One of the most tiresome group of people you encounter when you write a weekly column is the “suggesters”.
Throughout the week, my inbox receives a steady flow of emails; from friends, from colleagues, but mostly from total strangers – all containing useful links to stories they “assume I’ve seen”. And always with the same suggestion: “you should write about this in your column!”.
Worse than the suggesters are the “trusters”. They’re even more irritating because of their belief that they wield some kind of editorial influence. “Trust you’ll be writing about this in your column this week. Can’t wait to hear your take on it!” they say, blithely assuming that their lack of patience will ultimately be rewarded. Some of them even add a ‘LOL’ to further underline what total and utter wankers they are.
In truth, it rarely pays to indulge the recommenders or the trusters. If a subject has blipped across their radar then chances are, by the time my weekly deadline has come around, it will have been done to death by other bloggers and columnists. By Saturday even the person who ‘couldn’t wait’ to hear my take on a subject will be utterly bored with it.
The perfect example of this is Rupert Murdoch’s “threat” to remove News Corp content from Google, and his “negotiations” with Microsoft to make articles from The Wall Street Journal and the rest “only available on Bing”. It’s no exaggeration to say that the entire fucking universe has emailed me to say how much they’re looking forward to hearing my opinion on the prospect. Apparently my criticism of the aborted Microsoft adverti-raping of Family Guy means my views on Microsoft and Murdoch somehow matter a damn, and the fact that I’ve worked for old and new media means that I have some unique additional insight. Also, I swear a lot when I talk about Rupert or Microsoft, and people dig that shit.
After the eighty-six-millionth email dinged into my inbox, I did almost consider surrendering to popular pressure and dedicating an entire column to my analysis of whether such an arrangement is ever likely to happen and what it would mean for Google, and the wider world. But then I realised that I’m paid to write long, and that a column like that would read as follows (in its entirety)…
Will News Corp Remove Its Content From Google, And If So What Will It Mean For The World?
No.
And nothing.
…which feels lazy, even for me.
The fact is, as a Brit, I’ve seen Murdoch pulling this crap countless times before. The News Corp-owned Sun is the biggest-selling newspaper in the UK, and second biggest-selling English language newspaper in the world. In every national election for as long as anyone can remember, the candidate backed by the Sun has gone on to win. (And not just in the UK – the paper backed Obama for President, even though Murdoch also owns Fox News.)
The Sun’s endorsement of winners is, according to some, evidence of Murdoch-as-kingmaker; a man with the ability to shape opinion and to win (or lose) elections. Sure enough, the Sun’s recent shift from supporting Prime Minister Gordon Brown, to Conservative rival David Cameron coincided with a spike in opinion polls for the latter to become the next Prime Minister.
But to assume that Murdoch’s backing of Cameron lead to the spike is to flip cause and effect. Murdoch doesn’t create winners, he’s simply adept at spotting where public opinion is heading – waiting until he’s absolutely certain who the winner of a fight will be – and then endorsing them so loudly that when they inevitably win, he can share all the credit. “It’s The Sun Wot Won It”, the paper once declared after an election, when in fact a more accurate headline would be “it’s the Sun wot noticed it”.
The idea that Murdoch removing his content from Google will be the beginning of the end for the latter’s dominance is just nonsense. Sure a few smaller news rivals might be dumb enough to heed his rallying cry for a mass-boycott of Google News, but that will just be an added bonus to Murdoch. The numbers show that most searchers wouldn’t even notice if the Wall Street Journal and every other News Corp publication vanished from their results. What would definitely happen, though, is a huge drop in eyeballs and ad revenue for News Corp, which would certainly cost Murdoch far more than he could hope to recoup from a deal with Bing. Again, anyone familiar with the Sun (and its New York-based cousin, the Post) will know that Rupert will always put his hunger for eyeballs above his insistence that people pay for news – to the point where he is happy to slash cover prices to economically-suicidal levels to win readers.
But fortunately Murdoch doesn’t need to make that decision: unlike in politics where you can’t endorse both candidates, there’s really no reason for him to pick a horse in the search race. His ideal scenario is to continue to make News Corp content available via both Google and Bing, but to encourage both to display it in a way that drives the maximum monetizable eyeballs. Which is exactly what his current strategy will achieve.
By convincing Bing that there’s a chance he might drop Google – for the right price – Murdoch suddenly has a new partner falling over itself to give him prominence in their search results, on his terms. Sure enough, Microsoft has just agreed to help fund the next-generation search crawling protocol, ACAP, which gives content owners like News Corp more control over how their news is indexed.
Meantime, Google might not be worried about a mass exodus to Bing, but as more publishers start to consider alternative search services they have to at least begin to take ACAP seriously. After all, if you want to index the world’s information, you have to accept that a big chunk of that information belongs to Rupert. Again, this is win-win for Murdoch who can keep his content on Google, but with the option of locking some of it away behind un-indexable walls in future.
And that’s where we see Murdoch’s real genius: he has managed to use his illusion of influence to get all of these benefits without having to commit himself to anything, or expose himself in any way. There is no way in hell that News Corp content will vanish from Google and yet with every headline asking whether Google should be worried or suggesting that other companies might follow Murdoch’s lead, his image as a kingmaker is strengthened. It’s bad enough that he has millions of readers and viewers for his own outlets, without the rest of us doing his dirty work for him.
And it’s for that reason that I won’t be swayed by the recommenders and the trusters, no matter how many emails they send. I know Murdoch’s game, and unlike my poor misguided TechCrunch colleagues, I refuse to play it.
So, sorry Rupert, I don’t know what my column will be about this week, but one thing’s for sure: it won’t include a single word about you or your….
…oh.
Damn you’re good.
Demand Media would just start a ehow for news and google still gets what they need for free and Bing pays.
I only dream this would happen.
People like to use microsoft as a evil empire to gather sympathy vote from everyone. Microsoft is not Evil, it is a corporation. Guess what, like google is!
but people trust google like catholics trust the pope. Google IS agressive, they put a lot of people out of bussiness. A LOT! and no one is, crying for them. Generaly, people believe that google is offering a ‘better’ service, so it is excused to ‘extinguish’ competitors.
But in actuality the situation is more complex. The type of influence that Google uses, the type of tatics is just different but is also as agressive as Microsoft’s.
And yet, the blogosphere cheerlead for this corporation as it was the second coming of christe to deliver us from evil in a digital utopia.
they PIMP information that are not theirs. They are Inoformation Gigoloogle. The power of such corporation should be watched. They can not act as they ‘own’ all information.
Yes google is a corporation, yes google wants to earn money, no google is by far not like microsoft. M$ has no moral, their only goal is maximize their revenues, google also wants to eran money, but not by cheating or harming others.
M$ tries to harm competitors by putting patents on each and every idea they have. most of the time they dont use the ptents themself, their only goal is to ensure that if somebody else gets the same idea, they can disallow them to use the idea.
M$ never releases its software as opensource, unlessf they use GPL protected code and a clever dev notices it. Google most of the time releases its software as opensource and hopes lots of others will help them to improve the software, which is great for the users. M$ often uses it’s contracts with PC makers to make it economically stupid to install other OSes. They are so afraid that the better Google OS or another Linux could replace their OS on a PC that they choosed to make illegal deals with hardware manufacturers to ensure their OS gets installed by default.
M$ uses its monopoly to bundle lots of software with windows to kill their competitors. Most of the time, the software of their competitors is better then the M$ product, but because of the bundle, most users dont uninstall the software to replace it by another.
After M$ has gotten enough users by bundling software with their os, M$ starts to deliberately throw incompatabilities in their OS, their software, or their browser, to create plattform dependencies. Google does the opposite, they use standards as much as they can, to ensure compatibility with tier products, they know that their tools are great and thus arent afraid to loose customers, compared to M$ who knows their products are often worse compared to its competitor tools. By for example not following standards in their browser or by including incompatibilities, they try to harm their competitors, but the worse thing is, the ones that suffer most are web-devs and web-users. M$ tries to kill innovations on the net like html5 or browser video playback, the ones who suffer are the customers.
Silverlight 4 is AHEAD of standards! There is a growing MS-Bashing milicia on the blogosphere. There are some ’standards’ that are completly bias to the google model of browser-centered computing.
Not too fast – what are standards? who decide for them? I never voted for any of it!
Klaus – web standards are decided by open standards committees. You are free to comment or add your valuable insight. The fact that you don’t even know that suggests that it’s a good thing you haven’t.
Silverlight is ahead of standards? WTF does that mean? It means that Silverlight has nothing to do with any standards and everything to do with M$FT attempting to control the flow of content from providers to consumers. It’s a smart move by M$FT – but that doesn’t mean I have to buy into it.
The reason standards are useful (eg TCP/IP) is that any vendor can implement them. Are you telling me that M$FT will release the specification of Silverlight to ISO or IETF or W3? I call “bullshit”!
Go cash your M$FT paycheck.
what does it mean to be “ahead” of standards? I would call you a retard but you clearly are one and it thus is rude to call you as such.
Standards are either decided upon via committee within the confines of an accepted organization such as the IEEE or ISO. De facto standards, while not tied to a standards committee are standard to the industry due to the standard’s prevalence. Often superior standards will lose out to inferior ones for any number of reasons, but usually because the first one (cough, Flash) was first to the party. Since I took a Standardizations class while pursuing my Master’s, anyone who has a different view can feel free to fuck themselves, because I am never wrong.
“AHEAD of standards!” = does not conform to standards.
You might also want to look up Embrace, Extend, Extinguish on Wikipedia, Bing it if Googling is anathema for you.
“There are some ’standards’ that are completly bias to the google model of browser-centered computing. ”
Are there any that you could point out(I’d just like to know)? Open standards can be followed by anybody, including MSFT.
You are trollbot and I claim my five pounds. @programmer: great use of random cliches; is the complete list published anywhere?
Klaus you must be a bit dense anyone who has worked with standards knows there is an immense amount of politics that goes on. Look at the way the USA went for a different standard for mobile rather than going with GSM like Europe which is only now being deployed.
Thres an old joke about OSI about how politics is the eighth layer of the standard.
The Church of Googlentology is about to achieve unprecedent control over personal computing! People ‘trust’ to much on google! As they are a ‘just’, ‘nice’ and ‘honest’ corporation.
With ChromeOSucker, the Information Gigoloogle would gain unprecedent control over it users! This would be a TOTAL monopoly, TOTAL! OS, Apps, flow of personal information, etc, etc, etc…
This is too much! Gigoloogle is not search engine corporation anymore, they are a spreading all over. But they started from the place where we ave been trying to AVOID that ANY corporation would start.
History repeats itselsf. The first time it is a tragedy (microsoft), the repeatition is a FARSE (google)
Gigoloogle? Are you really that retarded?
@programmer. You’ve given the game away by making this trollbot entry too long. Its previous random comment was about right.
When someone writes a screed referring to Microsoft as “M$”, I don’t see a reasonable human being, I see just what Penny Arcade’s Gabe sees – a loser still living in his parents’ basement, stopping from his latest Star Trek fanfiction opus to register his worthless opinion.
You might be taken more seriously if you don’t act like a twenty-something neckbeard.
Come one stop with the M’$’ stuff, it’s a little old. I don’t like them, but I give them the respect of referring to them by their actual name.
It’s the prosecution asking the witness if he’s sure the dirty thieving defendant was the same man he saw burgling the house.
Google is becoming TOO powerful. I’m shocked that alot of ppl fail to see Google as the monopoly MS was trying to become. They are a company trying to become the central hub for all information and everything we do. If we let them, they will eventually become the “Big Brother” that watches everything we do. http://mobile.associatedcontent.com/article/2327418/big_brother_google_is_watching_you.html
TC is the TMZ of tech.
Why do you have to curse when you write your articles? People don’t dig it, at least, those who try to take you seriously.
For well-written posts, u’re better off at http://www.startstock.com.
Rrright.
clever take on this. thanks
so you say news corp-microsoft isnt important but covering the latest lame twitter and iphone apps are obviosly so much more important.
got ya.
No, all what Carr is saying is that ain’t real news and that he is not covering (and therefore supporting) the hidden agenda of an old fox.
Those people who write about with such disdain are the same people that support your website and put food on your table. You could show more respect to them
Absolutely agree.
+1
+2
No doubt you wont deign to reply to this, but I’ll say it anyway:
Why insult the very readers that try and support you. They are not trying to annoy you or patronise you – they are trying to help and be part of tech crunch.
Shame on you.
ahhh a little pocket of commenting “trusters” and “suggesters” that just couldn’t help but out themselves.
I quite agree – hubris. Its your job to read suggested articles. I hope these ‘total and utter wankers’ abandon you in droves.
Funny how bloggers get pissed off when they read “feedback” from those who read their blogs.
+1
Sorry – i think you have to take Carr as a kind of ‘House’ figure – very rude, insulting, distracted by his baser instincts, but often very witty and potentially annoyingly right…
Hmm maybe that takes it too far – but you get the idea. He riles me too – but i gotta admit he does talk a lot of sense…
If you mean his reference to suggesters and trusters is insulting to you, then I think maybe Carr’s British sense of humour has been slightly lost in translation.
Not saying it’s very funny, nor the the article is brilliant or anything, but that’s just a little teasing; it’s not venomous nor particularly aimed at TC readers, as much as friends and contacts generally. IMO.
This isn’t humor. This is ripping on email feedback. If you can’t stand being in the spotlight and hate all the attention that it receives, then you’re making a bad attempt at being a journalist. I think Rupert Murdoch has a point about bloggers. They’re idiots that don’t know how to do the job properly.
I trust you won’t respond to any of these comments. Doing so would be admitting you are doing a bad job at speaking to the people.
he isn’t referring to ‘feedback’ he is referring to ’suggestors’ and ‘trusters’. Maybe you ought to reread the articele…
Always a fresh take and a clever execution, Mr. Carr!
obscure blowhard hot-under-the collar act full of profanity is not fit for this forum.
Arrogent self rigtheous… as$hole… yeah.. you’re the big guy… to worship…
“Arrogant self righteous… as$hole…”
You say it like it’s a bad thing or something. It makes Paul so gd good to read.
I take it that the article didn’t go as you hoped. I wouldn’t be surprised if you have already pre-ordered your News Corp membership.
‘Trust me’, I really like this one, LOL.
nah its more his basking in the glory I am hot SHlT style… he thinks everyone wants him while the reason people are here is to read Arrington. That’s why he’s an arrogant a$$hole… can’t handle the truth that no one gives a crap… proof is also that he deleted a similar comment saying just that…
what the fuck is with all these dollar signs. you’re calling the guy an asshole. just do it. god.
That’s three faecal references in one comment…
Yes this is what I was waiting for. You didn’t disappoint with this insightful and unique analysis.
Good
Lame. And boring to boot. Carr into deadpool.
seriously?
Can I assume I’m not the only one that dislikes the cocky/filthy mouthed carr? You try too hard and it’s overly obvious
+1. Say bye bye to schools that encourage students to read TechCrunch.
*dislikes.
I assume that you trust me when I blithely state “Shit man. You are right. LOL”
A public service announcement: NSFW is the name of the column. If you don’t like his writing, don’t read it.
Now if only you could get someone to lock Murdoch in a room with the people that ignore my PSA … You could set fire to it and raise the average IQ of the Internet by at least 0.057 point.
Paul,
Excellent insight. I can’t help but wonder the point of Mr. Murdoch’s need to be Master of the Universe when he should cramming for his exam with God, the real Master of the Universe.
Thomas, founder
Sonshi.com
Did Carr lose some crazy bet with his TechCrunch colleagues last week? If so, after insulting his most loyal readers, his colleagues and the Microsoft executive team, I hope he has by now fully covered his obligation.
+1
Its just too far. I trust he will reply to this allegation?
I trust you will consider obtaining a sense of humour
I can’t wait to start emailing him articles. Trust you’ll be writing about this soon, lol.
+1
Let’s spam his pompous ass
Rupert Murdoch is one ugly ass motherf*cker!
Biatch!
The whoever wrote this needs to masturbate more.
gosh. i mean i’m an idiot but come the fuck on. does this make any sense? if you’re trying for an insult either just say whore, or just sub whoever with “person” or with the name of the writer, paul carr, which i’m sure you must have seen at one point when reading this post. man. maybe i need to gtfo but you are also in need of some hand loving. i hope you find your 6 hour linux user to do the job for you.
I really enjoyed reading this. Really great style and a strong sense of storytelling. And finally, a very interesting take on the Murdoch story. It makes a lot of sense – a man like Murdoch clearly doesn’t get where he is by being an insane first-mover.
I usually don’t notice who’s writing my stories, but this definitely made me sit up and take notice. I will be looking for your name in the future.
Nice
This was surprisingly clever.
I thought I was going to have to stop reading TechCrunch for a second there, but Carr turned it around and made the story interesting, funny, and smart.
Haha. Your article didn’t contain anything new. Well written though.
Until you acknowledged it at the end, I thought “ooo his time away from home has lead to an irony deficiency”.
Well played sir. Well played.
Man, comments around here are weird.
Anyway: fantastic article! I loved your take on that otherwise boring subject.
Btw: I think you wanted to say “in its entirety” but you wrote “in its entirely”
Big ups.
+1
@Kahlil – good spot on “entirely” – fixed, thanks.
your writing kicks ass
No, it doesn’t.
I’m sorry you don’t appreciate his humor. Sad for you but enjoyable for the rest of us.
If techcrunch had any spine they would remove this foul-mouthed idiot from their staff. Anyone who has to use such language to attract attention obviously has nothing to say and is disrespectful.
Absolutely.
You sir are a gentleman and a scholar.
/sarcasm
Seriously though, what is this? Kindergarten? We don’t need to put a dime in a Jar every time one swears.
If one word or two distract you from the substance of a 1208-word article then maybe you shouldn’t be reading. Puritans FTW.
I AGREE
I am always flummoxed as to why people comment to say they don’t like your writing. Generally they are people complaining that they always read your posts, and don’t like them after reading them. When will they understand that Paul Carr is always going to be cheeky, incendiary, and politically incorrect, and that a LOT of people read and enjoy his posts *because* of this. If you don’t like it, don’t read it.
Interesting analysis on the Machiavellian tactics of Murdoch… I wouldn’t be surprised if you were correct, that this is all a ploy to get his way on *both* search engines, rather than a binary decision to focus on just Bing.
Great article Paul! I would add that maybe those suggestors and trusters as you call them just are craving great journalistic penmanship and admire, respect and want to hear your take on the subject.
Second, your case was well stated and articulate without the profanity, but I respect your right to voice and pen your opinion from the heart.
the profanity here is not from the heart. it’s there to carve out the niche from other TC bloggers coz’ he’s got nothing else to beat them at.
ahahahaa wtf? hahaha this is hilarious. he’s using PROFANITY to carve out a NICHE to seperate him from the other TC emplyoees (can’t continue typing without laughing)…right. keep living in your bubble.
You can make a point without insulting your readers who are just trying to help you out by giving you tips. Lay off the douchery.
This is all really a secret plan by TechCrunch to rank for “NSFW.”
yes. yes it is. i mean paul should get kudos for posting that horrible close up of rupert murdoch for all to see and count his wrinkles.
really cool
I did not not that is was wrong to suggest an article or topic, sorry i wont do it anymore