mediajunk

Google has entered into a deal with media giant BSkyB, best known for its Sky Sports and Sky News channels, and associated satellite delivery system. From the Guardian:

In the first such deal for Google, the Californian firm will provide BSkyB with technology so it can offer email and internet telephony to customers of its fledgling broadband product.

I wouldn't have predicted such an alliance. Google's brand is associated with liberalist values such as freedom of information. Google is especially popular among the highly educated, and likes to flaunt its braininess, boasting about its PhD count, using maths puzzles in billboard ads, holding contests for computer developers, etc.

Sky, on the other hand, is an organisation that is innovative in a different and arguably more limited sense. The jewel in the Murdoch crown, the company has a cheap, tacky brand. Sky News is regularly sensationalist and/or dumbed down. The programming on Sky 1 is usually of the cheap and nasty "reality" fare. Sky Sports has a greedy, milk-them-for-all-they-are-worth veneer, regarded by football fans as having ruined the beautiful game by infesting it with money.

But Sky is successful and popular among the "ordinary people" of the UK, Ireland and abroad. And, in order to grow, Google's products and services must appeal to everyone, not just to geeks.

The Sky deal is another (inevitable?) deviation from Google's puritanical philosophy, a wobble that began a couple of years ago, when the company agreed to Chinese censorship of its search results. (Search for "Tiananmen Square" on Google China. You'll find little mention of any bloodshed.)

For the Murdochs, Google's innovative, easy-to-use products and services will boost uptake of Sky's recently announced broadband offering. But that's not the only reason Rupert Murdoch will have pushed for this deal.

Celebrating his 75th birthday earlier this year, the media mogul waxed lyrical about the internet revolution and the associated shift in power from the "old elite" to consumers. In July, Murdoch's News Corp acquired MySpace.com, the online community famous for breaking new music artists, for $580m.

It should therefore come as no surprise that, as part of their deal, Sky and Google say they will be exploring "future forms of web, TV and mobile advertising".

In their quest for Artificial Intelligence (AI), many computer scientists first aim for a child-like AI with the ability to learn from reading and experience.

As Stanford University Professor of Computer Science Dr. John McCarty puts it:

This idea has been proposed many times, starting in the 1940s. Eventually, it will be made to work. However, AI programs haven't yet reached the level of being able to learn much of what a child learns from physical experience. Nor do present programs understand language well enough to learn much by reading.

But what if computer "minds" could learn a different way? Not by reading but by Googling?

In his lecture All I Really Need to Know I Learned from Google, Oren Etzioni (University of Washington) describes how his research group's AI project uses Google to discover facts about the world.

Called the KnowItAll project, the machine "learns" by searching Google (and, more recently, its own web index) for certain types of phrases, then analysing the results.

For example, let's say KnowItAll wants to find a list of town names in Ireland. It could do this is by searching for the following phrase:
"Irish towns such as"
- and examine the words that follow this phrase, in each of the web pages in which it occurs.

It could also search for "and other Irish towns", and identify the words that come before this phrase.

Repeat this formula with many other useful phrases and you get a list of words that are likely candidates for towns in Ireland. Words that occur with less frequency, or do not occur in all of the lists, are less likely to be town names.

I'm glossing over the details here. The methods and algorithms used for finding and determining facts is much more complicated but, in principle, this is how it works.

What does this mean for the future? Hmmm... Well, within milliseconds, your artificially intelligent friend could find out the answers to each of those tricky Pub Quiz questions. And you wouldn't even have to buy it a beer. Thanks, Google School!

During Google's quarterly conference call with investors a couple of days ago, Larry Brin said:

Over half of local businesses don't have websites yet, based on the estimates we see, and our local business center helps those businesses easily create a web presence so they can advertise online.

Some commentators have interpreted this to mean simply that Google wants to see more websites, because this would lead to more search-related advertising.

Forget all the balderdash about organising the world's information. Here's Google's real goal: for every business to have a website. Remember that Microsoft's goal a couple of decades ago was to have a PC on every desk and in every home.

If Google really wants every business to have a website, it's going to have to compete with local web designers. Notwithstanding the internet's ability to link native companies with designers and developers from anywhere on the planet, most small business owners/managers adopt a "better the devil you know" approach - and award their web design contracts to a firm geographically close to them. At least, that's my experience.

So, should my web design company expect competition from Google? Perhaps. But I believe that Google creates more opportunities than threats for those who are willing to adapt.

The internet is an ecosystem and - for now - Google is top of the food chain.

I've been using Gmail as my primary email software for a couple of years now, for the following reasons:

• I find it has better spam filters than Outlook.
• Google pre-scans the messages for viruses.
• I can get my emails from any computer.
• I can use my Gmail account as storage and backup, by mailing documents to myself.
• I have not yet had to delete any old messages as the storage levels are so high, and continually increased.
• I can view PDF or Word attachments as HTML, so I don't have to wait for a separate application to load in order to read documents.
• I can make messages appear to be sent from any other email accounts for which I can verify ownership.

Some months ago, I got a Gmail for your Domain account, which I was excited about. Now, instead of just appearing to send emails from my Mediajunk account, I could do it for real.

Why should it matter? Well, sometimes my messages go into the recipients' spam folders, because the receiving programme realises that they have been sent from Gmail, not Mediajunk, as claimed. Other recipients see the message "sent by gmail on behalf of mike at mediajunk", which has confused some.

Anyway, I was all set to migrate to my hosted Gmail ... until I discovered that I couldn't merge my existing Gmail messages with my hosted version. For me, not having this ability renders the hosted account useless. It would mean effectively creating a new email account, and having to log in separately to my old Gmail address to find any old messages.

I have requested this feature many times and I see that others have too, looking at relevant boards. Apparently there's a workaround, but it's not a solid option.

I made one more probably futile attempt today, when I saw this Gmail suggestion box posted on Digg.

So come on Google, please integrate this really obvious feature!

Sidebar: it's probably no coincidence that Google has put a halt to development of new products (via Digital Inspiration), and has decided to concentrate on making existing products more interoperable.

I've been a fan of Picasa for a couple of years now. It's extremely easy to use and has some excellent features - notably its ability to find photos on your hard drive, and sort them in a logical manner. It's like having someone come in and tidy up your place.

Today, I upgraded to the newer (but still free) version, and tested out the Picasaweb feature. This is a photo album space, hosted on by Google.

I created a small test album at http://picasaweb.google.com/heraghty/Gothenburg2005.

The whole process of sending photos and adding captions took less than 5 minutes. I've also been impressed with the rich internet/AJAX features of the photo albums.

I'd love to see Google going one step further and releasing APIs so that you could upload images or video clips from Picasa to any website using the API and/or a gallery script.

I'd also like to be able to add Flickr-style tags, and have these show up in the online version.

Amit Agarwal makes similar suggestions, and more. See his excellent comparison of Picasweb and Flickr.

Google has launched a new document editing system called Google Docs.

This is an extension of previous Rich Internet Application (RIA) offerings that allowed the user to create and edit documents and spreadsheets via a web browser.

With Google Docs, you can also import existing Microsoft Word documents and Excel spreadsheets, as well as their Open Office equivalents. You can edit the documents via the browser.

I can see myself using this as a way of reading and converting (if possible) Open Office documents - I currently do not have Open Office installed. I got sent an Open Office document recently and had to download a reader to view its contents. It worked, but was a bit clunky.

One of the advantages of RIAs such as these is that the user does not need to purchase or install software in order to start working.

For more advantages and disadvantages, see the Wikipedia entry for RIAs.