We create the stories of the connected society

Google set the tech press on fire this week with the launch of a new feature called Buzz integrated with its popular web mail service Gmail.

A few weeks back Amazon got blasted by gay rights groups when it was discovered that gay and lesbian book titles were delisted from its site. Amazon claimed an internal glitch caused the problem and declined to offer additional details.  A spokesperson was quoted saying
“This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company [...]

The Senate Commerce Committee announced announced the lineup for their hearing about the future of journalism.  The list of speakers includes:

Senator Ben Cardin
Marissa Mayer – Vice President, Search Products and User Experience, Google
Alberto Ibarguen – President and Chief Executive Officer, The Knight Foundation
David Simon – Author, TV Producer and Former Newspaperman
Steve Coll – Former [...]

President Obama has pledged to run a more open, participatory and collaborative government, and coming off a political campaign powered by unprecedented digital organizing, we have every reason to take him at his word. The relaunch of the White House web site minutes after he became president on Jan. 20 was more than symbolic. It [...]

Google announced yesterday that it will close its business that sells advertising space in newspapers, saying the effort failed to deliver the impact it wanted (article).  The program, which had attracted more than 800 US newspapers since it began in 2006, produced “good results” for some advertisers.  But as the director of Google Print Ads, [...]

In an article posted online yesterday, Google CEO Eric Schmidt told Adam Lashinsky of Fortune Magazine that he wished he could save the newspaper industry, but he didn’t know how.  Very generous.
Dan Froomkin, former Washington Post reporter and now head of the NeimanWatchdog.org wrote on Huffington Post some suggestions for how Google can help to [...]

The annual list of what the world searches for online has been released.  No real surprises — Britney Spears and Barack Obama top the lists, which are littered with pop culture (WWE, Miley Cyrus, Lindsay Lohan) and political (Sarah Palin) references.  The Olympics, the iPhone, and functional terms like credit score make a good showing [...]

During a recent presentation at the New America Foundation, Google chief executive Eric Schmidt said “The vast majority of information is still not searchable or findable either because it’s not published or it’s on Web sites which the government has put up which no one can index.”  He was referring to the U.S. government, one [...]

Brian spotted an editorial in the Seattle Times published yesterday (Nov. 20, 2008), noting the dominance of Google in online advertising – and celebrating the failure of an advertising deal between Google and Yahoo! For Brian, the curiosity was a media company complaining publicly about Google. For me, the curiosity was that he read a [...]