Those much-revered top five placements on search engines for a given set of keywords only draws the viewer's attention for seven seconds. Gord Hotchkiss sees this short attention span as a call to brands to keep doing their market research.
Despite the hubbub generated by a New York Times report, the world of book digitization doesn't start and end with Google, or even the participation of Microsoft and Yahoo in the Open Content Alliance.
Traditionally, we came to learn about the “Golden Triangle” or the F-shaped scanning pattern. Now, Gord Hotchkiss says that with a change to personalized search, we are seeing more of an E-Shaped pattern.
There’s a bit of debate lately due to a Microsoft lawyer bashing Google’s book scanning program and their positions on copyright. It’s one of those stories everybody has to comment on, despite merely being a case of one company sniping at another, so naturally I stayed the hell away from it. Still, Lawrence Lessig made an argument that so defines the opposite of compelling that I had to say something:
Visitors to Google Book Search will have the opportunity to download and print classic titles from the service. Sometime today, Google Book Search should open its virtual doors to literary fans and allow them to download PDF copies of certain titles, and to print them.
Microsoft has agreed to extend Trend Micro's contract with MSN and permit it to continue providing antivirus scanning and cleaning for Hotmail's 230 million email accounts.
An event to be held in New York will have Google in attendance, along with representatives from the Authors Guild and the American Association of Publishers.
The competition with Google Print begins in the UK as Microsoft and the British Library have reached an agreement that will see 100,000 books digitized.
The moratorium Google announced to allow publishers time to discuss the project ends November 1, and the search engine company plans to resume book scanning as scheduled.