Archives

Google's quest to cut costs and find new ad-revenue sources continues apace, as the company has announced it's killing Google Shared Stuff, a del.icio.us clone that enabled users to create profiles and bookmark nifty Web videos and Knol articles there, as a gestalt approximation of your quirky sense of what's interesting in the world.

As the Internet undermines traditional media business models, no one has taken a bigger hit than the San Francisco Chronicle, the city's major daily. Yesterday, the Chron's parent company, Hearst Newspapers, announced that unless they secure major concessions from its unions (read: layoffs and salary cuts), it will have to close the paper altogether.

Google Earth's new ocean topography maps are so thorough and fascinating that new discoveries are being, um, unearthed every day. Why, just last week, a British aeronautical engineer was poking around the new ocean-mapping program when he discovered an odd grid pattern on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean. The grid was spotted some 600 miles off the Canary Islands and, according to CNet, appeared to be as big as Wales.

Ever since T-Mobile rolled out Google's first Android-based smart phone, tech geeks everywhere have been waiting for the next electronics company to jump on board. After all, you can't challenge the iPhone and the BlackBerry with just one carrier and phone manufacturer. Last December, the mobile-phone world buzzed with rumors that Samsung was planning to introduce a new Android phone at the Barcelona Mobile World Conference trade show next week, giving Google another iron in the fire.

Looks like Google CEO Eric Schmidt just can't stay out of politics these days. Schmidt endorsed Barack Obama for president last year and campaigned for him in the closing days of the election; his close ties to Obama led to speculation that the new president would appoint Schmidt chief technology officer in his Cabinet, but Schmidt curtly dismissed the scuttlebutt.

Got a smartphone? Got a hankerin' for a book published before 1923? Do you have to read it, like, right fucking now? Say no more. Yesterday, Google announced that all 1.5 million books in the public domain it has scanned are now available via iPhones and T-Mobile Android devices. With just a few clicks, the Google Book Search Team has declared, you no longer have to play Pac Man while waiting in line at the post office.

Perhaps you may recall Cash4Gold, the online pawn shop that wants to buy your jewelry and help you survive the new recession? The company raised not a few eyebrows when it ran a commercial during the Super Bowl, breaking the pattern of cars and dot-coms and signaling that a new era of austerity was upon us:

Here's the blogosphere's reaction, D-Day plus one, on Google Earth's new ocean feature:

ZDNet: "I just had to turn off my Santa Tracker since it kept pulling me from Bermuda ship wrecks to the North Pole."

That's the question on the mind of Robert Darnton, who runs Harvard University's library system. For years, the Google Book Search project has digitized millions of books from libraries around the world, running into copyright law and a class action lawsuit from the Association of American Publishers in the process. When Google reached a tentative settlement of the suit in October, Darnton got nervous and refused to abide by the settlement; at least, not until he studied it a little more.