An eight minute long presentation (http://www.broom.org/epic/) of what could happen(taken from the perspective of a historical documentary) in 2014 if Google's growth is unchecked.

It's fairly interesting, although I doubt everything in it would happen(Googlezon?)but it does give an insight of what could very well happen to the world media.

Less interesting text summary. (http://www.masternewmedia.org/news/2004/11/29/summary_of_the_world_googlezon.htm)

I read an article on this in Science Illustrated. It was about how Google can be fooled by lots of pages linking to a certain page (for example, if you search for "Weapons of Mass Destruction", Google is fooled into believing that the "These WMDs could not be found" is a page on WMDs). It also was about how huge, and thus influential, Google had become, and how important it has become to be on top of the list Google shows you when you search for a certain thing. It even covered the "if it ain't on Google, it doesn't exist" myth.

On those "newspapers that make themselves": They all run by "stealing" from other papers, so if old media seizes to exist, so would these new things.

And if news become like the Wikipedia, how on Earth can I trust it? When I buy, for example, Bergens Tidende ("Bergen Tidings" or something, my hometown's ancient, renowned, objective paper), I know I'm getting facts, news, and objective, serious information. Likewise, when I buy an encyclopedia from a store or on a DVD from the Web, I know it's made by proffesionals.

However, if I open an article on the Wikipedia, it can be an article written by a seven-year-old for all I know. I once saw a topic on the Web where someone linked to a Wikipedia article that was... False.

Likewise, if we post things here in the Senate Chambers, we have to list sources (to the proffesionals) or we'll not be believed, particularly if the stuff we post is controversial. Try to find an epic Senate Debate without anyone listing or asking for sources.

The media will live for a while yet, I hope. "Everyone contributing" means "everyone from proffesionals to complete idiots who have no clue what they're doing, but play 'proffesional reporters' contribute" to me. While it's made to sound coercive and scary (very familiar style, that, a spooky voice, and flickering pictures), it's just someone's opinions. I have to say it was well-researched, though (they even knew CERN, not the US Military, invented the Web!:)).

Not sure i have time for an 8 minute presentation :eek:

Google's search algorithm weaknesses have been known for some time, which is why it has started to get less relieable, and why they have started to cut back on the importance of "page rank" when determining priority and started to revert to older content based filtering.
(Its also why comments in blogs are often filled with comment spam, as it is an easy way for a site to boost it's page-rank by making a lot of links to itself).

The danger with google diversifying too much is that they will loose focus. Look back five years or so and everyone was saying that Yahoo! was going to take over the world. They pretty much won the search engine wars, then started adding stuff like groups, email, etc... and became a real "portal". Unfortunately in the process they diversified too much, their pages became a clogged up mess, and when google came along with its simple interface they were quickly overtaken.

At the moment google is still bringing fresh thinking and innovation to most of it's ventures... but if it keeps adding options to the front page (news, groups, froogle, translations, gmail, video, images, blogger, etc...) its pretty soon going to end up like yahoo.

Also, microsoft is definately going after google with MSN search tv ads etc...

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I think a news company recently sued google to have their news taken OUT of google news, which makes a change from people trying to get higher prominence.

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As for the validity of stuff on the internet, it is true that individual articles/sites are much harder to verify as they could have been written by anyone with any agenda.

But then your supposed "objective newspaper" is nearly as likely to print lies, mistakes and slanted opinions as a web site.
It used to be the case that "freedom of the press" meant that every town had two or more papers which between them managed to give a fairly balanced view of events. Takeovers and consolidations have meant that most towns now only haveone paper, and that is usually owned by one of the big two or three media publishers... so there is no longer the counteracting balance in effect.

In the UK at least NONE of the main national papers could be said to be politically objective. The biggest selling ones least of all. Almost ALL the local papers are owned by the same company (the paper in my home town is suspiciously similar to that in the town where i now work, down to the same campaigns and graphics).

Add to that the fact that I often see reported as "news" items that have obviously been ripped directly from google searches of the internet (and are often WAY out of date and have already been updated on the web)

Since most people only read one paper they get all their info from one source, and don't realise how un-objective it is. The web at least makes it much easier to see the overall picture of coverage. And while certain items may be untrustworthy, it is a lot easier to find corroboration on the web then if you read it in a paper.

- a nice clear example is movie reviews: My parents always read the same paper, so they base all their opinions of movies on that paper's critic's review (as i used to). However I now look on sites like imdb and rottentomatoes and I can see the overall opinions of a number of people and get a much better impression.
For any movie I can find reviews that claim it is the best ever, and reviews for the same film that claim it is the worst ever. Now if i only saw ONE of those reviews then I would think that the movie was infact terrible, even if 99.9% of other critics had thought it was the best movie ever made.

It is the same for news and facts... the more sources you can easily compare and contrast the better chance you have of getting an objective viewpoint.

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As for wikipedia... personally i don't think it is that great. The idea is excellent, i'm just not sure about the implementation. But if you DO find something totally wrong on wikipedia then you can CHANGE IT. If that same fact was wrong on paper then it would stay wrong, and everyone would believe it.

But then your supposed "objective newspaper" is nearly as likely to print lies, mistakes and slanted opinions as a web site.
Not really. See, newspapers can be tracked down, so to speak. If this newspaper lies again and again, it gets a bad reputation and becomes less reliable. Which is why they can't, in theory, be un-objective.

Of course, if they stop caring all together and decide to become full-time propaganda machines and still manage to hold onto their ratings (cough, FOX News, cough;)), that theory goes out the window...

Since most people only read one paper they get all their info from one source, and don't realise how un-objective it is.
I consider my favourite paper objective enough (althogh of course it's biased), but I read several ones. You're right, though.