Google Related Links is a tool to help push traffic around a web site.

In theory it does much the same job as Zemanta’s Interesting Articles feature – it allows you to add a list of related stories and Google searches to pages. At the moment there’s a test page at Googlelabs: http://relatedlinks.googlelabs.com/.

At the moment it isn’t as elegant as Zemanta – and it certainly doesn’t integrate well with Wordpress. But it’s results are interesting. I tested the service on my previous post: Windows 7 is great. Its price isn’t.

Here’s what it came back with:

Related Links by Google
Norton’s troubled Internet Security Windows 7 beta at Bill Bennett
Microsoft’s Security Essentials is almost un-noticable at Bill Bennett
Layoffs no panacea | Bill Bennett
Norton Internet Security – the alternatives at Bill Bennett
In memoriam Twitter at Bill Bennett
When Outlook trumps Gmail at Bill Bennett
Go East young man (or woman) | Bill Bennett
Computer security guide – what are the main threats? at Bill Bennett

Related Searches by Google
windows 7
windows 7 download
windows 7 review
isn
isn’t it

As you can see only two of the eight “related links” are directly relevant. Although another might just qualify if we are generous. And only one of the five ‘related searches’ is useful. That’s 3 and a half out of 13 or around a 23 percent success rate. Obviously some work is needed

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• Google Trying Its Hand At Related Links (techie-buzz.com)

My plan was to use Google Docs exclusively for a couple of weeks. I wanted to test its viability as a Microsoft Word alternative.

The experiment fell at the first hurdle. I caved in after two days because my productivity dropped too far. Worse, I made many more errors with Google Docs than with Word.

Let’s set the scene. I’m a professional journalist. Typically I’d write 10,000 or more words a week. That’s close to 2000 words each workday and a few more on the weekend. When you’re tapping out that many words, the tools really matter.

Productivity hit

My productivity dropped 25 percent when I switched to Google Docs. This may have been temporary – maybe my speed would pick up as I became familiar with the software. But the price was too high – a 25 percent productivity drop means I working 33 percent longer to produce the same output. This is not acceptable.

What was the big problem? Google Docs requires more mouse activity than Microsoft Word. Both applications offer a full set of keyboard shortcuts and many of them are the same. However scrolling up and down the page to read my work was considerably harder in Google Docs.

Cutting and pasting copy from other documents was also harder. And curiously I had problems switching between web browser and Google Docs. Switching between a browser and Word using alt-tab is easier than control-tabbing through a large number of open browser tabs.

Just to make sure the problem wasn’t related to the browser, I used Google Docs with Firefox and Internet Explorer. I also tried using Google Docs in a separate browser Window.

Two days into the experiment my wrists were starting to ache from the extra mousing. I didn’t experience serious pain – I bailed out before reaching that point.

Never mind the quality, feel the width

Speed is important. So is quality.

My other problem with Google Docs was proofing. That’s the business of rereading your words to find and correct mistakes or improve the text. At first I struggled to identify why my proofing was so bad. Then it hit me. Text in Google Docs extends across the entire width of the screen – while Word text tends to be restricted to relatively narrow columns. Proofing is much harder with wider text columns.

There maybe ways to work around these problems, but I need to get on and earn a crust, so earlier today I went back to Microsoft Word – a better experience.

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• Google Docs for journalists and writing professionals (billbennett.co.nz)

A press release from Nielsen (not online at the time of writing) says Mozilla Firefox is winning New Zealand  users away from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

It is, but Microsoft’s browser still accounts for a 60 percent market share. According to Nielsen, Internet Explorer dropped from 72 percent to 60 percent between July 2006 and July 2009. Over the same period Firefox climbed from 11 percent to 20 percent. The remaining market share goes to rats and mice – with Google’s Chrome picking up just 3.2 percent of the market.

At the current rate, it’ll be at least two more years before Microsoft’s market share drops below 50 percent – and longer again before Firefox goes past Internet Explorer.

Nielsen’s press release doesn’t explain what it means by market share. However, the company manages a net measuring business where it tracks traffic to a number of commercial websites. Browser information is included in the traffic information, so it’s reasonable to assume Nielsen simply adds up each browser’s share of the total traffic to these sites. Because Nielsen’s clients are among New Zealand’s busiest sites, it is a reasonable measure of total share. Read the rest of this entry »

Google’s plan to steal author copyright is the flip side of New Zealand’s asymmetric copyright regime.

The Stuff.co.nz website has a story this morning saying New Zealand authors are angry about Google’s plans to scan and digitise their books.

This is perfectly understandable- as the author of a popular book I understand why they are upset. It seems odd the New Zealand government, like so many others, is happy to bend our laws and traditions to give extraordinary levels of copyright protection to the huge movie industry corporations, but is unwilling to stand up to Google when it wants to strip the rights of local copyright holders.

Could it possibly have anything to do with the local authors not being able to finance teams of expensive lawyers and political lobbyists?

Here’s the current state of play:

• A child in New Zealand downloads a movie from a huge multinational reducing its profits by a tiny amount – perhaps there’ll be one less caviar egg on the table at the next Hollywood indulge-fest. The child will lose its internet connection, pay a huge fine and could face a criminal record.
• A huge multinational can steal intellectual property from a New Zealand author, wiping out their livelihood and reducing our cultural treasures – Maori have a good name for it Taonga.

Does this add up? There’s something asymmetric going on here.

Authors are knowledge workers and deserve your support. You can read more here:

NZ authors protest Google book plan – technology | Stuff.co.nz.
The Great Google Book Grab
Google steals taonga, rips off law commissioners
New Zealand Society of Authors

Incidentally, if you’re an author with a taste for technology, you might like to include your name on the New Zealand media people on Twitter list.

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• Five things New Zealand’s copyright law rewrite must cover (arstechnica.com)

I write a daily column about technology journalism in Australia and New Zealand for IT Journo (it’s an invitation only site). Today the dominant news story was the Australian debut of new Google Android phones from HTC. Also on the agenda was an announcement from Google about its new Wave communications software and the relaunch or rebranding of Microsoft’s search as Bing.

Judging by the local and international coverage of the stories, Microsoft should be worried. The yet to be launched Google Wave software recieved far more coverage than Microsoft’s carefully choreographed launch. Microsoft is preparing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars promoting its rebranded search and yet the story was lost in the noise.

As far as news media is concerned, Google is now far more important than Microsoft.

Google’s Chrome 2.0 browser was released on Friday (New Zealand and Australian time). The final version is much faster than before and now includes full screen mode as well as an auto-fill feature for dealing with web forms.

Chrome was already fast, but version 2.0 kicks the speed up a gear making it much quicker than Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 and Mozillar Firefox 3. The full screen mode is a welcome addition, as with Internet Explorer and Firefox, you get there by hitting the F11 key.

Compared with its rivals, Chrome is still feature-light, but it is fast, stable and clean. If you’re not wedded to one of the existing browsers it is definitely worth considering.

Download Google Chrome.

Rupert Murdoch says News Corporation will start charging for access to its news websites within a year. The Guardian quotes him saying this will fix what he describes as a ‘malfunctioning business model’.

Unless he has something clever up his sleeve, I think his words are just wishful thinking. Going by this Reuters report, News Corporation plans  to charge ‘micro-payments’.

He has a point

Murdoch is right when he says the business model for online news is broken.

Newsgathering and production is expensive to do properly. It requires far more than the pittance that can be earned from Google Ads.

Newspaper publishers historically made their money from two revenue streams: copy sales and advertising. When I first worked as a journalist in the UK in the early 1980s, copy sales made up the bulk of a daily paper’s revenue.

Advertising was just the cream on top.

Elsewhere, advertising is the bulk of a paper’s revenue. Kerry Packer famously once described the advertising going into Fairfax’s Australian metropolitan newspapers as ‘rivers of gold’. New Zealand newspapers have also done proportionately better out of advertising than copy sales.

Of course free newspapers only earn money from advertising. But, in general and with a few exceptions, their editorial is embarrassingly awful.

Print advertising revenue is dropping fast as advertisers move online. This is particularly true for the small advertisers who once paid for classified ads. Those dollars now go to web businesses like eBay, Google and, in New Zealand, Trade Me.

It won’t work for mass audiences

People might just pay for financial or other specialist information if it’s important to them and they can’t get it for free elsewhere. Otherwise, readers simply aren’t prepared to pay for content. And they certainly won’t do so if they don’t have to. The Sydney Morning Herald reports a survey saying what everyone working in the business knew already: Readers reluctant to pay for online news.

Previous attempts to charge have failed. When one paper charges and a rival doesn’t, the free site gets pretty much all the business. In the past publishers who attempted to run paid news sites either wised up or filed for bankruptcy.

Murdoch owns a lot of papers around the world. If they all impose a charging model at the same time they might just attract some paying customers. I doubt they will attract enough. The Murdoch papers certainly aren’t noticeably better editorially than their rivals.

I can’t see how this will work. Murdoch may be able to cut deals with phone companies and ISPs to deliver News Corporation content to customers behind certain content walls, but I don’t see consumers paying more than a few pennies per month for those kinds of services. There may be a electronic news reading device — perhaps it works on a subscription model. It would have to be good, simple-to-use and  inexpensive.

The paid content genie is well and truly out of the bottle. Not even Rupert Murdoch can put it back again.

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• Fairfax to follow Murdoch’s lead and charge for online news (billbennett.co.nz)
• Crunching newpaper online paywall numbers (billbennett.co.nz)
• Charging for online news (bbc.co.uk)
• Rupert Murdoch: Let’s Charge for Online Content Again (readwriteweb.com)
• One way newspaper paywalls could work: Sport (billbennett.co.nz)

It’s not my question. I’ve stolen it from Gerard McLean Do you know how to do anything? McLean has a brilliant point. One that’s been touched on before in Knowledge Workers. When he asks do you know how to do anything? He says people with identifiable skills to fall back on will be better placed to survive the downturn.

I’ve already found this to be true. After a meander down the paths of management, I’ve gone back to my journalist roots and now earn a decent crust writing thousands of words each week. That’s because I know how to do something.

McLean isn’t perfect. I stumbled across his site because I’ve set up Google alerts for the term knowledge workers. He spoils his otherwise insightful post finishing with:

We don’t need more knowledge workers or consultants or bloggers. What we need are people who can actually do things like write code, design stuff, make pottery, edit video. And we need people who can do more than just one step in the process.

We need craftsmen. And lots of them who can also lead.

Well that’s just plain wrong. People who write code, design stuff and edit video are all knowledge workers by just about any accepted definition of the term. People who can do more than one step in the process are higher level knowledge workers. So are craftsmen. And craftswomen too.  Those who can do these things and lead other people exist even further up the knowledge worker food chain.

Do you know how to do anything? | GerardMcLean.com