe that in…
"Maybe the point being made is that the amount of power Google has over publishers is unhealthy."
Framing it in an adversarial way may confuse the issue. The #1 challenge for any business is getting customers. When ever a business emerges that has a large influence on customer acquisition, it annoys businesses.
Lets re-frame the debate into one from the last century. In the US the telephone company knew the address and phone number of every business in a city by virtue of providing the service. One of the ways they leveraged that is they would publish a book, called the "Yellow Pages" which listed every Company and their number. Because the information was collected into one place, the it gained economic value (information economics being an interest of mine). It had so much "value" to customers that it was the first place they looked for the phone number of a business. Businesses realized that for generic things like plumbing, locksmiths, auto repair, being at the front of the list was better than being at the end of the list. Since the list was lexicographically sorted you started seeming names like AAA Locksmith, and A1 Plumbing. Hacking the name to be at the front. Then the Phone company decided to offer up "ads" where you could place an add on the same page as the listing, now even if your name was Zlotnicks Plumbing you could put an advertisement on the first page where plumbing started. That got you business. The complaint then was "Since everyone uses the Yellow Pages, I am forced to pay high prices to get an ad in their pages just so that people will know I exist."
By that same logic businesses may end up paying search engines to appear (and they do for Shopping links according to Bing's Scroogled.com web site).
And this comment: "I for one believe that in order to have the most accurate search results, the rankings should be based on content, not money."
I can totally agree with that, but I may internalize that differently that you do. I think that giving a search engine a choice "pay us or don't crawl us" they will simply opt not to crawl. But to understand why that makes sense economically you have to think about how the information involved gets its value. In this case a collection of 99 versions of a news story for 'free' is more valuable than 100 versions of the same news story. And its worth is exactly zero for uninteresting stories.
To be fair, there were a few positive/neutral articles, for example by Frank Rieger, a popular member of the Chaos Computer Club, in the FAZ (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) but they are in the minority. Of course, there is the obvious ignorance regarding technical facts like: "robots.txt is from the stone age. On or off for everyone is the only possibility" [1] which reminds me a lot of the discussion we had some ti…
"But the one thing I find really dangerous is that they (meaning major newspapers, politicians, etc.) managed to spin the story so that the narrative is now "greedy google" vs hard working journalists." Isn't there a certain degree of truth in this? Truly, there is a big problem if the rates for borrowing content is too high. But I think what the German public is responding to is how journalism has changed and not in…
I don't buy the assertion of inherent value. There's a ton of crap out there.
If there's any value in content it's subjective, not inherent.
People who are so convinced of the value of their content are free to erect a paywall and rake in the cash.
But what if newspapers could charge a modest fee commensurate to the value an article link is to Google?
It' perhaps something to consider, but it has to be a consensual act, where the value is negotiated. Google may already be providing commensurate value by driving traffic to a site.
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> Recently, two big news newspapers had to shut down and that print sales are declining is nothing new. I cant remember the last time I bought a newspaper and I am also pretty sure that although blogs/twitter/whatever are a good addition they cant replace classical media. There is definately a need for the discussion for new sources of incomes for classical paper based medias as ad sales from their online publication…
Well, if we're going to miss them when they're gone, then we should figure out a goddamned way to replace it, rather than saying, "The Internet is just too much revolution for you to handle, man." Full-time investigative journalism cannot go away, for the sake of society. It's a matter of how we will continue it, or what model and best practices will supplant it. iReport doesn't count.
In reality, I agree with Clay (and you, I think), which is to say that it isn't newpapers we might miss, but solid journalism. The interesting question is whether these are indpendent variables. I.e. could we have newspapers without good journalism and good journalism without newspapers.
I think a good case can be made that journalism has been declining for years, irrespective of the effect of the internet.
I also think it's quite possible we may end up with good journalism and no newspapers. I don't think wikileaks is the answer, for example, but such an organisation couldn't exist twenty years ago. I think we'll see a lot more attempts to create a 21st century journalism model before one sticks.
To be fair, there were a few positive/neutral articles, for example by Frank Rieger, a popular member of the Chaos Computer Club, in the FAZ (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) but they are in the minority. Of course, there is the obvious ignorance regarding technical facts like: "robots.txt is from the stone age. On or off for everyone is the only possibility" [1] which reminds me a lot of the discussion we had some ti…
"But the one thing I find really dangerous is that they (meaning major newspapers, politicians, etc.) managed to spin the story so that the narrative is now "greedy google" vs hard working journalists." Isn't there a certain degree of truth in this? Truly, there is a big problem if the rates for borrowing content is too high. But I think what the German public is responding to is how journalism has changed and not in…
I don't understand the distinction you are making between these two situations.
Think about the larger precedent that you're setting here, however. Should I not be able to quote a few lines and link you to a news story without paying money to the source I'm linking to? (whether the license was compulsory or not). What is google news but a factual stating of "here's what a bunch of sources said about the news today"? If a major event happens in your home town, how much money will it cost you to put up a blog post saying, "here's a roundup of coverage on this event"?
This is why Germans must vote for Pirate Party at the next elections. Oh, and I've noticed Twitter shows snippets from websites, too, now, so this will affect them as well.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
yes. They dont want to block google or other crawlers. They still want their traffic, but they also want to get paid for getting crawled and listed.
Well I can only read English transcribed interpretations so perhaps a native German speaker can correct me. As I understand it this is their argument: Google crawls site X, a user visits Google News or Google Search, Google displays a page which has extracted content from site X as a link (usually the headline) and a "snippet" of what that title is referring to. Google also has advertisements on the page. Now, as I u…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"But the one thing I find really dangerous is that they (meaning major newspapers, politicians, etc.) managed to spin the story so that the narrative is now "greedy google" vs hard working journalists." Isn't there a certain degree of truth in this? Truly, there is a big problem if the rates for borrowing content is too high. But I think what the German public is responding to is how journalism has changed and not in…
[C]ontent of whatever form -- be it newspaper articles, images, whatever -- has inherent value that should be recognized. I don't buy the assertion of inherent value. There's a ton of crap out there. If there's any value in content it's subjective, not inherent. People who are so convinced of the value of their content are free to erect a paywall and rake in the cash. But what if newspapers could charge a modest fee…
Next time a German native speaker tells me his loves his mother tongue because of the possibility of concatenating words together, I will point them to that hashtag.