Google looks to the future

The Google blog for President's Day contains a long post from the ever eloquent Jonathan Rosenberg, on the future of the internet and how we use it.

There's some good points to be made in his arguments, particularly on the importance of global information being available to all. Try telling a teenager today about life before the internet and they either won't believe you or will pity us our dark age existence.

Translation too is going to be important - vital even. No-one's still sure if Islamic martyrs are being promised 72 virgins or 72 raisins. If the 9/11 hijackers got it wrong then there's going to be a very downbeat baking party in their afterlife.

But there's some areas where he gets it wrong, particularly in online journalism. Rosenberg states that users should be able to log onto a news site and only be presented with the news we are interested. I beg to differ.

There's a definite advantage in not having personalised news content - it leads to less informed people. One of the side benefits of a newspaper is that you never know what you will find there - a small article could spark a whole new area of interest. Just sticking to what you know about leads to the kind of narrow mindset of a Fox News junkie.