France calls Google predator

Strong anti-Google sentiments from French publishers reveal a stuck-in-the-mud attitude prevalent throughout much old media. But who's right?

Interesting comments and round up on journalism.co.uk: French publishers vs Google: ‘You are becoming our worst enemy’

Also this video:



Laura Oliver who posted the article observes:

Google, secrecy about its algorithms and dominance of the online ad market aside, is looking forward; newspapers are trying to protect and control what they perceive as news and the news business. The problems they are facing, some related to Google and others not, should show them that this self-interested attitude can’t be maintained and their perception of ‘news as we know it’ is out-dated.

Movember is over!

Brooker Crushes

I have just, literally moments ago, discovered that I am not alone in my fondness for Charlie Brooker . . .

It started with a feed from the Guardian into my iGoogle page and now he's on TV and those clever techies have even erected a digital shrine in the form of charlian.co.uk: All Charlie, All the time.

Presidential evolution

From Dave Winer's Scripting News blog:

'I will show you fear in a handful of dust . . . '

I was catching up with the excellent Speechification blog and was directed by their recent post to The Poetry Archive, which was set up by Andrew Motion almost 10 years ago.

The title of my entry is of course lifted from T S Eliot's The Waste Land. You can hear the poet himself reading his poem here.

Google's making us smarter

No point paraphrasing - here's John Battelle's latest ripost to Nick Carr:

Well, Nick, sorry, but here's at least one study backing up my contention:

A new study suggests that searching online could be beneficial for the brain. Searching online triggers areas of the brain that control decision-making and complex reasoning.

A study at the University of California, Los Angeles, measured brain activity of older adults as they searched the Web.

"There's so much interest in exercising our minds as we age," said the researcher, Dr. Gary Small, a professor at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA. "One result of this study is that these technologies are not all bad. They may be good in keeping our brains active."

To study what brains look like when people are searching the Internet, Small recruited two groups of people: one that had minimal computer experience and another that was Web savvy.

Members of the technologically advanced group had more than twice the neural activation than their less experienced counterparts while searching online. Activity occurred in the region of the brain that controls decision-making and complex reasoning, according to Small's study, which appears in the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry.

Hear Baroness Greenfield's thoughts here on the impact screen-based technologies are having on our capacity for deep reading.

Deep Cove, Vancouver

Me, in Deep Cove.

Now back in London with much redder hair x