Google

From the BBC:

Entertainment giant Viacom Media says it will sue web search engine Google and its video-sharing website YouTube for $1bn (£517m).

Viacom, which owns MTV and Nickelodeon, says YouTube uses its shows illegally.

Viacom alleges that about 160,000 unauthorised clips of its programmes have been loaded onto YouTube’s site and viewed more than 1.5 billion times.

Google says it is “confident” that YouTube has respected the legal rights of copyright holders.

As well as more than $1bn in damages, the legal action seeks an injunction to prevent what Viacom calls “massive intentional copyright infringement”.

Dave Winer’s view:

Obviously this is a negotiation, either that or Viacom is jumping off the bridge and hoping that the fall doesn’t kill them.

The Google Operating System blog points out Google’s coverage of the upcoming cricket world cup.

Google’s stuff includes a cricket blogging competition (Blogger only, of course – boo!); some Google Desktop gadgets; an Orkut community and a special blog written by Krish Srikkanth.

Great post by Sam Sethi at Vecosys on Google and attention:

For the last two years I have been tracking a terminology called attention metadata. About 12 months ago some friends and I became really excited about the possibilities of creating a new discovery engine based on sharing our attention. We created an demo application and screencast video in Feb 2006.

There were other companies also looking to develop similar businesses around capturing and sharing attention metadata. e.g TouchStone, Attensa, Gesture Bank and Root Vault but the whole idea of attention metadata stalled because it promised much yet delivered very little. Recently though it has once again become interesting with the launch of new attention services from Google e.g Google Reader Trends and Google Bookmark and Search History.

Well worth reading in full.

[tags]google, attention, sam sethi, vecosys[/tags]

Google’s Coop cusomised search engine now provides usage statistics. This is undoubtably a Good Thing.

My customised search engine is LGSearch, one which searches local government websites. Sounds dull, but when you work for in local government, it’s useful. Obviously others think so too.

As well as the basic numbers, it also lets you know what the top searches have been:

Interesting stuff, and a great feature.

[tags]google coop, lgsearch[/tags]