George C. Dimitriou

Five years is eons in Internet time, and a lot has changed in the blogosphere since 2005. Sites have been born, sites have died, sites have grown up and others have faded away. Entirely new blogging formats have been created and business empires have been built on the foundations of humble blog beginnings.

The blogosphere of 2010 is powered in many ways by social media, something that barely existed five years ago, and was likely an afterthought to most hobbyist bloggers of the day.

How did we get from there to here?

Read the full story here.

How many books have ever been published in all of modern history? According to Google’s advanced algorithms, the answer is nearly 130 million books, or 129.864.880 to be exact.

In a detailed blog post, software engineer Leonid Taycher outlined just how complex counting books actually can become. The first step is defining exactly what a book is. The company decided to discount anything that wasn’t an idealized bound volume:

“One definition of a book we find helpful inside Google when handling book metadata is a ‘tome,’ an idealized bound volume. A tome can have millions of copies or can exist in just one or two copies (such as an obscure master’s thesis languishing in a university library).”

  In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the Central Intelligence Agency and Google Ventures are investing in Recorded Future, a company whose technology monitors the Web in real time and develops predictions of future events from the content, according to reports.

Recorded Future scours tens of thousands of Web sites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still to come. The company’s “temporal analytics engine” goes beyond search by “looking at the ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events.”

When the data reveals a possible future event, Recorded Future can — so it claims — trace the online “momentum” for the event and predict where and when it might actually happen.

Thirty nine years ago, President Nixon picked up his Sunday New York Times on June 13, 1971 to see the wedding picture of his daughter Tricia and himself in the Rose Garden, leading the left-hand side of the front page.  Next to that picture, on the right, was the headline over Neil Sheehan’s first story on the Pentagon Papers, “Vietnam Archive: Pentagon Study Traces 3 Decades of Growing U.S. Involvement”  (See documentation from the Pentagon Papers case ). 
 And Wikileaks today using modern techniques:

NYTimes: A six-year archive of classified military documents made public on Sunday offers an unvarnished, ground-level picture of the war in Afghanistan that is in many respects more grim than the official portrayal.
The secret documents, released on the Internet by an organization called WikiLeaks, are a daily diary of an American-led force often starved for resources and attention as it struggled against an insurgency that grew larger, better coordinated and more deadly each year.
The New York Times, the British newspaper «The Guardian» and the German magazine «Der Spiegel» were given access to the voluminous records several weeks ago on the condition that they not report on the material before Sunday.
The documents — some 92,000 reports spanning parts of two administrations from January 2004 through December 2009 — illustrate in mosaic detail why, after the United States has spent almost $300 billion on the war in Afghanistan, the Taliban are stronger than at any time since 2001. …

In May and June 2010, the Oriella PR Network carried out a survey of over 750 journalists in 15 countries to see how digital media has changed the nature of news-gathering.

This third survey uncovers growing uncertainty over the future of print titles and increased interest in paid-content models. Over 50% of the journalists surveyed believe their titles will shift to online-only.

“Concerns about the viability of journalist’s traditional media channels (print, radio or television) have intensified,” the report reads.

The Internet is poised to overtake newspapers as the second-largest U.S. advertising medium by revenue behind television, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Global Entertainment and Media Outlook for 2010 to 2014.

The online ad business, excluding mobile ads, is set to expand to $34.4 billion in 2014 from $24.2 billion in 2009, according to the report.

The mobile advertising market also is poised for growth as wireless networks are upgraded and more Internet-enabled smart phones hit the market. Mobile advertising in North America is predicted to quadruple from $414 million in 2009 to $1.6 billion in 2014, according to the report.

Newspapers, meanwhile, continue to suffer from a decline in advertising revenue. According to numbers released by the Newspaper Association of America earlier this year, print advertising revenue dropped 28.6 percent in 2009 to $24.82 billion. The PwC report estimates that print advertising in newspapers will hit $22.3 billion by 2014.

Google, like other technology and telecommunications companies, regularly receives demands from government agencies to remove content from their services.
To give people information about the requests for user data or content removal they receive from government agencies around the world, Google launched a new Government Requests tool.