Google

Possibilities of what GB can achieve for journalism.

http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=31&aid=177590

Ever heard of cloud-computing? It's all about data and programs being stored in a central network 'cloud' so that computers become 'lighter' and can run more efficiently. Originally the concept appealed most to businesses who saw the idea as a way to cut down on their hardware in a major way, offloading almost everything to a powerful central server core. But now, mostly thanks to Google, the whole concept of cloud computing is coming to the public. Think of the internet as the cloud, with all of your programs and data living on it rather than on your computer.

This may not be the most productive post of the holidays, but it may give a welcome break from Shorthand / feature writing / playing golf.

This a webpage from the Huffington Post site listing the most inappropriate Google suggestions when you type in half a search. It's amazing what comes up, and even more amazing what people put on the internet!

Since it's release, the iPhone has rocked the mobile phone industry. Industry giants who lumbered, sanguine, in their well-trodden paths were shaken half to death by Apple.

But why?

Apologies, but the iPhone is not a technological miracle. Things like 3G, video capture, and processing speed are only added a model after the time that they should have been. Fair play, multi-touch and video editing are key strengths that not many phones can mimic, but these things alone do not warrant such a die-hard following.

Did an apple fall from a tree and hit Issac Newton on the head thus prompting the great physicist to discover the law of gravity?

Almost certainly not.

But watching a falling apple did concentrate his mind and lead him, during the late 1660's, to formulate the theory that gravity operates in an inverse-square proportion. If this was true, Newton deduced that it would be possible to predict the planet's orbital periods. He therefore named the force "universal gravitation".

Google has added a new section to its Google News service that aims to highlight "in-depth pieces of lasting value" culled from its regular aggregate sources of journalism. The service is called Spotlight, and it uses one of Google's infamous computer algorithms to automatically select items of "investigative journalism, opinion pieces, special-interest articles, and other stories of enduring appeal", according to the search giant.

Microsoft recently launched its new internet search engine. It had been code-named “Kumo”, but when it went live it was under the name "Bing".
Search engines are becoming more and more important to our lives because of the spread of the internet. When my children want to research something for their homework, they wouldn’t dream of going to the library as I used to do; they type their questions into Google; the World’s most popular engine.
No-one seems to know just how many searches are carried out on Google each day, but it’s thought to be several hundreds of millions – and growing.

As part of the development of this site I've been working on an aggregration page that pulls together all of the most recent posts from the top bloggers in medialand. It's not a particularly complex thing to achieve, but it has got me thinking about the notion of Fair Use of content from external sites. How much of that content, supplied in a handy format by those bloggers in their RSS feeds, is it reasonable to present on this site as long as it includes a link back to the original? All of it? The headline and intro? Will we be driving traffic their way? Or gaining traffic of our own at their expense. And should I be asking permission to do so? In a minuscule way, it reflects the argument that has raged on and off between Google and newspaper publishers for much of the last decade and has recently flared up again with a vengeance.

I sat at the conference table today, reading The Guardian’s Technology supplement, wondering if I’d ever be saying “bing it” instead of “google it”. It didn't even cross my mind that later on I would reading about the sections possible disappearance.

Oh dear, you know this blog is going to be on either tea or Twitter. Today it's the latter, although I do suggest making yourself a cup right now.