Odyssey Online

Nicholas Carr has a new and very thoughtful piece on the evolution of Google as a technology, and as a company.  It’s a sobering short essay, argued in part with the poetry of T.S. Eliot and Robert Frost.  Carr’s thesis is that “Google’s goal is no longer to read the web. It is to read us.” His point being that the company’s push to personalize searches means that the real work Google is figuring out its users, not figuring out the web.  Carr doesn’t comment on the privacy issues explicit in the companies evolution, rather, he his concern is “the prison we now call personalization.”

This commentary combined with the news on Google’s tax shelters make the slogan Don’t Be Evil seem like something from a long time ago…reading Robert Frost is of course a good antidote to the news about Google and late January cold:

• Collected Poems, Prose & Plays by Robert Frost
• The Art of Robert Frost by Tim Kendall
• A Divided Poet : Robert Frost, North of Boston, and the Drama of Disappearance by David Sanders

Google matters. Google matters because a lot of people use it, Google matters because it is an important and useful research tool.  Atlantic Magazine has published a time line of Google co-creator Larry Page’s first year as the company’s CEO (succeeding Eric Schmidt).  You’ll note it was an up and down year…

…back to poetry (April is poetry month!) after this short Google update…

Derek Thompson has published an interesting piece in the Atlantic on whether the Internet is really  a technological breakthrough of historical proportions, or not…he engages such interesting questions as whether we are, at this point in history, in an “innovation rut,” and makes the interesting point that on the Internet we become the commodity.  That our use of the Internet creates information that various vendors can use…hello Google. A good read for the weekend…

…obviously, a hiatus from blogging (and not one that was planned).  Well with the first appreciable snow fall here in Canton, we resume, with a vengeance! (Blogging, tobogganing, blogging while tobogganing and all the joys of winter in Northern New York.) Two things that caught my eye in recent weeks, one, Andrew Sullivan’s comments on the future of Newsweek and magazines generally (more on this this week), and also Alexis Madrigal reporting on the Google Book algorithm.

…an interesting piece in the Huffington Post by Peter O’Dowd on ways companies and candidates bury themselves in Google. That is, folks such as eMarketer who will help you not only maximizes your Google presence (there are dozens of books on this kind of Google hack) but minimize at least part of your Google presence so unflattering accounts of your company or candidacy will be well down a Google results lists.  On a certain level this kind of manipulation really is just a day at the office, but it makes the days of information wants to be free seem far away…

Robert Darnton doesn’t trust Google. That is to say, he doesn’t trust Google to necessarily behave in the best interest of the public trust.  He is the author of The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future and in a recent New York Times editorial, he echoes a call he makes in the book for a National Digital Library.  This would be a collection of e-texts drawn from books essential to American Democracy.  It’s an interesting contemplation of what public institutions are and should do in compliment and contrast to Google…

…Atlantic Magazine recently pointed to a number of articles in which top executives at Google (such as CEO Eric Schmidt) have made statements that suggest they see Google applications so thoroughly embedded in people’s lives that any real sense of privacy, if privacy is defined as the ability to control information about oneself, disappears.  These articles are:

• We Know What You’re Thinking by Andrew Orlowski
• The Schmidt Problem by Nick Saint
• A Creepy Future by Ian Paul
• Eric Schmidt: Google Tries to Get Right Up to the Creepy Line by Matthew Zuras

Now Google isn’t the only online company in the world with privacy issues (think Facebook), but vision of human computer interaction here is one that makes one pause over what Google could possibly mean by “evil” in their famous slogan…

…not that that last post on dictionaries required this much rest, but, indeed, I’ve been amiss with blogging here, but, with this post, am getting back in the game.  What better to get back in the game with then Google!  Google just turned twelve (I’m fond of pointing out when I do presentations on G that for all of its cultural significance it’s younger than three of my four children…), and with this birthday comes the Google instant search, which the company claims knocks two seconds off every Google search (if I did the math I’m sure I could tell how quickly I’d get to a day from two seconds a search).   The Toronto Globe and Mail is also reporting that the instant search comes complete with a Blacklist, that is words which will no longer bring back any results.  The intention is to prevent accidental encounters with pornography, but one can’t help but think back on George Carlin, and his “seven words you can’t say on T.V.” routine…

…on a somewhat different track at Slate Farhad Manjoo has an interesting contemplation of the extensive (obsessive?) press coverage that Apple and Google receive…

…well rested having spent the summer considering the Creative Commons, we’re back at it here at Odyssey Online.  While we were thinking about the CC (and fishing, canoeing, gardening etc.) Google announced it’s impending entry into the electronic book game, in the form of Google Editions.  On Atlantic Magazine’s blog, Peter Osnos gives a good accounting of what Google wishes to do with this project, which boils down to this business plan: “…is that Google will be adding millions of digital titles for sale on any device with Internet access: smart phones, tablets, netbooks, desktops, and every digital reading device except Kindle…”

Bookseller.com predicts an autumn release date for Google Editions, and eWeek has commentary on where it fits among iPads, Kindles, and Nooks (oh my…)

…while I played my hand yesterday on what I exactly think about iPad’s some interesting reading today (in kind of a mid-week Friday blogging spirit) on Google’s plans for an Android-based iPad. You might want to take a look at:

• Google in Unique Position to Deliver iPad Killer PC World
• Atom Runs Android, Google Plans iPad The Register
• Apple Versus Google San Francisco Chronicle
• Google’s iPad Killer on the Way Guardian
• A First Look at Google’s iPad Killer Huffington Post