Those concerns are real – I’m not trying to move away from them. The fact of the matter is that if you’re online all the time, computers are generating a lot of information about you. This is not a Google decision, this is a societal decision. In Britain, you all allow yourselves to be photographed on every street corner. Where are the riots?

100701 You can trust us: Shane Richmond: Daily Telegraph

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… conned by the numbers from their web departments and aided and abetted by laughably inconsistent web metrics… newspaper owners will strip newspapers of the resources they need to reinvent themselves in order to nurture an internet beast that they believe is a rottweiler puppy but is, in fact, a fully grown poodle. They are barking mad.
- John Duncan, former managing editor of the Observer, 1999 to 2005, Press Gazette

It wasn’t just that working for Microsoft made her feel like Martha Stewart trying to fit in at a Star Trek convention — “I wanted to play with style and they wanted to play with robots.”

Comparing Microsoft’s desktop software to the Web 2.0 services available online, Quilao says that Microsoft doesn’t cut it for everyday people:

I created my blog business for less than $100, and it costs me about the price of a pair of nice jeans a month to run beyond my time and energy. I cannot do this with the current MS products or services. And I tried… I can use CSS and be creative in my blog design, and control what is advertised on my space. You can’t do that in Live Spaces. To buy Office 2007 Home edition is $150, and Vista Home Premium is $240. (Buying Vista Basic is really kind of pointless.) With that $150 and $240, many people can use that for more pressing things like health insurance, car insurance, debt elimination, rent, food, or gas…

… what MS has forgotten is that small business owners either left or despise the  Enterprise culture. The last thing they want is something that makes them feel Enterprise-y especially the creative types. When I speak to a group of Pro level bloggers, my passion group, I had nothing much to sell them on. When MS develops something as robust and creative as TypePad, Blogger, or WordPress, then it will be interesting.
- Stephanie Quilao, Back in skinny jeans

And it’s not just Quilao. Two other MS workers leaving for vistas new: Microsoft’s top search exec Christopher Payne and yet another enthusiast evangelist — hired way back in mid-February — Michael Gartenberg.

In conversation with the once angry young man, now grand old man of British cultural studies, DJ Taylor evaluates Hoggart’s thesis 50 years on — a culture devised by ordinary people for themselves is being stamped out by a mass culture devised by corporations for maximising shareholder profit.

One straight-forward answer is that in trying to compete against Apple and internet-based companies, in trying to anticipate whatever the future may throw at the PC, Microsoft ran into problems with Vista’s code. The geeks made it too complex. Senior executives stepped in and refocused Vista. And shipping got delayed.
- Microsoft milks the cow one last time, Independent
- After delays, Microsoft in party mood for launch, San Francisco Chronicle

Gates, not surprisingly, gives a positive spin to this. Five years is a worthwhile investment; it lays the deep foundation for incremental improvements down the line:

Well, we haven’t been idle. During that time, we had many Media Center releases, many Tablet releases, lots of things like desktop search. We had a security-oriented release called XP SP2. But, we also had to invest in the layering of the operating system, so that we could be more agile in the future, and have things at the higher layers, like the browser, release on an every-two-years, or even in some cases every-year-type basis, whereas the deep things like the scheduler, the file system, you don’t want to change those more than every three years or so, because they affect compatibility. So you want stability in those pieces. So we invested a lot in layering and security.
- Bill Gates, Q & A, Business Week Online

But maybe Scott Rosenberg has the better big picture answer. He doesn’t quite say it, but it’s there, bubbling under with a bunch of proximate causes: free coffee and pizza and a big salary; and it’s just too easy for the guys at Redmond to get into the flow, to succumb to the temptation of trying to create the one, perfect, transcendent program:

… unlike computer hardware — the microchips and storage devices that run programs — software isn’t rooted in the physical world. It’s still written, painstakingly, line by line and character by character; essentially, it’s all made up. Software straddles the wide-open realm of the imagination, where it’s created, and the fixities of everyday reality, where we expect it to work. And so far, it has proved uniquely resistant to engineering discipline.
- Scott Rosenberg, Washington Post

Murdoch and the better-off are mapping their monopolistic powers over to the new digital medium while the old medium’s powers to question these elites are being sidelined:

We should be nervous when politicians start boasting, as they are, that the net allows them to bypass irritatingly persistent, difficult interviewers such as John Humphrys and Jeremy Paxman. Obviously, they need to be scrutinised and cross-questioned by well-briefed interrogators, secure enough in their jobs to push the point. Democracy demands it. Putting up your own website, conducting online question-and-answer sessions, is a doddle by comparison. They allow the politician to control the terms of the exchange and never face a public challenge on questions they don’t want to answer.
- Jackie Ashley, Guardian

The BBC needs to be ready for “360 degree multi-platform content creation”, according to Thompson.
- BBC reorganises for an on-demand Creative Future

Or as one BBC radio, sorry, Audio and Music presenter put it:

You can’t say radio any more in case people are listening on a mobile phone or a toenail, or a haddock, or something.

via Ben Hoyle, London Times

For a few dollars a shot, bloggers can now sample what journalists have become totally hooked on.

Click over to one place and search. Cut and paste from a clutch of database cuttings. Leaving no citations to indicate that your great thoughts aren’t your great thoughts alone, damn, you sound authoritative.

Due respect to old skool Google, but you won’t want to go back. It’s like coca leaves v. crack cocaine.

And you won’t talk about it. In the last month, no journalist at any British quality newspaper, not the Guardian nor the Times nor the Telegraph, has mentioned, casually, in passing, that he or she uses LexisNexis. No mention in any US newspaper either. But everyone’s doing it. Quick and easy access to vast databases of information must be one of the most significant changes to journalistic practice in recent years.

Once the Google News Archive Search becomes more compelling – the timeline becomes more intuitive and there’s more content and more of it is free – and once bloggers, the end users that turned, start mining archives in the same way they mine their RSS aggregators, the standard news story format, in blogs and then in newspapers, is bound to change.

The prosumer news blogger, brought up to link and link again, is likely to introduce links to old newspaper stories. Iraq is the new Vietnam? Or the new Suez? Why not compare and contrast in great detail?

Great. The mainstream media shudders as the bloggers at the gate get fourth dimensional. Breadth is easy to provide thanks to broadband and Google. Now, users can expect depth as well, the historical context for any breaking news story.

But there is a fl4w. You’re unlikely to ever touch bottom, get the fully searchable depth, not the full 200 years (LexisNexis in comparison goes back only about 25 years) that Google claims it can deliver.
- BBC

Before getting out the tinfoil over Google Earth and the emergence of a Google cosmology or worrying about the recent airbrushing of a New York Times’ entry in LexisNexis, concerned citizens should be concerned about the technological limitations of news databases.

A search for “Internet” finds 15 news stories for 1819 and earlier:

He had heard a great deal about lhe .hipping internet…
- The Times, 6 October 1812

Sadly, this isn’t evidence of any early success with steam-driven computers, the spawn of some Charles Babbage abandonware. It’s due to the limitations of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology.

For your average machine, Times Roman on yellowing newsprint is difficult to read. “Internet” and “interest” look pretty much the same.

According to Nicholson Baker, searchable OCR text is often “intolerably corrupt”. A typical JSTOR article has a new typo every 2,000 characters – every page or two.
- Nicholson Baker, Double Fold, p71

Enough to throw any serious research.

Maybe the OCR technology will get better. Google is on the case. It recently released Tesseract OCR, an open-source version of an old OCR engine.

But, as Baker laments, the scanning of newspapers is mostly done. The cost of rescanning would be prohibitive. And, in any case, scanned newspapers tend to pass out of the archival system. They tend to get pulped or turned into decor for Dad’s den wall.

For a long time Governments have been looking around for way to get their ‘messages’ out to the public without the bothersome annoyance of journalists asking difficult questions. They may see YouTube as the fix for this.What they may not have taken account of is the video replies or text comments that people can leave in response.
- Simon Perry, Digital-Lifestyles