Happy families :-)Well, isn't it nice to know that
all we Bloggers (or should that be "Blogger.commers"? Blogger dot
commas?) are now collectively sheltering under the benevolent and
protective wing of Google.com? I like Google - who doesn't? It's the
favorite auntie of the Web. Knows the answers to all our searching
questions, etc. *And* it runs on nice, plain vanilla, Linux boxes :-)
But not so fast, perhaps: today another favorite aunt, Auntie Beeb, to be precise, whispered the following revelation to me over my zero-carb lunch:
Is Google too powerful? Google
is a privately-owned US company that has a policy of collecting as much
information as possible about everyone who uses its search tool.
It will store your computer's IP address, the time/date, your browser
details and the item you search for.
It sets a tracking cookie on your computer that does not expire until
2038.
This means that Google builds up a detailed profile of your search
terms over many years.
Google probably knew when you last thought you were pregnant, what
diseases your children have had, and who your divorce lawyer is.
It refuses to say why it wants this information or to admit whether it
makes it available to the US Government for tracking purposes.
And the much-loved Google toolbar tells Google about every web page you
look at.
Ouch! One auntie at the throat of another... I checked my cookies, and
sure enough, there it was: the cookie from Google, set to expire in
2038. What is man to do? I didn't dare delete it - they might not allow
me to search any more! I found myself counting my blessings that I am,
apparently, one of the those who doesn't much love the Google toolbar.
Nevertheless, one has to wonder just what, exactly, the folks at Google
are going to do with all the secrets I've vouchsafed to them over the
years (e.g. "What is a weblog?")...
The article from which the above snippet was culled was actually quite
interesting: the guy (a Bill Thompson) was writing mainly about blogs,
and in defense of "real journalism". The hullabaloo about blogs
replacing in some way the traditional media is thought-provoking. Not
that I would know anything about it, but it seems to me that the
blogging community is rather incestuous, and the whole notion of
blogging is so much in its infancy that it's really very difficult to
know whether anybody *but* "real journalists" will be doing it in a
couple of years time. Big names - people who attract attention through
other means - like Lawrence Lessig,
might be motivated to keep it up. But let's face it, typing all this
crap into the public domain is, for most folks, time consuming and,
well, a waste of time.
Something quite different may emerge once we don't have to type it all,
though: like the photoblogs that are, as I laboriously and
time-consumingly type, picking up steam thanks to camera phones. Of
course, photos don't *say* much ("This is me outside Wal Mart!") but
someone with a camera phone, nay, thousands of people with camera
phones, might all be present to snap the next great news event. The
media themselves would love that, much as they love the folks who walk
around with camcorders and just happen to be in the path of a tornado
one day. And there's another thing: video blogs - complete with
soundtracks (maybe even in Dolby 5.1 surround :-) ) are a logical
follow on.
And then, how do we sort the wheat from the chaff? I guess that's where
Auntie Google comes in :-)
And in the meantime, what is the purpose of the blog? According to an article
in today's Washington Post, somebody by the name of Bill O'Reilly, who
is apparently some sort of pundit on Fox TV, is getting "slapped" on
the Web for railing against its denizens like this: "All over the
country, we have people posting the most vile stuff imaginable, hiding
behind high tech capabilities. Sometimes the violators are punished,
but most are not. We have now have teenagers ruining the reputations of
their peers in schools on the Internet. Ideologues accusing public
officials of the worst things imaginable. And creeps gossiping about
celebrities in the crudest of ways.
"The Internet has become a sewer of slander and libel, an unpatrolled
polluted waterway, where just about anything goes."
I take great comfort from this. What Mr. O'Reilly is really saying is
that, far from the "Internet" (through the medium of blogging) turning
everyone with a keyboard and a phone line into an instant journalist,
it is finally acting to heal a wound it has opened: the burgeoning
isolation of so many folks who, for better or worse, spend a large
proportion of their lives in front of a computer screen and
correspondingly less time in front of actual people (e.g. I once
conducted a protracted and bitter row, lasting days, *with my office
mate*, in email rather than turning round to talk to him). It is
enabling people to do what they have always excelled in doing:
gossiping, spreading rumors and lies, attempting to ruin other people's
reputations, and generally being downright scurrilous and licentious.
So, blogs are the village square or street corner of cyberspace.
It's a good thing. After all.