If you are going to troll the Internet for images of or information about someone’s genitals, you might want to do it from someplace other than the university where you work... especially when the proprietor of the site where you land is a big fan of your colleague’s writing.

I’m not sure I’ve ever been more offended by a Google search.

It's understandable that Newton is, at first blush, upset, but are there really guys (or lesbians) out there who think they can just call up pictures of some woman's cooch on demand? That implies, first, an unusually specific type of physical lust. Not just for a naked body, or chest, or for a backside, but for the vag specifically.

But, fine, whatever, there are people out there with all sorts of kinks. But do any of them really have such a bold faith in the power of the internet — a network that any self-respecting perv knows like the palm of his hand — that they think they can just type in someone's name + "pussy" and actually get a picture of exactly that?

Alternate theory: Maybe the offense-giving prof was simply looking for a memorable post in which the lady writer's name was mentioned, for some reason, along with the word "pussy," which is, as keywords go, reasonably rare and especially memorable. The woman writer might have, for example, used a juicy (sorry) quote involving the term in a high-profile piece of writing.

Or maybe not! Perhaps the search was unambiguously offensive. Only Newton has all the clues, and she's being discreet. But everyone else should be installing Google Analytics on their Tumblrs or whatever, because they'll then probably have fuel for at least one outraged Google-search-terms post by Labor Day.

[Maud Newton]

(Photo via MaudNewton.com)

In the trial of a pornographic Web site operator, the defense plans to show that residents of Pensacola are more likely to use Google to search for terms like “orgy” than for “apple pie” or “watermelon.”

Well yeah, the people into "apple pies" and "watermelons" are the real sickos. An orgy is harmless family fun compared to that shit.

The whole thing really makes you think, though, because the ACLU is all "yes we shouldn't throw pornographers in jail" but also "oh wait you're giving up search data to subpoenas should we be concerned?" Thankfully the tactic won't work anyway. In a federal obscenity case earlier this month, the defense proved conclusively that porn is more popular than college football but the pornographer was convicted on all counts.

"A search was made on Google.com. You search by key words. There were six words. 'How to kill with a knife'," forensic computer expert and police officer Lawrence James testified at Neil Entwistle's double-murder trial.

Entwistle, 29, from Worksop in the East Midlands, has pleaded not guilty to murdering his wife Rachel, 27, and their nine-month-old daughter Lillian at their Massachusetts home in the United States two years ago using his father-in-law's gun.

He's obviously innocent, what with the knife/ gun discrepancy.

Seriously though, don't do the Google part, or the murder part. Come on, man.

[Breitbart]

Without providing specifics about how it might be accomplished, Schmidt said DoubleClick's system for serving up online display ads could generate "significant" revenue online for newspapers.

Still, he acknowledged the boost probably won't be enough to restore the hefty profit margins that newspaper publishers historically have enjoyed from print advertising.

It's sad to see the people who killed print have these regrets so publicly. They probably wake up in a cold sweat after terrifying dreams of bloody broadsheets calling their names—"you killllled meeee!" But seriously, it's too late, Eric. Not only is this ad thing a slap in the face, but Google has a nasty habit of aggregating and indexing lots and lots of newspaper content without paying anyone. So give it up and embrace your role! You are become death, destroyer of print! You made $16.6 billion in revenue last year!

At least Craig bought the newspaper industry a little going-away present. This empty talk is just sad.

Google CEO: "Moral Imperative" To Help Newspapers [HuffPo]

As a private community, North Oaks officials told the paper, they had to enforce the town's no trespassing laws. The common people with their public streets are at the mercy of public law, which does not prohibit photographing houses from the street.

Google removes houses from public view when the residents ask. Still, according to a spokesperson this is the first instance a town has asked to be removed from Street View. What if an entire city asked the same?

Ladies and gentlemen, various Silicon Valley millionaires present, The Seastanding Institue, "an organization dedicated to creating experimental ocean communities 'with diverse social, political, and legal systems.'" In other words, a project funded in part by PayPal founder Peter Thiel to create a libertarian utopia made of "vast clumps" of seafaring homesteads in international waters. And, of course, they've got a 300-page manifesto. They're not nuts, of course! Not like all those other people who want to start Utopian ocean micronations!

The brains behind the project are Google engineer Patri Friedman and former Sun Microsystems programmer Wayne Gamlich. The chairman of their "institute" is with Clarium Capital Management, a multibillion-dollar hedge fund. ("There's a history of a lot of crazy people trying this sort of thing, and the idea is to do it in a way that's not crazy," he says. Good luck!)

They plan to build "scaled-down" oil rigs called "spar platforms," only with houses on top instead of oil stuff. It's basically a big concrete tube with ballasts on the bottom. Once they build many of the spar platforms, with all their private money, they will have a lawless libertarian utopia ruled by enlightened self-interest, and money. They will support themselves with "aquaculture or tourism," which means fishing, probably?

We just need to quote a block of this now because it's too blindly stupid to summarize:

"Government is an industry with a really high barrier to entry," [Friedman] said. "You basically need to win an election or a revolution to try a new one. That's a ridiculous barrier to entry. And it's got enormous customer lock-in. People complain about their cellphone plans that are like two years, but think of the effort that it takes to change your citizenship."

Friedman estimates that it would cost a few hundred million dollars to build a seastead for a few thousand people. With costs that low, Friedman can see constellations of cities springing up, giving people a variety of governmental choices. If misguided policies arose, citizens could simply motor to a new nation.

"You can change your government without having to leave your house," he said.

Long story short, Peter Theil will give you half-a-million dollars for any batshit scheme you come up with. Let's all try it! I am going to build a giant Libertarian cloud city. The king and queen will be clones of Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand I've been working on. Also, it will have lasers, and talking monkey sidekicks for everyone.

Peter Thiel Makes Down Payment on Libertarian Ocean Colonies [Wired]

• In another Google blooper, an Australian man falls off bicycle
• A drug deal caught from every angle

[via C/Net]

October 2006: The Inevitable Hillary Avalanche Begins Rolling Down the Mountain of Victory Former Virginia Governor and, for a brief time, the Democratic Party's Great White Hope Mark Warner dropped out of the race before it even began. At the time rumors of a sex scandal briefly percolated, though he might've just had his hopes dashed by that notoriously terrible Times Magazine cover.

Guess what that meant! Hillary Clinton was now pretty much the "inevitable" nominee. But! "With Sen. Clinton likely to have the endorsement of most of the party liberal bigwigs, labor unions and activists, the expectation has been that one other Democrat will emerge as the anti-Hillary candidate in the presidential primaries." Another but! "Of course, politics abhors a vacuum, and someone will become the anti-Hillary candidate in the primaries. But given a lack of other Southern Democrats of Warner's stature, it is unlikely that candidate will have his potential to change the electoral map."

Also in that October (a year-and-a-half ago! Christ!), Senator Barack Obama said he'd consider a run for the presidency. Conventional wisdom was still divided on whether he was dumb enough to go through with it, but he was now the official anti-Hillary.

And in that same October the first Clinton-related OUTRAGE happened, with Elizabeth Edwards saying she'd had a happier life than Hillary Clinton, code for "better husband" and also "not a cuthroat ambitious bitch." At least that's how the Clintons spun it.

December 2006: Which Well-Spoken Fellows Will Decide to Lose To Hillary This Year? Obama's not-quite-campaign was the focus of most of the speculations. In a Tribune interview, Obama amusingly said that any match-up between him and McCain would be spun as "War hero against snot-nosed rookie." Well, we'll see.

It basically went on like that for another couple months—Clinton was still the inevitable candidate, John Edwards was someone you might have to watch out for in Iowa, and Obama was the anti-Hillary (unspoken: he'd end up like Howard Dean).

2007: Still Ridin' the Hillary Express, Next Stop The White House, Again Hillary was still inevitable, according to analyses linked by such guardians of blog conventional wisdom as Andrew Sullivan and Matt Yglesias. She had passionate reservoirs of support. The only people who didn't like her were the internet people who wanted Edwards or Richardson or maybe Obama (once again, shades of 2004 and Howard Dean).

Summer '07: Follow the Money! It Leads, For Some Reason, to Someone Other Than That Inevitable Gal! Then, in July of 2007, something odd happened! "Obama's money puts Clinton's 'inevitable' nomination in doubt" was how CNN put it. Obama's fundraising beat Clinton's throughout the "invisible primary" (the money race the year before any voting). BUT! "Howard Dean won the invisible primary in 2003, but was effectively finished a few weeks later after he came in third in Iowa." Silly internet candidates! Hill's inevitability was now "in doubt", but only pretend doubt.

But Obama kept raising more money, and gaining in the polls in Iowa, and then Hil "stumbled" in the October '07 debate.

Iowa: Hillary Loses Her First Thing Ever Then Obama won in Iowa and suddenly idiots were saying he was inevitable, especially since Clinton came in a miserable third place and surely Obama would go on to sweep New Hampshire.

Why Don't You Cry About It?

The inevitability argument didn't work! So Hillary moved on to "experienced" and also "human." Yes, she is human. She proved this with crying, which led to a lot of fairly offensive commentary and also a stunning New Hampshire victory that wasn't stunning because everyone had predicted it until Obama caught them off guard in Iowa. Then it was an open race! Where "open" means "between two people."

Then there was "I'm your girl" and the comeback narrative and things were swinging back toward Hillary's superior campaign machine and experience and Obama-as-Dean.

Well, That Scary Black Fellow Won Something Once Too, You Know

Obama came in second a couple more times in unimportant states, but then destroyed Hillary in South Carolina—Bill said something about Jesse Jackson and suddenly the campaign was about race! That was perhaps the strongest whiff so far of the "Hillary DESPERATE" narrative.

The Super Friends! But February's Super Duper Tuesday was supposed to end the campaign! For good! Specifically California and New York! It did no such thing. Obama "won" more states, but Clinton seemed to hold on to a delegate lead.

Wait, There's Math Involved? Except! Obama's campaign then did one of the smartest things they've ever done: they told every news outlet that, using "math," they calculated that they had more delegates than Clinton. And it turned out they probably did! This ended up on Drudge and has remained true ever since.

Oh My God Remember When Texas and Ohio Were Supposed to Finally End This Fucking Death March? When Hillary "won" Texas and Ohio a month later, the cable news chatterers all duly scored it in her column, but the next day's stories all pointed out once again that that nasty Obama delegate lead wouldn't go away.

It's Been Over For a Month-and-a-Half But It Would be Sexist to Tell Her On March 4, 2008, Newsweek's Jonathan Alter came out and said, explicitly, that Hillary could "win" every state yet to vote and she'd still never beat Obama's delegate lead. This was the official start of the "Hillary can't win, at all, and she's just in it for [insert conspiracy theory here]" narrative. The best the Clinton campaign could do to fight off that story was to try to woo superdelegates (underhanded! shadowy party bosses subverting democracy!) and try to make Obama melt down (Republican tactics! tearing the party apart!).

What You've Got You've Got to Give It To Obama Reverend Wright, Bittergate, and soft-on-crime-ness aside, Obama will survive tonight's Pennsylvania primary with his lead intact. Hillary may claim victory, depending on how large her margin is, but nothing short of a blowout will save her from having to resort to Superdelegate votes or a contested convention.

Which, obviously, is still within in the realm of possibility. And it might be amusing. But still—from inevitable to a spoiler in a year is a long way to fall.

(We blame Mark Penn.)

Editor's note: An earlier version of this post inadvertently appeared before being sexed up with occasional bold text and YouTube clips. We apologize for any confusion.

*Also notable: the Blackberry brand increased in value by almost 400% over the past year. Scary.

[via Millward Brown/ Ad Age]

Enter Case Western University's Institute for Management and Engineering, which began using its own 2D codes, called EZcodes, around Case Western's Cleveland campus in February. The codes are found everywhere from transit stops, where students can scan them to see when the next bus would arrive, to applications on Facebook and MySpace, to the student newspaper where QVC recently began rolling out its own marketing campaign with Mobile Discovery. As QVC's CMO Jeff Charney said, "We wanted to make the Case campus look like downtown Tokyo."

...

Google has already seen results from a recent test campaign conducted in three markets with jewelry retailer Blue Nile. Each ad contained a QR code and a response tag, and was tested against the same ads without the tags. The code-enhanced ads ended up driving 6.5 times more revenue than the ads without. Mr. Spinnell added that the majority of the web traffic to the ads' micro-site was also enhanced by search, which is the ultimate proxy at Google in determining how traditional media is performing. "Aside from the fact that it was a great way to bridge the gap and make these newspaper ads clickable, aggregating these calls-to-action will really benefit the end user."

Long staples of the gossip industry, it now appears that blind items will soon become relics due to the increasing power of the Google. Let's take an example from today's Page Six: "WHICH local reporter got sick to his stomach after he found out the Penthouse Pet with whom he'd been making out had just had sex with another man?"

In the old days, such an item would inspire a bunch of you to sit around your office's water cooler, a popular destination for gossip, and speculate back and forth about who the subject might be. In the modern age, though, we just enter the key terms into the Google—"New York reporter sick Penthouse Pet"—and bingo, up pops our answer, right after the original Post item:

It was Anderson Cooper all along. Do you now understand how the internet combines the accuracy of whispered office rumors with the quick reaction time of a wild, unrestrained mob, thirsty for blood (answers) no matter what the cost? Let's try another blind item, this one from Michael Musto: "Which top anchor is a bottom?" We have a theory, so we'll check it with the Google's robotic memory of wisdom:

The very first answer. It's not necessary to add much to that. Here we see that Google, the smartest technology in the universe, tells us that Anderson Cooper is the answer to all blind items. Not much point to continuing the practice from now on. Let's all turn our attention to loftier pursuits.

The new model is based not on cross-subsidies — the shifting of costs from one product to another — but on the cost of products falling fast.

The last debates over free versus pay online are ending. New York Times. Casual games. Google.

Two trends: 1. Extension of cross-subsidy to more industries. 2. Anything that touches digital networks feels the effect of falling costs. Transistors, storage, or bandwidth: at a certain point, they're cheap enough to be safely disregarded.

From the consumer's perspective, there is a huge difference between cheap and free. The gap is why Google doesn't show up on your credit card.

Free doesn't mean that someone isn't making money. The monetary benefits of Craigslist are distributed among its users.

The priceless economy's six categories:

• Freemium (tiers or a pro version, one percent of users support the rest)
• Advertising
• Cross-subsidies
• Zero marginal cost (online music)
• Labor exchange (Yahoo Answers)
• Gift economy (Wikipedia)

Manufacturing and distribution? Reputation and attention are the new scarcities.

Digital technologies have become too cheap to meter.

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