Chris Milk who made this crazy video with Gnarls Barkley, collaborated with Google on this - My home where I grew up in Moscow (click continue anyway there).
I don’t write about gadgets and gizmos but this seems significant. A while ago Google acquired Gizmo, the Skype competitor. They now integrated it into Gmail (rolled out in the last two days in USA). I used it this afternoon, it’s a real killer app. Certainly a killer app as far as Skype’s IPO is concerned. Skype opened up this market but they sadly stagnated for years under the terrible management and ownership of eBay.
The integration of Gmail, Contacts and most importantly Google Voice is impressive. You have the unmatched voicemail features of Google Voice and the Contacts. Most importantly Google Voice had to dial your phone to make a call and it can quickly drain your mobile minutes, but the new Gmail/Chat/Phone integration is a Skype like computer based client, a total bypass of a physical phone. And you can even accept incoming calls to your Google Voice number from Gmail Chat. Skype can’t do that. This is a game changer. Not to mention that the international Google Voice rates are a cent or two lower per minute compared to Skype. The sound quality was exceptional. Google really is the new evil Microsoft.
Eric Schmidt has a ingenious solutions to the conflict between the youthful indiscretions and the permanent index (via readwriteweb):
“He predicts, apparently seriously, that every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends’ social media sites.”
I am not sure if you noticed but Google rolled out the new design for their core search pages. Juts from my observation many elements are the same as previously introduced in YouTube (more about this at some later point). Here is the rundown.
Google Old Search Page – The old search box is concave, meaning the shadows are structured in such a way that it appears recessed from the surface of the page. The old search buttons are darker gray and they are sharply convex, meaning sharply protruding to the forefront from the surface of the page.
Google Old Search Results Page – There is nothing to add here, you know this page.
Google New Search Page – The new search box is taller (and wider?) by about 5 pixels, the box is now convex (this is the most radical element of the redesign), meaning the shadows are structured in such a way that it (the search box) appears protruding to the forefront from the surface of the page. You can see that they changed the position of the curser (more idiot proof). The search buttons are lighter gray, the are also taller and have a slight gradient tone, i.e. they are not as flat as the old buttons. This is the one element of the redesign that I think was a mistake. I like the minimalist flatness of the old buttons and the letters themselves (“Google Search” and “I’ am Feeling Lucky” ) blend better with the old background.
Google New Search Results Page – There is the “iconized” left options column. Generally this is a good idea, although there are still the same options on top navigation. May be as a transition this is OK, but you shouldn’t have the repetition of the same options on the same page.
Philosophically speaking the search gone from concave to convex.This is a bold move, pun intended. You now search “on the page” not “in the page”. Perhaps the Internet is no longer as permeable as it used to? The search is now less angular and less in contrast, it is less “masculine”. The new search is more oblique, gradient and curvy, how appropriate for the Mother’s Day!
Significantly there is also a new logo. The old logo (above) has a drop-off shadow to appear floating above the page. The new logo has just a hint of a shadow, almost flat on the page. In the old logo the letters are more articulated with the shadows, so they seem more shapely and a bit darker. The new logo has the same colors but without the shadows the same colors appear brighter. I am disappointed with the new logo, if they felt that a flat logo is more contemporary, they would have made a statement by going completely flat, instead there is the corporate half-ass in between compromise. And you can see how the new less convex logo is inconsistent with the new more convex search redesign.
The graffiti artist known as Bansky, Sale Ends Today, from the LA Series.
As much as the content of our society is advertising, the content of an ancient empire was sacrifice. But could it be that we are as delusional about the usefulness of advertising as people were about the sacrifices? These things are very hard to measure, even given the spy grade tools of the Internet and this is precisely the point. As long as people believe that it works, it’s all that counts. Speaking of the propelled by the ads Internet, as long as there are budgets allocated to “the Google strategy”, “the Facebook strategy”, “Twitter strategy”, etc. – it’s “what’s people do”. And now this timely riff by Joseph Javier Perla – Facebook is a Ponzi Scheme. Joseph is right, there is the novelty curve. The Internet is pretty good for point of purchase links but terrible for the classic “let’s create the vibe and the image” branding. People will catch on eventually, they always do.
We will offer you multiple platforms to publish. We will then stealthy crawl and index the most popular information and suggest the advertising modules to place by the side of your work. We will then sell the ads and give you a 5% cut (no one knows for sure, one of Google’s top secrets) for your own work. Because it takes too long to actually write and publish an interesting, creative content we will encourage aggregation, embeds and outright stealing (repackaging and relabeling) of the creative work, to the point that majority of the internet are the scraped splogs (spam blogs) and the content feeds. We will send you SEO (search engine optimization) signals on how to please and worship us, your master.
We would link all the available content and display the links with the ads. If you are a creative writer or an artist you are at a systemic disadvantage to the aggregation. Nowhere in our business plan is there a place for the direct reimbursement of the creative class, they must be reduced to selling tee shirts for the ugly fat stomach women alongside their silly poetry. And yes we will scan and link every book known to man.
We will then give you the tools for email, chat, calendar, video, etc.. This will enable us to spy on your habits and tastes even in your sleep (we might even monitor your emails when you are already dead). After we invade every crevice of your psyche we will use the computational power (the green energy of course) to increase your clicking ratios. Unlimited financial resources at our disposal will enable us to crash or buyout every innovation that threatens to disrupt our model.
Finally because nothing scales as fast as crap we will rank the most popular content that aims to sink to the lowest common denominator and to appeal to the masses of the Generation Like!!! and the Generation LOL!!!
We will then go to China and complain about the lack of democracy and the
“free information”.
***
And just to underline the above is a quote from the comment by Jaron Lanier to the conversation between Evgeny Morozov and Clay Shirky on the Edge (worthy of reading in the entirety):
“Here is what I wish Hillary Clinton had said to the Chinese after they hacked into Google’s computers: “Of course we need to stop hacking into each other’s computers. But let’s keep our eyes on the bigger picture: The world we want to live in would also happen to be the best world for China’s vital interests. We want to live in a world in which a Chinese movie routinely earns billions of dollars in the USA from intellectual property rights. China needs this world because eventually cheap robotics and other technologies will put pressure on the margins China can earn from manufacturing. We want to live in a world in which both Chinese citizens and Americans can often earn their livings from their hearts and brains, instead of their hands. We want them to use the Internet to do that, and that means we have to stop using the ‘Net the way we are, primarily as a way to gather data. Both the Chinese government and Google ought to change their approaches in order to bring about this world.”
You can read there also Douglas Rushkoff’s comments and it doesn’t really come close to the depth of Jaron Lanier. Take this profound thought as an example. The binary architecture expressed on the surface of the media:
“The basic problem is that web 2.0 tools are not supportive of democracy by design. They are tools designed to gather spy-agency-like data in a seductive way, first and foremost, but as a side effect they tend to provide software support for mob-like phenomena. There are some nice mob effects, but the intensity of the failures is more profound than the delights of the successes. A flash mob in San Francisco in which people suddenly hold a pose and disperse doesn’t compensate for a flash mob in Philadelphia in which people are beaten up.
In the USA, the rise of these tools has corresponded to a truly loony period of reality disconnect and rancor. When you bring digital tools into a system in a crude way, you risk infecting elements of that system with a binary character. Either you’re all in or you’re all out. Each politician becomes a bit.”
image via flickr/zaruka
Via exclusiverights:
“American Society of Media Photographers, Inc. v. Google, Inc. (S.D.N.Y. 2010) (complaint)
On Wednesday, a group of photographers, illustrators and graphic artists filed a class action lawsuit against Google. The class action plaintiffs allege that Google had, in effecting its Google Books program, committed copyright infringement by (i) scanning and creating digital copies of images without permission; (ii) storing digital copies of the images; and (iii), distributing and publicly displaying the images. According to the plaintiffs, the suit was “designed to redress the most widespread, well-publicized, and uncompensated infringement of exclusive rights in images in the history of book and periodical publishing.”
Is the Google page rank algorithm redirecting our culture? At the end of last year Fred Wilson wrote a post – People First, Machines Second. Fred was saying that the page algorithm elevates linking and anchoring of information, a human action. But there is a peculiar omission from the logic, machines or uncaring humans can link and anchor many times faster, and they do to the tune of billions of pages and millions of dollars. More importantly they poison the well of knowledge by cluttering the “super highway” with the clunkers or should we call them drones. For sure Google is aware that this has the enormous impact on the search results quality. But there is the deep apprehension that Google in fact prefers quantity over quality. Google is an advertising supported business, they need the inventory to distribute the ads, they would rather monetize point of purchase not the point of information (see Chris Dixon on the massive misallocation of online advertising dollars) and they don’t particularly mind the drones because that can multiply page views by the millions (see Aaron Wall – Spam vs. Mahalo).
Now Matt Cuts started to direct humans to the Google Spam report page, “help us maintain the quality of Google search results”. If this is not an admission that a Google bot sees no difference between a splog and a blog than what is? We know that Gmail spam filer works pretty well but then it relies on the reporting benefit of the huge installed base of the darn humans. And it doesn’t look like the usability of the search results will improve anytime soon, not after the massive amount of the social media clutter is now integrated into the pages. Tweets might be a human signal but if the disjointed bits of information, mostly click-through links to the 3rd party sites is not a spam than what is? Inevitably signal to noise ratio in relationship to a particular search is dismal. In short the search no longer gives you the aha “buzz”…
This commentary would remain academic if not for the fact that the “setup” is detrimental to writers and content originators. The machines don’t emote to art, poetry, heck they don’t even properly recognize the significant technical or scientific writing. The bots are not very good at detecting copyright. The robots are way too busy selling the washer dryers and the quantifiable viral amusement. If you think this has nothing to do with the punishing grip of this great recession than you really might be a machine.
On the subject of The Internet is off-key. The internet as we know it today works to please the advertising oligarchy. This has severe ramification on the publishing priorities. Quantity is favored over quality. The scarping and splogs dominate the internet. Point of purchase is monetized while point of information is not. The link hustlers are favored over the “creative class”. Here are the two noteworthy articles:
This disease is spreading, note what the new AOL CEO formerly of Google is doing with “journalism” – AOL Moves to Build Tech ‘Newsroom of the Future’:
“Rather than merely craft articles and passively post them on the Web, as many newspapers and magazines do, AOL is using software to determine which articles to write and then give journalists up-to-the-minute data on how much traffic those articles generate.”
Two events last week should put all users of Google services on notice. First was the so called “Musicblogocide” as described in the Guardian – Google shuts down music blogs without warning, as years of archives are wiped off the internet. We have seen before similar actions from Google and this one seem to fit the pattern. Google denies service in a somewhat arbitrary fashion, there is usually no warning and most importantly there is virtually no recourse, no innocent until proven guilty, no reasonable possibility to appeal or appease the lawyered up machine.
Similarly on the same week Google announced that they are discontinuing FTP service to the Blogger blogs, a serious disruption to thousands of users. Google’s excuse is that they are spending too much on the resources for the FTP based blogs is laughable. But back to the Musicblogocide.
There is a vast problem on the Internet with the copyright, especially as it relates to music but not only music. Google itself contributes to the ambiguity on this issue if not pushes people away from the admittedly digitally outdated copyright interpretations. The Google Internet as it exist today leads people in a certain direction. Specifically the Internet is viewed as an advertising page inventory with the following dire consequences:
- Quantity trumps quality, keywords trump coherent sentences. This leads to millions of Splogs and the entire Affiliate Marketing industry.
- Original authorship is diluted, share alike and mashups culture is encouraged. This leads to the proliferation of the aggregators (borderline Splogs really).
- The common “share alike” practices encourage republishing or even outright stealing of content (the borders are blurred again).
- There is still no micro payment system to deliver any value to the content originators, the so called “creative class”. You don’t have to look far to see the result of this, even in the current great recession.
Google is in the unique position to change this poisonous climate. But there is an impression that all they care about in the end is the display ads inventory. Today Google presides over the Internet that is anti authorship and anti intellectual property. But instead of tackling the root causes of this decrepit culture Google prefers to pick on the bloggers who only blindly follow where the system created and blessed by Google leads them. One way to solve this is to create a micro payment app to drive the value to the writers and the artists. You want to embed anything, pay the micro price. Shift the value proposition on the Internet from the DJs to the creators and composers. And don’t blame the DJs for the direction you Google yourself googled for them.
Bill Wasik makes some interesting observations in response to Nick Carr and George Packer, yet unlike Jaron Lanier Bill just diagnosed the symptoms, not the disease. Bill Wasik writes in Twitter and the Big Blog Dream:
“When people talk about how the Internet is killing the mainstream media, they’re really thinking about blogs, specifically blogs circa 2004. The sudden rise of blogs held out a tantalizing vision of the future, where amateurs would reliably attract an audience to rival that of the mass media. In the Big Blog Dream, there would still be a single media conversation, as it were, but there would be a leveling in that conversation whereby amateurs could join, often as quasi-equals, alongside the professionals.
This is the storyline that still basically dominates discussion of the Internet — and yet the Big Blog Dream has largely died. First, the mainstream media muscled in on it, using their storehouses of experience and talent to launch scores of their own high-traffic blogs. (Where they didn’t build their own, they hired the best amateurs to join their staffs.) Second, the Internet-native media that did survive are now hardly amateur by any definition: they’re places like TPM, Gawker, and the Huffington Post, that have built bare-bones business models that create tons of original content by leveraging young and/or unpaid/low-paid writers. And third, between these two groups (the big-media blogs and the Internet-native blogs), most of the readers no longer have the time or inclination to bother with any actual amateurs. Really, for the past three years or so, there’s been almost no hope for new bloggers who don’t quickly find their way underneath the umbrella of some established site. And so blogging (at least among the non-elderly, as Nick Carr recently pointed out) has come to seem far less vital.”
Everything Bill writes in the preceding paragraphs is true, but this is one of the effects, not the cause, specifically not the cause of the decline in journalism. Google is the God of the Internet. Whats is written on the internet is done to worship and please the Deity. The Google ethos is advertising and this has the far-reaching consequences. Google needs to maximized the inventory of pages to display the ads. The model is the incremental small display ads payments spread over millions of pages. The online content only gravitates in the direction where the monetization model leads it. Hence if you take the Huffington Post (and Gawker for sure) you will find that the quantity trumps quality. Certainly at some point the Huffington Post had the high brow aspirations and there is still plenty of decent content there but overall they moved in the direction where the monetization model leads them, namely a heavy dose of aggregation and the general style of news DJing, instead of the expensive investigative reporting.
The other aspect of the Google worship is that people start writing for a bot, not a human. A computer naturally favors words over coherent sentences. Enter the spam plague of the “affiliate marking”. A “cut & paste” article about a washing machine is more valuable for a bot than a Shakespeare’s sonnet. This encourages the wanton plagiarizing, the mash-ups and devalues an individual authorship. To make matters worse, the anonymity built-in the blog comments by design, degrades the online conversation, even leads to the raging mob and hate. And only then came the Facebook and the Twitter to finish off what was left of the intelligible conversation. So blogs didn’t kill the journalism but the underlying internet advertising monetization model did kill both the traditional journalism and the blogs.
“The word that comes to mind is vampires – When you think about vampires, they just suck on your blood – There’s absolutely no reason for you guys to be indexed on Google News … if they don’t pay you”
Sure enough there is a predictable gang of “believers” to through stones at Mark Cuban, many of them incidentally the beneficiaries of the current system. As usual this is not a black and white issue but beyond doubt is that Google values quantity over quality, as any computer driven system would. An author is at a eternal disadvantage to bots when the payment system is designed to scale. People who write original content lose, people who steal and aggregate win. Just look at the vast industry of the “affiliate marketing”. They and the aggregators make a serious buck under the current system, not the authors.
Update from Mark Cuban. Now I really think he doesn’t get it.
