Dominic Young
Writings and more
Category: Google
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Tim Berners Lee issued an epistle recently, a call to action to save the web from some dangers which concern him. One of them “misinformation” (or “fake news” as it rather more commonly and hysterically known). It’s a problem, he says. Everyone says it, and they’re right. Tim doesn’t identify the solution but he does…
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When is a link not a link? When someone posts a link on Facebook, the first thing that Facebook does it make a little abstract of the page they’re linking to and post it underneath. The headline, a picture or logo, a little bit of text. Takes a second or two to appear. Very handy.…
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I’ve been hearing this phrase “the free flow of information” a lot lately. It’s been in the context of the “Publishers Right” and it is usually preceded by the phrase “will restrict”. The heart of the concern seems to be the idea that if permission is needed before digital publications can be exploited by others,…
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A few months ago I started seeing this when I went to Google sites… Kind of funny, the privacy reminder. I’m guessing most people don’t see this because most people are logged in to Google most of the time and so have accepted their terms explicitly when they log in. But I’m not.…
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So, despite a campaign to prevent it, the Germans have changed their copyright law a little bit, raising the possibility that search engines might have to pay a fee for news content they access. Google has responded by changing the rules of Google News in Germany to make it “opt in”. In other words, before…
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There has been a lot going on, and I have been keeping my thoughts to myself. For the most part, it’s a bit depressing. The UK government (PDF link) is still seeking to change the law so that new exceptions (aka appropriations) to copyright can be introduced whimsically by politicians without bothering to trouble parliament…
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Google have released a new thingy, which allows people to save web content to their Google Drive (Google’s cloud-based storage thing), and do various things to it like add comments and annotations. Nothing much unusual about that, and there are lots of similar things out there like the formerly discussed bo.lt. Not to mention every…
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After the revelation that withdrawing from Google News seems to do little (if any) damage to publishers, Eric Schmidt has been in France trying to persuade the President not to allow news publishers to charge Google for including their content on Google News. Google says such a move would “threaten the very existence” of Google.…
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Well that didn’t take long. Apparently the Brazilian boycott of Google News has cost them just 5% of their traffic. They think that’s “a price worth paying”. I’d say so too. I don’t know how their revenues stack up but I would be surprised if the financial cost was much greater than zero. As Techcrunch…
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Brazilian newspapers have, en masse, withdrawn their content from Google News. The response, not least from Google itself, is the usual mix of unhelpful and self-interested grandstanding. Google’s comparison of themselves to a cab driver bringing customers to a restaurant is particularly absurd, since most restaurants want customers who can pay, and aren’t interested in…
Dominic Young 