AP Plans to Sue Aggregators

“We can no longer stand by and watch others walk off with our work under misguided legal theories.”
–AP Chairman Dean Singleton

I was preparing another blog post when I stumbled across this on Wired’s Epicenter blog. The Associated Press voted yesterday to target online news aggregators who they believe are violating their copyright. This could mean Google, Yahoo and any number of smaller news aggregation websites that may or may not be considered “legal” under the AP’s standard.

Being realistic, AP probably isn’t going to sue Google, they’re going to antagonize them a little to get what they really want, which is probably a cut of the profits and, as a NY Times article points out, control over how the aggregators work by “[making] sure that the top search engine results for news are ‘the original source or the most authoritative source,’ not a site that copied or paraphrased the work.”

Google Exec Will Address NAA Conference

While Rupert Murdoch is railing against the idea of newspapers continuing to allow Google to aggregate their content–as if most newspapers had any clue how to stop them–others are apparently rallying around them. While reading The Guardian today, I discovered this on their media blog:

A sign of the times? Google chief executive Eric Schmidt is to deliver the keynote speech at the Newspaper Association of America’s annual conference next week. He will talk about “his unique perspective on newspapers, journalism and his company’s role in the future of the industry.” Live audio streaming of Schmidt’s presentation on April 7 starts at 10am PST (6pm in Britain).

That’s 12PM for us in Central Standard Time. There’s been a lot of speculation about where Google fits in journalism, including some who say they should buy some of these failing newspapers, but it will be very interesting to hear what their official position is. I’m not sure if the NAA is going to post the audio online after his speech, but it will be streamed online and is conveniently starting 15 minutes before our class is over.

Dan Schwabel breaks down Google

Dan Schawbel, the owner of Personal Branding Blog and the author of Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success blogged on Mashable.com about way that you can make Google.com work to your advantage.

First off, he explains what Google can say about you – both positively and negatively – and how you can influence (or at least try) your hit rate.

Below is Dan’s eight  different suggestions (paraphrased) to optimize Google…for you!

1. Register for a blog and social networks

One way to take control for your results is by owning or renting web properties that carry your name. Blogs and social networks allow you to do just that…Make sure your blog, in some way, connects to your name. For instance, if your name is the URL or the title of the blog has your name in it, it will rank high for your name. …. start a blog because you’re passionate about a topic and want your voice to be heard.

The largest and most credible social networks have a high Google PageRank. PageRank is a measurement of importance in Google from 0 to 10. Twitter, LinkedIn, FriendFeed, and Facebook have a PageRank of 8, which might not surprise you…Anywhere you can use your full name, I encourage you to do so.

Google angers the Italians…

In a recent article by The New York Times, four Google executives are possibly going to face jail-time for an offensive video posted on Google-video.

The video, which depicts four youths making fun of a boy with Down syndrome, was quickly removed from Google’s site after complaints were made; however prosecutors are arguing that the video should have never made it to the website in the first place.

According to a Google spokesperson, the four executives who are being charged include:  David Drummond, Google’s senior vice president and chief legal officer; George Reyes, its former chief financial officer; and Peter Fleischer, Google’s global privacy counsel. The fourth executive, who works for Google Video in London, was not identified.

Google hates the Internet…

 

What happens when Google deems the internet unsafe?

According to Mashable.com, on Saturday (Jan. 31), Google.com was labeling every site as a potential threat and “may harm your computer”. The mistake lasted for about 20 minutes and is reported to have been worldwide.

Google explained the faux-pas on their blog, chalking it up to “human error.”

What happened? Very simply, human error. Google flags search results with the message “This site may harm your computer” if the site is known to install malicious software in the background or otherwise surreptitiously. We do this to protect our users against visiting sites that could harm their computers. We maintain a list of such sites through both manual and automated methods. We work with a non-profit called StopBadware.org to come up with criteria for maintaining this list, and to provide simple processes for webmasters to remove their site from the list.

We periodically update that list and released one such update to the site this morning. Unfortunately (and here’s the human error), the URL of ‘/’ was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and ‘/’ expands to all URLs. Fortunately, our on-call site reliability team found the problem quickly and reverted the file. Since we push these updates in a staggered and rolling fashion, the errors began appearing between 6:27 a.m. and 6:40 a.m. and began disappearing between 7:10 and 7:25 a.m., so the duration of the problem for any particular user was approximately 40 minutes.