What the google.be case is really about
Everybody’s been saying lots of things about the Google.be case, especially that the Belgian newspapers should have used robots.txt to tell Google what not to index. And that the fact they did not use robots.txt clearly show all they were interested is in getting money from Google…
Well, friends, I’m no lawyer or legal expert of any kind, but I’m French… and that lets me read and “almost” understand the terms of the ruling… I guess…
I think the ruling makes it pretty clear what the Belgian newspapers want, and I think this has been mistunderstood:
- The papers welcome Google to index and display their news as part of Google News! (or at least they don’t care)
- The papers’ particular online business model is that news are free, but access to archives require payments. Example here.
- Once an article falls out of the news category and into the archives category, it should not be freely accessible any more.
- Google, via its world (in)famous Google Cache, often makes the content available forever, or at least for a very long time after is has gone off the official site’s free area.
I guess that’s it: what the Beligian paper really want is a way to get the content out of Google News once it is no news any more.
Now, I’m no robots.txt or Googlebot expert either, but from what I understand there was no convenient way for the papers to tell Google that it is okay to index some content for, let’s say 2 months, but not keep it in cache after that delay.
Goggle made some general comments on the case on their blog, but:
- They are not allowed to comment specifically on the ruling, so it’s not that useful;
- They failed to show up at the trial, which is quite unbelievable… but would make it almost believable they fail to understand the real issue that has been raised… :roll:
Note: again, I’m no legal expert. Just trying to make a little sense of all this noise…
Slashdotted! (but not dugg...)
My post on iPod car integration got slashdotted last night. That really caught me off guard!
It is pretty incredible how fast the hordes of new visitors arrived. I only noticed about 1 hour later that the server had gotten insanely slow. It didn't crash though (Thanks Debian ;) ). So I made a static page of the post and (mod_rewrite) redirected to it. That brought the server back to normal speed.
Of course slashdot is now my top referrer of the week... by far (as shown by b2evolution).
Ironically, I actually submitted the post to digg.com, but it was slashdot who picked it up! Sure digg shows on the pie chart, but it's actually less than 1% referrers.
There would be two possible explanations:
- Either the digg community was less interested in this subject than slashdot
- or... on shlashdot, all you need is ONE editor to like your post and you're in for 10 000 visitors. On digg, you need quite a few people to like your post before it makes it to the home page...
I think I just got lucky on slashdot. Thank you Timothy! It's been a thrilling experience! ;)
iPod car integration: not quite!
On the last Apple special event, Steve Jobs was almost bragging about the fact that 70% of new cars sold in the US this year had (optional!) iPod “integration” available…
Obviously, he didn’t talk about the rest of the world. But most of all, what Steve didn’t tell us, is how crappy the existing “integration” solutions actually are!
At the very same time, I was at Apple Expo 2006 in Paris, checking out what the car manufacturers had to offer…
iPod & Audi TT
Audi was showing off their new TT. Nice car. Wanna check the inside? You gotta ask the blonde to unlock it for you…
California, here I come!
Okay, this time there's no turning back! I have booked my Flight! I'm off to San Francisco on October 4th! B)
Wow! It's actually been 12 years since I left Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania. And I've not been to the US once ever since. Despite my constant and renewed interest for the American culture. How could I let it slip away for so long?
This time it will be California for 3 weeks.
It's been pretty hard to decide for how long I would stay. I originally wanted to get an open ticket and stay until it got bored (or my VISA ended, or I ran out of cash, or I got homesick...:P) but it turns out that any open ticket costs 5 to 10 times the price of a fixed date round trip.
I settled for Air France which would conveniently fly me non stop from Paris to SF and back from Los Angeles to Paris, non stop again. 699 €, pretty hard to beat. (and yes, I chose to come back through LA on purpose! ;))
Now, of course I'm very busy evaluating the housing situation! A hotel inside the city costs somwehere between $70 and way too much. Of course, when reading the online reviews for the $70 hotels, I rapidly began to think that the $200/night offers were worth the price. :-/
I also checked Craig's list but I got bored really fast. Looks like there is no way to do any flavor of advanced search on this site! And if I have to browse through all the offers one by one, I'll never find until too late. That site may be extremely popular, I don't get it...
One of the most useful resources I have found is Orbitz. It is incredibly useful for targetting a specific area of the city. It also allows to narrow down on hotels with WiFi access.
Ironically, $70 hotels near the airport tend to get better reviews than $150 hotels downtown!
So I figured it would be cheaper to get a hotel out of town and rent a car than to try to get accomodation inside of the city. Actually I think, I'll stay downtown for a few days, and then get a car to explore the rest of the Bay Area. At that time, lodging off town might be more convenient anyway.
Haven't decided yet when and how I would get down to L.A. though...
The Gartner Emerging Technologies Hype Cycle 2006
This is one of those examples where a picture is worth a thousand words!
Got that from Cedric Giorgi who also points to this PDF from Gartner explaining what the hype cycle is about.
Now, the interesting part is comparing the 2006 hype cycle with 2005 hype cycle.
I can't help but wonder:
- Where the hell did Podcasting go this year? Massive adoption already? You could say that for RSS, but not for podcast. Has it fallen so deep into the out of sight lows that even Gartner did not see it this year?
- Why did the "semantic web" become the "corporate semantic web"?
- Are Tablet PCs going to stay at the bottom of the trough of disillusionment forever? (I would say yes!)
- What happened to the internet micro payments? Gone forever?
Well, I guess the answers may well be in the full report, which you gotta pay big bucks for.
