In what can be described as a rather intriguing bit o' news, Google appears to be on the defensive about alleged censorship (or non-inclusion) of certain news sources which it aggregates at news.google.com. With blogs everywhere buzzing about this, it seems prudent to see what this is all about. So, here we go...

The allegations (and some examples of proof) are that Google News is not including relevant conservative sources and articles into its Google News aggregation website. Allegations of extreme political correctness in the way Google News chooses to display stories is also brought to the forefront here; Google News is supposed to be mostly automated, yes? This includes the discontinuation of indexing certain news and related websites for aggregation into Google News.

What should you make of this? Sure, it seems somewhat of an insignificant development now, but for all the praise Google receives (I'm included in that list) about giving the best solutions to customers, this smacks of the notion that any single company should not have all the power. In this case, the power of instant news delivered over the web in many languages reaches highly into the strata of society -- in many countries. When all the viewpoints aren't represented, bias can show its head by definition. What do you think?

So, is the mainstream newspaper industry on its way out? If you're used to reading your daily news on the web each morning, throughout the day and at night, you may already know this answer. When news happens, most folks now immediately turn to the web for instant coverage -- from mainstream websites to blogs. What is this doing to the newspaper industry, you may ask?

This article over at Forbes.com tells of a generation (and many behind them) that have abandoned newsprint for online publishing. The best example I can think of here is Google News, probably the best ... no, positively the best news aggregation site on the web. It brings together stories in any category from online news sources the world over, in 20+ languages to boot. How can a newspaper compete with this scale? It can't and the newspaper industries know it.

A quote from this story sums up this move rather well, as it has many other moves in business history: "it is in the creative destruction of capitalism that industries evolve in a ruthless, Darwinian way" -- and that's all she wrote. Just like Wal-Mart's infiltration on the retail mom-and-pop landscape using superior logistics and information, so has online news against stodgy industries like the newspaper. While local newspapers will no doubt continue to live on (if not thrive), the large newspapers will soon be extinct, or will have to move circulations to the online version -- and not charge 50 cents a day as well.

Well, this is a story that can be twisted and interpreted any number of ways -- so we'll just pick a few, heh. This blog posting over at Hitwise is making the rounds today on the web and it's being picked apart by Google naysayers as well as having some logic injected by famous bloggers such as Om Malik.

On the surface, I can agree with most of this goobledy-gook -- this Google analysis, while surface-level (read: none of the competition is mentioned, if in fact an apples-to-apples comparison can be made), kind of reinforces a few things the Google brass said at its annual press day, which we live blogged here.

Here's what we heard Google say: "we'll respond and create a product based on what our customers want, and we'll figure out how to monetize it later". And: "we'd rather launch a product that's half-baked and improve it as we go then waiting until perfection is achieved" (both quotes paraphrased). I agree with both of these sentiments. First off, while Google's marketshare in some of the products it offers does not look to hot from this analysis, I highly doubt that the goal of Google's launch team is to immediately take share within 48 hours of release.

But, through giving the customers products they want (and, even in Beta, they work great), by tweaking the products as time goes by and by providing a streamlined and speedy interaction (as opposed to some web ad/bloatware by competitors -- hello, Yahoo! Mail), Google will slowly but surely grow its userbase for many of its products. Do they need a marketing lift so that the world knows about some of these products? You bet -- this is an area Google needs to expand beyond the company's trademark (and, let's be honest, oft-copied) viral marketing they have now.