News Corp. Weighs an Exclusive Alliance With Bing
On the possible Murdoch-Microsoft deal: I don't think there is a legal or regulatory question here. But there should be. Murdoch's properties are not that important to the Google experience or revenue stream. So it's Murdoch's loss to gamble on BING. BING is all about shopping, so WSJ would be an odd fit over there. Basically, Murdoch is just bluffing and blustering while trying to get a better global deal from Google. It does point out the need for search-standard regulations because if it were to succeed and spread, the fracturing of Web content among exclusive deals with search engi

Dan Clancy answers a few quick questions about the new Google Book Search settlement
Hi Dan. I know it must have been a stressful week for you. So I hesitate to ask you for a favor. But there are a lot of people in the scholarly/library community who have unanswered questions about the terms of the new GBS deal. So I was hoping you could help us out. Would you mind answering these so I can post the answers on my blog? 1) The settlement is now restricted to works from the Anglophone world (which will mean mostly, but not entirely, books in English). Does that mean y'all will stop scanning books published and copyrighted in other countries that sit on the shelves of partner libraries? Dan: Google is still scanning non-english books just as we

virtualpolitik: The Googlization of the BNF
Interesting post by Liz Losh about a troubling turn of events: Wednesday, September 02, 2009 The Googlization of the BNF Lunch yesterday with the former head of the bibliothèque nationale de France, Jean-Noël Jeanneney, was filled with the recent drama involing the entry of the long resistant French national library into negotiations with Google to digitize possibly tens of millions of volumes from its huge collection and to open up its cultural patrimony to the stewardship of the California search engine and targeted advertising company. This kind of information culture story would l