Google, the Department of Justice, and you

Google, the Department of Justice, and you

In it's bid to digitize the world, Google has moved forward again in it's application to digitize the worlds libraries. Lately however, things have taken a decidedly more serious turn with the Department of Justice weighing in with it's concerns. The DoJ became the latest party to file its concerns about Google’s book settlement and it appears the search giant will have to either make tweaks to the deal, or allow the feds—and maybe even Congress—to poke around. You should be betting on the tweaks.

While there were some good points made by the DoJ :

The United States strongly supports a vibrant marketplace for the electronic distribution of copyrighted works, including in-print, out-of-print, and so-called “orphan” works. The Proposed Settlement has the potential to breathe life into millions of works that are now effectively off limits to the public. By allowing users to search the text of millions of books at no cost, the Proposed Settlement would open the door to new research opportunities. Users with print disabilities would also benefit from the accessibility elements of the Proposed Settlement, and, if the Proposed Settlement were approved, full text access to tens of millions of books would be provided through institutional subscriptions.

They also made it very clear, that there are valid concerns about the settlement as it exists now.

..the breadth of the Proposed Settlement – especially the forward-looking business arrangements it seeks to create – raises significant legal concerns. As a threshold matter, the central difficulty that the Proposed Settlement seeks to overcome – the inaccessibility of many works due to the lack of clarity about copyright ownership and copyright status – is a matter of public, not merely private, concern. A global disposition of the rights to millions of copyrighted works is typically the kind of policy change implemented through legislation, not through a private judicial settlement.

In the end, Google is most likely going to make a few tweaks to it's compensation agreement and try to placate everyone as best as possible.

The future of Google is.. cloudy?

The future of Google is.. cloudy?

With it's seat firmly set on being the king of search, Google is constantly growing, and evolving. It's a living, breating, life sustaining organ of the web, and as such, any moment of service problems is almost immediately noticeable.

Gmail, Google news, Blogger, Youtube etc. the list of companies under Googles umbrella, and in their repetoire is quite large, and seeing as acquisitions are once again on the table, soon to be growing. With such a huge toolkit of technologies available to them, it should be understandable that the odd disruption of service were to happen; even though it is rare.

And now, with Google encouraging users to change their productivity apps from the desktop, to the "cloud", loss of service is beginning to become an issue. Not because it happens every day, or even if it happens once a month. The simple idea behind cloud computing being having "your computer" available to you anywhere is an incredible incentive. But, if when you go to use the cloud, you can't access it because of a glitch, programming error, someone trips on a plug etc, it is a problem.

It's like showing up to your current workplace, and your computer just not booting up. And the tech manager, is in the next city over, trying to communicate to you what's wrong over the phone, but because he's using sign language you can't tell what's going on, or when it's going to be fixed. All you can do, is wait until then.

Cloud computing, may very well end up being the greatest boon to business productivity the world has seen to date. But as of right now, it's still a brand new technology, and as such, will encounter hiccups, glitches, crashes, and downtime. Should Google be knocked, stripped, and beaten down for it? Not in my opinion, but everyone has their own.

For everything that Google does impressively, how easy is it to forget, when they're trying to make a step into a previously, unknown sector.

Catch the Wave

Catch the Wave

Google Wave was unleashed for public testing recently, with 100,000 invites being sent out; and with those a batch of invites, tied to the invites (think Gmail at it's inception).

Catch the Wave, it's setting itself to be the most interactive, social media collaberation idea out there. Email, instant messaging, documents, which can be edited by a list of people selected by you, it's a step to making the internet just a little more accessible. Google has a love affair with making information freely available, from their book digitizing (currently on hold), to the actual search engine and indexing of the majority of the internet, to handing out free services like Gmail, and now the Wave service.

Wave itself is still a good few months off yet, admittedly still buggy in their own blog writings, but when the Wave gets rolling, it would be best to be on it and ready for the ride.