Re: Neat summary of Google strategy

> dej,
>
> I won't go into why I have a low opinion of Google, but what
> I think increasingly significant is the number and strength
> of criticisms. The issue of taking other people's content
> without permission or payment has also been remarked on over
> the Huffington Post
> http://adage.com/mediaworks/article?article_id=136968 .
>
> As regards net access - I can only say we have something
> moderate, but very cloggy. But then economy class was never
> private jet ;-).

I'm with you that wholesale theft of content, and running huge,  
valuable companies that publish without payment is a very bad thing.  
HuffPo not paying sucks. It just really sucks. They got very big on  
the backs of others. But consider this, the NYTimes pays about $25 (or  
some other paltry sum) for each op-ed. The real "payment" has always  
been in the prestige and "exposure" of appearing on the NYT op-ed  
page. The HuffPo is not the first publication to scalp the little guy.  
As for the HuffPo wholesale copying content, that's what DMCA takedown  
notices and infringement suits are for.

However, I think that "copying content" and "aggregating links" are  
two very different things. Google isn't copying your content. They are  
linking to content, aggregating those links. That's what the net is  
all about, thinks linking to other things. The fact that they can make  
money on it speaks as much about the value of the aggregation as the  
value of the individual original content. Alone, a single article may  
be worth nearly nothing, cobbled together with other articles, it may  
be worth a few pennies, particularly in the way that Google allows you  
to make up your own news feeds from disparate sources tailored just to  
you. THAT has value too, beyond the value of the original content. I  
don't have a problem with Google making money aggregating links.

Somewhere (on my FaceBook account, I think) I recently posted an  
opinion piece that said that the newspaper companies are complaining  
about Google when it's really Craigslist that's eating their lunch  
(dinner and midnight snack too). That what's making newspapers not  
profitable is not Google's aggregating their links and putting  
advertising next to those links taking pennies out of their pockets,  
but rather Craigslist taking classified advertising--a very lucrative  
category--draining the lifeblood from their necks. Make of that what  
you will.

I have a moderate opinion of Google. I think that many Googles really  
do mean well. And I've personally built a goodly part of my career on  
the free software Google has offered. Enterprise level analytics used  
to START at $200/mo, placing them out of reach of the vast majority of  
small sites. Google Analytics brought high end metrics to the masses  
for free. Obviously, Google gets something out of that which makes it  
worthwhile (they charge large customers and aggregate information from  
small sites with permission) but it still doesn't change the fact that  
they gave something to millions which was simply not affordable  
before. I'm sure that there are analytics companies out there howling  
because GA is eating their lunch in the small end market of people who  
used to scrape pennies and buy analytics service and now use GA for  
free. In the balance of a huge good for millions of consumers vs a big  
bad for a small number of companies, I think I'm on the side of  
consumers.

No one ever said it was easy competing with an 800 lb gorilla.

dej

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