[LINK] Google

[Richard Chirgwin]

stephen at melbpc.org.au wrote:
> Richard writes,
> 
>> So from my *quick* reading (correction welcome) Wave rests on the
>> premise that we can all trust Google not to be evil. I don't. Others
>> may feel differently. RC
> 
> 
> No i don't much trust Google either, but i wonder how much one can avoid
> any google data-get, when one is using trusted localish companies, which
> are paying tax and providing a great service, in part courtesy of Google
> 
> Thanks Roger and Richard, for asking/investigating sensible & reasonable
> questions re Google. Another factor may be how much one can avoid Google?

Oh, I don't think "avoid Google" was particularly on my mind. I was just
thinking "what do I see in the Google Wave T&Cs?", and found that I didn't see
enough.

I do, however, somewhat dislike the Google-coloured-glasses that seem to be
issued to much of the media anytime there's a new Google story happening.

RC

> 
> 
> Om Malik | Sunday, May 31, 2009 | 6:51 PM PT | 
> http://gigaom.com/2009/05/31/iphone-web-offer-lonely-planet-a-new-life
> 
> It is fashionable for media companies to paint themselves as victims of 
> an increasingly Google-dominated planet.. Instead they should be looking 
> at various opportunities offered by technology to find a brighter future.
> 
> To learn a trick or two, they should look at Lonely Planet, an Australian 
> publisher of travel books. 
> 
> It is one of the few traditional publishers that has turned new 
> technologies such as social networks, online video, location-based 
> services and smartphones into engines of growth. 
> 
> Started in 1972 by Englishman Tony Wheeler and his wife Maureen, the 
> Melbourne-based travel guide company for most of its life made money by 
> selling specialist books and guides to travelers around the world. 
> 
> In 2007, the Wheelers sold 75 percent of the company to BBC Worldwide for 
> an undisclosed amount of money. The deal was rumored to be over $150 
> million.
> 
> New Wine, New Bottle.
> 
> “We want to (offer) not just books, but we wanted to provide travel tools 
> and become a travel platform,” said Matt Goldberg, who took over as the 
> chief executive of Lonely Planet. He was previously the senior vice 
> president, Digital Strategy & Operations, at Wall Street Journal Digital. 
> 
> Goldberg contends that in order to succeed in the new digital and mobile 
> world, one can’t approach these new opportunities as a publisher. “We 
> have to think and behave like a digital media company,” he added, and not 
> like a traditional publisher.
> 
> For instance, instead of simply repurposing its travel guides for the 
> iPhone, the company took all the content, made it searchable, and 
> enhanced it by embedding maps. 
> 
> It also made all the information geo-aware so as to capitalize on the GPS 
> capabilities of the iPhone, Google phones, and soon the Palm Pre. 
> 
> In less than a month, Goldberg said, Lonely Planet has seen “hundreds of 
> thousands” of downloads of its 20 city guides and several other products. 
> The company is working with Palm and Nokia to develop special offerings 
> for those devices.
> 
> The company tries to tailor its offerings so that they capitalize on a 
> platform’s special hardware capabilities. 
> 
> “On Android-based devices, we can leverage the built-in compass to help 
> you find things pretty quickly and help you get somewhere fast,” said 
> Matthew Cashmore, who has a very dot-com title of Innovation Ecosystem 
> Manager at Lonely Planet.”The information just pops up on your screen.”
> 
> In addition to its mobile efforts, Lonely Planet has built a blogging 
> platform that allows folks to blog about their travels. The bloggers get 
> to keep the advertising revenues, along with traffic that is funneled 
> from the Lonely Planet web site.
> 
> “We get interesting, deeper and rich content on our sites from our 
> community,” says Goldberg, “making the Lonely Planet web site more useful 
> for visitors.” In other words, the company is sharing its traffic with 
> its community.
> 
> In addition, it has launched Groups, which uses Google-backed Open Social 
> to help travelers create micro social networks, depending on destinations 
> and topics. 
> 
> The company has also helped foster a traveler community called Thorn 
> Tree, which attracts nearly half a million visitors every month. And it 
> has developed a trip traveler tool.
> 
> What next? I wouldn’t be surprised by an emphasis on transactions. 
> 
> Along with Web, Mobile and Books, Lonely Planet has launched a magazine 
> and is producing television shows along with its parent, BBC.
> 
> The way I look at it — these guys are doing a good job of embracing 
> change, and evolving with that change. I wish more publishers would think 
> along these lines.
> 
> http://gigaom.com/2009/05/31/iphone-web-offer-lonely-planet-a-new-life/
> --
> 
>> (Side-note: Google makes billions in .au, pays nearly no tax; and yet
>> someone thought it was appropriate for the G-G to open its new
>> Australian office. Not a good look for QB in my opinion...)
>>  
>> Roger Clarke wrote:
>>> At 13:32 +0000 29/5/09, stephen at melbpc.org.au wrote:
>>>> Went Walkabout. Brought back Google Wave.
>>>> 5/28/2009, 09:15:00, http://googleblog.blogspot.com
>>>> <http://wave.google.com/>
>>> Okay, I've been asking for years for an update to the venerable email 
>>> standards, with simple text plus *alternative* richer media, and 
>>> chat/IM, and conferencing, all with an integrated database, archive 
>>> and search.
>>>
>>> And of course standards-based, so that multiple vendors can compete 
>>> over the top of common protocols and infrastructure.
>>>
>>> So I'm desperately disappointed that, after all this time, it's 
>>> Google that's doing it, with no apparent IETF involvement.
>>>
>>> Google already has massive archives of communications, not just of 
>>> its users, but also of everyone its users correspond with.  We badly 
>>> need ways to avoid all of that data being gifted into a corporate 
>>> store, available for exploitation however Mountain View sees fit.
>>>
>>> My first suspicion is that Wave will be designed to ensure that the 
>>> maximum amount of traffic is captured into Google's archives.
>>>
>>> My second *was* that the mechanism would be proprietary and closed.
>>>
>>> On the other hand, this suggests proprietary and *open*:
>>> http://www.waveprotocol.org/
>>> http://www.waveprotocol.org/draft-protocol-spec
>>>
>>> [Adobe is an example of a provider that once had a decent reputation 
>>> for proprietary-but-open.  But they seem to have rather mucked up 
>>> that reputation lately, with more tricks (or just bugs?) that get in 
>>> the way of effective third-party implementations.  And even MS has 
>>> yet to destroy RTF as a proprietary but *reasonably* open standard 
>>> format.]
>>>
>>> Has anyone reviewed the Wave Protocol yet, to evaluate:
>>> -   the extent to which it's genuinely open versus pseudo-open?
>>> -   the extent to which it generates momentum towards capture of
>>>      all or most of our communications traffic into Google's store?
>>>
>>>
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