BPN 1702: Ethics for robo-pets

Okay, I confess: dogs are not my thing, excuse me my type of pets. In fact I am not a pet lover. But this week Google went too far when they showed their new acquisition, the robo-dog Spot. Well they did not really show the robo-animal, they kicked a rudimentary robo-dog into the world  (yet no word of protest from the Dutch political Party for Animals!). And in this same week there was some more kicking, but now Sony was going to kick out the robo-dog Aibo maintenance service.

The Aibo (Japanese for mate and acronym for Artificial Intelligence Robot) was presented in an interesting knick of time, the last two years of the former century. After the bringing down of the Berlin Wall and the ending of the Cold War, people needed something cuddly. And the toy industry with for example Warner responded with Furby, a mix of a cat and an owl. The pet was fluffy and able to speak, although it never made its promise of self learning come true. Yet fluffly was loved by babies and female pensionados. The pet was speaking to them, usually in English, felt fluffy and could be turned off and on. Beside it was not really an expensive pet.

For those with a purse of at least 2500 US dollar, Sony presented in 1998 the Aibo, a small cuddly dog. The dog could walk, sit up vertically, dance and sleep. You could talk to the dog, give command and stroke the pet. The Aibo could be nosy, busy or calm. They were also able to play with a pink ball, could balance a bone on their nose and when Aibos were brought together they would play together.  The Aibo also became a favourite with kids and female pensionados. (It is even rumoured by my Nordic friends that they love to have Aibos for their sleigh rides in the snow.)  

I remember an experiment from 2006 in the Netherlands where Furbies and Aibos were tested on pensionados (see photograph). The Aibo won. Over the years and mainly in Japan, small groups of Aibo owners got together to let the pets play together, but also to discuss issues of the silver wave of Aibo’s to come. Just like pensionados need knee and hip surgeries, robo-pets need limb repairs. But now that  Sony has announced the shut-down of its Aibo maintenance department due to budget cuts, the pets will have to look for a caring team or an old-folks home.

Spot, the pet from Google is a different kind of breed. It is as high as a young Great Dane. Its features are not very natural yet. It is (yet) not a likeable pet. It is still a technical pet even with a rear light at its tail, just like domestic dogs have these days for their evening walkies. And from the beginning it was made clear that the dog would be a new work horse type of robo-animal and not exactly a pet. Spot fits in Google’s portfolio of mobiles such as drones and self-driving cars. Spot is going to be a sturdy dog which will not easily roll over to be cuddled or when it is hit or kicked. Spot will be a delivery dog for example being used by facility managers for having the mail distributed within an office or perhaps by the national mail services.

It is interesting to see on the one hand the lifecycle of Aibo coming to an end, while on the other hand Google kicks Spot into the world. There is really a world of difference between them. The Aibo is realistic and seen as real pet, while Spot is work horse-like mobile. But the Aibos pose a basic question: are there ethics for living with robots and do the robo-pets have rights to a decent pet life and funeral?  Sony said: we are pensioning off you, flock of Aibos, so get to the scrap heap. But the people who possess an Aibo have come to see them as part of their life and are not willing to bring them to the scrap heap, like sheep to the slaughter house. One owner has already taken his Aibo along into his grave. And the other Aibo owners are now calling for an old-dogs home with a resident robot technician. The Aibo owners might even compose a digi-euthanasia statement for when the Aibo gets really old and disassembled. But is there then a cementary or a crematory for robo-pets?

 

Rest in peace, mate

 

                                                            © Tom's new stuff page

Sources:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/in-japan-dog-owners-feel-abandoned-as-sony-stops-supporting-aibo-1423609536

http://digg.com/video/meet-spot-googles-new-robo-dog-that-wont-fall-over-even-if-you-kick-it-super-hard

BPN 1662: Google introduces new search algorithm

Under the name Hummingbird, Google has introduced a new version of het search algorithm. The introduction comes on the 15^th anniversary of Google.

The company started out with the search algorithm BackRub, which was based on search software available at Stanford University. The software worked with Boolean principles of AND, OR and NOT, including or excluding keywords. Besides the first searchers usually formed search arguments with a single keyword or more keywords. But as searchers become more sophisticated and are working with concepts and meanings, the search algorithm has become insufficient. In the meantime more than 90 per cent of the search questions are processed through the Hummingbird search algorithm.

This year it is 15 years ago that Larry Page en Sergey Brin incorporated their company and started to work in the garage of Susan Wojcicki, who is now a senior Google executive. On September 27^th, 1998 their index system had surpassed Yahoo’s search engine in indexed terms. Interesting is the fact that Google started to collaborate with Yahoo! In 2000 and became their standard search provider. In the same year Google announced the first index with a billion URLs, thus becoming the largest search engine in the world.

The founders of Google knew each other from 1996 onwards. As postdoc students of Stanford University they had started to work together on a search engine, which they called BackRub. The system, on which they based BackRub, was already in use on the servers of Stanford for more than a year, but was abandoned as it used too much band with. By 1997 Page and Brin decided that BackRub needed a new name. After a brainstorm, they selected the name Google, a pundit on the mathematical term googol, which stands for 1 followed by 100 zero’s. The new name also reflected their mission aiming at organising a sheer unending quantity of information on internet.

Update BPN 1649: e-books in the Netherlands

Update article Google starts e-book sales in the Netherlands (5)

14 August 2013

Presently more than 75 per cent of the Dutch e-books are DRM-free. This comes down to 8400 titles. Now the publishers still get another chance to move from DRM to DRM-free before September 1, 2013.

Most publishers will have DRM-free titles, but in the distribution things might be different. Bol.com and bruna.nl deliver e-books DRM-free, but with a digital watermark against piracy. E-books, distributed by Apple’s iBookstore and Kobo, still carry DRM. Also Google, since last month a new player on the Dutch e-book market, adds DRM to the e-books sold.

web roi

BPN 1415 Content, community and commerce

It is CES-time. The Consumer Electronics Show has opened in Las Vegas. So it is time for the announcements. Google tried to steal the thunder with its smart phone from Apple, which is rumoured to announce the iSlate, a multimedia tablet, functioning as movie screen, iPOD and as ereader. And the ereaders will be obvious in the stream of press releases.

Amazon came with a press release for the international market. It introduced a new version of its larger-screen Kindle e-book reader, the Kindle DX with Global Wireless, which features wireless Internet connectivity in 100 countries. The company has said that the 9.7-inch display on the Kindle DX, first released last May, is more suited to reading newspapers, magazines and textbooks. The move will also make AT&T the company's global partner for 3G Kindle connectivity, replacing previous partner Sprint in the US. The $489 global Kindle DX is available for pre-order today, and will begin shipping on January 19, 2010. As said before I wonder whether the Kindle DX and the Kindle 6 inches are going to sell in Europe at all, given the Mobipocket format and the unknown AT&T network.

Also Microsoft had a product announcement. It finally showed its tablet. Not the rumoured Courier with two pages to be closed like a book, but the HP tablet, a derivative of the HP tablet PC, with a colour screen of 11 inch, but with touch screen technology. And more tablets of this type are to follow, coming from Asus and Archos. A real disappointment. Nothing special, nothing new. But this was not the only disappointment in the product announcement. Microsoft would associate its tablet with the Amazon.com online shop. A cheap choice as the Blio platform had been expected to be the online shop. All together is the Microsoft announcement already the most disappointing product announcement. The tablet was termed to be a Slate PC by Steve Ballmer. It exactly indicates that he does not understand the world of content and text iPODs.

Surprising was the press release of DMC Worldwide. The company announced a new platform dealing with content, community and commerce: The COPIA platform is a hybrid solution for consumers of all ages to experience a completely new way to discover, enjoy, share and purchase books, newspapers, magazines and a wide variety of digital content. At the same time, it integrates a software application engine for OEM brands looking to deliver content across their digital devices including e-readers, notebooks, netbooks, tablets and smartphones. The press release also includes an announcement about its own series of six ereaders: Ocean and Tidal. Every eReader powered by Copia comes standard with 2GB internal storage enough space for about 1500 eBooks. The top of the line Copia Ocean eReader features a 9-inch ePaper capacitive touchscreen, 768 x 1024 pixels resolution, 4-directional tilt-sensor, 3G connectivity (optional), WiFi (802.11b/g), Linux 2.6.21, 2GB internal memory, stereo speaker and 3.5mm stereo jack. The series of ereaders looks like a collection of OEM ereaders already on the market. Copia will be on trial from this month onwards and start selling by April, 2010. At first glance the DMC company seems to combine content, community and commerce for the first time. The question will be whether content is the same community commodity as music.

Blog Posting Number: 1415

Tags: content, community, commerce, ereader, netbook

BPN 1392 Frankfurt Book Fair: no e-book excitement

The annual pilgimage for publishers to the Frankfurter Book Fair is over. On this largest book grail publishers walk kilometers, select potential books to be translated and talk about the latest developments in the sector over a beer or a good dinner. And the e-reader definitely was on the menu of the item list. The marketing bureau Forrester forcated a sale of 1 million e-readers in the Christmas season, followed by sales of 6 million e-readers next year. And Google announced that Google Editions will start distributing e-books in the first half year of next year. But how much whipped cream wsa in these announcements?

Concretely there is some action on the e-readers front. Barnes & Noble will re-join the fray. And Amazon will launch a global English-language Kindle with wireless 3G access through AT&T in more than 100 countries. And Google has announced In my home country The Netherlands the Kindle will (finally) be available on October 19, 2009. Amazon will not have Dutch titles available yet; but the portfolio starts with the US offer and the European offer, read UK offer, probably with a small selection of French and German titles. The e-reader will be available at 185 euro, just a fraction cheaper than the cheapest Sony device. Besides subscribers to the Kindle will have to pay 99 eurocents for every megabyte transmitted. The offer looks too little, too late, as Sony has teamed up with the internet bookshop Bol.com and is well on its way with their introduction.

Not only in The Netherlands, but also in Europe Kindle will have a hard time. Publishing e-books in foreign languages is not yet popular with publishers as there is no real demand for it. In Europe there is still a culture of ink sniffing. No books without ink.

Google will start distributing between the 600.000 and 800.000 e-books. This portfolio will partly exist of public domain book of which the copyrights are no longer valid., and partly of books, to which Google has been licensed. Google will keep 55 percent of the sales price (Amazon keeps 60 percent).

Should we be impressed by the potential sales figures? The sale of 6 million e-readers is impressive, but still small in terms of demography worldwide and even of the US. It is a start. But publishers and certainly foreign language book publishers will remain careful.

Blog Posting Number: 1392

Tags: e-book, e-reader

BNP 1353 A changing e-Book world (2)

It is not only e-readers, where you see changes. Also in the distribution of e-books things are moving. Google will soon offer a program for publishers to offer the digital versions of their books. But also the e-book veteran, the Project Gutenberg, will increase its offer.

Google has a long standing tradition with publishers. In 2004 it launched its book search service, in which copyrighted books could be read online. Google was heavily attacked by authors and publishers. Yet it made 1,5 copyright free books available in the public domain through its site. Google is launching a download service in which publishers can set their own price on the book; this in contrast to Amazon, which offers books in Mobipocket format and optionally on its own e-reader Kindle.
Details about the service still have to be published. No word on the format, except for the guarantee that a book must be readable on an e-reader, on PC or a mobile phone. It is rumoured that the e-books will be transformed to HTML. There is also no word on whether Google will have its own e-reader produced (with android software).
Also the veteran of the electronic book, the Project Gutenberg, is shifting gear and making eyes to mobile phones. The first goal of Project Gutenberg was simply to reach totals of estimated audiences of 1.5% of the world population, or the total of 100 million people. With the advent of mobile phone access the project management is now setting its goal at 15 percent of the world population or 1 billion. Given that there are approximately 4.5 billion mobile phones now in service around the world that means that the project with its offer could reach just over one-fifth of all mobile phone users to accomplish this goal.

Given the estimated 4.5 billion mobile phones for which eBooks could be made, presuming they can all display plain eBooks, and the extremely slow rise in Kindle sales as compared to the iPod, iPhone, Blackberry Curve, and all the others, Project Gutenberg could reach more readers than Kindle and Sony combined. This attempt to reach these mobile phones has to include books in many more languages than English.

This means that Project Gutenberg will have to be more multi-lingual, if Project Gutenberg is to reach anyone beyond the number of people comfortable enough with English to read the eBooks on the mobile phones. There are already well over a thousand book titles in French, followed by lesser numbers in German and the other more popular languages, but not nearly enough to really offer a library in these languages.

Project Gutenberg especially aims at the smart phones and iPhones in particular. With iTunes as a shop it has a software and content distributor in one. Various iPhone applications for eBooks have appeared in the iTunes appl shop such as Plucker, the defacto mobile eBook reader format for Project Gutenberg, houses over 20,000 free eBooks. Another eText reader for the iPhone is Eucalyptus.

Blog Posting Number: 1353

tags: e-books, content

BPN 1241 Google jubilee: a confession

This year Google celebrates its first decade of operation. In just a few years Google was able to send search engines into oblivion. Who does still use Altavista, for example? Over the years Google has become an institution with an idealistic objective of making all the information in the world accessible electronically. And this not only means already digitised information, but also printed information such as books.



As part of the celebration Google has put up the internet index, not of the starting year 1998, but of 2001, when the first annual internet index was technically possible. This index shows a snapshot of internet in the new century. It also delivers an opportunity to compare the Google index of 2001 with the present index in the search engine. And the search company collaborates for the 20001 project with Internet Archive, which preserves old internet pages.

Of course I did some search and hit work. I looked for the name of my company in 2001 and 2008 and of course for my own name. The name of my company yielded some interesting results. Electronic Media Reporting (between quotes) delivered in 2001 a simple 245 links. The interesting part I that there were no links to my company, but al US links to the method of reporting with electronic media. In 2008 there were 3920 references, with only four references to the method of electronic reporting on the front page and more than 8 references to my company. In fact the first the first reference is to my company, which shows the improved localisation of the search engine. Of course I did also a search for my own name. This yielded in 2001 already 1820 references and had grown to 3110 links in 2008. For me the Google index of 2001 still showed the rise of internet and the global city theme, as my name is mentioned in the OJR Features: 50 international names to know (in journalism).

The jubilee also reminds me of a goof-up. By 1999, Google was ready to spread the wings over Europe. At that time I was working for the Dutch language newsletter Telecombrief . So on a day a press release came in and told about the launch of the Dutch language version of the search engine; at that time the major Dutch language search engine was Ilse., which now has shrivelled. I remember responding to the press release, which came from a Belgian PR bureau, which released the press releases rather in Flemish than in Dutch. Besides my remarks about their antiquated words, I told them that we, journalists, had heard all that stuff of being the best one before and that search engines still were stupid machines as they yielded more irrelevant stuff than relevant links. I told them also that Google still used the stupid search method of Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) and that searching had not moved forward since 1972. Looking back I am still convinced that my comments about the information overload and Boolean operators still stand, but I must grant that Google in the meantime grew to giant proportions.

I wonder where Google will be in the next ten years. Will they still exist? Will the company have made improvements on their search engine? In the meantime Google is the best we have at the moment.

Blog Posting Number: 1241

Tags: search engine

BPN 1181 Watch out for the Google Street View car

If you are living in Holland or are visiting the Low Countries, watch out: the ET-like Google Street View car is in Holland! Stay inside; if you have to go out, cover your face with a mask or even better, dress up in a burka. Otherwise, you might be the laughing stock for the years to come or worse your marriage might end as you were not able to explain why you were in the same suspicious place as that strange ET car of Google Street View. Can you imagine, telling at a party that your marriage of 30 years was wrecked by a Google car!

At least the people in Amsterdam and Rotterdam might be safe by the end of this month. Since May the Google Street View cars are driving around in those cities and are recording street by street, so that anyone with internet can see in what street you live or are supposed to live. Instead of having a panoramic view, you can get a view as if you were driving through the street or do virtual walks from the train station to your house.

Street View was launched in the USA in the Spring of 2007 and started with the cities of San Francisco, New York City, Denver, Miami and Las Vegas and is now operational in Australia, Asia and Europe. The programme was already active in France; there was even a Street VIew programme for the Tour de France (even after the Tour you can relive the full edition). More recently the programme was started in the UK, where a weblogger had a talk with one of the drivers. And now Holland is being recorded. (Just search on Goggle for Google Street View car and you will see a line up of various camera devices; the one on the picture comes from the UK).

Infringement on privacy came up as a problem when the programme was introduced. A couple in Pittsburgh claims damages of 25.000 US dollars as the Google car shot photographs or part of a movie of the road in front of their house. This, while a notice board indicated that it was a private road. Google reacted rather indifferent by saying that in this modern world there is nothing like absolute privacy. But the company seems to have learned as it did go into discussion with British privacy groups and was able to reassure them with some measures. It also contacted the privacy watchdog of the European Commission and several European countries. The company reassures people that will not be recognisable and is now developing software to make faces and number plates fuzzy and unreadable. Whoever recognises him- or herself can lodge a complaint and demand the image to be removed.

It is not the first time that street film cars are touring around the Netherlands to record streets, the houses, offices, factories and parks. The first time this was happening was in 1989, when a transporter was used in Rotterdam to collect images of streets. It was a project by the former Dutch telecom monopoly PTT in cooperation with the CD-ROM producer CD-Europe. I am not completely sure anymore, but I suspect that the early navigation adapter Tele-Atlas was also involved. (BTW Not one complaint about privacy at that time!). Since 1992 the Dutch company Cyclomedia executes this type of work and has now 34 cars on the road to record the streets, one by one, for government and private companies.

Blog Posting Number: 1181

Tags: navigation, virtual walks, privacy

BPN 1117 Belgian newspapers claim 49 million euro from Google

Copiepresse, a copyright body for 19 Belgian French and German languages newspapers, is seeking 49.1 million euros from Google Inc. in a lawsuit over the right to feature links to the publishers' content on the Internet.

Copiepresse asked a Brussels court to award this sum. A court ruled last year, that Google violated Belgian copyright laws by publishing links to articles on Google News without permission. The damages of 32 million euro are in addition to a daily fine of 25,000 euros, ordered by the court ordered.

Google and the Belgian newspapers started discussions about a settlement and an agreement after the court ruling in February 2007. Google did immediately remove the links to Belgian French and German languages newspapers in its search engine and on Google News.

In May 2007 Google removed the cached data. The agreement allowed Internet users to access Belgian newspapers again on Google's Web site in the country.
In addition to damages, Copiepresse is also asking the judge to have Google publish the court ruling from last year on Google.be in a visible and clear manner. If Google does not publish the ruling, the group seeks a 1 million-euro daily fine.

The sentence will stir up a debate all around Europe, except for the parts which are covered by Angel-Saxon jurisdiction. In practice the newspaper organisations in other European countries can go to court and try to stop Google news. They might have a good chance.

The sentence hinged on three aspects: consent, deeplinking and caching. Google News set up the service in Belgium without asking the Belgian publishers. Google said that it did not have to do this as it used the searching machine and set up a link. Google News deeplinked to the relevant article, without passing the front page. But the caching problem was really at the core of the court case. Google News did not just linked to the relevant article, but also kept it in cache.

With the Belgian sentence in their pocket newspaper publishing associations will start other court cases. Of course they could ask Google News to take off the titles of their associated members voluntarily as the Flemish publishers, united in Rerocopy, did. But many associations want to make clear to Google that copyright and database rules are different at the other side of the pond.

Blog Posting Number: 1117

Tags: copyright, newspapercopyright, deeplinking, caching, newspapers

BPN 1099 ilse gives up in favour of Google

The Dutch pioneer search engine ilse has lost the search engine battle in favour of Google and will no longer be the heart of Startpagina, the starting pages for Dutch language sites. The company ilse media is defining a new strategy.

In 1996 ilse, the first Dutch search engine, was launched by Wiebe Weikamp, Merien ten Houten and Robert Klep. ilse grew at an amazing rate and quickly became the market leader in Dutch search engines. Two years later in 1998, a group of friends, under the supervision of Durk Jan de Bruin set-up Startpagina. This site with site pages per subject, including all daughter sites (respectively 1,500 and roughly 5,000 pages) quickly grew to become the biggest Dutch internet portal. By 1999 Google appeared on the scene. In 2000 VNU magazines, now Sanoma magazines, acquired both companies and put them in ilse media B.V.

The search engine became the stimulus for the development of a digital publisher company. By now ilse media has a network of 150 websites, of which Starpagina is the largest. It has a news site and a weblog site. IN 2005 ilse media started a cluster of youngsters and youth sites under the name newrulez. Ilse media also manages the women and home sites of Sanoma publishers and the site TVGids.nl, an electronic television guide, for the public broadcast stations.

From the beginning the search engine ilse was a popular site for the Dutch language searchers. When Google started its activity, ilse was on its height and has been going down ever since. In the last year there was a discussion about the search engine. Most people thought that the engine had come at the end of the cycle. And this became clear from the penetration rate, which went down to 5 per cent, while the real use for searching went down to 2 per cent. Presently users of Startpagina use Google five times a week, while the search engine of ilse media is used five times a week.

Of course Google will bring in extra revenues. But the management of ilse media will have to contemplate the use of the search engine. The company is adamant in stating that the dismissal of their own search engine ilse is the beginning of the end. Ilse media is working on a new strategy for the search engine. One way will be to use the search engine for vertical sites like the women magazines of Sanoma.

On May 8, 2008 ilse media announced a new site, familii.nl, a family and relatives sites, which offers tools for keeping contact with family and relatives and for mapping the relatives. Familii.nl has a few competitors in the Dutch market: Verwant.nl, familieband.nl and familiepagina.nl. Verwant.nl is the Dutch version of the popular German Verwant.de and is run by De Telegraaf.

Blog Posting Number: 1099

Tags: search engine

BPN 1088 Google cancels appointment

Yesterday it was the Day of the Freedom of the Press. It was celebrated in The Netherlands with a conference for which a representative of Google had been booked as a speaker. However he has cancelled the appointment for a lecture. The conference was organised by the Dutch Journalist Union (NVJ). Central issue at the conference was the situation in China.

Peter Fleisch, vice president of Google and responsible for ethical policy, was asked to explain the decision of Google to launch its site in China earlier this month. The agreement of Google to the censorship in China was met a lot of criticism worldwide. It is unclear why Google has retracted from the conference. It is not clear either whether business relationships have requested Google to stay away from the conference. The cancellation was motivated by Google as pressing business in the States. No replacement was offered nor was a video conference link offered. I guess that the Google vice president ethical policy, was afraid to face an audience of critical journalists.

At the occasion of the Week of Freedom of the Press, Freedom House published its annual report Freedom of the Press 2008 Survey Release. Global press freedom underwent a clear decline in 2007, with journalists struggling to work in increasingly hostile environments in almost every region in the world, according to a new survey released today by Freedom House. The decline in press freedom—which occurred in authoritarian countries and established democracies alike—continues a six-year negative trend.

While the survey indicated that setbacks in press freedom outnumbered advances two to one globally, there was some improvement in the region with the least amount of press freedom: the Middle East and North Africa. The survey attributes the gains in the Middle East and North Africa to a growing number of journalists who were willing to challenge government restraints, a pushback trend seen in other regions as well.

Out of 195 countries and territories, 72 (37 percent) were rated Free, 59 (30 percent) Partly Free, and 64 (33 percent) were Not Free, a decline from 2006. However, the study found that declines in individual countries and territories were often larger than in years past.

Key regional findings include:
- Central and Eastern Europe/ Former Soviet Union: This region showed the largest region-wide setback, with Russia, Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan, and several Central European countries, among others, showing declines. Only 18 percent of the region’s citizens live in environments with Free media.
- Middle East and North Africa: More unrestricted access to new media such as satellite television and the internet boosted press freedom regionally. Egyptian journalists showed an increased willingness to cross press freedom 'red lines,' moving the country into the Partly Free category.
- Asia-Pacific: Restrictions on media coverage were imposed in Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, and Vietnam’s government cracked down on dissident writers.
- Americas: Guyana's status shifted from Free to Partly Free, while Mexico's score deteriorated by a further three points because of increased violence against journalists and impunity surrounding attacks on media.
- Sub-Saharan Africa: The region accounted for three of the year's five status changes: Benin declined from Free to Partly Free, while the Central African Republic and Niger moved into the Not Free category. Political conflict and misuse of libel laws were key factors behind a number of country declines.
- Western Europe: The region continued to have the highest level of press freedom worldwide, despite declines in Portugal, Malta and Turkey, the only country in the region ranked Partly Free.
The survey assesses the degree of print, broadcast, and internet freedom in every country in the world. The 2008 ratings are based on an assessment of the legal, political and economic environments in which journalists worked in 2007.

The key trends that led to numerical movements in the study include:
- Unrest and Upheaval: Media played a key role in covering coups, states of emergency and contested elections in countries such as Pakistan, Bangladesh and Georgia, and as a result, journalists became prime targets during government crackdowns.
- Violence and Impunity: Violence against journalists and, in many cases, corresponding impunity regarding past cases of abuse was a key factor in determining press freedom in countries as diverse as Mexico, Russia and the Philippines.
- Punitive laws: Media freedom remains seriously constrained by the presence and use of numerous laws that are used to punish critical journalists and outlets.The abuse of libel laws increased in a number of countries, most notably in Africa.
- New media: Satellite television and internet-based news and networking sources are an emerging force for openness in restricted media environments as well as a key target for government control.

The world's worst-rated countries continue to include Burma, Cuba, Libya, North Korea, and Turkmenistan. In 2007, Eritrea joined the ranks of these exceedingly bad performers, while a crackdown in Burma worsened that country’s already repressive media environment, leaving its score second only to that of North Korea worldwide.

Blog Posting Number: 1088

Tags: Freedom of press

BPN 1061 Of sopranos and music companies

It looks like the online music business is changing. A soprano from Google, Douglas Merrill, has joined EMI to work on the download challenge. Sony BMG has announced its own download service. And the great labels team up with social networks like Myspace.

So far the music industry has gone through cycles of illegal music downloads and music download services by third parties. The reaction of the music industry to illegal downloads has been one of persecuting. And they were most happy to offer their collections to third parties which created download services. It is typical behaviour by publishers, be it music or print publishers: they first cry foul on copyright breakers and after that phase the offer licenses to third party download services. It is unbelievable that the music companies do not see it as their own task to set up own services; this while they see their revenues going down. Last year they lost nine per cent of their revenue stream due to illegal copying, but they picked up income from third party download services.

Now the third development after illegal downloading and third party download services is coming on stream with investment in their own download services. You wonder why the companies did not think about their own download services earlier. It is of course quite an investment and technical challenge. But the music companies use to have enough money and technical knowledge you can buy.

So what will be the difference with third party download services? There will be disadvantages and advantages: the offer will be limited to company owned music and songs, but the prices might go down or even be settled by a monthly subscription. Another benefit might be that the music companies finally will offer their backlist of music and songs; presently the big companies offer only five per cent of the music they have under contract. Of course the user will have to subscribe to more than one company service in order to get the range of music and songs, they want. So the music companies will have to find how they can work together in a meta service, offering the full assortment of their backlists.

But it is not only their portfolio and technology. They will have to market themselves to the audience at large. This they have never done before, as they only were dealing with wholesale and retail. Now the music companies will have to address the consumer and that is a different beast. Besides they have to change their image of hunters for breakers of copyright to an innovative and reliable company.

I think that EMI and Sony BMG are finally responding to the challenges and I love to see their download services as far as assortment, price and customer service. Of course you can hire Google sopranos, but you will have to see whether they can sing with the company’s orchestra.

Blog Posting Number 1061

Tags: music industry, download service, backlist

BPN 1023 Search engines in the Netherlands

How do search engines fare in the Netherlands? Of course some of the Dutch use Google, Live Search Yahoo, and/or Altavista. And others search in engines from Dutch origin. The result bears hardly any surprises as Google is way ahead of foreign and Dutch search engines. In fact nine out of ten Dutch people google, when searching.

Checkit and the marketing survey bureau RMI Interactive monitor the use among 1475 internet users by web survey twice a year. The method is simple. User get a list of search engines and are asked whether they know the name of the search engine, have used occasionally or use it mostly.
Below are the stats of the five most popular search engines in The Netherlands. Between brackets is an indication of the rise and fall over against the results of the survey presented in September 2007. Google, Live Search and Yahoo are foreign search engines with a Dutch language interface and Dutch priority search. Ilse is the oldest Dutch search engine, owned by the Finnish publishing company Sanoma. Vinden.nl is a meta search engine, combining the results of more search engines.

Familiar with name
Google 99% (+1)
ilse 83% (-3)
Live Search 63% (+15)
Yahoo! 71% (=0)
Vinden.nl 49% (+14)

Used occasionally
Google 95% (=0)
ilse 9% (=0)
Live Search 7% (-1)
Yahoo! 4% (=0)
Vinden.nl 7% (+5)

Used mostly
Google 93% (-2)
ilse 1% (-1)
Live Search 0% (-1)
Yahoo! 0% (=0)
Vinden.nl 2% (+2)

From these stats and this graph it is clear that Google is well known and well used. Remarkable is the fact that MSN Live Search picks up 15 per cent, when it comes to name familiarity, hardly used. Vinden.nl picks up name familiarity and converts this in more search actions. The eldest search engine in the Netherlands ilse is slipping further into oblivion.


Blog Posting Number: 1023

Tags: meta search engine, search engine

BPN 999 Google still rules the search market, but for how long?

The company Indenty has published a Dutch language report of 52 pages on search engine marketing under the title Google still determines, but for how long... The authors, Michel Bieze and Peter Schinkel, looked at the competition between search engines, the development in searching, search engine marketing campaigns and the search engine marketing bureaus.


In summary the following conclusions are produced:
- Competitors will be able to damage the imago of Google, now that Google has left the ‘do not evil’ principle behind and has replaced this with commercial monopoly. In the market opportunities are created for an Open Source Search engine, when this initiative is supported by the Open Source Community.
- Mobile internet will be mainly used for local search questions and the fulfilment of an immediate information need.
- Due to the Google algorithm updates, the link structure itself will be less influential. More stress will be on the relevance of web pages in the link structure and the uniqueness of the content in the web page.
- Social bookmarking and personalised search will be the trends for the next five years.
- SEA campaigns need well converting landing pages, the use of images and user interaction.
- For SEO campaigns the relevance of the web pages in link structures and the uniqueness of content will be more important. The top 500 advertisers will choose for a holistic approach with optimised web sites.
- For the search engine marketing bureaus client loyalty will be a challenge due to the rising level of knowledge among advertisers.

The report comes at an interesting time. The proposed merger of Microsoft and Yahoo will become a challenge to Google; of course the question still is whether Yahoo wants to merge with Microsoft (a pioneer of internet with the slowest internet software provider).

The report sees opportunities for an Open Source Search Engine. The founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, has started such an initiative under the name of Wiki Search. But the first trial was not impressive. Besides the search engine follows the same search principles as Google.

The report has a holy belief in Google’s algorithm, which is based on simplified Boolean operators and masses of results. I do not notice any research in other algorithms, which will deliver more precise results and less duplications. I take it also that internet users are becoming more and more versatile with searching and will be able to use the AND, OR and NOT as long as Boolean operators are in use.

Blog Posting Number: 999

search engine, search engine marketing
Tags: search engine, search engine marketingIdentity, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo

Wikia not moving Fast

There is some movement in the field of search engines. Jimmy Wales has launched the first prototype of Wiki Search, while Bill Gates is attempting to leave Microsoft with the legacy of a decent search engine by bidding for the Norwegian search engine Fast Search & Transfer.

Wikia or Wiki Search is part of a commercial project, contrary to Wikipedia, and is now in its alpha version and it will take another two years to mature. Wikia is open source and will have to develop with the input of users. Presently mainly English language websites are indexed; the alpha version has some 50 to 100 million web pages of the 18 billion indexed pages by Google or the unofficial estimate of 30 billion pages. Search results will come with mini articles with a small explanation or photograph. Users can write mini articles regarding the subject like in the Wikipedia. User can also rank articles thus providing better results. The site starts out for searches, but in the future images should be searchable as well as news. To protect Wikia from spamming the same methods are being used as with Wikipedia.

I have had a look at the search system and can imagine that it will take at least another two years. Of course with help of the open source community and open content community it should be possible to reach a competitive stage with Google earlier. But this help might be sparse as Wikia is a commercial operation.

The results of the search were very disappointing. I did 3 searches. One calibration was searching for my name, one search action for the blog and one search on cross-media. The search for my name Jak Boumans delivered 11 results, of which 6 were displayed and the series of 7 to 11 was not accessible. The first 6 results were not impressive: 3 results were duplications, 2 were not really important references and one result was okay. For the first 6 results the search engine had picked up references fitting the multiple word criterion; what I did not get to see is whether the other results dealt with Jak and Boumans separately. Searching for this blog’s name, I had 2 hits, both referring to secondary sources and not to the blog itself. Last but not least I searched for cross-media. I did this in order to see how it would handle cross-media, with or without a hyphen and perhaps even a word morph like x-media, with or without a hyphen. The list of its results was overwhelming 1490 hits, again only 10 hits were displayed; there was a reference for the hits from 11 to 20, but again this did not work. Of course, asking for such a fashionable media term is like asking for the word God in the Bible or Allah in the Koran. Clear is that the search engine looked for cross-media and cross media, but not for crossmedia and the search engine did not sidestep to the term xmedia.

On the search engine front there was some encouraging news: Microsoft had made a bid for 837 million euro (1152 million dollar) for Fast Search & Transfer. I have written about this search engine before. I consider it as one of the best one in Europe and a better search engine than Google. So far it has been oriented to the business market. It has dived into the mobile search market and in the advertising sector. When Microsoft has bought this company by the second quarter (it is a friendly acquisition), it most likely will start out to exploit it in the business sector as Fast Search is active there already. I would not be surprised, when Microsoft would start to build up a competitor of Google in the background.

Blog Posting Number: 972

Tags: search engine

Belgian court to ISPs: prevent sharing illegal content

An ISP is fully responsible for illegal file-sharing activities on their networks. That is the ruling of a Brussels based court last week. The case had been brought by SABAM, the Belgian society of authors, composers and publishers, against the local ISP Scarlet. The case was presented to the court in 2004, originally against the ISP Tiscali and its 60.000 subscribers, which was acquired by Scarlet in November 2004.

The judge had already decided that the subscribers of the ISP infringed on copyright with p2p network software like Bittorrent and eDonkey. He recognised that p2p technology can be used for transferring legal and illegal content. He made the ISP responsible for the transfer and demanded a technical solution. An expert was asked to study the technical feasibility. In January this year the expert reported to the court and offered a report with eleven technical solutions, of which 7 were applicable to the network of Scarlet. But 6 solutions would block all content, legal and illegal, and would be unworkable as downloading open-source software through p2p networks would become impossible.

The preferred choice of SABAM looks to be a solution of Audible Magic (see diagram). This system checks content by filtering the content and looking for digital fingerprints of copyright protected music and movie files. The software does not filter out all the illegal content yet, but it already blocks 70 percent of illegal content. The ISP has six month in order to decide and install a solution. If after the 6 months Scarlet has not complied with the ruling, then SABAM can demand a penalty of 2500 euro per day.

This ruling can be a landmark ruling not only for Belgium, but also for the European Union. SABAM will be able to persecute any ISP in Belgium waving the verdict of the Brussels court. But the European societies could put a case to the European court.

It looks like Belgium is the country where legal internet history will be written for the second time. Having handed down the ruling on p2p network sharing software, another Belgian court will be faced with an appeal by Google in the case of the French and German language newspapers.

Last September a Belgian court ruled that Google infringed on the copyright of the Belgian French and German language newspapers by copying their articles for the Google News service. Google was ordered to stop copying the newspaper articles on a penalty of 1 million euro a day. Last February Google lost again a case against the organisation Copiepresse, in which the newspaper publishers are united. Despite the fact that Google is negotiating an agreement, Google is appealing the ruling. The appeal will take place on July 17, 2007. This appeal will be the last stage in the copyright fight and will yield a principal ruling for the newspaper publishers as well for Google. If this appeal ruling is favourable for the newspaper, Google will have to act fast, if it does not want to be in court in the European continental countries.

Blog Posting Number: 808

Tags: copyright, newspapers, p2pp2p, copyright, newspapers