Doc Searls points to some rather overblown rhetoric surrounding the idea of hyperwords (and the associated FireFox extension). This is essentially the age-old idea of generic links (you can read a nice little paper from 1996 on generic links).

So, the idea’s not particularly new, and the "tyranny of the link" is a particularly odorous piece of rhetoric that implies a kind of hierarchical power that doesn’t actually exist. That doesn’t mean the idea is bad. The plugin is actually interesting. It’s essentially a way to provide a browser-based context menu for selected text. Of course anyone who uses many extensions and third-party accessories with their browser has already had a number of these same features available to them: highlight and search, highlight and email, highlight and "shop" by searching commerce sites, etc.

The issue with generic links is that the information they link to is, by and large, useless to the reader. The strength of "normal" links is that they carry meaning and intention. That’s why authors pot them there and why we want them. Hyperwords are intended to supplement directed links, but in terms of value they are small coin indeed. The vast majority of words and terms are intrinsically ambigous– connotation is the reservoir of power from which language draws. Generic links don’t understand ambiguity.

The bottom line– if you want a centralized and handy little browser widget that unifies a number of other plugin functions (and adds a few more searches and links of its own), then HyperWords is of interest. But the real intellectual work– taking the idea of the generic link and doing something more with the anchored text than linking to common searches and web utilities– hasn’t been done. I don’t have any bright ideas other than thinking that the real power of the generic link/hyperword would be revealed by tying it to my existing social network connections and employing strong heuristics to help make the results more relevant. For instance, of performance weren’t an issue, pulling up the latest 20 Technorati and MyWeb results for a term and displaying them immediately as entries in the context menu. Or making use of my vast pool of resources that have merited my attention: del.icio.us links, flickr pictures and contacts, my blogroll, etc. The idea of hyperwords tied to the promise of social network and attention-based search technologies and agents is something worth thinking about.

In a blog comment, the author says:

The title of the piece was inteneded [sic] to provoke debate on what we can do in addition to the link. Of course the link is great! Now, what else is there?

Hyperwords would be a lot more interesting if he were making more of an attempt at answering that question himself.

[ruminate, hyperwords, hypertext, linking, search, firefox, extensions]

The reactions to Google setting up shop in China are funny to watch. I wrote about Google China a while back, so won’t repeat too much. But the Google boycotts are great theater. The contortions people will go through to pat themselves on the back as caring global citizens…

I don’t get it. Google not offering any services in China, good. Google offering services following Chinese law, bad. Chinese users with search facilities that give no indication of censoring (i.e. pre-Google), good. Getting the same results with a notice that search results have been censored, bad.

Or is it that Google makes money off the venture and they themselve shouldn’t do business in China? To what end? Does anyone really believe that will be a stick to change the nature of China’s censorship policies? And the same people would still be complaining even if Google had no monetary stream at all.

In my opinion, it is much more effective to provide the legal search to Chinese citizens and <em>let them know when results are being held back</em> than to toss rose petals into the canyon and wait for the echo, which is about how effective simply ignoring the problem is… and that’s all Google was doing before. It’s not as if they were some great rights advocate gone bad. Why did these caring folks love Google when Google didn’t care one way or another?

[ruminate, google, china, free speech]

Quite an uproar over Google’s agreement to censor results in their Chinese search portal (I’d link to it, but I can’t find any official Google press release or statement, just thousands of duplicate AP stories– does anyone know where the source is?). Where were the dissenting voices when Yahoo and Microsoft agreed to the same conditions? I’ll say the same thing about this as I did the (irrational) praise Google was receiving for refusing to turn over search records to the Department of Justice: it’s all about the money.

In the DoJ instance, Google sees a nice way to look good at no cost to themselves. Ultimately, I think they’ll turn the information over, sensibly stripped of potentially personally identifying data.

The Chinese decision is even simpler: Baidu is threatening Google in a huge market that is going to grow astronomically over the next few years. Relying on the “Great Chinese Firewall” results in Google services becoming essentially unavailable to most Chinese users– and a loss of all that revenue.

I admire Google and I think they are generally going in the right direction most of the time… but this particular instance is all business. They have no leverage here (denying the request and having no portal will do nothing in the effort to democratize China), so it’s hard to get worked up about the morality. I’d like the think that the folks at Google suspect– as I do– that this will ultimately work in the favor of democracy anyway, because there’s nothing more threatening to a communist regime than its populace becoming aware of what it doesn’t and cannot have. I don’t think the real issue here is about finding prohibited contents, but about the fear the Chinese government must have that their populace will really start talking to each other– and a on a large scale. If there’s something to be worked up about here, it’s about the fact that the Blogger service isn’t available in the Google China portal… that would be something.

But the results are interesting. Compare the US search for Tiananmen Square with the same Chinese search. However, before you gloat, search for Xenu in the US Google — see that note at the bottom? Now search in Google China. Interesting, no? And I don’t mean that the DMCA exclusion in the US search is only partially working, but that it doesn’t exist in the Chinese search.

[ruminate, google, china, free speech]

I already use a number of the titles in the free Google Pack of software: Google Toolbar, Google Talk, Trillian, Firefox, Google Earth… but it amazes me that all the people criticizing the software included seem to be missing the obvious point of Google Pack. It’s not really intended as a delivery of software, but as a software delivery method. The Google Updater is the real point– getting insinuated into your desktop in a serious way.

[ruminate, google, googlepack]

Google Base was much more interesting to me as a concept than it is an idea in practice. With very limited facility for tagging and access through tags and a 31 day maximum lifespan for information stored in the base, it is clearly much more a tool for marketing than what I had hoped it would be: a highly-reliable, free, tagging, searchable, free-form database tool. At this point, for my purposes, it’s just a manual search booster. Whoopee.

[ruminate googlebase google base]

Leggo My Ego - GooglePrint and the other culture war. By Tim Wu

I believe that everyone who considers themselves an author or an author’s advocate should take a deep breath and, at least this time, praise Google Print. In the end, it is just a search, not a replacement product. We readers need help finding what exists, and we authors also need help being found. There is here, as anywhere, such a thing as too much control. It may be time for the offline media to learn something from online mediaââ�¬â�?namely, the virtues of letting go.

[ruminate google google+print ip copyright]

In the Washington Post Nick Taylor writes:

We’d all like to have more exposure, obviously. But is that the only form of compensation Google can come up with when it makes huge profits on the ads it sells along the channels its users are compelled to navigate?

This makes no sense. Does Nick mean to say that no one can make a profit from the work but himself, even if it is providing a service neither he nor his publishers can or will provide? Imagine that I decide to sell Chris Notes book summaries, or I offer a service to help people polish their term-papers, or I get paid to teach people to read, or any of a million services that use books. All of these entail compensation being made on a service that depends upon the source materials. Nick doesn’t seem to care about that!

What does Nick care about? Well it’s obvious isn’t it? He’s jealous about a facet of the new economy that, as a writer, he isn’t part of: the “huge” profits made by selling google ads. I don’t see him complaining about his publisher’s predatory practices… after all, big print publishing is notorious for its inequity just as record labels don’t do a lot for most of their artists. Nick’s complaint is a non-starter borne of an old conception of the way the world of information and access works.

For authors, exposure is a major form of compensation– without it, there is no selling of books! They can’t get the full text on Google; they buy the book. The worst case scenario: no one feels compelled to buy the book after reading the search result snippets (which is likely assuming Nick’s books are as ill-reasoned as his Washington Post article). Nothing is lost. Most likely case: more copies are sold, putting money in the pockets of the publisher and the author at no cost to them. I can see why Nick is upset.

I certainly expect better from a newspaper like the Washington Post. Don’t they hold themselve above bloggers because of their “quality control?” Apparently those people were on a break when this fluff slipped through.

[ruminate google googleprint copyright intellectual+property]

The Google Print project would be a boon for readers, researchers, authors, and publishers. By making the full-text of books searchable just as websites are searchable, a whole new era of information innovation will dawn that has never previously been possible.

The key to understanding why Google’s Print initiative sn’t the evil enterprise a few publishers would like you to think it is lies in the provisions for different kinds of material:

1. If a book is in the public domain, then your search results will include the full page from the book as context and you can page through and read the book online (as well as purchase copies, if available). Presumably there will be download links of the book is freely available on the web already.
2. If a book is submitted by a publisher, the search results will include the full page and a few pages on either side. You can look at excerpts, the table of contents, indices, and other information provided by the publisher as well as purchase the book. But you cannot read the whole book or access the full text.
3. If a book is a library book still under copyright you can view snippets of the page showing the search results and a few sentences of context. You cannot view surrounding pages or access the full text.

The first argument, then– that Google Print is enabling illegal use is clearly false. The items in bold above make clear why providing access to the content in this way doesn’t contradict fair use. Being able to find books with information that is sought can only benefit users, and if the material is protected by copyright, then purchasign and access will increase which will benefit publishers, authors, and libraries alike.

The second argument is a kind of “if a tree falls in the forest” argument. Because Google has to make a copy of the entire book in question, and because copying an entire book is a copyright violation, then the publishers maintain that Google’s actions are de-facto illegal. But the rule against copying materials is based on the idea that doing so causes harm. If a copy is made but no one can access it except in fairly accessible chunks, then where is the harm? If a copy is made and no one can read it, is there really a copy at all?

This goes back to the original objections to Google’s Cacheing system (which is also an opt-out system, incidentally), when some protested at the illegal copies. This was not supported in court. More importantly, it can be likened to a lawsuit against one of the first image search engines which made thumbnail copies of images and provided them to the public (linked to the original, of course). This judgement was also in favor of the information provider because:

the use of Kelly�s images was not highly exploitative, the commercial nature of the use weighs only slightly against a finding of fair use.

and they said:

This case involves more than merely a transmission of Kelly�s images in a different medium. Arriba�s use of the images serves a different function than Kelly�s use � improving access to information on the internet versus artistic expression.

Finally, they closed by saying this:

use of Kelly�s images promotes the goals of the
Copyright Act and the fair use exception because the thumbnails do not supplant the need for the originals [and they] benefit the public by enhancing information gathering techniques on the internet.

Of course the real reason for the objections is the worry that once Google has all of these full texts they might suddenly change their mind and make them available (in other words, they might want to monetize a resource that the publishers themselves have not yet taken advantage of). I don’t see a real basis for this suspicion. To do so would clearly be illegal, and such a practice couldn’t last very long. It also isn’t morally responsible to prevent a legal practice because of a small potential for illegal abuse later. That’s the kind of draconian thinking that leads to legal codes where you can’t create your own copies of your own legally purchased material because you might someday decide to illegally share them.

Other intenet commentators are complaining about Google Print as part of a backlash againts Google’s success. Now that they are no longer the independent upstart, the cool tech clique naturally begins to turn against them. Everyone loves the scrappy underdog until they win. Unfortunately for those commentators (such as Dave Winer), none of their other predictions about Google’s evil ways have proven true. Remember Dave’s diatribes about the Google Toolbar’s abilities and how it would cause internet chaos? It not only hasn’t happened, but far more comprehensive manipulation tools like GreaseMonkey haven’t caused the sky to fall in either…

People shouldn’t conflate this argument with other copyright fights. I am all for the Creative Commons and radical reformation of our copyright practices, including reverting to The Founder’s Copyright and the use it or lose it model… but that has nothing to do with Google Print. Google Print’s success would be a huge success for all of us.

[ruminate google googleprint ip copyright intellectual+property]

The latest brain-child of Chris Pirillo, http://gada.be is– as far as I can tell– essentially a combination of tagging and meta-search. Like Technorati, the service is accessible through user-created tags. But instead of being taken to an aggregation of others using those tags, you are taken to a collection of search results using that term from a vetted collection of search engines.

I’m not sure how useful this is. I find more interest in the intersection of those things which have been purposefully tagged with a term rather than the same term happening to occurr in the text of an article or blog post which may have nothing really to do with the topic.

Really, I guess I want both. Ideally clicking on one of the tags below a post like this one would take you to an automatic meta-page which would show you other related posts in this blog, and all the information resources aggregated by Technorati and gada.be. In fact, that’s such a workable idea I think I’ll add it to my “someday” list.

[ruminate gada.be technorati opml search tagging folksonomy]

Google now has feeds for News and News Searches in both Atom and RSS formats (that’s a bit surprising). Will regular searches be far behind?

[Ruminate google rss search]