Still in beta

Luckily, not everyone is going to lay down and wait for a future full of terrifying, super-convenient news-delivering spiders. Not media hero Rupert Murdoch, who gave a fiery speech to Bejing last week, letting it be known that he’s not going to stand for any more shenigans by news aggregators.

Murdoch’s basic point is that new aggregators and search engines are stealing content from those news organizations that make it. (He goes as far as to use the word ‘thief.’) While he doesn’t name Google, when he talks about search engines, you kind of get the picture.

I usually would just say that this is the grousing of someone too set in his ways and unwilling to embrace the future of news. But I thought, in the interest of fairness, I would look into this further. Besides, this comes from MURDOCH. If anyone is really concerned about the future of quality journalism, it must be him, right? Right? Who does Google think they are, picking on an old man?

Lovable.

So, I did some research. Booted up the old browser, and searches Google News for news on the biggest threat facing the Western world today.

I then proceeded to click the first link, and got ready to steal some content from the hard-working journos at Boston.com. I felt dirty, knowing that I would enjoy the fruits of their work, but all of the ad dollars would be going to Google! But still, it was for SCIENCE! So, I pressed on.

Dun-dun-DUN!

It was even worse than I thought. Google didn’t just steal all of Boston.com’s content. It stole the format and masthead as well! At first blush, it looks like Google simply linked to Boston.com’s website, sending the traffic (and advertising dollars) there. The uninformed person might think that Google is actually helping out these news sites. After all, Google is helping users get to their sites, meaning more readers, and better chances of getting advertisers.

But I know that’s not true. Because Rupert Mordoch told me so.

Just to make sure, I check to see if Google was also stealing the high-quality, hard-hitting journalism that Mordoch wants his people to be paid for.

News I can use…apparently

Son of a bitch.

Impoverished media moguls like Murdoch have been painted into a corner. Google has indexed their pages, and will continue doing it as they add more news.

Is there a way to keep Google from peeking into our sites? There might be, but who knows where to find it. If only there was some kind of easy way to scour the wild mess that is the Internet?

Oh. Right.

Sure, you can search for it. But Google would be a fool to let their engine direct you to an easy way to keep them away from your stuff…

…or they might just put it up on their help section.

What have we learned? I learned that if Google is trying to steal readers from the news sites, it’s doing a really crappy job of it. I learned that if Murdoch really thought the arrangement was unfair, he could keep Google away from his site with almost no work. And I learned Wordpress really loses its shit when you try to format a lot of pictures in a post.

SPECIAL BONUS MORAL

I also learned something unexpected. Check out the fourth headline from the top:

The Internet is crazy and dangerous. Dangerous like angry ghosts.

Google Street car in Edmonton (via iNews880.com)

As we all slowly crushed under the weight of 6 billion articles about the coming Swine Flumaggedon, let’s all take some time to stop and thank the Ottawa Citizen for forging their own path.

See, while most media organizations are losing their heads over the swine flu, Citizen’s Robert Sibley has latched on to a more grave threat: a car with a CAMERA on it (c/o mathewi)

“We may once have thought we were under God’s surveillance. Now Google watches over us.”

Sibley’s piece asks whether the expansion of Google’s Street View is an invasion of privacy, a question that has been asked again and again the world over. What kind of expectation of privacy (root word: private) does one have in a public place? That’s the whole definition of the word public: it pretty much means “not private.”

One of the concerns, according to Sibley, is that Google is capturing things ”most would prefer be kept from public view…”

“When Street View debuted in the United States in 2007, bloggers posted pictures of people being arrested, urinating in public and sunbathing in their bikinis.

Wired magazine found images of police attending a fatality, a possible drug deal and a man climbing into an apartment (a possible burglary?)…”

Here’s a pretty surefire way of making sure thing you don’t want in “public view” showing up on Google Maps – don’t do these things in view of the public.

Also, kudos for the concern over Street View taking pictures of fatality investigations, arrests and dudes climbing on the outsides of buildings. These are, of course, not the type of things that the Ottawa Citizen might report on and take pictures of at the scene, right? (I even hear some newspaper websites are putting such photos on the Internet. That’s categorically different than what Google is doing…probably…somehow.)

I’m not saying that I’d be ecstatic to be shown on Street View doing something embarrassing. There’s a way I avoid it – by keeping my most embarrassing activities confined to the privacy of my home as much as I can.

Until Google starts snaking a camera under your front door and snaps some pictures, columnists should probably keep the “invasion of privacy” talk down to a minimum.

I mean, don’t we have more important things to blow way out of proportion?