8 Comments Add your own

• 1. Brink  |  August 8th, 2007 at 8:10 pm

  If the story’s already representing both sides, then doesn’t this gimmick suggest that Google’s developers need something to do?

• 2. anon  |  August 9th, 2007 at 4:27 am

  If Google continues to make editorial decisions like this with other providers’ material, they may find themselves defending those decisions in court.

  Being a content agreggator/search engine is one thing, but actively affecting that content is another thing entirely.

• 3. Jeremiah  |  August 9th, 2007 at 8:37 am

  You’ll only get a voice if Google says so. In this case, the McDonald’s Corporation is, of course, granted access to this medium. I wonder how well this will work out for Scott Beauchamp?

• 4. discreet_chaos  |  August 9th, 2007 at 3:30 pm

  Thanks for highlighting this story. I’ve been planning to write a blogpost about Google’s recent propensity to enhance the brand in lieu of producing revenue and this piece was the additional item which motivated me to act. (Click my name, if anyone is interested, but I don’t really spend a lot of time on this particular example)

  As others have mentioned, there are many questions raised by this effort. And, though I’m no expert in the laws governing common carriers, it seems to me that setting themselves up as an arbitrator of who may respond could raise legal questions, as does the fact that Google is apparently hosting the response.

  One of the subjects of the McDonalds story are preschoolers; Is Google going to let every preschooler respond? Are we going to be hit with the White House spin on every story about the war in Iraq and are they going to let the soldiers in the field post a response?

  Not to mention — Who owns the copyright to the posted responses?

  I’m pretty sure this is not going to be the last that we hear of this issue and it seems once again, Google has come up with something that may increase eyeballs, but it does nothing for the bottom line.

• 5. discreet_chaos  |  August 9th, 2007 at 3:40 pm

  OK - Not but a couple of minutes after posting my comment, I see a TechCrunch story titled “Google News Hypocrisy: Walled Off Content” which doesn’t directly answer my copyright question, but does go a ways in that direction.

  (Click my name on this comment for the TechCrunch link)

• 6. discreet_chaos  |  August 9th, 2007 at 4:04 pm

  Following-up on the TechCrunch thing;

  Correction: It appears that Google’s TOS would cover the copyright for the comment and it prevents the response from being reproduced in any other space. So, Google can scrape an NYTimes story from their website, post and host a comment in reply, but the NYTimes would be forbidden from reprinting the comment or possibly from quoting from it, altogether.

• 7. randallt  |  August 10th, 2007 at 10:46 pm

  The immediate flinch of course is just as discreet_chaos has described.

  The opportunity to massage the news about the war.

• 8. Peter Brock  |  August 11th, 2007 at 8:40 pm

  So in the above example how McDonald’s advertising affects kids’ perceptions of their products, will you allow children or parents to respond to the story, or is this primarily designed as a way for corporate PR to obfuscate issues?

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