Google News

Posted at 3:52pm on Friday, November 20th, 2009

Recently Google News has been heavily featuring Fox "News" stories without alternative coverage. These stories are political hit pieces by and large. While they are fine as opinion pieces Google is doing us a disservice in putting them in "news" slots.

Mondo Times editors    Boulder Colorado USA

Posted at 2:18pm on Monday, November 16th, 2009

Google To Scan "Orphan Books" First, Ask Questions Later, Business Week reported on November 14, 2009:

"So-called orphan works, millions of books for which copyright laws still apply but whose rights owner is unknown or cannot be located, will still be scanned and sold in an online registry.

In September, head of the US Copyright Office Marybeth Peters said Google’s initial “opt-out” proposal to scan orphan works before attempting to find rights owners amounted to a throwing out of “fundamental copyright principles.” Though the most recent revisions stipulate more rigorous steps for collecting and distributing money to authors and publishers, the proposed agreement is still opt-out, as Danny Sullivan pointed out in his blog Search Engine Land. Peters is still likely to object."

The full story:
http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/techbeat/archives/2009/11/google_books_sc.html

Mondo Times editors    Boulder Colorado USA

Posted at 3:42pm on Tuesday, November 10th, 2009

Google Plunks Down $750 Million for Mobile Ad Company AdMob

Wired reported on November 9, 2009:

"While Google already has text ads that accompany mobile searches, AdMob specializes in graphic ads that show up on web pages and mobile applications. AdMob collects demographic data on mobile users, and charges a premium to let advertisers choose to target professionals, teens or early adopters.

Google pulled in $5.96 billion in revenue in the third quarter of 2009 and had $1.65 billion in profit. Search engine text ads accounted for 67 percent of that revenue, while 30 percent comes from ads on other publishers’ sites."

The full story:
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/11/google-buys-mobile-ad-company-for-750m/

Mondo Times editors    Boulder, Colorado USA

Posted at 1:54pm on Tuesday, November 10th, 2009

Responding to Rupert Murdoch's plan to remove News Corporation content from Google, Google spokesman Chris Gaither told the E-Commerce Times that publishers can do what they like:

"News organizations are in complete control over whether and how much of their content appears in search results. Publishers put their content on the Web because they want it to be found, so very few choose not to include their material in Google News and Web search," Gaither said. "But if they tell us not to include it, we don't. There are simple technical standards, used by millions of webmasters and honored by all reputable search engines, to instruct a search engine not to index a Web page or even a particular photo on a page. And if publishers want their content to be removed from Google News specifically, all they need to do is tell us."

The full story:
http://www.ecommercetimes.com/rsstory/68597.html