May 28th, 2008 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
Despite the headline on this post, I have nothing against Belgium as a country. I am a big fan of their waffles, for example, not to mention their chocolate — and Brueghels is pretty cool as well. Still, they are inescapably intertwined in my mind with one of the stupidest lawsuits I can think of in the “new media” sphere (and that includes Viacom’s lawsuit against YouTube): the country’s media agency, Copiepresse, is suing Google for linking to its content, and is asking for $77-million in damages. I am not making this up.
The lawsuit was filed in 2006, and Google lost the case in Belgium — as well as a subsequent appeal — and had to remove links to Belgian newspaper content from its Google News index. At some point after that, it seemed as though the geniuses at Copiepresse realized how their “victory” was anything but, and talks between Google and the agency aimed at a settlement of some kind took place for awhile. Those talks have apparently fallen through and the group is now pressing forward with its suit, like someone who is determined to saw through the tree branch that they happen to be sitting on.
I know that some people are probably going to start arguing with me in the comments, so before you do, I encourage you to read up about the case — including some of my previous posts on the topic. As far as I can tell, Google’s use of excerpts from news stories meets (or should meet) every test of “fair use” imaginable — except perhaps in Belgium — especially since the company makes no money from advertising on Google News pages. On top of all that, linking enhances the value of newspaper content by exposing it to a broader audience. Belgium’s newspapers should be thanking Google, not suing it.
Feb 22nd, 2008 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
Tony Hung of Deep Jive Interests has a post up about Google News and its commenting feature, in which the service reaches out to individuals who are involved in news stories and allows them to post comments — or in some cases, apparently, takes their blog posts and publishes them as comments. The case Tony refers to is one in which Mick O’Leary of Information Today wrote about Citizendium, the Wikipedia competitor that Larry Sanger (a co-founder of Wikipedia) started last year.
O’Leary wrote a piece about Citizendium and how it is failing to keep up with Wikipedia, and is in fact “almost useless” for a number of reasons, mostly because there isn’t enough material in the entries he checked. Sanger’s comment on the Google News entry is essentially a shortened and edited version of the blog post Sanger wrote in response to the original story, in which he took the writer to task for not calling him.
Like Tony, I think that Google’s comment feature is a fascinating one, and I wish that it was used more often (there are some recent examples here). As Tony suggests, it’s a feature that can come in very handy for “new media orphans” — although I would argue that Sanger isn’t really an example of an orphan, since he was more than capable of responding on his blog. At the same time, however, while the Information Today piece would show up in Google News, Sanger’s blog response wouldn’t.
Feb 7th, 2008 | Media 2.0, Social Media | 1 Comment
For lots of people I know (including me, I have to admit) Google News has effectively become their online newspaper. I don’t know where it stacks up in terms of news portals, and whether Yahoo News or MSN have bigger market share, but for many the day starts with a browse through Google’s version of the newspaper — and now that paper will include local news as well as world news. Can the 800-pound gorilla make local work? And does that help or hurt newspaper sites?
The first thing I wondered was whether Google was just looking at the placeline and/or the source for its stories, since the section in my version of the new Google News showed that the five stories were all from the Toronto Star. Was that paper being ranked higher just because it has the word Toronto in its name? Not according to the Google blog.
We’re not simply looking at the byline or the source, but instead we analyze every word in every story to understand what location the news is about and where the source is located.
As always with Google, the algorithm is king. And the local section on my page did a pretty remarkable job of pulling together news from most of the local outlets, including radio-station websites such as 680News, as well as newspapers like the Star and the Globe — although it did pick up stories from as far away as Kingston and Montreal, so it’s not foolproof. But it’s still as good or better than many of the other news aggregators I’ve tried, including Yahoo (which used to be my start page).
Update: Topix founder Rich Skrenta has a response to Google’s launch that is worth reading, and there’s a post on the Topix blog that also looks at the impact of Google moving into the company’s local search space. The point of the post seems to be that “local news is not a search problem.”
I may be somewhat biased toward the “Web is friend, not foe” argument as far as newspapers are concerned, but I think this helps newspaper websites rather than hurts them. I know that there will be the inevitable arguments, like the ones the World Newspaper Association and others keep trotting out, that Google is “stealing” eyeballs and readers who just want a quick summary of the news, but I think that continues to miss the point.
In a nutshell, if a quick summary or the first paragraph of your story captures all that you have to offer, then you don’t deserve to have those readers in the first place. Write well, add value and readers will continue to come to you — and now even more may wind up coming, as a result of features like Google’s localized news.
Dec 13th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
Just came across something interesting from a few days ago that I somehow missed, but which could have serious implications for newspapers and their evolving relationship with Google: Search Engine Journal notes that Google News is tinkering with its algorithm and the way it ranks news stories. It wants to do a number of things, but one of the main ones is to promote the publication that first breaks a news story, rather than one of the follow-up pieces from newswires or larger papers.
That’s good for smaller local papers, since they will get more exposure and hence more traffic. It doesn’t say so in the Google News blog post, but I have to wonder if this is related to some of the criticism that Google got after they did the deal with Associated Press to host AP stories on Google servers and some people complained that local publications weren’t getting credit from Google News for the stories they were breaking.
Nov 29th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
I was looking around at some of the blog posts and news articles on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, including one at Compete about traffic flows on Cyber Monday, and as usual I wound up at Google News doing a search for the term Cyber Monday. What came up was a cluster of almost 700 articles with one from CNet at the top.
Directly underneath the story cluster, however, was a comment balloon, indicating that Google News had added a comment from someone involved in the story, as the site started doing earlier this year in an attempt to add balance to the news that it presents (a curiously journalistic approach for a search engine). The Cyber Monday comment was one of the first ones I’ve come across “in the wild,” so I took a snapshot of the page. As it turned out, there were actually three comments:
One comment is from the chief retail analyst at NPD Group, a research firm, a second is from the executive director at Shop.org — where they have put together a page with hundreds of Black Friday deals, and a third comment comes from a retail analyst at Forrester Research.
What purpose does this serve? I’m not sure. The NPD analyst is actually quoted in some of the retail stories I came across, but his comment on the Google News page is substantially longer than any of his quotes in news stories; does that add value? Perhaps. The Shop.org comment seems fairly blatantly promotional, which makes you wonder why Google bothered. And the Forrester comment — which is quite short — arguably adds something to the story, but not a huge amount.
Will many people read those comments? And if they do, will it add to their understanding of the story in a way that a simple quote in a news article wouldn’t? I wish I knew.
