Screencast from Adobe’s new ad campaign

It’s been a few weeks since Steve Jobs wrote his public broadside against Adobe generally and Flash in particular.

Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen countered via the Wall Street Journal, calling Apple’s technological objections to Flash “a smokescreen.”

What’s missing though is why this, why now? What’s going on that a tiff between two technology giants should become so public? Usually the war of words occurs between the fanboys on each side. Public words of attrition by respective CEO’s? Not so much.

The technologist Charles Stross provides good insight into the matter. Simply, he writes, Jobs is betting the Apple farm that the future is not just mobile, but handheld or tablet in general:

Apple are trying desperately to force the growth of a new ecosystem — one that rivals the 26-year-old Macintosh environment — to maturity in five years flat. That’s the time scale in which they expect the cloud computing revolution to flatten the existing PC industry. Unless they can turn themselves into an entirely different kind of corporation by 2015 Apple is doomed to the same irrelevance as the rest of the PC industry — interchangable suppliers of commodity equipment assembled on a shoestring budget with negligable profit. [emphasis his]

While Stross believes wired broadband is generally too expensive to improve leaps and bounds, wireless broadband isn’t and will. With 4G just around the corner and hardware becoming increasingly commoditized, Stross looks five years out to predict that the industry will be mostly mobile and mostly in the cloud. Control that cloud, or control the apps being served from it and your company has a business model. Don’t and, well, you had a nice run while it lasted.

This is where the Apple and Adobe hand to hand combat begins. It’s a turf war over the application portion of a cloud ecosystem each wishes to control.

Which brings us back to Adobe, and a new campaign that fires back at Jobs’ contention that the company creates closed, proprietary software incompatible with the future internet.

From the BBC:

Adobe has launched its latest salvo in an ongoing dispute with Apple.

The co-founders of Adobe have published an open letter in which they say that Apple threatens to “undermine the next chapter of the web”.

The software firm has also started an adverting blitz in newspapers and on popular technology news sites.

Ads like the one I captured in the video above are appearing online at sites like Wired and Techcrunch. Offline, they’re appearing in the New York Times, Washington Post and Financial Times among others.

The fun though is in the Any Letter You Can Write We Can Write Better department. Adobe co-founders Chuck Geschke and John Warnock play on Jobs’ Thoughts on Flash to pen, Our Thoughts on Open Markets.

Apple, they write, is undermining “the next chapter of the Web” by keeping their app garden closed to third party development kits. Adobe, of course, creates just such kits with Flash and Flex.

We believe that consumers should be able to freely access their favorite content and applications, regardless of what computer they have, what browser they like, or what device suits their needs.

No company – no matter how big or how creative – should dictate what you can create, how you create it, or what you can experience on the web.

The issues here are many and the irony is that while both companies are closed and proprietary, each is trying to stake their claim to the open Internet that has brought us so far.

The opening salvos have been fired. We look forward to seeing the turf wars head next.

About Adobe Strikes Back

This article originally appeared on ScribeMedia.org.

Please visit the original to rant, rave or otherwise discuss.

Ant Boxing. TruShu via Creative Commons/Flickr.

Last week my Internets got caught in the crossfire of an online journalism spat.

Seems Sharon Waxman had enough of Michael Wolff. Specifically, Waxman, a former New York Times entertainment reporter and now editor of The Wrap is pissed that Wolff, a Vanity Fair columnist and founder of Newser.com, is “stealing” her content. She accuses Newser of “parasitism” and says the site ignores established online etiquette of clearly linking back to source material.

Wolff struck back with a douchebag stick.

In a belittling post titled, “I Can Say Anything You Can Say Shorter,” he writes that Waxman “is having indigestion because Newser shortens her stories [and] Newser readers don’t find a need to click the link under the BIG RED SOURCE BOX that would take them to her longer story.”

Who’s Stealing What

Looking to see how your content’s being used.

Try Attributor’s Fairshare. It helps track your content as it spreads on the Web.

The playground got heated after that. Salon’s Andrew Leonard wrote, “If the Web doesn’t kill journalism, Michael Wolff will” while Slate’s Jack Schafer simply asked, “Is Michael Wolff a Parasite?“

Neither seem to like Newser — or Wolff for that matter — but both generally accept that there is and always will be something like it in the online ecosystem. Simply, in any and every business bottom feeders may not necessarily break established rules and ethics but will bend them near 90 degrees.

And this is fine.

Aggregation is important. It fits well with the curatorial role of the traditional editor and those doing it well include the Atlantic with the AtlanticWire and Slate with The Slatest. Each employ different strategies but both do it fairly by transparently linking to source material. Tumblr’s built an entire platform based on curation.

To create or aggregate isn’t either/or but rather both/and. But the question is a distraction from the get-go. Except for a few cases, neither holds the key to the economic lock that the journalism finds itself in.

Traditional content may be king but its domain is an ever a shrinking empire. Instead, mobile, social and real-time applications rule the roost.

“I like to think of this as the golden triangle,” writes Fred Wilson. “You can build interesting businesses in each of these three sectors. The iPhone is the poster child of mobile. Facebook is the poster child of social. Twitter is the poster child of real-time.”

This Golden Triangle — or something quite like it — is what will lead journalism out of its doldrums. Publications that create meaningful applications that deliver core information, and more importantly, services based on that information will win reader time and loyalty.

That is the nut publications must crack.

Content is ubiquitous. Anyone who maintains an RSS Reader knows how quickly a thousand plus articles that will never be read pile up. Dust-ups over who reads what where become besides the point in this ecosystem because much as we slave over our wordsmithing, content unfortunately becomes secondary to delivery mechanisms and services that are built around it.

Instead, think about how your readers or viewers access your information anytime, anyplace and on any device; make sure the content delivered is more interesting than what comes through on an RSS feed; and figure out what value add services can be created with — or built on top of — the content based on the platform it is being viewed on.

Waxman versus Wolff may be fun distraction, but it’s nothing more than that.

About

To Create or Aggregate, That’s Not the Question originally appeared on ScribeMedia.org.

Please visit the original to rant, rave or otherwise discuss.

The wired and wireless future of media and infotainment. tsevis via Creative Commons/Flickr.

The Internet became a blanket of white noise as we hit Saturday’s D-Day for the official iPad release.

Articles about people standing in line, videos of people opening the packaging, photos of smiley, happy people with their Jesus-ware safely in hand. And then half baked reviews of just about any app a writer could get his or her hands on. Forget it, people didn’t even need to have the iPad in hand, or have used the application, any string of words that won a few extra page views would do.

Live blogging the first day of sales? Really? The New York Times and Reuters joined by the likes Gizmodo, CNET, paidContent, Tech Crunch and TUAW.

8:59 — man pressed against Apple store door.
9:00 — doors open
9:02 — man holds Jesus pad in hands, squeals like a little boy getting cupcakes for breakfast

“I think that the press has been all over the iPad because Apple puts on a good show, and because everyone in journalism-land is looking for a daddy figure who’ll promise them that their audience will go back to paying for their stuff,” writes Cory Doctorow. We’ll get back to him in a minute.

Suffice to say though, the reporting’s mostly monotonous — and embarrassing for journalists who should know better — but lurking around the edges are a few thoughtful ideas about what the device actually means, and what the iPad and future products like it might signify for the computing and media world of the near future.

Copyright

Marc Aronson writes in the New York Times that the promise of truly multimedia, immersive nonfiction won’t make its way to devices such as these unless the copyright regime changes.

In order for electronic books to live up to their billing, we have to fix a system that is broken: getting permission to use copyrighted material in new work. Either we change the way we deal with copyrights — or works of nonfiction in a multimedia world will become ever more dull and disappointing.

The hope of nonfiction is to connect readers to something outside the book: the past, a discovery, a social issue. To do this, authors need to draw on pre-existing words and images.

Unless we nonfiction writers are lucky and hit a public-domain mother lode, we have to pay for the right to use just about anything — from a single line of a song to any part of a poem; from the vast archives of the world’s art (now managed by gimlet-eyed venture capitalists) to the historical images that serve as profit centers for museums and academic libraries.

The amount we pay depends on where and how the material is used. In fact, the very first question a rights holder asks is “What are you going to do with my baby?” Which countries do you plan to sell in? What languages? Over what period of time? How large will the image be in your book?

As the publishing world latches onto the iPad as a possible industry savior — or at least a final bit of light in an otherwise gloomy economic reality — the urge will be to further restrict copyright.

Doing so will put most content out of reach of most multimedia authors.

“Given that permission costs are already out of control for old-fashioned print, it’s fair to expect that they will rise even higher with e-books,” writes Aronson. “After all, digital books will be in print forever (we assume); they can be downloaded, copied, shared and maybe even translated.”

Aronson’s solution is somewhat of a radio model. Pay the copyright holder some royalty per play.

Better would be to readdress our fair use laws and how best to shape them for a truly digital, multimedia age. Our current regime is not built for 21st century mashup culture. Instead, its built to protect 19th and 20th century business models.

Computer as Appliance

As I mentioned above, we’d get back to Doctorow. He wrote Friday about why he wouldn’t buy an iPad. More importantly, he wrote about why you shouldn’t either.

The crux of the matter — as many have pointed out — is that the iPad is for consuming rather than creating. The history of the open Internet, and the reason it’s been so disruptive is because anyone could create anything, stick it online and potentially shape an industry or create entirely new ones. Think YouTube, FaceBook, Twitter, Amazon, Blogs, eBay, Netflix and any other online service or application that’s upended the status quo over the last 10-15 years.

The iPad flips all this on its head and creates a walled garden appliance. Apple, not the iPad owner, has the final say about what applications can be created for and therefore used on it.

Imagine where the Web — or personal computing as whole — might be if anyone who wanted to create new content, try a new business model, create a new application or do anything of creative interest to him or her had to apply to some governing body in order to do so.

That is the digital dynamic the Apple has created with the iPad.

As Doctorow writes:

I’ve spent ten years now on Boing Boing, finding cool things that people have done and made and writing about them. Most of the really exciting stuff hasn’t come from big corporations with enormous budgets, it’s come from experimentalist amateurs. These people were able to make stuff and put it in the public’s eye and even sell it without having to submit to the whims of a single company that had declared itself gatekeeper for your phone and other personal technology…

…As an adult, I want to be able to choose whose stuff I buy and whom I trust to evaluate that stuff. I don’t want my universe of apps constrained to the stuff that the Cupertino Politburo decides to allow for its platform. And as a copyright holder and creator, I don’t want a single, Wal-Mart-like channel that controls access to my audience and dictates what is and is not acceptable material for me to create.

Jonathan Zittrain wrote a book a few years ago called The Future of the Internet and How to Stop it. In it he dealt specifically with turning the open Internet into closed, proprietary systems. Appliances like the iPad would lead that way. Pick it up and give it a read when you have the chance.

So those are the two important stories that our journalists should be talking about.

Unfortunately, they’re getting drowned out in OMG fanboy squealing about yet another app.

About OMFG, Another iPad Story

This article originally appeared on ScribeMedia.org.

Please visit the original to rant, rave or otherwise discuss.

SebaKito via Creative Commons/Flickr.

Why is HTML5 Important

Pete Spande, Federated Media.

With preorders for Apple’s iPad rolling into the company’s coffers the future of HTML5 and its native support of video is just about here.

Apple famously does not support Adobe’s Flash video technology on the iPhone or Touch, and will continue to ignore the Web’s most popular video delivery mechanism when people get their hands on the iPad in April.

The background for all this is long and colorful. It includes barbs traded between Apple and Adobe with Steve Jobs first calling Flash software “buggy” and later going on to say that Adobe itself is simply lazy.

Adobe, of course, quickly shot back with Flash marketing manager Adrian Ludwig writing on the company’s blog, “It looks like Apple is continuing to impose restrictions on their devices that limit both content publishers and consumers… without Flash support, iPad users will not be able to access the full range of web content, including over 70% of games and 75% of video on the web.”

This sniping occurred during the iPad launch and soon developers and technologists were sparring over — and dissecting — which side is right. There are some delicious ironies of course. Notably that Apple, which is famous for creating hyper-closed, proprietary systems, is pushing for the open platform that HTML5 promises: a platform where no one needs plugins or other proprietary technologies in order to view or interact with content.

HTML What?

For a somewhat technical grasp of the what HTML5 is, try this page from Dive Into HTML5, a book in progress by Mark Pilgrim.

While HTML5 is about much more than video, the native browser support it promises for Web video will have tremendous repercussions for publishers and consumers in the immediate future. Think VHS versus Betamax, BluRay versus HD DVD. Among others, Dailymotion and Vimeo have released HTML5 players and support. So too has YouTube, the site most responsible for turning Flash into the defacto Web video delivery platform in the first place.

Blip.tv is also working on an HTML5 solution.

“We have an HTML5 player in development that should be out soon,” says Justin Day, Blip Co-Founder and CTO. “Right now it’s more of an experiment than anything else. Because we don’t have integrations for advertising or for analytics it’s not all that useful. It does work pretty well with the iPhone/iPad though.”

The inability to serve ads in a world where publishers need cash flow immediately is, of course, a major impediment for adoption.

This May we’re doing a deep dive on HTML5 at Streaming Media East. Join us if you can.

“The biggest reason ad serving would be difficult would be the cross-domain restrictions that exist on the browser,” Day explains. “Flash can make calls on remote ad servers more easily than Javascript can. Not to say that it’s not possible, just more difficult.”

Another reason for slow adoption is the nature of video itself. When preparing video for Web delivery, producers need to decide which codec to compress them with. Leading varieties include h.264 (often used with Blip, Brightcove and YouTube among others), VP8 which was created by recent Google acquisition On2 Technologies, and Ogg Theora, a freely distributed (as in no licensing fees) video compression format.

That’s all well, good and bit confusing in and of itself. The rub though is that our leading HTML5 browsers don’t all support the same codecs. For example, Google’s Chrome and Apple’s Safari support and can therefore play back h.264. Opera, Chrome and Firefox — true to its open source ethos — support Ogg Theora.

So HTML5 video producers need to decide which codec to use in order to target different browsers and platforms. This isn’t necessarily an easy task and some providers are keeping mum about how they’ll handle it.

“Support for HTML5 is just a TestTube experiment and a starting point,” YouTube spokesperson Chris Dale vaguely explains. “We can’t comment specifically on what codecs we intend to support, but we’re open to supporting more of them over time.”

Meanwhile, everyone is waiting to see what Microsoft’s Internet Explorer might support. Since it controls much of the browser market, the company’s decision could be a game changer.

“Microsoft has not yet officially announced how they will support the video tag,” says Michael Dale, Senior Developer at Kaltura, the open source video platform. “But their support is likely and they have been participating in the HTML5 working group.”

Interesting Thoughts

John Gruber of Daring Fireball recently wrote, “I’ve been writing about this saga for two years. My fascination with the subject is fueled by the fact that it’s so polarizing, and that it encompasses both technical and political issues.”

Morgan Adams, an interactive Flash developer, thinks the whole debate is besides the point because Flash interface metaphors don’t make sense on touch screen devices anyway.

Dale believes HTML5 makes it easier to integrate web technologies with video and the company has been rolling out interesting HTML5 solutions through its work with Wikipedia. An example, he explains, is “using HTML text in subtitles so people can add links to Wikipedia articles when using closed captions in Wikipedia.”

Beyond that, the company is making an HTML5 Video library available for Web developers. Part of the solution is to push forward with HTML5 support while gracefully falling back to Flash when users without the proper browser hit a page set for video delivery.

“This lets you take advantage of HTML5 video today with existing browsers,” says Dale, “without having to worry about how playback is supported across the underlining platform or browser.”

Confused yet? There’s no reason you shouldn’t be.

With the release of the iPad and various articles asking whether the device will be publishing’s savior, much depends on the future of video delivery. Video, after all, has become the Web’s most lucrative ad delivery format and publishers are increasingly trying to create more of it for their audiences.

“While HTML5’s video tag offers promise that there might be a single unified standard for video playback, early signs point to more, not less, complexity in the years ahead,” says Dave Wegman, CTO and Co-Founder of Twistage, a white-label video delivery network. “The straightforward nature of the video tag itself belies the fact that it is implemented and supported differently in each of the major browsers.”

As demand for HTML5-based services grow, he says, publishers and consumers shouldn’t have to concern themselves with which browsers support which codecs.

“Put simply, he says, “the video tag is an implementation detail.”

If only, for publishers and consumers, it were so easy.

About What Does HTML5 Mean to Video Publishers?

This article originally appeared on ScribeMedia.org.

Please visit the original to rant, rave or otherwise discuss.

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Pawns via Creative Commons/Flickr.

“It’s overwhelming, fantastic, and like all technological marvels,” says Damon Horowitz, “just a little bit amusing.”

Just a week ago Google bought Horowitz’s social search start-up Aardvark for a reported $50 million. The price is one the company co-founder will neither confirm nor deny. What he will allude to though is that now that they’re under the Google umbrella, Aardvark-style “social search” will attempt to integrate across the company’s ever expanding offerings.

If you’re familiar with Aardvark let your imagination run for a moment and consider how the platform can turbo-boost Google Buzz which was also, and perhaps serendipitously, released last week.

If you’re not familiar with Aardvark — and since it only launched a public beta last October, there’s no reason you should be — a basic primer runs something like this.

Aarvark is a free service that lets those of us puzzled about life’s quandaries ask our social network for answers to our questions. These range from the mundane, “Anyone have a tailor they trust to alter suits near the 1 line in Manhattan?,” to the possibly profound, “How would you figure out how many cats there are in the US that are named Gary?”

More often than not, a response comes within a few minutes.

“We think of Aardvark like a contact who should be available everywhere, through your existing communication channels,” says Horowitz.

Limits of AI

Damon Horowitz explains Artificial Intelligence’s inherent limits and how humans and machines can play nice together — TEDx SoMa 2010.

Questions can be asked through Vark.com, mobile apps, email or instant messenger and the beauty of it all is that responses are contextual. Answers are, after all, coming from people within your social graph. The benefit of social search is the human touch, real responses from real people.

“Aardvark is great when you want to get an answer from a person right away, and you don’t want to try to hunt through a bunch of web pages yourself,” Horowitz explains. “Often we don’t want static information from the web, but a personal answer to our specific question — we want someone to hear our question, understand our context, and share their relevant experience.”

By connecting into existing social circles such as those we have via Facebook and Twitter, Aardvark scans our social graph for those who have similar backgrounds, sensibilities and interests. Send Aardvark a question and the service surveys our first circle of connections and then friends of friends.

Like Twitter, Aardvark should be thought of as a utility rather than a Web application or destination site. Whether it’s Aardvark that succeeds or another company like it, giving people the ability to leverage their social graph to intelligently ask and answer questions across any connected device will increasingly become part of the Internet’s plumbing.

Aardvark’s leveraging of the vast amounts of social, geographic and overall data sloshing through the Web and reconstructing it into a useful utility demonstrates an overall shift in the Internet’s evolution. There’s even a name being promoted to describe the trend. It’s called the Synaptic Web.

In His Own Words

Khris Loux explains the Synaptic Web at the Defrag Conference 2009.

“The Synaptic Web is a set of observations about how the Web is forming,” says Khris Loux, CEO of Echo and proponent of the concept. “As the speed, flexibility and complexity of connections on the Web increase exponentially, the Internet is increasingly beginning to resemble a biological analog; the human brain.”

The metaphor here is that all our information and actions are pings firing across the Internet much like synapses firing in a brain. A single ping doesn’t do much in an of itself but multiply to scale with the billions and billions of social actions people are committing online and you have the beginnings of a pulsating, thinking ecosystem.

Microsoft’s Photosynth is a Synaptic Web example, says Loux. By taking the discrete photos taken by the crowd, combining them with geographic data and mixing them through — and analyzing them with — very smart code, whole new images and ways to explore spaces are created.

“Photosynth,” Loux explains, “is clear proof that patterns exist and meaning can be discerned without the need for active coordination between users.”

What he’s talking about is a meta-web, a place that isn’t so much sites and HTML pages but instead human connections augmented by the machine.

Horowitz has worked on these problems for a while now. His background is in Artificial Intelligence and philosophy. What he concluded though is that trying to get the machine to think and act like a human is a bit of a fool’s errand. Instead, we should be harnessing the machine to increase connections between people and leverage human intelligence.

“Machines do well at processing large quantities of information — they are great at fast indexing, numerical analysis, pattern recognition and such,” says Horowitz. “Humans deal well with context — they are naturally adept at understanding other humans, at sharing subjective experiences, thinking through ideas, and helping each other out.

When the Web was born some twenty years ago, it was a publishing mechanism. If you learned some HTML you could put up a page and broadcast your thoughts. Everyone became a publisher.

When the Web was reborn as Web 2.0, everyone became a commentator. The read/write Web has been a participatory experience. You write, I comment. You post, we share.

Facebook built an empire on this read/write model and while it and Twitter are now part of social media vernacular, Aardvark — despite its aquisition by Google — is still under the radar.

This is a shame. Where else can you get answers to life’s questions in under five minutes, a claim Aardvark legitimately makes.

“I know this ‘we sit on top of all your other social information online’ approach isn’t yet a fully established paradigm,” Horowitz says, “but I think everything is moving that way.”

The change is tectonic and while tectonic change comes imperceptibly at first, Internet time moves quite fast. Five years ago seems ancient in the Web world, just as five years from now 2010 will appear quite quaint.

This article originally appeared on ScribeMedia.org.

Please visit the original to rant, rave or otherwise discuss.

Before an earthquake brought Haiti to international consciousness, Justin Brandon, Brian McElroy and Dan Schnorr traveled the impoverished nation for five weeks and made Road to Fondwa.

The 37 minute documentary above brings us from Port Au Prince to the rural hillsides, and explores the difficulties communities face — pre-earthquake — just to survive. No story can be complete, and the situation in Haiti has been, unfortunately, forever complex.

As Schnorr acknowledges in his director’s statement:

Though film offers a powerful medium through which to begin exploring rural Haiti, no collection of clips could ever do full justice to the intricate obstacles faced by the people living there, or to the exciting measures being undertaken in villages like Fondwa to overcome them.

Acknowledging this, we intend for The Road to Fondwa to serve not as a conclusion, but rather as an introduction.

At this point in time, the introduction is the need for resources, advocacy and continued helping hands.

Earlier today, Brandon, a Google alum, wrote to his former colleagues that he would stream the entire film and dedicate his time now to raising funds for relief efforts. The film’s site links to Partners in Health’s Stand with Haiti Campaign. We will too.

In our ADD age, we only hope that our very human reflex to help build, rebuild and continually improve Haiti doesn’t fade when the next shiny object passes our media screens. That one of the world’s poorest nations lies just off our coast is a continued embarrassment.

Those reading this elsewhere (such as via RSS or Facebook) can watch the video here.

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Censorship – the|G| via Creative Commons/Flickr.

Good news for human rights watchers on the Google front. The company announced today that they will no longer censor search results on their Chinese Language search engine, Google.cn.

“We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all,” writes David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer, on the company’s blog. “We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

Google, like other tech giants such as Microsoft and Yahoo!, has come under heavy criticism over the past few years for bending to Chinese demands to censor specific content (eg., anything to do with Tiananmen Square, Tibet and Falun Gong come to mind). For a company with a “Do no evil” motto, Google was particularly sensitive to the criticism.

Google.cn was launched four years ago and came under immediate attack by human rights activists for censoring results. Google, like others, had previously responded that it was trying to operate within Chinese law.

The company’s change of position stems from a sustained December cyber attack in which hackers attempted to glean information on Chinese dissidents and their US and European advocates.

“These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered, combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web,” writes Drummond, “have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China.”

Around the Web

• Google’s Statement
• Global Voices translates Chinese netizen reaction:
  

  The sin of facebook is that it helps people know who they wanna know. The sin of Twitter is that it allows people to say what they wanna say. The sin of Google is that it lets people find what they wanna find, and Youtube let us see what we wanna see. So, they are all kicked away.

• James Fallows, writing in the Atlantic:
  

  I have long argued that China’s relations with the U.S. are overall positive for both sides (here and here); that the Chinese government is doing more than outsiders think to deal with vexing problems like the environment (here); and more generally that China is a still-poor, highly-diverse and individualistic country whose development need not “threaten” anyone else and should be encouraged. I still believe all of that.

  But there are also reasons to think that a difficult and unpleasant stage of China-U.S. and China-world relations lies ahead… And if a major U.S. company — indeed, Google has been ranked the #1 brand in the world — has concluded that, in effect, it must break diplomatic relations with China because its policies are too repressive and intrusive to make peace with, that is a significant judgment.

• Kim Mai-Cultler via Venture Beat, says Google’s self-censorship was never all that:
  

  The Open Net Initiative has a great tool for comparing Google China’s results with the main site. Or you can check http://www.google.cn and do an image search for ‘Tiananmen Square Protests‘ The results pull up pictures of people who were attacked and the famous ‘Tank Man.’ ‘Tiananmen’ alone brings up highly censored results. If your results are affected, this will show up at the bottom. It translates to “According to local laws, regulations and policies, some search results are not shown.”

• Wired (via Reuters) includes a timeline from 2000 to the present of key developments in Google’s bumpy foray into China.
• Andrew Peaple, via the Wall Street Journal, writes that even though they’re number two in Chinese search, Google’s giving up an enviable stake and position:
  

  As its founders said when the company went public, “we may do things that we believe have a positive impact on the world, even if the near-term financial returns are not obvious.”

  But it makes sense to live up to at least some of its IPO promises—and not just from an ethical perspective. Google, which relies on consumer trust given the huge amount of personal information it stores, needs to show it guards the data jealously and uses it judiciously. Also, pushing for the free dissemination of information everywhere is hard to square with the prospects of ever greater curbs in China.

  Overall, the move is a depressing sign for foreign businesses in China.

• China Digital Times translates Chinese language Twitter response to the news.
• Kit Eaton, via Fast Company, wonders whether Google’s move worsened China’s Human Rights situation.
  

  [W]hether or not you approve of Google, while it was operating in China it was pushing for relaxations of censorship–using its size as a global giant to try to lever open some cracks in the censorship wall. And if it leaves the country, then what’s to stop the Chinese government running roughshod over any other players in the Internet tech game–likely far smaller ones than mighty Google–and forcing them to comply?

• And now, of course, live reaction below via Twitter:

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