Google News
A New York Times story on Google Inc.'s new for-profit philanthropy wing makes note of the man they've hired to direct it:
On the actual idea of for-profit philanthropic activity, my knee-jerk response is that it makes sense, considering how everything's conglomerating across industries now. It's a broader analog to a publisher supporting relatively low-profit parts of a catalog with sales from a higher-profit area. I don't think this should be called philanthropy, though.
All this is better than other recent Google news. Several weeks back they were sending letters to media outlets (scroll halfway down) demanding that writers not use the word "google" as a generic verb. My theory is they're not actually overreacting to the actual trademark issue, but rather trying to browbeat their way to more overt company references in news articles. Come on: just let the good people verb your fake word.
And "google" is a great fake word, hovering as it does between "goggle" and "googol." Especially good, I think, since the word googol itself still feels like a fake word.
Meanwhile, Josh Marshall relates the news that Google Inc. has hired a particularly sleazy batch of Republican lobbyists to promote their cause in DC. I have no real interest in poking any deeper into sausage-factory lobbyist politics beyond that: just, duly noted.
Dr. Brilliant, a 61-year-old physician and public health expert, has studied under a Hindu guru in a monastery at the foothills of the Himalayas and worked as a Silicon Valley entrepreneur.Okay, cynical caveat: it's a business-page puff piece, the whole thing's orchestrated to make a splash, etc. Still, you have to admit that's an awesome sentence. Hopefully they fact-checked this guy's resume.
On the actual idea of for-profit philanthropic activity, my knee-jerk response is that it makes sense, considering how everything's conglomerating across industries now. It's a broader analog to a publisher supporting relatively low-profit parts of a catalog with sales from a higher-profit area. I don't think this should be called philanthropy, though.
All this is better than other recent Google news. Several weeks back they were sending letters to media outlets (scroll halfway down) demanding that writers not use the word "google" as a generic verb. My theory is they're not actually overreacting to the actual trademark issue, but rather trying to browbeat their way to more overt company references in news articles. Come on: just let the good people verb your fake word.
And "google" is a great fake word, hovering as it does between "goggle" and "googol." Especially good, I think, since the word googol itself still feels like a fake word.
Meanwhile, Josh Marshall relates the news that Google Inc. has hired a particularly sleazy batch of Republican lobbyists to promote their cause in DC. I have no real interest in poking any deeper into sausage-factory lobbyist politics beyond that: just, duly noted.
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