Everybody likes earning badges. It's what built
scouting and what drives the
Khan Academy. Now Google has introduced "
Google News Badges". Is this a benevolent attempt to get more people to be aware of what's going on in the world, or is something deeper and/or darker going on? It's an unusual move, whatever the reason.
posted by strangeguitars
on Jul 14, 2011 -
41 comments
Getting to advanced reading level content. As pioneered by Adrien Chen of Gawker, by far the most interesting application of the tool is its ability to rate the overall level of material on any given site, simply by dropping site: [domain.com] into the search box.
posted by Muirwylde
on Dec 21, 2010 -
52 comments
How to Save the News. "Everyone knows that Google is killing the news business. Few people know how hard Google is trying to bring it back to life, or why the company now considers journalism’s survival crucial to its own prospects."
posted by chunking express
on Jun 1, 2010 -
64 comments
Google CEO Eric Schmidt gave a
talk at the Newspaper Association of America convention on April 9, 2009 in San Diego. He speaks about how Google and newspapers might co-exist in the future.
[more inside]
posted by reenum
on Oct 4, 2009 -
78 comments
NPR Backstory is an automated Twitter feed providing helpful links to news items from the past 14 years that might be relevant to current events. For example, when masses of people started googling
medical information after a news item about 200,000 patients' medical histories being accidentally exposed, NPRbackstory linked to an April 2008 analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of storing patient records online.
[more inside]
posted by ardgedee
on May 14, 2009 -
7 comments
Microsoft buys stake in Facebook. Microsoft has paid $240m (£117m) for a 1.6% stake in
Facebook that values the hugely popular social networking site at $15bn (£7.3bn). Facebook spurned an offer from Microsoft's rival
Google, which was also keen to invest the site.
Microsoft will also sell
internet ads for Facebook outside the United States as part of the deal that took several weeks of negotiating.
Mark Zuckerberg started the online social networking site in his Harvard University dorm room less than four years ago.
[more inside]
posted by Tommy Gnosis
on Oct 25, 2007 -
114 comments
Google Checkout is officially unveiled today; the latest service to join the Google
arsenal in their race to control the entire www. It has been suggested
in the news that the Google payment service was also a big factor in the recent Yahoo and eBay partnership, since eBay's Paypal service might finally have some real competition. More info on the service
here.
posted by p3t3
on Jun 29, 2006 -
32 comments
Google's News has
launched as a new tab on their other search interfaces with a heavy redesign, though it still carries a "beta" label. The front page changes every few minutes based on some hidden popularity algorithm, as do the sub-pages. Featuring a stark ad-free design that looks quite a bit more attractive than CNN.com or any other major news site, perhaps robot-collected news is the wave of the future.
posted by mathowie
on Sep 23, 2002 -
40 comments
