.cross.wired.mind.

I was browsing through the stories over at The Register when this one jumped out at me - Is Google Legal?

What? Huh? WTF?

So I read on and to my horror it would seem people still don’t get the Net.

To people who create web sites the indexing done by Google is vital to drive traffic their way. In an article in the New York Times one ecommerce site owner said:

Ms. Le Tendre says she assumes that there are many thousands of proprietors like herself who are dependent on Google traffic for their incomes. “I couldn’t even guess at the amount of sales generated by Google,” she said, “but I would imagine it would be sufficient to run a good-sized country.”

But in Belgium a newspaper publishing group is trying to get Google to pay for the right to index their sites. They filed a law suit claiming copyright infringement by Google’s news aggregator. The article is very detailed and I will not attempt to summarize it here so I encourage you to read it for yourself.

The real kickers in the article are this …

Copiepresse told the court that Google damages the publishers’ ad revenue by bypassing their homepages. “We want search engines to send people to our homepage,” she said, explaining that only the homepage always carries ads.

… and this …

“Yes, we have a problem with Google, but we don’t want to be out of Google,” Boribon said. “We want Google to respect the rules. If Google wanted to index us, they need to ask.”

Copiepresse also wants Google to pay for indexing sites. Boribon declined to discuss how or how much. “That has to be negotiated,” she said.

This shows that greed leads to stupidity. Google drives the traffic of the World Wide Web. They do this by accessing the public sites that publishers place on the Web. Publishers can easily prevent Google from indexing their sites but why would they want to?

If you are trying to get people to come to your site why would you block the single largest source of traffic? Why would you ask them to pay? If that model were put in place Google would fold as site owners large and small demanded payement.

So of course Google has removed the Belgian sites from its index, and what was the response?

“They have done it to punish us,” said Boribon, who didn’t want Google to go that far. “They have a bad attitude.”

Hmmmmm. You file a lawsuit demanding payment for the right to index your pages and when Google says no, and drops you from their service you cry foul. To me it looks like you tried extortion to tap into Google’s revenue stream and when they switched you off and your site traffic dropped (and thus your own ad revenue) you realized just how much you need Google’s service.

Oh, and if you want to generate ad revenue - don’t put all of your eggs in the “home page” basket. Search engines drop people on the page they want, not the page you want. My suggestion is to rethink your entire web strategy and get with the times.

Let Google index your site. Place your own ads on story pages as well as the home page. Encourage people to link to your content and even use (in a fair way) the content on your site in their blogs. Open up, don’t close yourself in hoping that it will increase your revenue. The more proprietary your system the more people will turn elsewhere for content.

The Web should be open, free, and completely cross connected. That is the power of the Internet. That is what makes the Net a powerful communication tool that will help us all to realize our collective potential.

This past Friday October 27th was the sixth anniversary of my father’s passing.  As the years have gone by I find myself mourning less.  That does not mean the sadness has passed - hardly.  Rather than mourn I have tried to find ways to honor the memory of my father.

One of my father’s favorite activities was going over to Valley Forge National Park (a couple miles from my home) to shoot a roll or two of photos.  When my family was going through my father’s old photos I think we found about two dozen pictures of the Memorial Arch taken over the span of at least 30 years.

Today, after breakfast at the G-Lodge, Jennie and i drove through the park and I snapped a few shots in honor of my dad.

The bad news is I broke my toe last Thursday.

The good news is that while I was resting my foot a package arrived from China with all of the prototypes for my toys!

You can see the images at the Dreamland Toyworks for both My Little Cthulhu and the Hoodiez.

For those that don’t want to click over, here are two of my favorites ….

The prototypes have arrived. More soon …

I just don’t get it. I go to the Reading Terminal Market for lunch about three times a week. I love Carmen’s hoagies and Dinic’s sandwiches. I shop at Metropolitan Bakery and *L*O*V*E* Termini Brothers fine confectionary delights.

Today, being a very clear-headed day, I decided to look at the patterns and flow of people. I don’t know why I hadn’t noticed this before but it jumped into view as I stood in line for some good cooking at Delilah’s Southern Cuisine. It became very clear that I was the only white person in line. Ten people - one white guy. I thought that a bit odd since the food is amazingly good. So I got my chopped chicken BBQ, black-eyed peas and rice, mac and cheese, and corn bread, and sat down to eat.

I sat in a position to watch the line. A half hour passed before one other white guy got in line. So a few dozen people passed through the line while I was watching and only 2 of them were white. How does that make sense? The food is awesome and the service was wonderful. I actually talked with people in line and had a great time.

So I got up from my table and walked around the market. Most places seemed to be racially diverse except for the southern places and the Italian places that seemed to be almost exclusively mono-racial.

I am not sure why, after all of these years of studying the issue of race, I am still amazed that racism is so strong and so ingrained in our way of life that segregation - even voluntary choice - still exists in such a stark and brazen incarnation. I felt like grabbing some of the white folk around me to evangelize the benefits of eating such amazing food. Heck, Oprah even called the mac and cheese the nation’s best.

Racism needs to die a swift death. Bias needs to be replaced with acceptance. Walls need to come down.

Now don’t get me wrong. I am not talking about color blindness. I think we must embrace our diverse cultures and appreciate the great diversity of the human race. My personal philosophy is that we should learn to love the culture of others, understand it, experience it, enjoy it, and above all respect it.

I am proud of who I am and the path my ancestors took to get me here. I am not a wannabe anything. Except I wannabe me. Here’s my thing - respecting diversity is not about tacit lines of segregation that allow others to have their culture on their side of the line while we have ours here. Diversity should be a unifier - we should all be unafraid of crossing and blurring the lines that divide us so we can all live as one human family.

Too many people are invested in defining what is white, black, Asian or Latino and then building a wall to keep people in and others out. White folk should have no fear of eating at Delilah’s. Black folk should tuck in to the occasional Italian hoagie.

Beyond food and the other physical artifacts of culture, we need to cross other lines as well. Patterns of friendship, the places we live, the organizations we belong to, the fabric of our lives needs to be open.

I will be happy when the lines are open to everyone and no one feels the need to segregate their lunchtime.