No, Nicholas, Google’s not there to make information “free”
Nicholas Carr observes Google’s odd rule on AdSense advertising over at his blog - the contract basically says “Don’t say nasty stuff about us” (and it’s more observed in the breach..) - and then comments Still, it’s curious that a company whose ostensible mission is to make all the world’s information freely available should be such a control freak when it comes to information about itself.
Ah, I don’t think so. Fundamental misunderstanding there. I believe you’ll find Google’s mission is to organise the world’s information. (Scroll down, it’s there.)
And perhaps then charge you to get at it, who knows?
I would have left this comment right there on Nick’s blog, but he’s got Typekey “protecting” it, and time is too short to bother with Yet Another Place To Detail Your Inside Leg Measurement.
- These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
- Nicholas Carr on MySpace; audiophile MIDI leads (yup) (21 March 2006; score: 42.8%)
- Your search for "information farmer" yielded no results but your own, you egotist (29 August 2006; score: 29.35%)
- What we won't pay for is ad-free TV; but we'd like it to be like that (13 January 2005; score: 27.64%)
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April 26th, 2006 at 5:26 pm
Charles, Sorry about the comment registration rigamarole on my blog. It’s not something I wanted to impose on readers, but over the past month I’ve been getting more than 500 comment spams a day, and I just got sick of dealing with them. Nick
April 28th, 2006 at 3:07 pm
500 per day? Ptuh.
Seriously, though, this blog gets a couple of hundred (depending). But Spam Karma 2 eats them all. (OK, very occasionally there’s a false positive - usually people posting from NetNewsWire - and the odd one slips through.)
I think there’s a version for Movable Type.
April 28th, 2006 at 3:57 pm
Akismet has killed 541 comments/trackbacks on my WordPress blog this month. And there’s now a version for Movable Type. The few that slipped through got trapped in moderation.
April 29th, 2006 at 8:59 am
Is Akismet any better than Movable Type’s own SpamLookup? Very little of the spam I get nowadays goes into my main comments page (MT 3.2 has a special junk section) and I’ve only had one false positive (involving trackback, not comments). It’s a world away from the plague of spam I had to deal with when using MT 3.1.
April 29th, 2006 at 8:59 pm
I don’t know if there’s been any objective comparisons of Akismet (which is still pretty new - only set up in November 05) and MT. Anyone care to point us to some?
Personally I use Spam Karma, which is fantastic.