Entries tagged 'Google'
Monday, July 14th, 2008
What Did They Really Say?
This looks like it could be one of the most useful political tools to come about in many years: Google has announced that they’ve automatically transcribed and indexed every video posted by a politician on YouTube.
They’ve even made this sexy little embeddable gadget:
From this, one can query how many times Obama or McCain have spoken about a topic, like education, or said something about taxes. I can’t wait to see bloggers start putting this to use soon.
• Email This PostFriday, July 4th, 2008
Pushing Back on a Rediculous Privacy Ruling
Earlier this week, U.S. District Judge Louis L. Stanton ruled that Google should turn over its viewing logs to Viacom Inc. as part of Viacom’s copyright-infringement case against YouTube.
According to the Associated Press, the database includes information on when each video gets played, which can be used to determine how often a clip is viewed. Attached to each entry is each viewer’s unique login ID and the Internet Protocol, or IP, address for that viewer’s computer.
This is clearly an overreaching grab by Viacom in their effort to show that copyrighted clips are viewed more than Otters Holding Hands in order squeeze $1 billion out of Google, YouTube’s parent company.
If this ruling stands, the question is what comes next? A court forcing Google to turn over their entire database of search records to show that people search for the copyrighted term “playboy” when they’re just looking for plain-old porn?
The best reaction I’ve read so far to this ruling, however, has to be a suggestion that Google hand over the 12 terabytes of logs in paper form, just for kicks.
For the record, those logs would be equivalent to all of the printed books in the Library of Congress.
That’s a whole lot of document revew for some recent law-school grads. Have fun with that.
• Email This PostThursday, June 12th, 2008
All My Life Are Belong to Google
So for one reason or another, Google is running ran super slow right now for a period of time tonight with ping response rates at 3-4 times that of other major search engines.
The slowdown isn’t affecting all of Google’s properties — YouTube and Gmail are still running well — but is causing trouble with Reader, Search and Blogger.
During this time, I really began to realize how much I rely on Google for my daily Web life.
Despite knowing about the issue, I found myself repeatedly entering random words into Safari’s search box trying to move between sites. I couldn’t remember more than a handful of the 300+ blogs and news sites I read on a daily basis via RSS.
I felt cut off from the world, despite 99.9% of Web sites I might otherwise visit working perfectly well.
Just one more reminder that the name of the game on the Web is still search, despite all the hype over social networking, Web 2.0 and other technologies that steal our attention from time to time.
Alas, before I could even finish writing this post, Google’s webmonkeys had search up and running once again. Thanks guys!
• Email This PostTuesday, June 3rd, 2008
Blogging via Google Docs
So in fiddling about with Google Docs‘ sharing settings, I noticed a new feature that appears to let docs be published as blog entries to major blogging platforms such as WordPress, so I wanted to try it out.