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France, Sweden Top Europe In Blog, Internet Use

Doug Caverly — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 20:37:15 +0000

I’ve seen a lot of nationalities get insulted online, and no one seems to detect and respond to those insults as quickly as the French. Now I know why: according to a new Forrester Research study, young French Internet users are more likely than just about anyone else in Europe to visit a blog.

France, Sweden Top Europe In Blog, Internet Use

The AFP reports, “The study showed that 72 percent of 12-24 year-olds in France consulted blogs at least once a month and sent in comments at least once monthly.” Granted, to those of us who visit at least 30 blogs a day, that might not sound like much, but let’s be honest – in this respect, we’re at a pretty odd part of the bell curve.

As impressive as France’s accomplishment is, then, Sweden actually managed to beat the country in a related measurement. To again reference the Forrester Research report, the AFP states, “Swedish youngsters out-paced all others in terms of daily internet use, with 88 percent in the 12 to 24 year age bracket consulting the web every day compared to an average 79 percent in the seven European countries researched in the third quarter this year.”

National trends such as these will obviously have an effect on many, many companies. Forrester’s report could even influence the decisions of some of them. At the same time, it’s hard not to notice that things seem to be playing in Google’s favor.

In France, Google’s market share is around 90 percent. If France’s youth are such serious bloggers, then they’re presumably responsible for at least part of this accomplishment, and so Google may be able to count on their support in the years ahead. In Sweden, the example is less impressive, but still important; not long ago, Google partnered with the “Nordic media market”’s self-described search leader, Eniro.

Cerf: Internet Will Expand Into Outer Space

Doug Caverly — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 16:27:58 +0000

Astronauts would never again be without Google. But that’s just one of the benefits that could come from expanding the Internet into space, which is where Vint Cerf says it’s going to go.

“This effort is now bearing fruit and is on track to be space qualified and standardized in the 2010 time frame,” he said at a conference. Google’s Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist, who is also known as one of the founding fathers of the Internet, may soon deserve even more titles; he later continued, “Eventually we will accumulate an interplanetary backbone to assist robotic and manned missions with robust communication.”

Does anybody else foresee a space shuttle named “Cerf”? Or perhaps a “.cerf” top-level domain name – according to the AFP, the man spoke of an endeavor to expand the current system, as well, and “said ICANN, which manages domain names and addresses, was preparing to launch a new format accommodating 340 trillion trillion trillion addresses.”

Still, a space-worthy Internet seems to be the more interesting project. Also, even if Cerf was speaking as an independent thinker, it seems likely that Google would be closely involved with any advancements; from buying a SpaceShipOne replica to creating the Google Lunar X Prize, the search giant has always shown an interest in extraterrestrial matters.

Deals Bring Publishers To Google News

WebProNews Staff — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 12:17:28 +0000

A four publisher deal brings content from major news organizations to Google News and its hosting services.

Deals Bring Publishers To Google News

Google News readers will be familiar with the search results they see when a news story by AP gets picked up by a variety of newspaper websites. The story appears over and over again for that topic, with each newspaper destination individually linked, all for the same content.

There is a new destination for those Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, UK Press Association and the Canadian Press stories. Those organizations will have their content hosted by Google, the company announced on the Google News blog.

Google said that since the quartet does not have consumer sites to host their articles, they haven’t benefited from Google’s ability to drive traffic to news websites. That traffic for articles has traveled to newspaper sites that are members of the given syndicate.

Another feature update by Google News should make more views on a topic available, beyond the multiple duplications of the same wire story on all those newspaper sites:

By removing duplicate articles from our results, we

YouTube Phone To Arrive In Europe

Doug Caverly — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 16:04:57 +0000

LG’s recent Google phone (the KU580) received a small amount of buzz – perhaps proportional to the area in which it was launched. Now there’s word that a YouTube phone is on the way, yet it may be a while before the device reaches American shores.

“LG Electronics will unveil a mobile handset that fully supports the YouTube service for the first time in Europe in the second half of this year,” according to a report from the AFP. When it shows up, “the proposed model will enable users to upload, view and share video clips or user-created content (UCC) online freely without using computers.”

That sounds pretty interesting, although details about pricing or any other features remain unknown. I also feel obliged point out that the Google phone failed to “wow” anyone (it was pretty much a modified Chocolate).

As for the not-in-America release of the YouTube phone, Pocket-lint.co.uk offers one possible explanation: it “should beat Apple’s YouTube enabled iPhone to the European market.” If that’s LG’s primary motive, it gives us an idea of the level on which the new product is intended to compete. And as Google likes to point out, competition is good for the consumer.

GoMo News gives us an idea of how content owners may also benefit: “Perhaps to get the real point here you need to look from the other end of the binoculars, rather than the users’ point of view, and remember that 60 – 70% of the video clips that appear there are professionally produced. This is a great way of opening up a new distribution channel aka another revenue stream.”

“Bad” Internet Words Include Blog, Wiki

Doug Caverly — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 16:35:01 +0000

A new study has found that the words “blog” and “wiki” tend to make people upset, as do “cookie” and “netiquette.” To be honest, I’m not sure what we – the owners of blogs, the users of wikis – are supposed to do with this information. But there you have it.

The study was conducted by YouGov, a British market research agency. Want to argue that the agency’s employees aren’t pros? Well, they are. That they interviewed a crummy sample? 2,091 adults participated, and YouGov works with groups that are “carefully selected and controlled” such that they are “representative of the adult population as a whole.”

We can’t even suggest that YouGov’s respondents aren’t Internet-savvy, because all of the firm’s polling is done online.

And so, as reported by the AFP, “Topping the list of words most likely to make web users ‘wince, shudder or want to bang your head on the keyboard’ was folksonomy, a term for a web classification system.

“‘Blogosphere’ . . . was second; ‘blog’ itself was third; ‘netiquette’, or Internet etiquette, came fourth and ‘blook’, a book based on a blog, was fifth,” the article continues. “‘Cookie’ . . . came in ninth, while ‘wiki’ . . . was tenth.”

So, should we wind back the clock and revive terms like “web log”? I hope not, though I’ll admit that some people seem a little too ready to whip out Internet-specific terms. Keep writing your blogs, then, and reading Wikipedia. But you may want to reconsider talking to your pals about these things.

Yahoo Japan Deselects Sony

Doug Caverly — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 21:18:59 +0000

As far as Yahoo Japan is concerned, Sony’s out and Apple’s in. The iTunes Store will now serve as Yahoo Japan’s primary music seller.

Sony Out, iTunes In

Sony’s not been entirely forsaken – users can still find their way to its offerings. But, as Martyn Williams, a reporter for the IDG News Service, writes, “The partnership means that visitors to the Yahoo Music pages now see a prominent link to iTunes in the menu bar and one-click access to the download service. Until Thursday, Yahoo Japan had relied solely on Mora, a download service run by the Sony-affiliated LabelGate, for music downloads.”

As for how much money may have changed hands, nobody’s talking, but Masahiro Inoue, the president of Yahoo Japan, was willing to describe the deal in general terms. “I’m very happy that, thanks to the cooperation with iTunes, users of Yahoo Japan will be able to access the iTunes store directly,” he stated. “We will provide broader content and functions through our services that have attracted many users.”

The AFP, which carried Inoue’s statement, then hinted at the arrangement’s implications; as most of you probably know, the iPod isn’t a uniquely American phenomenon. “Apple has sold more than 100 million iPods since introducing them in 2001 and the devices command about 75 percent of the global MP3 player market,” the AFP article reveals.

Looks like Yahoo Japan made a good decision in switching to the iTunes Store, though Sony and Mora probably wouldn’t agree.

French Channel May Join YouTube Europe

Doug Caverly — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 22:09:53 +0000

I think pretty much everyone is aware of Britain’s BBC, but France Televisions, a public national television broadcaster, may not be as well-known in America. Now France Televisions is in talks to join the European version of YouTube, though, so perhaps its profile will rise.

Nothing’s decided just yet, however. The AFP can only report that France Televisions’s Camille Pascal, the assistant development director, said, “We want to be present on YouTube in Europe,” and confirmed that “negotiations between France Televisions and Google have started.”

It seems this may lead to all sorts of interesting possibilities. According to an article in Forbes, there was “a report in Les Echos this morning, claiming Google is preparing to launch a French version of YouTube as the first step in a European development for the multimedia site.” So could France Televisions spearhead this effort? There’s also the matter of how YouTube’s coming content filter would affect these international negotiations.

Then there’s the question of whether France Televisions’s relationship with other video-sharing sites would frustrate YouTube; Pascal told the AFP “that negotiations with YouTube were ‘not exclusive’, and France Televisions was also interested in other sharing sites such as Dailymotion.”

Ah, well. Viva la France Televisions.

Google and AFP Agreement

Philipp Lenssen — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 16:16:35 +0000

Huh? AFP and Google are friends again. As you may remember, AFP – Agence France-Presse, who employ 1,000s of journalists, and who have been caught plagiarizing Wikipedia – sued Google over the use of their headlines and thumbnails in Google News.

Via no one else but AFP’s newswire (I might get sued for posting this fair use snippet):

Agence France-Presse and Google signed a licensing agreement Friday giving the search engine the right to post AFP news and photos and settling a lawsuit filed by AFP two years ago.

A joint statement by the companies said the accord allows the Internet giant to post AFP content on Google News and other services. Details of the pact were not made public.

If Google paid AFP some money to come to this agreement, then they indirectly invite others to also attack Google over usage of their content. However, the deal may also foreshadow something else entirely to come out of AFP’s content – possibly, a deeper integration than mere fair use. Quoting from the statement, the article goes on to say the deal “will enable the use of AFP’s newswire content in innovative, new ways that will dramatically improve the way users experience newswire content on the Internet.” Seeing is believing…

[Thanks Colin C.!]

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AFP Settles Google News Lawsuit

WebProNews Staff — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 16:10:57 +0000

The sweet sound of stacks of Euros being riffled with glee has brought an end to Agence France-Presse’s suit against Google for indexing its stories and photos for Google News.

A licensing agreement inked between Google and AFP will permit the French news company’s content to appear in Google News, where it can be found in snippet form, enabling searchers to visit the original AFP posting for the complete story.

Financial details of that agreement were regretably undisclosed in the report about the deal. Legal filings and the back and forth cries of “J’accuse!” and “Fair use!” have been taking place since March 2005, when AFP sued Google over copyright infringement.

The report cited AFP chairman and Chief Executive Officer Pierre Louette, who said the details of the newly licensed partnership will go beyond snippets of content:

“The agreement will allow uses of AFP’s content in ways that go beyond its typical use of content in Google’s services, which features just headlines and snippets of text to provide just a taste of what an article offers,” Louette said. He did not elaborate.

Google has a similar agreement in place with Associated Press, with financial terms also unavailable.

The usual position Google has when it comes to indexing content, whether it is from personal websites, news sources, or even printed books, has been that its operations fall under the context of fair use. Google presents a brief piece of the overall content to searchers in the results for a query.

Doing so has made the Internet’s vast repository of content far more available to people. Search sends these visitors along to sites containing the entire content; prudent sites find ways to monetize those visitors, either through advertising or full-blown e-commerce solutions.

AFP has found a way to monetize its content through Google as well, above and beyond the possibilities we’ve listed, by securing this licensing agreement.

Google Grabs Polish Poets By the Bards

WebProNews Staff — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 16:32:30 +0000

The only one sounding their barbaric YAWP in the poetry world these days is Google. A Polish writing group – the AFP chunks them all as poets – named Grupa Mlodych Artystow i Literatow, or GMAiL, has been set upon to analyze the finer points of rhetoric from Google’s legal team.

Yes, I like what the lawyer’s done here. He expresses his message with such clarity yet with such ferocity that the reader cannot help but get lost in the author’s finger pointing style. While the legalese is somewhat fatiguing, it adds an air of authenticity to the work, making this commanding prose a true fait accomplis.

At issue for the Group of Young Artists and Writers, better known in Poland as GMAiL, is the association of artists’ ownership of the domain gmail.pl. Google’s trademark lawyers are demanding the group give up the domain.

This isn’t the first time Google’s made an assault on poetry. Remember Matt Waddell’s arrhythmic tribute to Google Mobile services? Sadly, some of us will never forget.

The Group, in traditional artistic defiance of corporate governing, said that not only did they buy the domain "legally, with our own money," but they have no intention of giving it up without a fight.

Accusations that the Group was purposefully cybersquatting on the domain for a payday, which they deny, are moot. Google’s legal team made it very clear that the company "had no intention of paying for something which belonged to [Google]."

Google hasn’t had much success in Europe claiming the variations on Gmail domains. Their insistence has fallen on deaf ears in the UK and in Germany, where gmail.co.uk and gmail.de were in question. The difference in those cases, however, is that the domains were purchased before Google launched Gmail.

But that may not matter either considering Europe’s historical support of the arts. As we’ve seen in Belgium, writers win whether it makes any sense or not.

So, on this occasion of Google’s second assault on poetic profundity, we thought we’d revisit the ever-useful-in-a-poetry-spoof-bind Vogon poetry generator. Warning: do not read this aloud, as the point is to create really, totally, profoundly awful poetry that if uttered into the air, matter and antimatter everywhere would find each other thus negating existence. Ahem. Here ya go:

Googledygook

See, see the authoritarian sky
Marvel at its big salmon depths.
Tell me, Eric Schmidt do you
Wonder why the bush baby ignores you?
Why its foobly stare
makes you feel scrunch-goggled.
I can tell you, it is
Worried by your pusserchunked facial growth
That looks like
A Polish sausage.
What’s more, it knows
Your butternut potting shed
Smells of goose berries.
Everything under the big authoritarian sky
Asks why, why do you even bother?
You only charm foot fungus.

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