Google makes money off this stuff?

Perusing an article about Standard & Poor's downgrade of the U.S. government's credit rating, my eye was caught by one of those "Ads by Google" provocatively (and bewilderingly) entitled, "Obama Loves Annuities."

He does? And even if he does, is any D.C. politician so popular these days that he or she is a good bet to attract would-be consumers?

I suppose the teaser line did its job, and made me read the ad. On the other hand, my immediate reaction to this prominent ad box was, "This is sleazy."

That was also my reaction to the smaller ads populating another box next to the same article, ads shilling for credit reports, payday loan relief, and repairing one's credit rating.

The process of generating those ads is automated, of course, and it is amusing to imagine the government consulting a credit-repair outlet: "You have how much debt? Holy crap, how did you manage that???" Yet there's no getting around the fact that these tacky come-ons for by and large shady outfits tarnish the reputation of the sites that feature the ads.

The New York Times' reputation won't suffer much. You have to wonder, though, whether these ads are reaching anybody who will follow through (click) on them. The kind of person reading the New York Times seems unlikely to be so ill-informed as to be susceptible to one of these clumsily-worded teases.

This kind of mismatch is what Google delivers for advertisers' dollars? And advertisers actually find this worth their money?

Google needs to adopt "opting in"

Nicholas Carr's Rough Type blog pointed me to Judge Denny Chin's rejection of the Google Books proposed settlement.

Judge Chin's rejection has three main underpinnings. First, the settlement would address novel copyright concerns that are better left to Congress, especially since those concerns extend to stakeholders who are not covered by U.S. law. Second, the settlement would create a new right for Google (the right to publish entire so-called "orphaned" works) that the original lawsuit simply did not cover and that therefore fall outside the scope of what the court could legitimately approve.

Finally, the settlement would upend long-established practice by requiring copyright holders to opt out of the proposed scheme rather than opting into it. As Judge Chin opined:

... it is incongruous with the purpose of the copyright laws to place the onus on copyright owners to come forward to protect their rights when Google copied their works without first seeking their permission.

This, to my mind, is the most important point made in the decision because it goes to the heart of what I hate about so many firms' online practices: they would rather beg forgiveness rather than seek permission. Indeed, most such firms don't even worry about begging forgiveness.

Whether it's Wal-Mart (which apparently added my email address to its database without asking me), or Angie's List, or Google itself with its privacy-invasive Buzz rollout, we're seeing what the market does if it is allowed to follow its own instincts. It doesn't ask permission before it exploits us.

Good for you, Judge Chin.

And Google, are you ever going to learn to ask before you do?

Allusion in the age of hyperlinks

I'm not sure what Nicholas Carr's essay "The quality of allusion is not google" is getting at. (By the way, "Google" is spelled lower-case in Carr's title.) His point seems to be that mere hyperlinking, the functionality that makes the World Wide Web what it is, is not the same as "alluding," but I can't tease out what he thinks "allusion" is.

Here's his first stab at a definition:

An allusion is a hint, a suggestion, a tease, a wink. The reference it contains is implicit rather than explicit. Its essential quality is playfulness; the word allusion derives from the Latin verb alludere, meaning "to play with" or "to joke around with."

That didn't clear things up for me. Care to try again?

An allusion, when well made, is a profound act of generosity through which an artist shares with the audience a deep emotional attachment with an earlier work or influence.

That makes a bit more sense to me. However, it raises another question: if the audience is unaware of the earlier work or influence, was the artist's deep emotional attachment to the latter conveyed to that audience?

That's a silly question, because an artist would have to be a fool to make his or her work's impact depend too heavily on a familiarity with another. A work of art stands on its own. Those who miss an allusion in that work will still feel something of what the artist meant to convey.

So what's Carr's gripe with hyperlinks as they relate to allusions? He cites the inclusion of footnotes in certain editions of T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" to make his point:

By turning his allusions into mere citations, the notes led readers to see his poem as an intricate intellectual puzzle rather than a profound expression of personal emotion - a confusion that continues to haunt, and hamper, readings of the poem to this day. The beauty of "The Waste Land" lies not in its sources but in its music, which is in large measure the music of allusion, of fragments of distant melodies woven into something new.

Hyperlinks, of course, are nearly invisible inline citations. You can choose to ignore them, or you can follow them. Carr seems to be arguing that including them diminishes the artistic creation.

If you see an allusion merely as something to be tracked down, to be Googled, you miss its point and its power. An allusion doesn't become more generous when it's "democratized"; it simply becomes less of an allusion.

He has lost perspective. Hyperlinks don't change the nature of allusions. The presence of hyperlinks doesn't transform a poem into "an intricate intellectual puzzle." Only the audience can do that.

You can certainly argue that not including hyperlinks in the online text of a poem (or novella, or image of a sculpture, or ...) would prevent some people from treating the work as a puzzle rather than as an expression of emotion by the artist. However, isn't that overkill? Are we not banning sharp objects from the house because children might find them?

The culture has changed markedly since Yeats or Eliot (not to mention Shelley or Shakespeare) wrote their allusive works. We are educated differently, we have different baselines of shared experiences, shared cultural touchstones. We undoubtedly perceive poetry of a century ago differently than our great-grandparents did. Should we disallow even the possibility of recapturing something of their understanding of those poems by foregoing a technology as innocuous as hyperlinking?

In the end, Carr makes a good point that most of us overlook (I know I did):

My intent here is not to knock Google, which has unlocked great stores of valuable information to many, many people. My intent is simply to point out that there are many ways to view the world, and that Google offers only one view, and a limited one at that.

The flip side, though, is that Internet search engines represent merely a high-powered extension of one organizing principle -- the indexing of key words -- humanity has attempted to impose on its great stores of information ever since the invention of the printing press. If search engines are reductive, it's because that organizing principle is reductive. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our search engines, but in ourselves.

Google Voice misgivings

A friend invited me to Google Voice a while back. I accepted the invitation because he's my friend, not because I felt I needed the service. Initially, I simply didn't see the point. Having thought about it, and having read David Pogue's enthusiastic overview, I understand better what purpose it serves and why it appeals to people. The gymnastics of "Call me at 111-111-1111 before 11, 222-222-2222 from 11 to 6, and 333-333-3333 after 6--unless I have to pick up Jimmy from soccer practice, which will mean you won't be able to reach me until 7 at the earliest" can be replaced by, "Call me at 555-555-5555," and magic will happen so you can take the call on whatever phone is handiest. As inventions go, I'd have to rank this just a notch or two below sliced bread: it's genius. (I don't believe it's Google's invention, either, although Google is likely the first not to charge customers for the service.)

On the other hand, it gives more of my life -- or at least the information therein -- to Google. That bothers me from a privacy standpoint: Google, and therefore the world, already know more about me than I would like. Moreover, adopting the service would place me even more deeply in thrall to the company. Every time Google simplifies access to and management of another sector of data in our lives, it does so by consolidating control of that data in its servers. Those servers used to hold merely our search queries; now they store our email, photographs, videos, spreadsheets, word-processing documents, and calendars. By positioning itself as a person's de facto personal data hub, Google is becoming as indispensable as the water or power provider. However, I don't know how to forage for my own water or to generate my own electricity; I do know how to manage my own data, and I take a certain pride in doing so. That attitude may turn out to be as anachronistic as clinging to the horse and buggy in the face of the automobile, but there it is.

So I remain ambivalent about Google Voice.

A little Google jab at Apple

Interesting: when spell-checking my last post, the blogging software highlighted "iPads," "iPhones," and "MacBooks" as potentially misspelled. "Coca-Cola," however, went unchallenged. Is it mere coincidence that the putatively misspelled terms are all Apple product names, and this blogging site is owned by Google?

And away we go

I'm not a huge Jackie Gleason fan, but I do like the lighthearted image that comes to mind with that phrase. And how else to start a blog with no fixed agenda?

Like the long-vanished variety show, yet another set of random observations about the world may not appeal to the fickle public, but hey ... as long as Google and its investors are willing to indulge me, I'll take advantage of their largesse.