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Krishna Bharat is the principal scientist at Google. He also invented Google News. He got the idea for Google News after September 11th – since he thought it would be a good idea to aggregate news around particular topics.
He recently gave a presentation at the International Press Institute Congress in Edinburgh. His message: newspapers need to do more than just reprint articles on the Web. That is, they need to leverage the Web's inherent advantages.
Suggestions:
• Link to other stories (actually, CNET does a good job at this).
• Allow for personalization (such as filtering to your preferences – as well as learn about your preferences).
• Open up archives.
• Link to rich resources, such as Wikipedia.
• Allow reader participation (eg, blogs)
So, is Google News a threat to newspapers? Maybe.
Rather, Google News is a way to gain insight about the content business – especially local content. This is important because Google wants to make a fortune on local advertising -- which appears to be the goal of Google Base.
I talked to Craig Donato, who is the CEO of Oodle, which is an online classifieds site: "I'm not sure newspapers will continue to think of themselves as being in the news business. They're really in the local business, or probably better said, the local advertising business. As such, the big fight with Google is going to be for the account control of local advertisers -- does the local car dealer advertise with (or through) the newspaper or Google?"
Links:
TCM – Googlevision
Bio – Krishna Bharat
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