I’m no big fan of Rupert Murdoch, but I think he’s right about Google and newspapers. Something has to be done about the fact that search engines get a completely free ride sourcing millions of articles on the Web…and then taking most of the advertising revenue.

Murdoch called Google’s actions “theft” at a Washington forum on the future of newspapers. That’s true, although it’s akin to leaving your trunk open and then bitching when your laptop is taken.

The question is how to fix the problem.

Murdoch’s own Wall Street Journal may have part of the solution, although it predated Murdoch’s acquisition of the newspaper.  The Journal is the only mass market newspaper I know of that gets away with charging for its product on the Web. If you want to read the full text of the newspaper online, you need to either have a subscription or pay $50 a year.

You can get away with that if you have a product so valuable people are willing to pay for it. But not if your competitors are willing to provide the same news when you start charging for it.

So one piece of the solution will undoubtedly be a consortium of publications willing to band together to charge — say, accessing all the articles from the L.A. Times, New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle for a set monthly fee.  That, and pressuring Google to give up a small piece of the billions of dollars it makes off newspapers’ backs.

Posted under Michael's Blog

The new search engine brings more to the Web content table than a good personality

After an extended, invitation-only beta period, the search engine that indexes people, Spock.com goes public with this today. Performance was sluggish when tested this morning, but it is a novel search engine well worth exploring once it settles down. I tested it extensively months ago and found its un-Google-like approach refreshing. Spock doesn’t crawl sites for word hits so much as extract data from sites pertaining to people. When you search on a category like “men on the moon,” the engine delivers a catalog of astronauts who have walked on the moon rather than pages containing that phrase. Each result is a detailed profile that has been assembled from data at multiple sources.

What Spock is doing is part of the so-called “Semantic Web.” In this model, the Web is not a series of text-based HTML pages that need searching but a set of data points that can be assembled in different ways. Spock pulls data from things like the Internet Movie Database, MySpace, blog pages, etc. to create a database of people that can be indexed and filtered by users, akin to the way we might manipulate any SQL database. Ultimately, I should be able to run a modified version of the search I mentioned above for just astronauts who walked on the moon between 1972 ad 1975. I can’t do that now, because the front-end natural language parser is not up to it, but most of the pieces are here.

What does this kind of flexibility give to content providers? Well, it may allow the search box on a given site to behave more like a human support person. It also allows users to start tagging information and people online more effectively. Spock is also a social-media search engine, in that it lets users tag entries and even manage their own profile in the database. Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Media (and Web 2.0 guru) sang Spock’s praises months ago. As a business tool alone he calls it “a great outboard memory connecting names, faces, topics and companies.”

Spock is still very much a beta, and it cannot handle the complex queries that eventually make this model more useful. There is also the issue of its own business model. Getting people away from the major engines and to a new vertical database has doomed many a company over the year. But it points us in the direction of a very different way of thinking about digital content – less as text and pages and more as data. As various sites offer one another APIs that let partners dig into their data and mash it up with others, we will see the real potential of the Semantic Web emerge as the technology prompts us to imagine content differently. 

Posted under Michael's Blog

Sprint’s announcement that it will partner with Google to create a mobile Internet portal for its upcoming WiMax service has to be bittersweet.

Google users will get to access all their favorite tools — including search, Gmail and calendar — on the network that Sprint claims will reach 100 million people by the end of 2008. It’s another step toward turning cellphones into mini-computers.

Great so far. Except that super-fast computer cellphones will also enable something Sprint wants far less: VOIP on a massive scale.

Consider that the vast majority of wireless carriers’ revenue still comes from voice services. WiMax and other broadband wireless services mean that the day is closer when consumers on unlimited data plans will choose cheap VOIP calls over expensive network calls.

Cheap landline phone calls are what forced the carriers to deploy IPTV as a new revenue stream. Now, carriers like Sprint are seeing the same thing happen for cellphones. The first all-you-can-eat wireless plans are already emerging.

Sprint’s hope to retain profits lie in offering cool data services like a WiMax powered Google portal. Problem is, such portals will also kill its profits, too.

It’s a little like marrying the thief who took all your money because they’re rich. Go figure.

See Also

• Sprint WiMax Release

Posted under Uncategorized

Most of you are probably too young to remember when Terry Semel and Robert Daly were co-presidents of Warner Bros., running the studio through perhaps the longest winning streak in Hollywood history.

Yes, running Yahoo! is a second vocation for Daly.  Unlike Google chiefs Sergei Brin and Lawrence Page, who cut their business teeth on search engine technology at Stanford.

Daly’s Hollywood contacts and savvy undoubtedly played a big role in Yahoo and Viacom’s joint announcement today that Yahoo would be the exclusive provider of search ads at MTV.com, Nickelodeon.com and other Viacom sites.

If you wonder how Yahoo! will survive Google’s onslaught, that’s it in a nutshell.  Yahoo is a media company.  Google is a fancy search engine.

The famously incestuous world of Hollywood doesn’t do well with outsiders — whether they’re named Google or Microsoft.  Look for a lot more Hollywood deals in Yahoo’s future.

See Also

• Yahoo Provides Search Ads for Viacom web sites
• Terry Semel Bio

Posted under Uncategorized