Google News – Friend or Foe?

Friday, May 8th, 2009

Suddenly the world at large seems to have woken up to the fact that ad-funded delivery doesn’t work as a business model for large-scale web publishing. Worse, the big beasts of print publishing, the brand-name newspapers, are effectively forced to cut their own throats by providing their print content online for free. 

Rubbing salt in the wounds is Google News, the simple aggregation portal that is managing to make money from the newspapers’ content that it is using for free (aka “stealing”).  Some publishers are even threatening to withdraw access to their content unless Google starts paying them.

So is Google a villain here? And can the ad-funded revenue model be made to work?

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Google Earth gets Google News

Wednesday, May 21st, 2008

Any Google Earth fans out there? Good. Now how about Google News fans as well? Excellent. Ever thought how cool it would be if you could combine the two? No, neither had I to be absolutely honest. However, this kind of maps and events mashup is something that has been happening for some time now. Myself and a mate even created something using Google Maps and BBC traffic news a couple of years ago that did just that, overlaying traffic reports onto a Google Map of the UK. All quite cool and interesting at the time, although now a long since forgot about project. Oh yes, back to the point of this posting. Well now it seems that Google itself has gone and produced a Google News layer for Google Earth.

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