Big Bird!
I see they have gone and got it all wrong… Again! Who are these guys??? I mean I thought I was the only one paranoid enough deserving of papers but its a big universe and now we can even Google up mars! Still I’m left a little bilwildered how anyone would be so paranoid as be concerned about published infomation becoming personal. Even more of a mystery is why all of a sudden they have decided to gang up on Google… Because its big and giving away free stuff maybe??? Read on and be Mystified for youself!
Writely: Great changes, same paradox by ZDNet’s Mitch Ratcliffe — Gary Edwards sees Nirvana in Google’s Writely acquisition, an open data Pearl Harbor for Microsoft. But it’s more of Google’s personal information extraction infrastructure.
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March 15th, 2006 at 9:02 pm
“Who are these guys?” is exactly the question Google will be able to answer when it sees into the minutae of your life and work by storing data. Moreover, with the government gaining access to Google files, the search becomes a conduit of government control.
I’m not paranoid. Rather, I see the big picture, rather than the little pieces you’re pulling out and looking at? Writely is not about published data, it is about authoring data, which is, for corporate users that I specifically identified as needing to be concerned about this, a private act. It cannot replace Microsoft Word without obliterating that line between public and private if Google can use the contents of the documents in process as fodder for its indices and ad-targetting business. It’s really very simple.
I agree published information is public. My own company operates on that principle, treating content and links in published pages as expressing information about influence. I would never allow my own business to intrude on personal information, like unpublished files stored on a hard drive, regardless of its physical location, to feed my own profit. You’re insisting that Google is giving away free stuff while ignoring the real price it charges: Ever-increasing access to one’s life and, if you consider using Writely for business, corporate assets.
Who is “ganging up on Google?” I’m paranoid because, why? If you think it is paranoid to talk about user’s rights to own their information and civil liberties, then you’re taking a completely counter-intuitive position from most of the computer-using world, but all you did is label me “paranoid.” Have you actually got an argument or is it simply enough to label me without responding to me? That’s pretty old media of you….
March 19th, 2006 at 1:46 pm
Good morning Mitch, so nice of you to stop by and visit my little humble blog abode. I’m still at a loss to understand why you have such a problem with the Google acquisition of “Writely”… It simply makes the online community a little more blog friendly. I mean if you have a problem with people knowing about your “PUBLISHED” information perhaps you should consider “publishing” your letters in a bottle. But if you’re problem is simply with Google indexing your personal information with the publicly published record well that’s this hazard of the trade now days.
Yes we are in a new media type format and more can be known and sorted and I suppose it can even be done down to the tiniest minutia but how it affects the larger picture… You mean perhaps in terms of Complexity Theory where you have the butterfly effect maybe? I mean I’m not sure if I understand which big picture are you talking about. You can still use notepad if you wish but if you blog it will be filtered and indexed into a XML document of some type with all its indexed and meta tagged components. I’m not sure how Googles acquisition’s of “Writely” will change this one way or the other except it will make it easier and more secure for everyone (and when I say secure its not to add to the security of the document itself but server side code is definitely less like to have the inherent problems of viruses and worms so that it makes the net itself a more friendly and less invasive place to work). You can still use encryption on your own files and documents if you have that kind of concern.
I think you do bring up one ligaments concern which is percisely why would Google utilize an application which will not carry ads by bloggers themselves??? But, on the other hand, which can be used to target ads quite effectively to the benefit of who just Google and their large corporate buddies? They have also the stated problem they have with those of us who may wish to copy write their work. I mean if this is your concern then it is something of a shared concern. I mean if they only want the big corporate sponsors to make a profit and screw everyone else who contributes to the web, it does appear to be a bit of a double standard. But this is not something new, I mean the little guy always gets stuck the wrong end of the stick forever, seemly, stuck in the wrong place. In my mind, this is not a price we have to paid but seems instead a price that has always been extracted from the little guy, like it or not.
I’m not tying to label you, we all, like water, find our own label level sooner or later:) I just think your reaction to Google, at this point in time and given the technological realities is a bit extreme. I would just give it more time to sort itself out. I look at it a little differently in that “They more things change and more they stay the same.”… I just see human nature as remaining rather a constant factor despite technology. And so given a Charlie Brown kind of perspective, if you wish, “I love mankind… It’s the people I can’t stand!” It’s just the way of the world is and that’s the way I see it.