Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Google?

Internet giant, Google, just does not seem to stop evolving. Ever growing, and ever vigilant, just how efficient this internet ecosystem can get continues to surprise, and even has an uncertain few shivering at the thought of where it is all going. However, perception is almost everything and at the moment is this really something to percieve as a threat?

To David Carr it might be. Going so far with Carr as to read him write,

Not long ago, someone invited me out to the Googleplex, the nickname for Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.The fact is, I already live there. And it’s starting to worry me.

Well if David really lives there then surely he could not be afraid of any headquarters that looks as unintimidating as this one.

Evil empire...NOT.

It seems fancy features, such as Gmail’s new video chat, and its creepy icon have Carr questioning whether this corporation is headed for complete control of us. But aren’t there more corrupt companies Carr could correspond on? Like Halliburton, Blackwater, or Wal-Mart, where people are literally dying over their sales, or they are at least outsourcing Americans out of jobs. That sounds certainly more malignant than mere internet enterprise. Then again, Carr is also the kind of guy changing moods fairly often, so it’s no wonder he is complaining about Google one minute and utilizing it the next. He writes,

It’s easy to update my status under my chat icon while I’m on Gmail, so I tend to update that mood ring with more frequency than my Facebook status. When Google acquired YouTube, it gained another chunk of my mindshare.

The fact he is on Facebook is unnerving enough, nontheless to think his mind runs off the random videos floating around Youtube.

Given though, when Carr quotes Google’s chief executive the guy does come off completely creepy with this response to Carr who has basically claimed to him to be owned and operated by Google.

“I’m glad to hear it,” said Eric E. Schmidt, the chief executive of Google, who was in New York last week. “We want a little bit of Google in many parts of your life.”

A little bit of Google in many parts of my life? Almost expect to see this guy watching through your window tonight with talk like that.

The point pretty much is Google, with its search engine results based on revenues from advertisers, is not going to take over anyone’s life more than television already has. In fact right now it has available way more information than one would ever hear on their nightly news. On top of that, at least this powerhouse of https is American made as well, and we are all not forced to learn Chinese, Carr should lay off for now at least. What is the worst that could happen? I mean it’s not Skynet. Yet!

Out w/ the old in w/ the new!?

Businesses are being forced to cut costs, which means employees to most execs. They are kicking to the curb some of their oldest, most experienced workers. This technique to save over budget businesses is being implemented at newspapers across the nation and other companies, such as electronic super store, Circuit City. Bloggers, both David Carr and Jeff Jarvis are weighing in on the issue and both make valid arguments.

David Carr of the New York Times writes,

But there is a business argument to be made here. Having missed the implications of the Web and allowed both their content and their audience to be scraped away by aggregators and ad networks, newspapers are now working furiously to maintain audience, build new ad models and renovate presentation. But they won’t stay relevant to readers with generic content ginned up by newbies with no background in the communities they serve.

Jarvis and Carr both seem to support the idea that newspapers carry the most value to the community they serve. Increasing coverage of more localized news should strengthen the support of the readers who still get the paper, which is to say, older people who care about what is going on the backyard. Spending money in the area nearest to you is definitely the surest way to impact the economy that influences you most.

Jeff Jarvis appears to agree when he writes,

I’ve argued that newspapers should have spent these last five years retraining all these people to take on new-media skills, inventing and promoting new products, and focusing intensively on local value. Then, perhaps, they might have been in control of their fates. They didn’t. Now they’re in a crisis.

Yes, they should have listened to Jeff all along but they must have been too busy not reading his random blog site. Does make a valid case for intensifying that local value.

Apparently this “crisis” has gotten so serious that last Thursday fifty newspaper executive met in a dimly lit, smoke filled room somewhere to address the issue. The chosen ones included representatives from Times news papers across the country, and plenty of others. This group released a summary that concluded they needed to meet again six months from now, hope they are doing their homework because six months is a stretch at this point for some newspaper publishing companies to make.

Jeff Jarvis also disagreed with David Carr about his take on a classical music critic from The Tampa Tribune starting his blog like so,

I was with David Carr until he got to the classical music critic.

Jarvis is just trying to be difficult here it appears because upon reading Carr’s article he was simply listing people who were cut not defending them as being quite critical.

Last week, Media General, a company that owns newspapers, television stations and Web sites in the Southeast, eliminated 80 positions in Florida, including a prominent columnist and the editorial page editor at The Tampa Tribune. “The Book of Ruth,” a long-running wiseacre feature by the longtime columnist Dan Ruth, will be missed, now and then. He and the editorial page editor, Rosemary Goudreau, follow a political columnist, Joe Brown, the movie critic Bob Ross and the classical music critic Kurt Loft to the exit.

That was annoying almost to read that Carr was not really rallying the troops for this random critic after all.