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.
Google’s (GOOG) controversial Street View service–which will offer ground-level pictures of every UK street online–can finally be launched in Britain, after a privacy watchdog said it had no complaints about the service.
“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.
More than half of young people copy the songs on their hard drives to friends and even more swap CD copies, according to research that reveals the huge challenge home copying poses to a music industry already battling Internet file-sharing. Three decades after cassette decks first allowed people to make free music tapes for friends, a study by the industry group British Music Rights suggests home copying remains just as ingrained in U.K. culture.
We natter on these days about how people are becoming social online. But we have always been social; the Internet merely provides more ways for us to connect with each other. What’s truly new is the opportunity for companies, especially media companies, to be social.
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.
I despise Facebook. This enormously successful American business describes itself as “a social utility that connects you with the people around you.” But hang on. Why on God’s earth would I need a computer to connect with the people around me? Why should my relationships be mediated through the imagination of a bunch of supergeeks in California? What was wrong with the pub?
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