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Cornered! is a blog devoted, most of the time anyway, to telecommunications: local and global issues, technology, people and trends from the perspective of someone who's been reporting, analysing and commenting on the industry since the dark ages (BC - before competition). Sometimes serious, sometimes flippant, sometimes frivolous. Controversial, analytical, informative, amusing, but never boring; a vehicle for examinations of important issues and observations on my encounters and experiences in an industry where polarised views and hyperbole are the norm.
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Technology news and Jobs arrow Cornered! arrow A new 'iBook' from Google?: be afraid, be very afraid
A new 'iBook' from Google?: be afraid, be very afraid E-mail
by Stuart Corner   
Sunday, 21 January 2007


So what? We have also lost contact with the primary experience of hunting killing, dismembering and cooking large beasts in order to eat, and that of being hunted, killed and dismembered by other wild beasts in the process: to name but one unpleasant experience that civilisation has deprived us of.

'Googlisation' would not only make books in their entirety eminently more accessible, as downloaded soft copies, but their information more easily located thanks to search technology. This would seem like a good thing, but Appleyard thinks otherwise.

"An index is the work of a mind with knowledge, search engine results are the product of an algorithm with information. Parents will already have seen the power of the algorithm. Google has supplanted the textbook as the source of homework research."

And it concerns him that "Google is a profit machine." Nothing wrong with that, he says, "as long as we don't delude ourselves into thinking it is an entirely neutral source of information." So? Most disseminators of information on the planet are profit machines. Why pick on Google? As a dominant profit-driven information provider it pales into insignificance compared to Sunday Times publisher, News Limited.

I would suggest that the indexes of most reference books today are complied largely by algorithms, not human indexers. And anyway search algorithms will inevitably improve - the industry is after all still in its infancy. But nevertheless Appleyard seems to believe that  search technology applied to the great mass of published works will downgrade the way these are used and that our civilisation will be the poorer for it.

 
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Cornered! is a blog on all things tele-communication from the perspective of one who has observed, analysed commented and reported on the industry since the dark ages (BC - before competition).
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