The deals are a “stunning one-two punch,” according to All Things Digital: Microsoft announced today that it has struck agreements to integrate real-time feeds of status updates from Twitter and Facebook into Bing. The deals are nonexclusive—which means Google could follow suit—but for the time being, Bing has something the search giant has yet to tap, at least in the case of Facebook. And get this: Microsoft is paying for it—exact terms, of course, haven’t been disclosed.

This is nonetheless “a precedent that the ability of search engines to index and link to content is worth some money,” Ryan Chittum writes for Columbia Journalism Review. “Where this goes from here no one knows. . . . Would the AP yank its news off Google if Bing paid and Google didn’t? Would it be worth it in the lost revenue from not showing up in as many search results? That’s too early to tell.”

One thing is clear, as Chittum says: This will be worth watching.

Sources: All Things Digital, Columbia Journalism Review

Inside Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, employees take part in a meditation class called “Search Inside Yourself.” The program, profiled by Shambhala Sun, is the brainchild of Google employee number 107, Chade-Meng Tan. Now that Google’s success has made him rich, Meng is devoting his time to popularizing meditation worldwide, a goal that he believes will literally bring forth world peace.

The classes started as a stress reduction program, but Meng found that engineers and other Google employees weren’t interested in reducing their stress. Now the classes focus on teaching about emotional intelligence. Among the lessons, employees learn about “mindful emailing,” where people are taught to stop after writing an email, take three breaths, and visualize the recipient’s emotional and mental response before sending. Meditation experts have been brought into advise the proceedings and tackle the inevitable dilemmas involved in mixing spirituality with the corporate work environment, including “Will they truly serve the participants’ lives or just the company’s goals of efficiency and profits?”

Source: Shambhala Sun (article not available online)

Google and the Saddleback megachurch have more in common than the undying worship of their devotees. Both organizations are set up around “campuses” that are meant to be spaces where people can do more than just work. They both have beach volleyball courts and cafes, where people can socialize and feel a greater connection to their organizations. Triple Canopy reports that the architecture “is meant to persuade church members or secular employees—especially younger people—to spend their most productive time there.” 

The modern corporation and the Christian megachurch have developed simultaneously, according to Triple Canopy. Both organizations have tried to figure out how to maximize the engagement and productivity of their devotees. For the churches and the corporations, creating city-like campuses represents “the logical next step in their colonization of everyday life, part and parcel with the ever-more-diffuse protocols they have developed for managing souls.”

(Thanks, Kottke.)

Source: Triple Canopy

Image of the Saddleback Megachurch.

Search results from Google are a bit too godless for some. That’s why intrepid, religious entrepreneurs started Koogle, a search engine designed to adhere to Jewish law. The name is a play on the delicious and traditionally Jewish casserole, kugel. Explicit material, including scantily clad women, will be filtered out of the search results, according to the San Francisco Business Times. Results will also exclude televisions, which are verboten in orthodox homes, and will prohibit shopping during Shabbat.

(Thanks, The Blingdom of God.)

Source: Koogle

The big dogs of the internet, including Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Yahoo, are stocking up in an arms race to power the future of information, according to the new issue of IEEE Spectrum. The companies are building gargantuan data centers, or “warehouse-sized computers,” that will theoretically create the backbone for the future of the information economy.

The data centers are designed to facilitate “cloud computing” where people will be able to store much of their private information remotely, rather than on a physical hard drive. Gmail or online banking are manifestations of this idea. In the future, people may be able to store much more.

Housing the servers that will store these massive troves of information is proving to be a challenge for electrical engineers. Microsoft’s datacenter in Quincy, Washington, for example is nearly 43,600 square meters in size, and consumes enough energy to power 40,000 homes. The article profiles some of the (rather complicated) steps that these companies are taking to control their energy usage, and cut down a bit on their carbon footprints.

Image by Paul Hammond, licensed under Creative Commons.

Sources:
IEEE Spectrum 

A new form of censorship has quietly crept over the internet. Though governments continue to pursue old-school forms of prior restraint, technology is quickly making the blackened-ink style of censorship obsolete. The new ways to restrict free speech don’t require killing information entirely, governments and private companies simply inconvenience and frustrate people away from information they want to keep under wraps.

The internet was meant to foster communication, and it still creates opportunities for vibrant free speech. At the same time, computer science professor Harry Lewis writes for the Chronicle of Higher Education that the internet’s “rapid and ubiquitous adoption has created a flexible and effective mechanism for thought control.” As people increasingly rely on the internet for their news and information, banishing something from the web means effectively striking it from the public consciousness.

Governments have already begun to influence internet usage inside of their countries to enforce social and political norms. Lewis writes that on the internet, there is already “no sex in Saudi Arabia, no Holocaust denials in Australia, no shocking images of war dead in Germany, no insults to Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in Turkey.”

China sits at the vanguard of this new form of censorship. The country’s famed “Great Firewall” is one of the most advanced information blocking tools in the world. Every savvy netizen, however, knows of proxy servers, encryption services, and other ways to skirt the firewall and find information that China doesn’t want its citizens to see. “The Great Firewall of China isn't impenetrable, “Jacqui Cheng reported for Ars Technica in 2007, “it just takes a little elbow grease and high Internet traffic to squeeze a few banned terms through.” That requirement of elbow grease constitutes the cornerstone of the new censorship.

Governments don’t have to censor all the information that comes into their country anymore, either. Censorship increasingly relies on one information bottleneck: Google. Jeffrey Rosen wrote for the New York Times that Google and its subsidiaries, including YouTube, “arguably have more influence over the contours of online expression than anyone else on the planet.” Governments and businesses now realize that banning information from Google means effectively censoring it from a massive audience of people, and they are developing strategies accordingly.

“To love Google, you have to be a little bit of a monarchist, you have to have faith in the way people traditionally felt about the king,” technology expert Tim Wu told the New York Times. After the Turkish government successfully lobbied YouTube to take down videos inside of Turkey that were deemed offensive, the Government tried to ban the videos worldwide to protect Turks living outside the country. These videos would all be available on websites other than YouTube, but with one website eclipsing all others for web videos, really, who would know?

In the United States, copyright laws are often invoked to frighten people into censorship. The Electronic Frontier Foundation reported that the McCain-Palin campaign, an unlikely advocate for internet freedom, claimed that YouTube “silenced political speech” after it took down campaign ads due to copyright violation claims.

YouTube general council Zahavah Levine responded saying, “YouTube does not possess the requisite information about the content in user-uploaded videos to make a determination as to whether a particular takedown notice includes a valid claim of infringement.” Because of that lack of information, the site often takes down videos first and examines the validity of copyright claims later. By the time videos are restored, especially in a fast-moving political campaign setting, the damage has already been done.

The website Chilling Effects documents many of these cease-and-desist letters in an attempt to combat some of the unnecessary censorship. The site was created in partnership with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a number of universities to help people understand their First Amendment rights and protect legal online speech. But with governments and businesses exchanging and learning from each other’s censorship tactics, the strategies to restrict free speech will likely grow more sophisticated.

CatholicGoogle, which deems itself “the best way for good Catholics to surf the web,” launched last week. The new search engine, which is not affiliated with Google, makes use of “ ‘safe search’ technology” to favor Catholic-related sites and screen out “unsavory content.”

Snarky bloggers have seized on the browser's priggish tone, and largely dismiss it as a backwards attempt to censor information that's unfriendly to Catholic doctrine. Religion Dispatches offers a slightly more substantial take. It ran some hot-button words—contraceptives, abortion, stem-cell research—through the engine, and reports that it generally returned conservative Catholic sites.

But CatholicGoogle’s no Catholic Big Brother: The Religion Dispatches search results were shaped by the rhetoric of the search terms. By changing ‘contraceptives’ to ‘contraceptive rights’ and ‘abortion’ to ‘abortion rights,’ I received links to some progressive Catholic organizations, as well as NARAL, the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy, and Atheism.com.

The site's not so ominous, then. Whether Catholics will find it particularly compelling is another story.

When television broadcasting goes all-digital in February, a range of old TV frequencies known as “white space” will be up for grabs, and technology pioneers like Google’s Larry Page have been lobbying the FCC to dedicate that spectrum to free internet and other public communication.

But the National Association of Broadcasters, mobile phone companies, and other entities who stand to profit from private, pay-based communication have been fighting white space liberation.

Until last week, that is, when the FCC ruled to open white space to unlicensed use (pdf), scoring a huge victory for Page’s camp. This essentially means that online communication will be faster and available to more people, especially rural and low-income users. It will also likely result in cheaper offerings from internet, cable, and cell phone service providers as competition in those markets intensifies.

Jeff Jarvis outlines these and other benefits of public white space at his blog BuzzMachine. (“Note this historic moment,” he writes. “I’m praising the FCC.”) He argues that the internet is no longer a merely a privilege, but a right: “Access to the internet—and open, broadband internet that is neither censored nor filtered by government or business—should be seen, similarly, as a necessity and thus a right. Just as we judge nations by their literacy, we should now judge them by their connectedness.”

Jarvis also does a good job of explaining white space and its benefits in non-wonky terms, focusing on the ways it will benefit education, government, and society at large.

Image courtesy of rvaphotodude, licensed by Creative Commons.

After two years of litigious wrangling, on Tuesday Google announced an agreement with the U.S. book industry that will allow the media giant to sell online access to millions of titles—many of them out-of-print or hard-to-find.

For several years now, Google has been laboriously scanning books, making their pages available through the company’s Google Book Search. Two years ago, the Authors’ Guild and representatives of the American Association of Publishers filed class action lawsuits against Google, charging copyright infringement.

The three parties hailed the $125 million settlement—which awaits approval by a federal court in Manhattan—“as a key moment in the evolution of electronic publishing,” reports the Guardian. If the deal is approved, users will be able to search for books via Google, sample the contents, and purchase reading rights. Google will fork over a share of the proceeds to a newly established nonprofit Book Rights Registry (BRR), which will then distribute funds to authors and publishers.

The BRR also would “locate rightsholders, collect and maintain accurate rightsholder information, and provide a way for rightsholders to request inclusion in or exclusion from the project,” according to Google.  

In short, the BRR would operate a whole heck of a lot like ASCAP does today, writes Adam Thierer at Technology Liberation Front. That’s a good thing for writers and publishers, but the architecture of the deal also has Thierer wondering: “Could this be the beginning of a move toward a more comprehensive online collective licensing system for other types of content as everything moves online[?]” 

The magic ingredient to collective licensing schemes, as Thierer and others have pointed out, is a gigantic, trusted middle organization—capable of handling all the transactions. (Who else but Google can tap the resources to scan and digitally archive the individual pages of 7 million books?) In the current media-and-publishing landscape, we’re probably to be forgiven if the words trusted and gigantic don’t seem a natural coupling.

Assuming the settlement goes through, however, we could have a glimpse of our digital future. “This will make it substantially easier for authors and publishers to find, distribute and monetize out-of-print books—in effect, creating or enhancing a ‘long tail’ for book publishing,” writes Mathew Ingram, a technology writer for the Globe & Mail, on his personal website. Ingram also points out that libraries stand to benefit—as part of the settlement, Google will provide free online access to millions of books through public libraries and universities.

Just when you thought Google couldn’t get any more useful (or pervasive), engineers at Google Labs have launched Mail Goggles, a Gmail feature designed to prevent you from sending drunken emails you may regret in the morning. Here’s how it works: When the feature is enabled, Mail Goggles will ask you a series of basic timed math problems to see if you’re functional enough to know what you’re typing. If you pass, your message will be sent. If you fail, it’s probably best to wait until morning to write to your ex (or mother or boss).

To activate Mail Goggles in Gmail, go to the settings, click on "labs" on the right-hand side, and scroll down to find it. The default active time frame for the feature is late at night on weekends, but you can tailor it to your specific needs; say, if you tend to go overboard on the Bloody Marys during brunch, or if you plan on playing one of several drinking games designed for the presidential debates.

(Thanks CNet.com)

Image courtesy of  SuperFantastic , licensed under  Creative Commons . 

For the car-deprived among us (like me), Google Maps was once a frustrating application. Getting directions involved being directed down highways and making rough time estimations based on how long a trip would take in a car. As if they knew what I was thinking (and maybe they do...) Google has begun offering walking directions on Google Maps. Now I know that it would take approximately 17 days for me to walk from Minneapolis to Manhattan. Maybe now I can stop agonizing over the best route on the way to the office every morning.

(Thanks, Gizmodo.)

“Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) today embarked on an historic first-ever visit to the Internet,” satirist Andy Borowitz joked on his website. In an effort to pull the headlines away from Barack Obama’s trip to the Middle East, Borowitz wrote that McCain, surrounded by reporters, visited “Weather.com and Yahoo! Answers, where he inquired as to the difference between Sunnis and Shiites.” Borowitz did not mention any plans of visiting, as Sen. McCain once said, “a Google.”

Privacy experts panicked last week when a federal judge ordered Google to turn over sensitive information about its users to Viacom. The New York Times reports that some believe, “the video viewing habits of tens of millions of people could be exposed.” Viacom asked for the information to assist in a $1 billion copyright infringement lawsuit against Google’s video sharing site YouTube, but the case is sure to have larger implications than a few illegally posted videos. 

Some privacy advocates have called attention to the inevitable flaws in Google’s system of collecting private data. Writing for Computer World, Jaikumar Vijayan asked, “what is Google doing collecting and retaining all that data in the first place?” According to Vijayan, the company is clearly trying to improve targeted marketing campaigns, but users should be skeptical of any company that keeps such a huge cache of personal information. 

There is one way that Google could get back into the good graces of some privacy advocates. If they’re being forced to turn over all the personal information to Viacom, TechCrunch suggests that Google should simply produce it in dead-tree paper form. The information they’re ordered to turn over is estimated at about 12 terabites—enough to fill up the Library of Congress. Printing it all out wouldn’t be eco-friendly, but it would definitely slow down Viacom’s efforts to parse the info.

UPDATE: What does 12 terabites of data look like? Neatorama breaks it down: 2,615 DVDs or 5 billion single-spaced typewritten pages.

The jumbled mess that is the internet has a certain charm. Masses of confusing information and useless web pages sit neatly along side important sites, with Google standing as one of the only ways to tell them apart. Google is still the top dog in organizing the web, but the internet has evolved since the company began 12 years ago (that’s about 90 in web years). In fact, Tim Berners-Lee, who’s credited with inventing the World Wide Web, told the Times Online that he believes Google will be “superseded” by the Semantic Web.

Instead of simply focusing on web pages, the Semantic Web would, in theory, organize all kinds of information from bank statements to maps to photos to medical research studies. In a video for Technology Review, Berners-Lee talks about how Semantic Web technology could help doctors compare different kinds of medical data, combining the information with nutrition data or seemingly unrelated data like air travel patterns, illuminating trends and information that could literally save lives.

For now, much of the promise of the Semantic Web has yet to be realized, but companies are busy preparing to take advantage of the new technology. The latest incarnation is a website called Twine, created by Radar Networks, currently in private beta testing. CNet News reports that the company has raised $18 million in two stages to implement the technology.

Right now, Twine looks a lot like Facebook, MySpace, or other social networking sites. Users create a profile, upload a picture, and connect with other users on the site. The company hopes that users will soon begin dumping massive amounts of emails, research data, and other work-related information into the site, so that people will begin to make sense of the information in new ways.

The difference between Twine and MySpace, Facebook, or other social networking sites is that “a social network that is about who you know, Twine is more about what you know,” Radar Networks founder Nova Spivack told CNet News. If the Semantic Web works as well as Spivack and Berners-Lee hope it will, people will soon start to know a lot more.

—Bennett Gordon

Image by Noah Sussman, licensed under Creative Commons.

Just for fun, here’s a very cool video about organizing the web:

In the latest incarnation of the highly offensive Facebook/MySpace-divide hypothesis, an article in TechCrunch reports on data suggesting that wealthy people tend to use Google for their Internet search engine while poor people tend to use Yahoo.

—Morgan Winters

Intimate details of peoples’ lives are freely available through the magic of Google. Many people post their names, email and street addresses, phone numbers, and photos to the internet, without much thought about it. According to a survey released last month by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 60 percent of internet users aren’t worried about how much of their personal information is available online.

Teenagers and children are often accused of being too cavalier with the details of their lives, but the survey suggests that adults are even more open with their personal information. Among people with visible profiles on social networking sites, such as MySpace or Facebook, the study reports that teens “make more conservative choices with respect to visibility” than their adult counterparts. A full 61 percent of adults don’t try to limit how much information is available about them online, and only 38 percent said that they have taken action to limit that information.  

“Of course, what amuses me is that adults are saying one thing and doing another,” writes social networking guru Danah Boyd on her blog. Adults are telling children to protect themselves online, and then not protecting their own information. That kind of “do as I say, not as I do” attitude could hinder a meaningful and nuanced view of privacy in both children and adults.

—Bennett Gordon