Making Adsense (out) of New Media

The Internet has been rebuilding walled gardens before our eyes, what with Facebook's "black hole" content model - and now Google - the "Do No Evil" boys - are up to much the same game.

The idea is to carry on scraping content off other people's News sources, but to allow those people who are newsmakers to then comment on the story on Google News. Only catch is, others may not scrape this content in turn, it is now Google's content.

(A familiar pattern is emerging here - if you, as a user, generate content on these emerging UGC sites it becomes theirs, not yours, and you get nowt - at least the much derided Olde Media Industry usually pays the content creator).

Anyway, a number of people such as TechCrunch have come to the conclusion that this is (i) not exactly a reciprocal relationship and (ii) not exactly the way the 'Net is supposed to be run by "good guys". Others eg Robert Scoble believe this is Google acting in a RealPolitik (RealEkonomik?) way and advise people to Get Over It.

(It is kinda sad hearing people who have done well by the Open Net now defending those who would emulate the Hated Olde Media and enclose it - shades of Animal Farm?)

Now Steve Rubel makes two telling points:

- It means Google is now in effect a news editor (does this mean they have to subscribe to journalistic codes of conduct)

- He implies that it is very unlikely that the "voice of truth" is what you will get, but that its more likely that the PR industry will get a nice boost in its workload

Anything that increases the workload of PR and lawyers can't be good

But to an extent the News Media are all big girls and can sort each other out - more concerning is this point from one of the comments on TechCrunch by Dan Penny:

Google’s apparent hypocrisy is a bigger nuisance for Science, Technical and Medical publishers, who can provide links for their readers to go directly into searching Google Scholar, but are prevented from scraping Scholar’s citation results and display them on their site - which would provide scientists with useful information all on one screen, and would not even be commercialised.

These are the sorts of guys who can't fight the good fight, and its that sort of thing that makes me irritated - this is not what I had in mind when I thought of linking all the world's information.

I hope Google do not persevere with this plan, for the simple reason that I think this is the sort of behaviour that a "Do No Evil" business should not take up. To me it moves them from being part of the "Vision Thing" to just another Corporation, and Ii think it will hurt them medium term - a large part of the "feelgood" about Google is a strong and good feeling about them from their behaviour up until recently.