Rupert Murdoch to Internet: “Get Off My Lawn”
Show of hands: Who doesn't understand Google?
To get everyone up to speed, Rupert Murdoch is the News Corporation CEO and owner of such fine news media outlets as Fox News, the Sun, and the Times. (By the way, the Internet needs a universally agreed upon “sarcasm” formatting.)
In recent weeks, Murdoch has begun to lay out plans to remove much of his News Corp content from the eyes of popular search engines. Claiming that sites like Google “steal” his material, Murdoch plans to implement a giant “paywall” around his news empire, forcing users to pay a subscription fee in order to view his content.
After announcing this, every tech blog and social media site went berserk with laughter, with Twitter founder Biz Stone predicting Murdoch’s plan to “fail fast”.
I, for one, cannot wait to see this grumpy old man fight the Internet. To me, Rupert Murdoch is the 12:00-flashing VCR of the 21st century.
The Internet’s Complaint Box
In Soviet Russia, Google deletes you!
I have been doing God’s work.
I’ve have graciously spent one of my lunch breaks patrolling and helping peeps on the Google Web Search forums. In this short time, I now fully comprehend the staggeringly low technological competence of the average Internet user.
The Google Web Search forum is a catch-all. Clicking “Search Help” at the bottom of any Google results page will take you to its door, inviting any and all forms of complaint and suggestion.
Scanning its contents, you will quickly see that Google unfairly gets blamed not only for all common software and hardware problems, but it is considered to be the omnipotent Internet moderator, deleting and adding sites from the web at their own will.
To the not-so-well-versed Internet user, this forum is a last ditch effort for support. To put it simply, this is where your grandparents seek out computer help when you don’t answer your phone.
An overwhelming majority of forum topics can be categorized into two trends: “I am being scammed” and “How come my blog isn’t appearing on Google?” But in-between, there is a mind-numbing number of questions that must be seen to be believed.
6 Future Projects in Google’s Arsenal
It was the year 2000, the early days of the Internets, and Google had easily rose above AskJeeves and AltaVista to become the adolescent nerd’s tool of choice for finding time-wasting Flash games and crappy Flash videos. As the adults took notice, Google’s publicly traded stock rose along with its popularity. And the web was happy for a brief moment. We were years away from inane youTube comments and inbox flooding lolcats. And then in 2002, Google got fancy. First came Google Labs, then Froogle. Then it was blogging, social networking, text messaging, mapping, and image searching. Suddenly Google became scary — like a tinted white van full of puppies and candy.
Tell Your Friends
