So what does the Google acquisition of Doubleclick tell us? It says that Google isn't an all-you-can-eat restaurant in Mountain View or a do-no-evil NGO or a research department of Stanford University. It isn't even a search engine. No. Google is a remarkably profitable business that is cornering the market for selling all forms of advertising on the Internet.
Are really living in a global village? Or was Marshall McLuhan naive in his belief that the electronic media revolution would speed up society and transform all of us into global citizens?
Earlier this week, Tim O'Reilly and Jimmy Wales published their Codes of Conduct for Bloggers. But they both got it wrong. The solution to the uncivility of the blogosphere is a Elitist Code of Conduct for Bloggers.
Should there by a Pulitzer Prize for Bloggers? If so, I nominate the bearded, prickly one (Dave Winer) as the winner of the 2007 award.
So what's the solution to the newspaper crisis? Should rich people own American newspapers? Or should they be government owned?
Craigslist is giving away free sex on the Internet. That's morally disgusting. They should be charging their users to advertise for erotic services. That would stop them shafting local traditional media.
Tim O'Reilly blames messed-up people for corrupting the blogosphere. He wants a code of conduct that will clean up the anonymous Internet. But he's unwilling to sanction any sort of government intervention. He's wrong. What we need is the outlawing of anonymity. That's the only way to clean up the cyberswamp.
"Get naked and...." So says the April issue of Wired magazine. But behind
Twitter allows us to tell each other "what we are doing". Is this Web 3.0? Or is April 1 early this year?