Every cloud has a silver lining. Ask the cybersquatters. Even as the short-selling vultures began circling Lehman Brothers, HBOS, Merrill Lynch and company, a legion of entrepreneurs began betting on domain names for hastily merged financial institutions.
“Is Google Making Us Stupid?” was the provocative title of a recent article in the U.S. journal The Atlantic. Its author was Nicholas Carr, a prominent blogger and one of the Internet’s more distinguished contrarians.
The First Law of Technology says we invariably overestimate the short-term impact of new technologies while underestimating their longer-term effects. The invention of printing in the 15th century had an extraordinary short-term impact: Though scholars argue about the precise number, within 40 years of the first Gutenberg Bible between 8 million and 24 million books, representing 30,000 titles, had been printed and published. To those around at the time, it seemed like a pretty big deal.
The First Law of Technology says we invariably overestimate the short-term impact of new technologies while underestimating their longer-term effects. The invention of printing in the 15th century had an extraordinary short-term impact: Though scholars argue about the precise number, within 40 years of the first Gutenberg Bible, between 8 million and 24 million books, representing 30,000 titles, had been printed and published. To those around at the time, it seemed like a pretty big deal.
This is a section of the All Things Digital Web site featuring posts from around the Web, from other Dow Jones properties and also original pieces we solicit. The section is now explicitly labeled that it comes "from other Web sites."
We are fully aware of the controversies around how linking and aggregating is done on the Web and we, in no way, are attempting to "scrape" original content created by others. Instead, regarding third-party posts, we are trying to point readers of this site to other posts from around the Web that we admire and are trying to do so in the quickest manner possible.
The Internet is full of terrific content that is not ours and we want to help our readers find it by making editorial suggestions--Look, Mom, no algorithm!--of posts we think are worth their time.
That is why we have made even more changes to Voices to ensure we do this in the most transparent and timely way. While we don't expect that everyone will agree with our policies, we have made changes that reflect our intent in pointing to content outside our site.
So here is exactly what we do: Read more »
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