Google launches wire service for Google News

Google has recently announced that they are launching a new service allowing direct access to wire services such as the Associated Press (AP), Agence France-Presse (AFP), UK Press Association (UK AP), and the Canadian Press (CP). In the past, content publishers have complained about, while at the same time benefiting from, the links on Google news and the brief overview of the content hosted on the site. Several newspapers and sites have threatened to sue Google over the issue, some having said outright that Google is attempting to kill traditional print media. Maybe now Google is looking to force the issue, scrubbing their index by removing duplicate links that most of these sites use to get listed.

“Our goal has always been to offer users as many different perspectives on a story from as many different sources as possible, which is why we include thousands of sources from around the world in Google News,” Josh Cohen of Google said in the announcement for the new wire service. “However, if many of those stories are actually the exact same article, it can end up burying those different perspectives,” he added.

Those cloned articles, known as reposted wire feeds, are what many sites use to gain traffic to their website, thus gaining readers and profit from advertising. There is nothing bad about this, but when those same sites blame Google for their lack of revenue or loss of readership, then there is an issue.

Not too long ago Google News faced all sorts of problems when print media attacked them. Several newspapers said Google News was to blame for the loss of print reporting and the shift to ad heavy news websites. Anyone who uses Google News to read news and visit sites online knows this to be false. If it were not for Google News, the rants of how bad the service was would never be seen or read. Yet, they complained. Regardless, Google moved forward with a year old deal they had worked out with the Associate Press. This time however, they added more to it. The bulk of the plan is content and duplicate detection.

“Duplicate detection means we’ll be able to display a better variety of sources with less duplication. Instead of twenty ‘different’ articles (which actually used the exact same content), we'll show the definitive original copy and give credit to the original journalist. (We launched a similar feature in Sort-by-Date and got great feedback about it.) Of course, if you want to see all the duplicates on other publisher websites with additional analysis and context, they’re only a click away,” Cohen wrote.

Google explained that by, “removing duplicate articles from our results, we’ll be able to surface even more stories and viewpoints from journalists and publishers from around the world. This change will provide more room on Google News for publishers' most highly valued content: original content.”

“The amusing back story here is that AP is owned by the newspapers, who are screaming the loudest about the collapse of the newspaper industry, and that Agence France-Presse (AFP), sued Google for alleged copyright infringement on the News site, despite the clear and present rules regarding Fair Use,” reads the Raving Lunacy blog.

“The question AP member papers should now be asking is not how Google could be so mean, but how they, themselves could be so blind about their relationship with the AP,” writes Steve Boriss over at thefutureofnews.com. “Being a member of the AP made sense when papers were necessary middlemen for people to get their news — papers would pay the AP for electronically-transmitted stories, then reprint them and sell them for a profit to a public that had no better access to the freshest news. But now that the Internet and Google News have essentially installed an AP News Terminal on the PC of everyone with broadband service, newspapers who are members of the AP are funding their own destruction.”

The original content is what gets the most views; there is no loss of fact there. The little websites who post only wire feeds in order to gain traffic will suffer; this includes the small local newspaper websites. Therefore, by removing much of the fuel for their recent attacks by the press they have both helped and hurt them. Sites will need original content to get listed on Google News. Those who serve only feeds will be lost to the fold. For the professional reporter, this is good news as their work will get the credit due and their publisher will get the readers they claim to have lost because of Google.

Another point that was mentioned in several articles about the recent move by Google is that most of the smaller local papers who complained about this deal with the AP and others covered world news in wire reports. If the local paper cannot cover local news, why are they worried about the world news feeds? Readers will want local headlines first, and will then skim over the wire reports for international news.

Say what you will but Google has just made a move that will ultimately help the way news is reported online, many have often complained that the wire reports were slanted and biased, so with a focus on original content that could add some balance to what you read online.
Source : http://tech.monstersandcritics.com

Google Shift on Handling of News

Google is playing host to articles from four news agencies, including The Associated Press, the company said Friday, setting the stage for it to generate advertising revenue from Google News.

The news agencies — the Press Association of Britain, Canadian Press, Agence France-Presse and The A.P. — now have their articles featured with the organizations’ own brands on Google News. The companies have agreed to license news feeds to Google.

The five-year-old Google News service previously searched the Web to uncover links to news articles from thousands of sources, and clustered links on similar subjects together.

Josh Cohen, business product manager of Google News, said his company would consider eventually running advertising alongside the agencies’ articles.

The changes will not affect the ranking of articles in search results on Google News, Mr. Cohen said. If an Associated Press article ranked eighth among different versions of an article previously, it would still rank eighth under the new service.

To avert legal challenges, Google does not now run ads next to automatically generated links. Agence France-Presse recently dropped a suit against Google for using its text and photos on Google News without permission.

The four news agencies act as wholesalers supplying news to other news organizations, and do not try to attract customers to destination sites of their own. Google News has inevitably linked to the customers of the agencies instead.

For example, an article on Google News credited to The Seattle Post-Intelligencer could in fact have been originally from The Associated Press.

The changes will have little impact on news organizations that receive traffic directly from Google News, Mr. Cohen said.

Google’s licensing of articles from news organization partners is similar to the way rival news sites like Yahoo News or the MSNBC portal of Microsoft have licensed news from news organizations for more than a decade.

Jane Seagrave, vice president for new media markets at The Associated Press, which is based in New York, declined to comment on the terms of the deal, and on whether Google would run ads alongside AP articles.

Because of Google’s campaign to simultaneously reduce duplicate articles, the original wire service article is likely to be featured in Google News instead of versions of the same article from newspaper customers, sapping ad revenue to those newspapers.
Source :http://www.nytimes.com

NBC responds: nuh-uh

This is turning into a regular soap opera. First NBC Universal says it's not renewing its iTunes Store contract with Apple. Then Apple responds with a press release saying NBC wanted to double the wholesale pricing for shows, which would push per episode prices to $4.99. Now NBC is back saying that isn't true, that they only wanted "flexibility in wholesale pricing, including the ability to package shows together in ways that could make our content even more attractive for consumers." Further they complain that Apple is more interested in making money on hardware than money for content provider (no, who would have thought that Apple wants to make money for itself rather than other people). Anyway they emphasize that NBC shows will be available until December, and they left open the possibility that a new contract might be negotiated in the meantime. In general I think it's unseemly for companies to air their dirty laundry in public like this, but I'm starting to get the sense that this is a negotiating tactic on both sides. Personally I have the sneaking suspicion that something will get worked out before December.



Source :http://www.apple.comwww.tuaw.com

Wii outguns opponents

Nintendo’s Wii continues to dominate the gaming console wars, outselling Sony’s Playstation 3 three-to-one and Microsoft’s Xbox over twenty-to-one according to Enterbrain’s Japan sales figures.

The Wii has proven to be a very popular choice among gaming enthusiasts, consistently outselling its rivals the Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3. Its popularity is closely linked to its lower price and innovative controls, which saw it becoming the fastest selling gaming console in markets like the UK.

According to the Japan sales statistics released by Enterbrain, Nintendo sold 245,653 Wii consoles, Sony 81,541 PlayStation consoles and Microsoft a mere 11,288 Xbox 360s.

Both Sony and Microsoft have announced price cuts in the hope that their gaming consoles will be able to compete more effectively against the Wii, but Nintendo’s product’s popularity seems to be based on more than merely price.
Source :http://mybroadband.co.za

US court allows navy to use sonar

The US navy has won the latest round in a court battle over whether it can use sonar equipment which environmentalists say can kill whales and other mammals.

An appeals court overturned a decision banning the use of sonar equipment in tests to be held off California.

National security needs must be weighed against protecting the safety of marine mammals, the judges ruled.

Wildlife experts say noise pollution from sonar disorients whales, causing them to become stranded on beaches.

The navy argued that it had monitored waters off southern California for 40 years and had not seen any whale injuries from the use of sonar equipment.

It says the device is necessary to track submarines.

'At war'

The ruling the latest stage of a long-running battle between environmentalists and the US Navy over marine safety.

In a split decision, the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a two-year ban on the equipment ordered in earlier August, in a case brought by a coalition of animal welfare groups.

It criticised the navy for not taking action to minimise harm done to whales during exercises in California, but said the district court that had imposed the ban had not proven that the move would prevent "irreparable harm to the environment".

"The public does indeed have a very considerable interest in preserving our natural environment and especially relatively scarce whales," Judge Andrew Kleinfeld wrote in the ruling.

"But it also has an interest in national defence. We are currently engaged in war, in two countries."

In 2006, a UK government-commissioned report called for more research into the effects of noise pollution on marine animals.

It concluded that there were many noise sources in the seas, including seismic surveys for oil and gas, shipping, offshore wind farms, military sonar and scientific research.

The study identified 13 cases of strandings by whales and dolphins that appeared to be linked to noise, adding that most of the cases did involve naval vessels.
Source : http://news.bbc.co.uk/