Content and services

This Forbes article is illuminating, as it neatly describes the Google vision for taking over and dominating every minute of our lives. Google provides a lot of good and even great tools, but the question is, "At what point does Google get so big and so powerful that it sucks all the oxygen out of cyberspace?"

The Huffington Post has a couple of interesting articles on the direction of journalism today. It is a weird time for news, as the old media and the new media continue to collide. There is much finger pointing going around, with many old media journalists and owners trying to make a fiscally sound transition to new media while simultaneously complaining that new media bloggers and news aggregation sites (like the HuffPost).

Barnes and Noble is about to release an ebook reader called Nook. The bookseller and publisher wants to compete with the Amazon Kindle and the Sony Reader. It is easy to find people who say they love their Kindle, but I remain skeptical. I do think that within a few years, we will reading many more books using some kind of reader device, but I think the long-rumored Apple tablet is likely to crush these dedicated devices.

USA Today has an article noting some of the "Cyber Monday" shopping deals. But Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit says, "Who cares?" Reynolds makes a good point--that Cyber Monday evolved back when broadband at home was rare and people waited until the Monday after Thanksgiving to shop online--at work, where broadband connections made it much less frustrating. Nonetheless, online retailers expect big sales.

Bing hasbroken the 10% market share for online search. I continue to like Bing--it returns fewer and better results than Google.

If you ever wondered how the "free" video channels on the Intertubes could make any money, it is becoming apparent that the plan all along was to turn them into TV, complete with ads. And you can't turn the ads off. The stop button on the players does not work while the ads play.

Bing, the Microsoft search engine, can now return results from the Wolfram Alpha computational engine. So you can enter queries into Bing that require computation and the query gets passed to the Alpha engine and then returned via Bing. I continue to think Microsoft has a real winner with Bing, which returns better search results, in my opinion, than Google.

MediaMemo reports that Apple has quietly begun to talk to some TV networks about making all their content available on the iTunes Store for $30/month. This might not sound like a good deal for the TV networks, but in fact, it is very bad news for the cable TV and satellite providers.

An interesting fight is brewing between the movie studios and the movie rental outfits. And as usual, it is upstarts like Netflix and other Internet movies on demand outfits that are causing the problem.

As I predicted many years ago, the video store is on the way out. Blockbuster has just announced it is closing more than 900 stores. Netflix and video on demand over the Internet has taken its toll. Blockbuster has added a Netflix-style ordering system with the supposed advantage of being able to drop movies off at the local store, but that's just a dumb idea that was always dead on arrival.

The latest Web phenomenon is Animals with Lightsabers, proving once again that no idea is too stupid for the Internet. This particular flash in the pan is not likely to last, as you can be amused by a squirrel with a lightsaber only so many times. The object lesson is that the Web and the Internet continue to dismantle traditional publishing.

If you have not tried Microsoft's Bing search service, you may be surprised. Bing seems to do a much better job of delivering relevant search results than Google. On a few queries I tried for topic areas I am familiar with, I found Bing producing fewer results of much higher quality, especially on the first couple of pages. Bing also is trying to integrate information from other Web sites and information sources in a thoughtful way, especially if you are trying to identify how to get to a business.

eBay has announced it is selling Skype. The auction giant bought the VoIP phone company several years ago for $2.6 billion, has already written off $1.4 billion and apparently hopes to get $2 billion in the sale--Meaning Skype never made eBay much money. In a related story, Skype has announced it is doubling its rates for international calls, where the firm makes most of its revenue.

Sony has announced it's $400 ebook. Intended to compete with the Amazon Kindle, the device costs $100 more than the Kindle but works with several open ebook formats, giving users access to a wider range of books.

Here is an interesting article about a study of current "cloud" computing services, which "seem to come up short. This really should not be a surprise. Businesses that think cloud computing services are going to be a panacea for their IT problems are going to be very disappointed.

Digital music downloads continued to gain a larger share of the music sales in the U.S. While CDs still are the most popular way to buy music, digital downloads increased in the first half of 2009 by 50%, up to 30% of music purchases. The iTunes Store is now the largest retailer of music in the country, with 25% of the total market.

File this under "It's about time." Google has promised its new Caffeine search engine will be faster and more relevant. Why are they announcing this now? Probably because Microsoft's Bing must look pretty good to them. Nothing like a little competition to scare the complacent.

Via Boing Boing, the entertainment industry has grandly announced that their customers should not expect to be able to play songs, watch movies, or read books "forever." Instead, you should only be able to do that "for a while." Okay, I made that last quote up, but that is, in effect, what they are saying. It is really is strange that an profitable and successful industry is so contemptuous of its own customers.

Amazon may have inadvertently killed its own Kindle ebook reader over the past week. The company discovered that pirated versions of Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm were available for sale on the Kindle bookstore. To comply with the copyright protection laws, Amazon removed the ebook versions from the online bookstore. But then Amazon also remotely deleted copies of the book from all Kindles and refunded the purchase price to the Kindle owners.