Google: Where is it going?

A common thread of discussion here is where is Google going? They seem to be very good at what they do, but what is there larger plan, if any? Google going after Microsoft and Apple is an article by Mike Langberg of the Mercury News (Sunday, Jan. 15, 2006) that suggests that Google’s plan is to go after Microsoft and Apple. Very ambitious, and possibly doable.

Thanks to James Chartrand for this.

More on the Wikipedia

More on the Wikipedia fuss. watching wikipedia watch is a blog entry on how Daniel Brandt of Wikipedia Watch outted the author of the false Wikipedia entry on Seigenthaler.

In an earlier story if:book, a group blog, comments on a Nature article comparing Wikipedia to the Encyclopedia Brittanica – they found them equivalent in terms of accuracy, though Brittanica articles were generally better written.

Wikipedia: Game or Reference?

What is it with Wikipedia? by Bill Thompson of the BBC summarizes the recent fuss about the accuracy of the Wikipedia. For example John Seigenthaler wrote an opinion in USA Today titled USATODAY.com – A false Wikipedia ‘biography’ about the prank biography in the Wikipedia which suggested he was tied to the Kennedy assassinations. In his opinion piece he wirtes about his attempts to track down the joker who defamed him.

Today Google News had as a top story a joke news story in The Register by critic Andrew Orlowski that Wikipedia founder ‘shot by friend of Siegenthaler’. Orlowski references the Wikipedia on the shooting, though I can’t find the reference now. Working my way back through the Wikipedia history for the Jimmy Wales entry shows that today (Dec. 18) there have been an unuasual number of edits on the page including spurious ones with graphic pictures. His entry has become a site for contest and Orlowski is mocking it/Jimmy for and with this. Orlowski compares the Wikipedia to a roleplaying game for wannabe encyclopedia writers, but there is another game afoot which is more serious, and that is the game of the hack.

Is this the end of the open Wikipedia? Will it be hacked into forcing people to register to edit? Is it the nature of open systems that if sucessful they get vandalized?

The Maddness of Intellectual Property

This is madness. Ideas aren’t things. They’re much more valuable than that. Intellectual property – treating some ideas as if they were in some circumstances things that can be owned and traded – is itself no more than an idea that can be copied, modified and improved. It is this process of freely copying them and changing them that has given us the world of material abundance in which we live. If our ideas of intellectual property are wrong, we must change them, improve them and return them to their original purpose. When intellectual property rules diminish the supply of new ideas, they steal from all of us.

Thanks to Slash.dot I came across this Guardian article on intellectual property, Owning ideas (Andrew Brown, Nov. 19, 2005). The article provides different examples from software to genomics. One of the examples the article provides is Microsoft patenting XML related technology for packaging objects into XML, see Microsoft slammed over XML patent – ZDNet UK News.

Can we patent the idea of intellectual property? Or the process of frivolous patenting of business practices?
Continue reading The Maddness of Intellectual Property

Scumware

M. E. Kabay has a paper in ACM Ubiquity about viruses, malaware and scumware, Some Notes on Malware. It is a long piece (about 21 printed pages) that introduces the subject of viruses, gives a history, and ends up with a discussion of “scumware.” What is scumware, you ask?

Scumware is any software that significantly changes the appearance and functions of Web pages without permission of Webmasters or copyright holders. For example, a number of products overlay banner advertisements with other ads, sometimes for competing products. Scumware may add unauthorized hyperlinks to a user’s view of a Web page – sometimes using links to possibly objectionable sites. Such programs can interfere with existing hyperlinks by adding other destinations to the intended target. In addition, some products install themselves without warning users of these functions; others bury the details of their Web-page modifications in the extensive legalise of end-user license agreements.

I guess the idea is that such software puts scum on the clear surface of your web pond.

Google’s Site Ranking Secret is Out

Great Site Ranking in Google The Secret’s Out is an article on how Google ranks sites based on a reading of their US patent application which describes their approach to ranking and how they deal with spam. The article was suggested to me by Matt Patey and is worth reading. Darren Yates, the author, concludes with “Overall keep it ethical and you can’t go far wrong.” (Yates, 6/11/2005, in Buzzle.com)