Lots of smart people are concerned about how quickly technology is changing virtually everything it touches in the world, but count Google's Eric Schmidt among the optimists.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt
(Credit: James Martin/CNET)Schmidt would agree that technological change has happened so fast over the past few decades that it's almost impossible to appreciate the long-term effects of that change, he told attendees at The Atlantic's First Draft of History Conference Friday in Washington, D.C. But he said he feels that while it's true that such change can be used against the world, it's important to remember that the combination of access to knowledge and cheap powerful computers can also spur people to new heights.
"If you live in a little group of terrorists, you can decide that the whole world agrees with you. (But) the same is also true of optimists and people who want to change the world," he said.
Schmidt touched on a variety of topics during his 30-minute interview, which was streamed live online, with James Fallows of The Atlantic:
• Governments could improve their ability to make "gray-zone decisions" by opening up information and debate to a wider circle of voices, Schmidt said. It's so easy in the current world to create "disinformation" that the best way to tackle a complex subject is to have a wide circle of people discussing the possible effects of a decision as to minimize the impact of that disinformation.
• The print-based news industry is doomed, Schmidt said, but the silver lining is that an emerging Internet-based news industry could have a bright future because of its ability to sell "products that are highly targetable, and products that are highly targetable are highly advertisable."
• "I start everyday by assuming that people don't appreciate how fundamental the Internet is," Schmidt said, when asked about his and Google's efforts to support investment in broadband Internet connections, which is currently being debated in Washington. Fast Internet connections should be a national priority but complicating the matter is the fact that opening up fast connection to the home will negatively impact a lot of existing businesses, such as the cable industry.
• Schmidt expressed his hope that the settlement in the Google Books case is approved, but the settlement he referred to will likely be different from the one that will emerge as the parties involved revise the terms of that deal ahead of a status conference next week with a federal judge in New York.
• He also expressed support for Arthur Levinson, a Google board member who is also a board member at Apple. Schmidt stepped down from his role on Apple's board earlier this year amid concerns the companies had grown into competitors as well as scrutiny from the FTC. The FTC is still looking at whether Levinson's service on both boards in an issue, but when asked if Levinson would have to step down from Google's board, he said, "I would hope not."
Google made two significant enhancements to Google.com on mobile phones Wednesday.
The first, history sync, now makes it possible to carry over a record of your search queries when you switch between mobile and desktop versions of Google.com. Dubbed "Personalized Suggest," Google will now remember your searches and will add them into the list of search suggestions you see as you type into the search bar. The new feature saves you from browsing through your history to repeat a query.
Of course, you do have to be logged in to Google for this to work, and you've got to have Web History switched on. Enable it on a phone by selecting "save searches" in the Settings menu on Google.com. At launch, the feature is only available in the U.S. on Android, iPhone, and Palm WebOS phones.
Google Local on mobile.
(Credit: Google)The second addition today similarly gets the mobile and desktop versions of Google.com talking to one another. Google has redesigned local search to make finding places of interest while on the mobile Google site much more finger-friendly. Click or tap "Local" on the mobile browser and you'll see a Start screen with categories you can browse to find restaurants and other businesses nearby, similar to what you can do on Google Maps. You'll need to have the My Location feature enabled.
There's also a category for viewing the points of interest that you starred as favorites on a Google Map. Starring essentially bookmarks the location's Google Place page. Bookmarking isn't anything new, but the browsable layout is relatively new to Google, which generally favors bare links to graphical enhancements. This treatment has the mobile Google site looking like a mobile hot-spot-finding app you might find in an on-phone app store. We have to say, it's a nice change.
The rejiggered Local Search kicks off in the U.S. and China, with support for more regions in the works.
We've covered a number of Web history tracking and organizing tools in the past, but Wikipedia Diver may be one of the most interesting, albeit niche. This Firefox add-on gives you a visual history of everywhere you've been on Wikipedia, and organizes it down to the day, order, and session in which you visited the sites, making it easy to revisit old entries.
Each visited page is presented as a small red globe that you can click on to advance the timeline. There's also a source list of every site you visited, that will take you right to the page.
Tiny red balls tell you how you got from looking at video game descriptions to the molecular makeup of precious metals.
(Credit: CNET)Like some other Web history trackers, Wikipedia Diver intelligently tracks when you hit the back button on your browser. Each time you leave whatever Wikipedia entry you're on to visit a link that's on that page, it simply attaches it to your history. In one entry I was looking at, I had clicked on seven different links that were on that page, and the extension kept track of how I had arrived at each of those pages. That in itself can be fun to look at--e.g. how I got from the Zoopraxiscope to the assassination of Alfred Herrhausen.
One thing it does not track are the reference links you click when exiting the site to view a source. I'd like to see this added as an option, but understandably that takes it into the realm of watching everything you do.
Also worth a mention is that all of this data is kept safe and secure on your local machine, and never sent to the cloud. Like any other extension that does this, this means that your information isn't being beamed elsewhere, although you can only access your history on that particular machine, and in that particular browser.
Don't worry, John Quincy Adams will not be tricking you into clicking on the Rickroll video.
John Quincy Adams might not be re-tweeting Ashton Kutcher and Shaq anytime soon, but he does have a Twitter account now. The Massachusetts Historical Society has launched a Twitter account, @JQAdams_MHS, and will officially start tweeting Adams' personal diary entries on Wednesday.
Adams died in 1848, right around the time that people first started flooding the San Francisco Bay Area in search of quick money. Except then it was in the form of gold, not venture dollars from Sand Hill Road.
As an Associated Press article explained, "a high school student touring the sixth U.S. president's archives recently noticed his bite-sized diary entries looked a lot like tweets." Most of the entries in question date back to Adams' days as a U.S. minister to Russia, which makes you wonder if @AKGovSarahPalin (or whatever her post-gubernatorial Twitter username may be) will be tweeting that she can see him from her house.
A sample: "Thick fog. Scanty Wind. On George's Bank. Lat: 42-34. Read Massillon's Careme Sermons 2 & 3. Ladies are Sick." Yup, sounds about right.
Privacy advocates aren't pleased with Google Web History, which records the sites you visit, searches you make, images and videos you view, and even sites you haven't been to but may like. When you create a Google account, the option to use Web History is checked by default. Opting out doesn't mean Google doesn't collect the information, just that you don't have such easy access to it.
It feels like I've been using Gmail for five or six years, but I found my Web history begins in January 2007, according to Google. The entries since that time are far from a complete log of all my searches and surfing; apparently, events are recorded only while you're logged into your Google account.
To open your Web history, sign into your account, click My Account in the top-right corner of the main Google screen, and choose Web History under My products. The default view is All History. Your other view options include Web, Images, News, Videos, Maps, Blogs, and even the Sponsored Links you were served up, just in case you missed them the first time.
View a record of your online activities in Google Web History.
(Credit: Google)I was ready to find all sorts of embarrassing information about myself in the logs, but they were really kinda boring, which probably indicates their accuracy. I did find several entries that didn't belong—obviously, someone borrowed my PC while I was logged into my Google account. To remove unwanted items in your history, click Remove items in the left pane, check the entry or entries you wish to excise, and click Remove.
To surf without being tracked, click the left pane's Pause button. (Frankly, I'm inclined to sign off the account altogether.) When you're ready to go back on the record, click Resume.
One of my favorite Web History features is Trends, which shows your top 10 queries, sites, and clicks over the past seven days, month, year, or all recorded. I had fun trying to figure out why I did almost three times more searching last April than I did the previous October, or why I've never searched at 2 a.m. A real shocker for me was that I search more often on Sundays than I do on Fridays. I would've never guessed that one.
Get a view of your search history by hour, day, or month in Google Web History's Trends.
(Credit: Google)Maybe I should have qualms about anybody keeping such close tabs on me, but the fact is, most or all of this information is tracked whether or not I sign up for the service, unless I use an anonymizing service or product. About a year ago, I described how to customize the history settings in Firefox and Internet Explorer, and all browsers let you wipe your Web history clean, but these settings don't affect Google's servers.
Google's privacy policy offers a link to DoubleClick's opt-out cookie, but the best solution is to disable cookies altogether. Doing so cripples many of the Web's most useful features, in my book. So I'll just keep my surfing semipublic and hope Google doesn't suffer the security breach of all time.
Updated 2:57 p.m. PDT with Google's commentary about ad revenue sharing and other details. Also, my colleague Rafe Needleman covered Google's launch of the newspaper digitization work at TechCrunch.
Google is making searchable, digital copies of old newspapers available online through partnerships with their publishers, the company said Monday.
Under the ad-supported effort, Google will digitize millions of pages of news archives, including photos, articles, headlines, and advertisements, Google said.
Google's newspaper archive search and display effort is supported by ads, visible on the right edge. (Click to enlarge.)
(Credit: CNET News)"Around the globe, we estimate that there are billions of news pages containing every story ever written. And it's our goal to help readers find all of them, from the smallest local weekly paper up to the largest national daily," said product manager Punit Soni in a blog posting about the effort. "The problem is that most of these newspapers are not available online. We want to change that."
The effort is of particular interest to reporters such as myself who've made the jump from print journalism to online. When I started at CNET News a smidgen shy of 10 years ago, I was initially concerned that the online medium was more ephemeral than print.
But as soon as I realized that CNET's search box opened up our archive of work, I realized that online news actually is more permanent in many ways than a newspaper that's almost invariably recycled or thrown away within a day of its publication. Few have the time and money to visit a newspaper's archive of old papers, called the morgue, or flip through back issues in a state library's microfilm collection.
The results of Google's project initially will be available through the Google News Archive site, Soni said. "Over time, as we scan more articles and our index grows, we'll also start blending these archives into our main search results so that when you search Google.com, you'll be searching the full text of these newspapers as well," he said.
Google didn't reveal which publishers are partners except the Quebec Chronicle-Telegraph and two organizations, ProQuest and Heritage Microfilm. However, examples of the service showed pages from The Evening Independent of St. Petersburg, Fla., the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times, The Tryon (N.C.) News, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
The project expands on an earlier partnership to digitize content from The New York Times and The Washington Post, Google said.
Google has tangled with news agencies before over who has rights to content. It settled a lawsuit with Agence France-Presse in 2007 and a similar suit from the Associated Press in 2006.
The profit motive
With Google, it's often hard to tell what project is designed to contribute revenue directly and what's part of the larger corporate mission "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," which can have the effect sometimes of making Google's search better, therefore used more often, therefore a better business.
The newspaper effort falls into this profit-and-loss gray area. Although the company is supporting it with advertisements, loftier goals were foremost in the mind of Adam Smith, the director of product management who oversees the newspaper effort, Google Book Search and related efforts.
"For us this is about improving the users' experience on the Web," Smith said. "Our objective is to bring all the world's historical newspaper information online in conjunction with our partners."
That's not to say money isn't involved. Google supplies advertisements on the right edge of the page that are based in part on the content in the newspapers, he said.
The majority of the ad revenue goes to the publishers, Smith said. (Update Sept. 12: Apparently I misheard Smith--it's only the majority of revenue, not the vast majority.)
And other revenue models are possible, he said. "There may be pay-per-view in the future, but we don't have anything to announce now," Smith said.
Although the project involves Heritage Microfilm and ProQuest, which both have microfilm archives, Google is doing the actual scanning of the film. The index has more millions of articles so far, he added.
Currently the system shows only images of the newspapers, not the text that's shown by existing news archive partnerships with newspapers that typically already have digitized much of their content.
Dozens of publishers are involved in the effort, he said.
I had a funny moment earlier this week when I showed Google's Chrome to one of my friends. She was floored that one of the top nine most visited sites featured on the browser's start page was Woot.com. Given how much browsing I do as part of this job I suppose it was surprising even to me, but it's also a hint of how intriguing your browsing history can be to others.
A service called Timelope is banking on that idea, letting users share their browsing history (or at least selected parts of it) with the rest of the world. Unlike Friendfeed which aggregates just the items you want from the sources you have chosen, Timelope posts all of your activity in one large stream and does it passively without requiring you to click on anything out of the ordinary. You can then befriend other Timelope users and see what they're looking at (almost in real time) as long as they're sharing.
All of this hinges around a browser plug-in that currently only works for Firefox. You simply plug in your user name and password and it pipes over the data in the background once the page has loaded. You can turn it on and off with a just a click, and it remembers its state between browsing sessions so you don't accidentally start sending off things you don't want others to see.
There are some obvious privacy concerns here. Making what you're viewing online public, able to be searched, and timestamped is a very open window into your habits and who you are. There are, however, some decent protection measures you can instate, like an anonymous log-in and both a black and white list for controlling which sites are shown to others, even when the plug-in is turned on.
Another company that offers a very similar service and a slightly deeper analysis of your habits, along with a way to create private groups is Hooeey, which we profiled back in late 2007. I thought then, as I do now, that these services can be incredibly useful for a certain few, but are likely to instill fear in people who are already worried enough about having their e-mail passwords stolen, let alone sharing what they're doing with strangers.
Timelope is currently in private alpha but was still accepting new sign-ups when I published this.
Timelope lets you browse other people's browser history as well as publishing your own using a Firefox plug-in.
(Credit: CBS Interactive)
YouTube nets a perfect 1:1 gender ratio of users, however your browser history might be another story.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Mike Nolet of blog Mike on Ads has put together a fun little diversion that gives your browser history a quick once over and cross-references it with sites on the Quancast top 1000. Using the gender ratio on each site (according to Quancast) it will cobble together an overall percentage of what gender it thinks you are based on those results.
Not surprisingly most of us in the office, including my colleague Erica Ogg, have come up as male, with many tech sites having higher ratios of male users. The tool will give you a complete rundown of all the sites that popped up, along with their respective ratios. It's pretty fun to go through them and see the estimated makeup of each place--you might be surprised.
In case you're worried about your browsing history being used for evil, Nolet insists he's not doing anything with the data. Many users have left their true genders and the tool's guess in the comments below Nolet's post. The general consensus is that if you visit many popular tech sites you'll be pinned under the male persuasion. Visiting some sites with higher female-to-male ratios like TMZ and Livejournal will swing your overall percentage the other direction.
Note: The tool runs a little slow in Internet Explorer, so if you're having problems switch over to Firefox or Opera.
Mozilla's new project called Weave is an exciting new add-on to Mozilla's popular browser Firefox. While in its infancy, the service plans to be a way for users to save and access their personal browsing information across multiple machines. It's a little bit like Google's Web history, del.icio.us, and a Web password saver all wrapped up into one.
Some use cases for Weave (as listed by Mozilla) include: accessing your history and bookmarks from your home version of Firefox on your mobile Firefox browser, shared/collaborative bookmarking, and personalization tools to let you log in and sync up your home bookmarks, plug-ins and passwords on another machine; all things that are typically a pain unless you're technically proficient or know how to plan ahead.
Weave version 0.1, which Mozilla's Labs team rolled out a few weeks back, lays the foundation for Web developers to add Weave integration into their services. It's limited to some very basic back-end tools for developers, although version 0.2 which is planned for "early 2008" is adding a full-blown API, and a user interface complete with settings to let you control how much of your information Weave can access.
Currently, users who want to take advantage of the Weave plug-in must be running the latest beta of Firefox 3, Mozilla's upcoming follow-up to the current version 2.0, which you can grab here.
The move to archive nearly everything we do online has been spearheaded mainly by Google in both Gmail as well as Google Web history. The same thing is happening in the chat space with Meebo and Google Talk, as well as desktop chat clients that have had integrated chat logging for years now. The one thing missing has been a way to take those locally saved conversations and make them available for search and reading while away from your home machine. IM History and Simkl are two companies have jumped on the task in an attempt to let people archive everything they've talked about, as long as they're willing to trust their log-in information to a third party. Like financial service Mint, that trust is rewarded with tools that let you get more out of each service than originally intended.
Between the two, IM History released first, and at the moment is the only one of the two that doesn't require an invitation to use. The service went 1.0 last week and supports six popular chat protocols, as well as desktop chat application Trillian. Windows users install a small app that sits on the taskbar and monitors any or all of the supported chat programs that have been setup to get cached. There's also a version for Linux users that works with the Pidgin multiclient chat application. Both versions quietly record your conversations and send them to a private server where you can come back and view them while away from the home machine.
The other new app is Simkl, which is still in private beta and has a nearly identical feature set to IM History, although Simkl takes a slightly different approach by forgoing software in place of having users manually route their messages through a proxy server. This takes a little more work on the part of the user, but the payoff is not having to install an application that may lose its efficacy on applications as they get updated. The service also provides how-to's that let you mindlessly set up each client.
The draw of both of these services is that once you've got them configured on one or more of your machines, it'll track your chats and make them available via separate gateway sites. IM History has the added benefit of letting you access that same information from the desktop application when you double-click the icon. It's a nice touch.
Between the two I'm partial to IM History because I prefer its more robust history browser. But I'm honestly too wary of the idea, no matter how good the execution is because of the potential security problems of having your IM logs sitting on someone else's servers. CNET and many other companies don't allow chat logging, and before using either of these solutions in the workplace you should check with your IT department.
Since Simkl is still in private beta for the time being, the folks there were nice enough to hook up Webware readers with some invites. There are 500 available, and to use them, just use "Webware" (no quotation marks) in as the invitation code when signing up.
