Google Roundup - Popularity, Books, Ads, Surveillance

Under-echoed Google items which have crossed my screen:

"Mr. Google's Guidebook" - A long post by Tom Slee explaining in literary-story style some of the problems with herd-mentality aspects of using link-popularity. Sites which are popular then become more popular, leading to a entrenched dominance of early winners (by the way, Google in particular and search experts in general do know about this issue, and try to add in some other factors, but that leads to other problems, etc.).

Competing books: What Would Google Do? (answer: index them and sell little ads on search) - Siva Vaidhyanathan notes that, including him, there's four books coming out on (my phrasing) the Google-and-society book bandwagon.

"Google's riches rely on ads, algorithms, and worldwide confusion - Cade Metz has an extensive irreverent piece on theses topics

The Externalities of Search 2.0: The Emerging Privacy Threats when the Drive for the Perfect Search Engine meets Web 2.0 - Michael Zimmer, "... this paper argues that the drive for Search 2.0 necessarily requires the widespread monitoring and aggregation of a users’ online personal and intellectual activities, bringing with it particular externalities, such as threats to informational privacy while online." (as I've put it: "The price of total personalization is total surveillance."). It's part of Special issue of First Monday: Critical Perspectives on Web 2.0, which is all probably of interest. And yes, I love the title of Søren Mørk Petersen's article there: Loser Generated Content: From Participation to Exploitation

Seth Finkelstein's Infothought blog (Wikipedia, Google, censorware, and an inside view of net-politics) - Syndicate site (subscribe, RSS)