A few days ago Rupert Murdoch suggested that he plans to make News Corp’s content invisible to search engines. It’s saddens me that obviously intelligent men can be so completely out of touch with the way things are. Old media is dead because of people like Murdoch. Sadly, he will wind up taking a lot of talented people down with him because they have an employee mentality instead of understanding that his complete lack of understanding about how the world works now gives them the freedom to become their own masters instead of reporting through the eyes of half a dozen editors.

There’s a rumored deal for exclusive search between News Corp and Bing. Which is fine but also shows a lack of understanding about the way people use the net. People use a search engine because that’s the one they’re comfortable with or feel gives them the best results. Over the years for me it has been Lycos, followed by Altavista, followed by Google (since approximately when they went live). If News Corp’s content is filtered out of Google’s results I’ll read somebody else’s articles. I can think of very few situations in which I feel the need to read a specific journalist’s article particularly in the arena of hard news.

The cold, hard facts are that Murdoch’s only foray into the net is his purchase of MySpace which he paid too much for and bought at the worst possible time. Perhaps that explains his hatred of the net. Whatever. The landscape is littered with the desiccated  corpses of business men who didn’t understand the changing business climate.  There’s a good summary of the situation over at Mashable (which seems to be getting along fine with Google bringing them all that useless traffic).

[Photo by Dave Beckett via flikr]

No Comments »

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL

Leave a comment