Odyssey Online

…couple of things on the situation between Google and China (what does it mean that I’m writing about Google like it was a country)…the Washington Post is reporting that Google’s decision comes on cyber-attacks launched against Gmail, and that these attacks “on Google that the search giant said originated in China were part of a concerted political and corporate espionage effort that exploited security flaws in e-mail attachments to sneak into the networks of major financial, defense and technology companies and research institutions in the United States.”

Also of note, Peter Fallows, who writes on a variety of topics for Atlantic Magazine and is a frequent commenter on China, writes of the implications of the Google v. China stand off here and here and here.  National Review lauds Google’s decision here, useful reading on what is really an interesting, and in some ways frightening situation.

…two good posts on Google’s decision to at least consider cutting off business with China.  Both are from Atlantic Online, one by Marc Ambinder on the immediate implications, and one by Derek Thompson on future implications.

…more soon, both men do point out that Google itself is not a transparent company and there is a lot to read into their decision/announcement…

Happy new year! Couple of quick thing, with the new year spinning out stories from the past…just before Christmas the Washington Post reported that the U.S. Federal Government is having a tough time finding specialists who can fight ongoing cyberwars.  With the ongoing situation in Iran making news and furious blogging, I’d point to a list of new titles in our collection on Iran that was posted here to Odyssey Online last summer.

…also the Boston Globe reported on the most popular searches in Google...

Updates on items of interest to Odyssey Online…as reported in the Washington Post the House of Representatives is taking steps to ensure more cybersecurity for legislative action and business. Also, commentary continues on Google’s quiet shift over to a personalized search as the basic Google web search:

• Google’s Personalized Results Could be Bad for a Search PC Week
• Google Extends Personalized Search to All CNET News
• Google Chrystal Ball Equal Parts Fun, Frightening Google Watch
• 3 New Forms of Search Google is Working on Now ReadWriteWeb
• Google Unveils a Host of New Features Vactor News

…from the Washington Post, Google will now apparently gift wrap their browser Chrome for you, so that you can have a Christmas present from Google…

…while it is perhaps a temptation to read too much into this, it got me thinking about the Internet and lonely people.  Years ago, back in the days of when Gopher was the Internet, I heard a story about two tech savvy librarians who took a senior member of the faculty to a computer terminal to show him the wonder known as the Internet.  He sat down and started surfing one Gopher site after another, apparently fascinated. Some time the two beaming librarians returned to this gentlemen, and when he looked up from the screen he said, “I had no idea so many people were so lonely.”  There is a body of literature about the Internet and personality types and alienation and technology and all that, accessible through subject headings like, say, Internet–Social Aspects.  Thoughts on lonely people and browsing the web on a rainy December day…

…this is slightly incredible, but there is an application for Google’s browser, Chrome, called Frame. What it does is, well, I’ll quote from this article in Slate by Farhad Manjoo” “Chrome Frame does this by replacing IE’s guts.” Ergo, it inserts the Chrome process into IE…wow…

I’m having recollections from science fiction movies where some alien life from drills down into the human noogin and inserts itself into one’s corporal frame….unfortunately there was a security hole in Frame, apparently, which Google insists has been fixed…

In other news of all things webical, Facebook is thinking again about privacy. The Washington Post has the story…

…in a very interesting very quiet move, Google has personalized all searches. That is, based on the information Google keeps on searches an individual does, and based on information uploaded to Google by gmail and the like users, each Google search will be a little bit different.  Good commentary on what this means from Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land, and Mercedes Bunz in the Guardian. Sullivan makes a good connection to this and reference work done by librarians.  In a library every search is customized as a researcher works with a librarian to find the best materials…what Sullivan points out though, is that you wouldn’t expect a librarian to remember a conversation, verbatim, you had a half a year ago. That’s what Google does, and, I agree with Sullivan, that’s the creepy part.  What happens in the library stays in the library, even as the books leave…is that perhaps an advantage of a library.

Also, with criticism growing from the news industry of Google’s role in the economics of news delivery, Eric Schmidt takes a few pages of the Wall Street Journal to defend his company…

…the revised Google Book Settlement is due out Friday. I will be driving across Vermont’s pleasant hills and greenswalds on Friday, but trust me I’ll blog like a son-of-a-gun on this next week. In the mean time here are a couple of posts offering preliminary analysis based on what has been leaked so far:

• Electronic Freedom Frontier offers a fairly optimistic take on the revised settlement, although notes concerns over Fair Use Guidelines and Google Books, as well as “one interface to rule them all” worries…
• Karen Coyle–whose writing about the Google Book deal as been excellent so far–articulates concerns about what Google Book means, or pointedly doesn’t mean, for libraries…

More next week…

…the BBC web site ran an interesting piece by Rory Cellan-Jones on Google’s new feature Dashboard. The article is titled My Life Online–Time to Delete? and ponders uploaded information.  Dashboard allows one to see what information that one has uploaded to save is associated with what Google feature. Ergo, what you’ve given Google to mind and where Google has put it.  It’s a fine check, but as Cellan-Jones reflects, it’s your information out of your hands and in Google’s…forever?  Does on want all of one’s online discourse (like this blog post) saved forever?

…the article mentions Viktor Mayer-Schonberger’s book Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age,  which is an extremely well written study of the social utility of forgetting, set against the new digital storage technologies. Well worth the time to read it…

…since the Obama Administration’s ruling on supporting network neutrality (reported on here at Odyssey Online), the debate has come more into public focus, the politics of said have become a little sharper.  The Washington Post reported that the FCC is drafting the specific rules that will keep ” Internet providers as acting like gatekeeprs,” and also reported that CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, favors network neutrality but thought it would be “a terrible idea for the government to involve itself as a regulator of the broader Internet.” Atlantic Magazine provides ran a useful Political Primer on network neutrality, identifying the players and what they are after.