Bloggasm

For years, Google defenders (including Google itself) have been daring newspapers to flip the switch — modify their code ever so slightly as to ward off any search engine spiders and remove themselves from the Google index completely. If Google was such a parasite, then why not simply apply the anti-body? The reason behind this bluff was to extract an admission from the newspapers that they do enjoy the flood of traffic from Google, after all.

And perhaps Rupert Murdoch is issuing a bluff of his own, but recently he said that he was considering turning off the Google hose.

“I think we will, but that’s when we start charging,” he said. “We have it already with the Wall Street Journal. We have a wall, but it’s not right to the ceiling. You can get, usually, the first paragraph from any story – but if you’re not a paying subscriber to WSJ.com all you get is a paragraph and a subscription form.”

There are many who think this would be suicide, but if it is it would be suicide in the name of answering the question we’ve always asked: Can a newspaper survive without Google?

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Last week a New York judge ordered Google to turn over the identity of an anonymous blogger who called a model a “skank” in a blog post. The order was part of a defamation suit, and apparently Google complied because the blogger in question is now talking to the press, and she’s angry.

Speaking out for the first time since a court order forced Google to reveal her identity, blogger Rosemary Port tells the Daily News that model Liskula Cohen should blame herself for the uproar…

…The pretty 29-year-old Fashion Institute of Technology student added that she’s furious at Google for revealing her identity, so much so that she plans to file a $15 million federal lawsuit against the Web giant.

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Tinnitus, according to Wikipedia, is “the perception of sound within the human ear in the absence of corresponding external sound.” It’s usually in the form of ringing, and can be maddening for those who suffer from it.

This guy decided to plug the word into Google Trends and noticed something odd: searches for the term spike up at the end of the year. Why would something like that happen?

Are there seasonal correlates to tinnitus? I didn’t think so, but I’m definitely no expert. It seems to spike around the end of the year. Maybe it’s from listing to that Christmas music in China Mart.

What other queries describe sine waves, but without apparent seasonal or other correlates?

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Coincidence?

Banished

Do not ask for whom the Google tolls. It tolls for me.

I woke up this morning to discover that I no longer exist. The entire contents of this blog has been erased from Google’s index. Every post. Every last bon mot. Gone. Without a trace.

But unlike most bloggers who would issue this kind of complaint, Nick Carr is influential enough to get an immediate response from Google in his comments section, and his site has now been restored to the index:

Hi Nick,

I am from Google’s web search team. It looks like your site was removed because it has been hacked. We tried to send you an email last Friday with information on what happened, but it was difficult to find a contact. Full details are in our webmaster console which can be found at http://google.com/webmasters. You also now have my email address and I can share more details with you directly.

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WSJ publisher calls Google ‘digital vampire’

The gloves are coming off in the intensifying battle between newspaper publishers and Google.

In a keynote speech at the annual PricewaterhouseCoopers Entertainment and Media Outlook event Tuesday, Dow Jones Chief Executive Les Hinton raised the rhetoric a notch, calling the Internet search giant a vampire “sucking the blood” out of the newspaper business, and promised that new developments would level the playing field.

“There is a charitable view of the history of Google,” said Mr. Hinton, who is also publisher of The Wall Street Journal. “[It] didn’t actually begin life in a cave as a digital vampire per se. The charitable view of Google is that the news business itself fed Google’s taste for this kind of blood.”

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Google News now linking to Wikipedia – a recipe for disaster?

As you can see from our elementary attempt at Photoshop artistry, Google News today began linking to Wikipedia – a move search expert Michael Gray has called “incredibly horrible.”

Since its launch in 2002, Google’s news aggregator has maintained high standards for its “feeder” outlets. Most articles on the site come from established papers such as The Christian Science Monitor, wire services such as the Associated Press, or news sites such as Channel Web; there is also room for input from a coterie of blogs and online forums.

The inclusion of Wikipedia seems to indicate that Google tacitly views the encyclopedia as an equally reputable news source. But Wikipedia is an open-source encyclopedia, which means that each article is subject to editing by a community. The process has been the subject of controversy before, and it will probably be the subject of controversy again.

Should Wikipedia be elevated to the same plane, say, as The New York Times?

via poynter