"On Wednesday, [Steve Ballmer], Microsoft’s chief executive, will unveil a novel take on a slate-type computer during his evening keynote at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas."
Robert Andrews: "yanking news from Google searches would pose this challenging question: do web users value news so highly that they would switch search providers? The answer, in sad truth, may turn out to be 'no'."
"Microsoft has had discussions with News Corp over a plan that would involve the media company’s being paid to “de-index” its news websites from Google, setting the scene for a search engine battle that could offer a ray of light to the newspaper industry. ...[The] Financial Times has learnt that Microsoft has also approached other big online publishers [besides News Corp] to persuade them to remove their sites from Google’s search engine."
"[The] Financial Times has learnt that Microsoft has also approached other big online publishers [besides News Corp] to persuade them to remove their sites from Google’s search engine."
"Microsoft plans to launch an assault on Google’s flank, by cosying up to major content providers, especially newspapers, that feel hard done by Google News. It plans to use Bing as a way to entice them out of the Google eco-system, into one where, increasingly, the content of major newspapers could well be found more often on Bing than on Google. ... Our sources say Microsoft has pledged to help fund research and engineering into ACAP to the tune of about will put £100,000. This is the more granular version of the robots.txt protocol which has been proposed by publishers to enable them to have a more sophisticated response to search engine crawlers. "
Unlike Google's Fast Flip thing, this is actually a radical thought about how future news sites might work: "Microsoft’s response [to the NAA] ... included an intriguing screen shot of an unreleased product it calls the 'Next-Generation Newspaper'... the concept bears a close resemblance to TweetDeck"
"Tom Corddry, who was part of the team that created Encarta, talks about designing the first digital encyclopedia, the surprising backroom negotiations that surrounded its launch, and plastic that smells like leather."
John Naughton: "The story of Britannica is now a business-school case study in how rapidly competitors can emerge - apparently from nowhere - in a digital world. The First Rule of Business nowadays is that somewhere out there someone (and not just Google) is incubating a business plan that is based on eating your lunch."
Martin Belam: "We are used to hearing that search engines are one of the primary routes that people find news on the net, but I've just been having a scout around the three major search engines as news of the terrorist attack in Mumbai unfolds, and I have to say that they are not performing very well."
"In an exclusive interview with CIO magazine, TMG CIO Paul Cheesbrough told us why [he's shifting 1400 Telegraph staff from Microsoft Office to Google Apps]."
Steve Balmer: "there will be no media consumption left in 10 years that is not delivered over an IP network. There will be no newspapers, no magazines that are delivered in paper form."
"BLEWS uses political blogs to categorize news stories according to their reception in the conservative and liberal blogospheres. It visualizes information about which stories are linked to from conservative and liberal blogs, and it indicates the level o
"AT&T Inc., News Corp. (owner of Dow Jones & Co., publisher of The Wall Street Journal) and Time Warner Inc. -- all considered candidates to do such a deal -- aren't preparing rival bids for Yahoo, according to people familiar with the matter."
"a spokesman for the News Corporation said Sunday night that it was not preparing a bid, and other frequently named prospective suitors like Time Warner, AT&T and Comcast have not begun work on offers, people close to them said."