So the Googlies are, allegedly, gnashing and wailing.
Their ears, their nostrils, even their fully formed eyebrows are twitching beyond all human control.
Though I am not one of those who necessarily subscribes to the idea that Googlies ever have extreme emotions, the rumor is that they are in a fizzy tizzy. Because of Bing, the new search fragrance from Microsoft.
According to a report, Google's Sergey Brin has ordered some of his finest brains to take Bing apart as if it were a secretly smuggled advance exemplar of the Palm Pre.
He wants to know how it thinks. He wants to know who its friends are. He wants its very innards examined for performance-enhancing algorithms.
I would very much like to believe this story. Mainly because I want the word "Bing" to become part of the language, but also because Bing seems like a rather fine product.
However, a small part of me, somewhere between my spleen and my liver, is sending a warning signal. You see, last Christmas I read the highly amusing Michael Wolff biography of Rupert Murdoch.
In it, Wolff describes how Murdoch's wife, Wendi Deng, encouraged him to hang with a younger crowd. You know, some of the folks that might just decimate the newspaper industry as we know it. Folks such as Sergey Brin and Larry Page.
So perhaps that place between my spleen and liver has been aroused by the fact that the newspaper that broke the "Google is blinging scared" story was Murdoch's own, and very much beloved, New York Post.
Of course it's possible that someone at Google was trembling so much that he spilled his tale of fear to a friend at the New York Post.
However, when you're perceived as being a little bit of a, well, monopoly, isn't it nice to occasionally bathe in the idea that there is a serious threat to your throne and your, um, pension? Might you just be tempted to find a nicely engineered way of slipping that story out there just to improve the way you are regarded?
It's a little like movies of the last 15 years or so in which the male protagonist has to show his vulnerable side to get the girl.
Because he sheds a tear or two and visits a psychologist to talk about his mama, we end up thinking his belching, slobbering, swilling, snorting, slightly uncouth persona was all actually rather charming.
He does get the girl, though. And that, for him, is really all that matters.
I spent some of my vacation with Rupert Murdoch.
I lay him down on his back in the sand and said: "Sir, please tell me a little about yourself." His words, translated often very sympathetically by his authorized biographer Michael Wolff in a book entitled The Man Who Owns The News, were quite picturesque.
As I lay glistening in the heat, Mr. Wolff shined a light on MySpace's owner: "All right, he's not quite a liberal. He remains a militant free-marketeer and is still pro-war (grudgingly, he's retreated a bit). And there was the moment, one afternoon, when over a glass of his favorite coconut water (meant to increase electrolytes) he was propounding the genetic theory that the basic problem of the Muslim people was that they married their cousins."
I will admit to finding Mr. Murdoch's alleged view faintly quaint. However, the idea of attraction to one's cousin and marrying into one's own bloodline is one that has secretly fascinated many.
Happily, Professor Diane Paul of the University of Massachusetts in Boston and Professor Hamish Spencer of the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand have slipped their heads above a rather difficult parapet to suggest there's nothing wrong with marrying your cousin.
They declared that the risk of genetic defects in babies born from the unions of cousins is no greater than that in babies born to women over the age of 40.
Scientists appear to have known for a long time that cousin-coupling was not as risky an adventure as many feared. The root of society's aversion to finding a man from your clan and a spouse at your house seems to have been largely engendered by the eugenics movement.
First cousin marriages are legal in the UK, but not approved by 31 states in the US. You will be stunned to discover that Texas has not hitched itself to the cousin-coupling wagon. Whereas you might feel a frisson on hearing that Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina see nothing wrong with it at all. (You see, there really is no homogeneous entity called the South.)
Professor Spencer, had, perhaps, not read the Murdoch biography before telling the Independent newspaper: "Neither the scientific nor social assumptions behind such legislation stand up to close scrutiny. Such legislation reflects outmoded prejudices about immigrants and the rural poor and relies on over-simplified views of heredity. There is no scientific grounding for it."
Because I know many of you are great believers in science and played in your school orchestra, I can tell you that H.G. Wells, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein and Johann Sebastian Bach all married cousins. As did, um, Jerry Lewis.
Then there's Queen Victoria and Rudy Giuliani. No, they didn't marry each other. But they did, according to the immensely pupil-stimulating cousincouples.com, marry cousins.
In our great new world in which nuance attempts to wrestle with swathing generalization, many are glad that science is playing a role in helping us grasp some of the more difficult issues.
However, I am skeptical about the rumor that scientists in the Middle East are trying to find a definitive conclusion as to whether the biggest problem of the Australian people is that they are largely descended from British convicts.
Although if such research were taking place, Mr. Murdoch might be very interested in sponsoring it. Mr. Wolff suggests his subject believes Britain would be a far better place without British people.
(Disclosure: Yes, I used to be responsible for the advertising for Mr. Murdoch's Sun and Sunday Times. Yes, it was great fun. Yes, I learned more than I might ever have imagined.)
A very wise (and, strangely, important) person in the news industry said to me the other day: "Do you know ANYONE who has ever clicked on an online ad?"
I had to confess I knew many who clicked on those little Google thingies, but not many who clicked on display ads. And even fewer who would admit to it.
This led us to consider how news organizations might make more (some) money in the future, given that untold riches are not exactly flowing yet from online display advertising.
So imagine if all the (supposedly) reputable news organizations got together one night, in a dark room owned by Rupert Murdoch and decided that they would all start charging for their online content. Not just one or two of them. All of them.
No more linking by the Drudge Report without a fee. No more getting up in the morning to read the election latest online before you put on your lucky underwear, without, at the very least, a subscription.
Of course it's true that, in times gone by, these same news organizations had little clue how the Web would develop. They believed in unlimited free sampling of their product online, in the interesting belief this wouldn't devalue the one thing they had to offer.
Some organizations did try charging (a few, like The Wall Street Journal, still do) and then backed away like Alaskan moose when faced with an armed news crew.
But it used to be free to park on many Main Streets in America. Then they put in parking meters and, though we might show McCainish grouchiness on occasion, we pay. Could it still be the same with online news?
(Credit:
CC Sillygwailo)
Where, in fact, does the thing we call "news" come from anyway? Don't we imagine that somewhere out there are paid journalists of some repute, battling past press releases, spin surgeons, and proprietorial prejudice in order to sniff out something akin to truths and bring them to their readers?
If, at noon tomorrow, all news organizations announced they would immediately start charging for their hard-earned and, presumably, valuable online product (I'm imagining Rupert Murdoch and The New York Times' Arthur Sulzberger making a joint statement, their arms linked in solidarity, each reading every second word of their pronouncement), would people refuse to pay?
Yes, there would still be competition from new free sites, financed solely by advertising. But these would have to be new brands. Would people trust them? Remember, I am talking about every single news organization coming together and sticking to a joint principle. (Yes, I know, I know. Please dream with me, won't you?)
Given that times are now a-changing and we are all a-working together to blunt the parts of capitalism that the finest algorithms failed to anticipate, might some readers hope that by paying for news they might just get a product of slightly better quality?
What if the proprietors suddenly grasped the times they were living in, clutched the concept of truth like a man rolling off a cliff grabs at a dried-up branch, and shared a little of their business model with their readers?
What if they then promised their readers that for, say, a $25 subscription (yes, not much more than 6 coffees or a pack of 24 condoms) they would guarantee a 25 percent expansion in online news coverage?
Might this also allow the news organizations to reverse their tendency (their need, they might say) to pepper their pages with so much display advertising that their online content sometimes looks like a teenage acne-ridden cheek?
Isn't there just the smallest, tiniest chance that readers might buy into this new commercial relationship? If the financial folks can all get together to save themselves, er, I mean, to readjust their business principles, isn't this a good time for online news organizations to do it too?
That'll be $49.99. Thank you.
- prev
- 1
- next
