Have you noticed of late Google being a bit.. well.. monopolistic?
Well I have. Don't get me wrong, I love the company and the work they do – but their business and public relations practices are beginning to smell a lot like Microsoft.
Take Adwords and Adsense for example. It is the sole reason that Google has the money it has – text based advertising. Recently, the text underneath the bulk of adsense ads (like the ones below) that used to say Ads by Google, now has a Google logo image, furthering their brand to all who use the internet and see their ads.
With Google's recent purchase of DoubleClick for billions of dollars, I can see their stake in on-line advertising boom further.
Then we come to YouTube. Love it or hate it, we have to live with it; And regardless of whether you think that it showing copyrighted video clips over the internet goes against intellectual property laws, Google is making a killing from the 'Tube. Rumours are rife to the meaning of the YouTube deal; Many people (including me) believe that Goggle acquired YouTube because they were losing so much money over them selling Adsense ad space, that a takeover in the end would in fact save them money.
It could also be said, now that Google own YouTube and Google Video (obviously), they have a giant 55% share in the on-line video market — easily having the monopoly.
This is embarrassing… I recorded this piece of ‘music’ as part of my Software Engineering coursework, where we are to produce a presentation to advertise our product (a board game about Engineers’ Sandwiches).
I took the song Baby Got Back, originally mastered by Sir Mix-a-Lot, loungified by Richard Cheese, and then defaced it by replacing words in the song to reflect sandwich making or eating.
I hope it doesn’t annoy/offend/sadden you too much!
Andy Callaghan – Baby got Sandwiches Ft. Richard Cheese. Lyrics by Sir Mix-a-Lot.
A storm is brewing up in America over the publishing of keys that allow the circumvention of HD-DVD and Blu-ray copy protection systems.
The AACS have been recently quashing bloggers, directories and search engines over the discovered keys, giving cease and desist letter to those who infringe upon the copyright.
However, a rebellion is starting on the world famous Digg website. Initially, Digg's stance was to remove any stories linking the keys. As more users became aware of Digg censoring the story, the owner and founder of Digg, Kevin Rose, decided to come outright with it. In a bold move he titled a new blog entry with the key it self in.
Swedish mega-torrent site PirateBay are soon to launch a free online music service which the bands and acts listed actually profit from.
www.playble.com
Instead of users of the service subscribing to the website by explicitly paying for it, PirateBay give a cut of the advertising profits which appear on band pages to the band themselves, thereby making money for the band and PirateBay.
This comes as a welcome change to the previous stance of the PirateBay on piracy. The ’screw you!’ element of authority may be starting to dissolve in place of a more legitimate approach to torrenting in a few years maybe?
Earlier this week, Google release iGoogle, a general term for all of their personalised content, and user-centric homepage which is customisable by the user (obviously).
For me, it comes as a great improvement to Google services to me, and an marvelous time for Google to start trumpeting about all the goodness of social networking, in opposition to the fat $1bn lawsuit that Viacom has slapped it with a few months back over copyright infringement.
In a statement to BBC news, Google representative said:
By seeking to make carriers and hosting providers liable for internet communications, Viacom's complaint threatens the way hundreds of millions of people legitimately exchange information, news, entertainment and political and artistic expression,
