Google’s growth animated and digital teddy bears storming Worthing seafront in this week’s roundup

“Meet Google. The noun that became a verb.” That’s how this little film starts, going on to list all the vast projects that the company is involved at the moment using lovely animation. Made in the style of the viral “Did you know?” videos, it gives you a pretty good impression why people call Google a “frenemy”. So is Google Darth Vader? Or just a business?

Remember Charlie Brooker’s parody of TV news reporting recently? Here’s the American equivalent. Enjoy the Onion ripping apart up-to-the-minute coverage of some irrelevant story that has no ramifications whatsoever. Excellent – but not to be watched if you dislike strong language or dead fish.

Finally, we have teddy bears invading Worthing seafront. They hop above the streets, play with some cars, and kill some pigeons – all the stuff that you do when you are an animated teddy bear in a viral video fantasy from a rather talented young man.

1 The Beast File- Google (HUNGRY BEAST)
If you want to know why they call Google a “frenemy,” watch this info-animation from Hungry Beast for Australian TV channel ABC.

2 BMW S1000 RR. Dinner for RR
You know that conjuring trick where you pull out the tablecloth so quickly and smoohtly that dinner remains undisturbed? Well, BMW has tried it with a food bank and one of their motorbikes, and …

3 The Handsome Men’s Club
A post-Oscars Jimmy Kimmel gets Robert Downey Jr, Sting, Patrick Dempsey, Tad Dampsey, Ethan Hawke, Ben Affleck, Matt Demon and others to make fun of Handsome Men – that is, themselves. Really kicks of with when Lenny starts to sing. So who is most handsome?

4 Turning into Michael Jackson
Amazing transformation: Why beauty operations? Séverine takes you on a tour using make up and scotch tape to look like Michael Jackson!

5 Teddys storm Worthing sea front
Cutie of the week! Watch an endless row of teddy bears taking over the seafront of Worthing. Internet creativity as its best.

6 Iron Man 2 Trailer 2
Marvel Comics meet blockbuster featuring machines, special effects, Robert Downey Jr, Scarlett Johansson and Mickey Rourke to perform a film fest coming in May. But the trailer has already made it into the charts.

7 TRON: LEGACY – Official Trailer
Another movie in which technology plays the main role, and this time its a father and son tale that puts us back into 1980s cyberspace. Oh, but in 3D. Is that enough?

8 NEW E*TRADE Baby – Girlfriend
Animated human baby boy and baby girl have a serious relationship talk. What happened last night? And was that milkoholic Lindsay there as well? Very well made ad, deserves to go viral.

9 PS22 Chorus “LISZTOMANIA” Phoenix
You think Glee is TV fiction? Than watch this! Here is the pop video of the week featuring the elementary school chorus from Public School 22 in Graniteville, Staten Island, who cover Lisztomania by Phoenix.

10 Captain Kirk deals with a strange alien culture
Looking at the screen, Spock and Kirk can’t really believe their eyes. Or ears.

Source: Mostly taken by Unruly Media, but heavily inspired by Mag.ma. Compiled from data gathered at 18:00 on 11 March 2010.

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Micro-blogging service Twitter’s user growth has almost levelled off since September 2009, according to a study

Twitter’s growth seems to have lost its momentum, according to a new study.

Growth in the micro-blogging service’s number of users peaked at nearly 20% last April, but had dropped down to 0.15% in December 2009, says a study by Barracuda Networks.

Recent web analytics had already suggested that Twitter had reached its peak, as Twitter.com recorded a traffic high in July 2009 and has never reached that level since. According to Compete, Twitter reached 23.5 million users in August 2009 and stayed put. However, as Twitter client applications have grown and have become a bigger percentage of Twitter’s user base, the numbers didn’t necessarily reflect the actual situation of the micro-blogging service. By using the growth in Twitter users, instead of the site’s traffic, the Barracuda study now puts things into perspective.

Strong growth in user numbers of 21.17% in April dropped to 10.95% in July and to 0.82% in September, and has ever been under 1% since – 0.58% in October, 0.34 in November and finally 0.15 in December. The accounts deleted by month also was growing, from 3.36% in April to 12.03% in October from which they peaked off to 8.48% and 8.14% percent in November and December.

To get these figures, Barracuda analysed more than 19 million Twitter accounts for frequency and content of tweets, user-to-user interactions, and each account’s overall activity level. “We have been monitoring Twitter for more than one and a half years and keep track of the public timeline, and any new account of the public timeline,” says lead researcher Nidhi Shah.

Barracuda’s chief research officer, Paul Judge, explains the stagnation of Twitter with the end of “The Red Carpet Era”. Twitter shows “a very concentrated growth spurt during the early part of 2009 – a period that we define as the ‘Twitter Red Carpet Era’. Twitter users came online to follow their favorite celebrities. The most famous people have already joined Twitter, so I don’t think they’ll see another growth spurt like that,” says Judge. From November 2008 to April 2009, several big celebrities, including Ashton Kutcher, Oprah Winfrey and John Mayer, joined Twitter.

In comparison, the number of Facebook users has been rising continously. According to Facebook, today 50% of the 400 million active users log on to Facebook in any given day, with more than 35 million users updating their status and more than 60 million status updates posted each day.

Another Twitter study published by US web analytics company RJMetrics last month seems to confirm Barracuda’s report. It says that Twitter has 75 million users, an estimation that Barracuda roughly agrees upon, with a large percentage of accounts being inactive.

According to RJMetrics’ data, about 80% of all Twitter users have tweeted fewer than 10 times, about 40% of accounts have never sent a single tweet, and 25% of accounts have no followers.

RJMetrics concludes that “the past six months have shown steady decline in the number of new account registrations”, but the number of new users a month is currently at about 6.2 million. Their report doesn’t say anything on the number of deleted accounts.

Twitter, which has not yet commented on the reports, recently announced that it had hit 50 million tweets a day. According to Barracuda’s report, users are becoming more active on Twitter, with the most active users being those with about 1,000 followers.

According to internal documents leaked to TechCrunch, the company’s forecast that it would go “from 25 million users at the end of 2009 to 1 billion in 2013″.

Until now, Twitter itself has not released precise figures on its growth. Recently, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone posted an email newsletter saying that it had recorded 1,500% growth in the number of registered users but did not specify the timespan.

The reports certainly will prompt several questions. Has Twitter reached its peak? Is Twitter a micro-blogging service where only marketing people tweet to each other? Was it overhyped? How relevant is it anyway?

One thing is certain, the days of micro-blogging might not look as rosy as they did last spring, but they are far from over.

Google is giving tweets a visibility they never had before. After the launch of Google’s real-time search in December, Twitter’s traffic rose 9% from December 2009 to January 2010, according to ComScore.

Twitter’s number of users may not have grown, but with the Google deal it became more important than ever.

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Print publishers are hopeful the iPad will hit the streets next month.

There are already several test examples out there. Some blend print and online as BERG’s version for the innovative Swedish publishing house Bonnier shows, others ues a more online approach as the video of De Telegraaf shows.

Publishers are hoping the iPad will encourage people to read digitally with users willing to pay for content. It is also hoped that the iPad will be used more in people’s leisure time so it will attract different advertisers.

A question which isn’t answered is if publishers are ready to serve another platform, in a time when workforces are not getting any bigger, who is to shoulder the extra work?

Maybe the version of De Telegraaf therefore isn’t the most thrilling, but the most realistic. As Robert Andrews of paidContent UK points out rightly about De Telegraaf’s approach: “It only renders Telegraaf.nl’s existing website on the gadget.”

Have a look at the different iPad versions, and decide which one is your favorite.

1 Wired and Adobe decided to go for a deconstructed magazine version. They favored on scrolling down instead of flipping sideways, but magazine sides are still the entry point. In addition, they show some new possibilities for advertisers.

2 The Swedish publisher Bonnier R&D asked BERG to help with the transition of the print reading experience to a digital format. BERG focused on maintaining the relaxed and curated features of printed magazines, and compared to Wired it feels more like an app, indeed. In addition they invent a couple of new ways of navigation through “heating up” to select all, cut, copy and paste, among others.

3 The official iPad commercial of Apple shortly shows a really short glimpse of the New York Times application at second 0.6. Developed in house, it has also favorites a more curated feel than the website.

4 Sports Illustrated version for the iPad was one of the first and is a collaboration between Wonderfactory and Time.

5 The Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf transferred its website to the iPad, however this might be the most realistic approach for most publishers in terms of work flow.

Which interactive iPad design is most convincing?

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The US State Department has launched a web application to gather and map the views of citizens and those abroad about US foreign policy

The US State Department has launched a web application, Opinion Space, that solicits views and input on US foreign policy.

The site was launched at the Alliance of Youth Movements summit in London.

Instead of a virtual suggestion box, users respond to comments by moving a slider showing gauging your view ranging from strongly disagree to strongly agree. For the launch, Opinion Space explores five topics, the threat posed by nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists, the role of empowering women in terms of development, “proactive diplomacy”, food security and climate change. Users can also leave an idea and suggestions for follow up for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

The topics will change every month. The initial topics are broad, but in the coming months, the questions will “drill down” into issues including those that might relate to upcoming trips by Secretary Clinton, said Ari Wallach, founder of consultancy studioBenZion which was involved with the launch strategy of the site and developing the topics and questions.

Secretary Clinton said: “Opinion Space is an example of 21st Century Statecraft, where connection technologies can encourage open dialogue and engagement. My staff and I look forward to listening to the opinions and ideas the Opinion Space participants provide and vote on.”

What is 21st Century Statecraft (for those of us who don’t have a degree in international relations)?

In the past, Wallach said that diplomacy was often “two people in suits over Scotch talking about how they were going to do this or that vis a vis the other country”.

In Secretary Clinton’s vision, 21st Century statecraft means that foreign relations isn’t just government-to-government but also government-to-people, people-to-people and people-to-government, “a new matrix of how we interact with one another”.

Developed with the Centre for New Media at the University of California Berkeley, the site designers hope that contributors will not only add interesting views but also filter the best ones.

Once you’ve added your views, you are charted in what looks almost like a star chart. It’s a very impressionistic mapping of your views.

“This map is not based on geography or predetermined categories, but on similarity of opinion,” said UC Professor and Berkeley Centre for New Media director Ken Goldberg. “It’s designed to ‘depolarise’ discussions by including all participants on a level playing field.”

Wallach said that they thought a lot about ways to create incentive systems as opposed to “unintelligent, unenlightening, debate flame wars”.

Also, once you’ve left your views and comments, you can then see the views and comments of others and again, using a slider, say whether you strongly agree or disagree with the comment and whether you found the comment insightful. The site also lists the top authors and reviewers. You can see other views and see how they relate to one another.

This is not just an information gathering tool for the State Department, it’s also an information gathering tool for everyone who uses it, Wallach said. People answer the questions but in testing the site, they saw people spending 20 to 40 minutes exploring other views.

It’s an experiment and they hope to refine this over the years, he said. “In line with the technological aesthetic of the day, don’t wait for something to be perfect. Put it out there. See how it works and how it doesn’t work. Refine along the way.”

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Joojoo tablets, no video chat on planes?, Facebook prodded on panic buttons, Flash vs HTML5 – timed!, Windows 7 – too easy?, AOL v Bebo, Jimmy Wales interviewed, Zeus strangled

A quick burst of links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team

jkkmobile: JooJoo tablet dissected: Reveals Atom N270 and Nvidia Ion
Remember that tablet computer – the CrunchPad – that Michael Arrington was going to, ahem, make? Now called the JooJoo and disentangled from Arrington (not that he’s happy about that; lawsuits should still be lingering somewhere), it’s got FCC approval in the US and may be on sale from March 25.

Or Americans could wait a week and buy an iPad. Hmm, wonder what they’ll do?

Video Chat on the Plane? Illegal? OK? Legal Gray Area? – John Battelle’s Searchblog
“Cameras not allowed!”. Well, “two-way devices” not allowed on planes. Except.. er… they provided the Wi-Fi. But they block it. Except for Apple’s iChat. Until now.

MPs Urge Facebook to Add Child Protection Button >> eWEEK Europe UK
Harriet Harman urges “swift action” on buttons. However, she might not have considered what’s really needed to add it.

Relative Performance of Rich Media Content across Browsers and Operating Systems >> Mike Chambers
“# From these tests, Flash content does not perform consistently worse on Mac than on Windows.
# There is a wide range of CPU usage for HTML 5 video, depending on the browser / operating system it is being played back on, with Mac generally being slower.
# Canvas / JavaScript animations (at least those tested) seem to have high CPU usage, and generally run slower on Mac than on Windows (although not in all cases).”

Why one IT guy found Windows 7 to be too user-friendly – CIO Symmetry
Installation of Windows 7 only takes three clicks? How can you justify an IT staff with that?

AOL Has a Boo-Boo on Its Bebo
“What’s interesting is the predicament facing AOL. Due to some complex tax laws, it may actually make better financial sense for AOL to just shut Bebo down.” Scary stuff: will Bebo become the first big one to vanish?

A Crowdsourced Interview With Mr Wikipedia – video at All Things D
In this case, it was “crowdsourced” by asking for suggestions on Twitter

Zeus botnets suffer mighty blow after ISP taken offline • The Register
“The takedown is the result of two network service providers, Ukraine-based Ihome and Russia-based Oversun Mercury, severing their ties with [east European ISP] Troyak, said Mary Landesman [of ScanSafe], who cited data returned by Robotex.com. The move meant that all the ISP’s customers, law-abiding or otherwise, were immediately unable to connect to the outside world.”

Facebook Credits Now the First Payment Option in FarmVille – Inside Facebook
Facebook’s virtual currency, Credits, is growing in popularity

Hackers love to exploit PDF bugs, says researcher
“According to F-Secure, 61% of the nearly 900 targeted attacks it’s tracked in the first two months of 2010 exploited a vulnerability in Reader, Adobe’s popular PDF viewer. By comparison, Microsoft’s Word was exploited in just 24% of the attacks, and bugs in its Excel spreadsheet and PowerPoint presentation maker were leveraged only a combined 14% of the time.”

But do the exploits work against Apple’s PDF-reading Preview? We await news.

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If music executives sold bottled water, they’d be calling for a ban on tapwater downloads. But their industry is proving resilient

Illegal downloads continue to be a cause of Armageddon within the music industry and a source of endless fascination outside. Business leaders still regularly moan that illegal downloads are destroying their livelihood, especially if representatives of government are within hearing range. At the first Music 4.5 conference in London last week, speakers took it as read that “kids are not buying music anymore” and that they must look elsewhere for revenues. Evidence of the demise of purchased music is everywhere to be seen, except for one place: the statistics.

In fact it is easier to make the case that the music industry, far from imploding, is one of the great success stories of the recession. The most dramatic example of this is in what kids are supposed not to be buying any more: single tracks. Last year sales of singles soared to an all-time record of 152.7m units, an astonishing 33% rise in a year when the whole economy (GDP) contracted by 3.3%. If the music pundits seriously think that these are not being bought by kids, then it shows how out of touch they are with their customers. These same youngsters who were – and probably still are – massively downloading free music from the internet were prepared to pay up to £3 a pop for an insipid ringtone (interestingly, not included on the industry’s statistics unless they are full-track ones). Why? Because there is an easy payment system on phones which didn’t exist on the web. Now there is an easy payment system (iTunes et al) on the web they are starting to pay again. If the big music companies had spent their energies dreaming up a payments mechanism for web downloads instead of suing their customers they could have swept all before them. Instead they were like the crew of a sinking boat that blames the sea instead of trying to mend the leak. If they were in the bottled water industry, they would probably be urging the government to stop free downloads of tap water at home as unfair competition. Yet the bottled water industry should have been their model. It got away with charging us lots of money for a product that was no better than free tapwater through clever marketing.

Even now practically everyone I meet from the music industry protests that it couldn’t be expected to combat the technological disruption that was eroding its traditional model. What piffle. Lots of books have been written about disruptive technologies. They can’t say they weren’t warned. As it turned out, pretty well every system for monetising music – iTunes, Spotify, We7, Shazam, Nokia’s Comes with Music et al – has come from outside the industry. What a missed opportunity.

Sales of singles are, of course, only one part of the industry. There has, unsurprisingly, been a fall in sales of albums – down from 133.6m units to 128.9m last year, not helped by the closure of key UK retail chains Zavvi and Woolworths – but that was more than offset by growth elsewhere in sponsorship, live shows and merchandising where there is something of a boom happening in Britain. Overall, the music industry grew by an amazing 4.7% in recession-ridden 2008, according to PRS for Music, and will probably be resilient when the full 2009 figures come in. A key fact is that last year income from live music overtook that from recorded music for the first time. Don’t think tracks, think music.

Clearly, the industry is changing. Consumers can now buy the singles they want without being locked into buying albums containing other tracks they don’t want. That may bring in less income but it is the gateway to other revenues. The people who allegedly won’t pay for downloads will pay huge sums to hear their favourite artists live or be part of the merchandising experience. Maybe illegal downloads – which, needless to say, I don’t approve of – should be looked on as a massive crowd-sourced marketing operation to generate money for gigs, memorabilia and future sales.

The future lies in capitalising on the whole musical experience, as the admirable Music 4.5 initiative well knows: it seeks to bring together artists and entrepreneurs to plot the future. If the quality of the five-minute pitches made at the conference by budding businesses is anything to go by, the future is bright. I loved the way Songkick.com is moving beyond Last.fm by linking songs you and your friends like with information about the band’s past and present gigs, enabling you to talk about them after the show. MusicGlue offers free downloads in exchange for email addresses which, over time, will produce geographic patterns showing where there is a dense enough cluster of fans to justify a gig. CloseCallMusic encourages people to interact with live music as it happens, while TuneRights is trying to crowd-source the financing of records. Audiofuel, which matches music to your jogging beat, aims to be the new Ministry of Sound. I loved what Decibel is planning – to have a vast data base of meta tags so you can find out details of each member of the band: that Jimi Hendrix played as a session man on a Little Richard track, for instance. That is just the sort of value-added that will lure people away from free downloads. Nick Hornby would love it.

These were only some of the pitches made which suggest that the future of the industry may continue to reside in bottom-up initiatives rather than the top-down approach of the major labels. The music industry, to be fair, is still a very heavy investor as a new study shows, but it had better be alert if it doesn’t want to be upstaged even more. The sad fact is that around 90% of start-ups fail – but it is vital for future employment, as well as the health of the music industry that we spend money to find the winners. A revolution is under way.

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• We reported an interesting twist in the saga of the digital economy bill last night, when it emerged that the controversial clause added by the Liberal Democrats – which has been criticised for threatening sites like YouTube that don’t carefully monitor user content – was actually drafted by British music industry body the BPI. The battle between the different lobby groups looks set to continue – and get more vicious – as the bill draws closer to becoming law.

• After a week in which its appeal over a near-$300m patent lawsuit failed, some good news for Microsoft: the Xbox 360 overtook Nintendo’s Wii to become America’s most biggest-selling games console in February. Less promising? Games sales dropped by 15% in the same month, despite the launch of high-profile titles like BioShock 2.

• And given that it’s Friday, I’d like to leave you with a . Jason Kottke points me in the direction of this fascinating article about the work of David Cope – who has spent years developing a piece of software that can compose classical music. The crucial addition to his latest iteration is that it doesn’t just lob in any old notes or copy the patterns set by old masters like Bach and Mozart, but actually analyses how to break the rules to make its compositions sound more real. Listen to the compositions and you might have a hard time distinguishing it from the real thing. That opens up some amazing – if slightly worrisome – possibilities.

You can follow our links and commentary each day through Twitter (@guardiantech, @gdngames or our personal accounts) or by watching our Delicious feed.

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Google’s new interface turns the web into an interactive entertainment magazine

Google has launched Google Reader Play, an experimental feature that offers a new, highly visual way to browse the web.

The new interface displays only one story at a time, focusing on pictures, videos, visual statistics and maps.

“We think Reader Play is a fun way to browse interesting items online that you wouldn’t find otherwise,” said software engineer Garrett Wu in a blogpost announcing the new product.

Unlike the standard Google Reader in which users have to subscribe to feeds, Google Reader Play requires no set-up. It learns new users’ preferences by asking them to mark items they like with a star to read later.

“We designed it especially for people who don’t want to spend time curating their own set of feeds,” said Wu.

Google Reader Play is thus easy to use, and as the items are displayed in full-screen, there is one type of content it is perfect for: television.

As Nick Bilton of the New York Times puts it: “Although Google doesn’t address television in the description of the product, the promising use case for many people could be the ability to use Google Reader Play on a computer hooked up to a larger screen.”

Launched a few weeks before Apple’s iPad hits the stores in April, Google Reader Play makes it clear that the big tech companies are aiming to take on the consumer market.

Do you like the idea of Google Reader Play? Please have your say in the comments

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Wired’s past predictions, solicitors accused, Amazon clicks it, Sony’s Move move, OSS on Windows, emerging sites, and the web’s real Cold War

A quick burst of links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team

Wired Reread – seeing how well old copies of Wired forecast the past
Ah, those far-off days when the year 2000 and the millennium bug were ahead of us, and handheld computers were not at risk of slipping down the sofa. Or of being held in your hand, come to that.

Two solicitors accused over file-sharing ‘bully tactics’ | The Law Gazette
“Mark Stephens, a partner at Stephens Finers Innocent who is representing the two solicitors involved, rejected the consumer group’s allegations. He said Davenport Lyons has a long tradition of protecting the rights of creators, and its methodology for handling illegal file-sharing cases conforms to industry best practice, and has been adopted in the Digital Economy Bill currently going through parliament.

Stephens said it was not correct to say the solicitors’ conduct was inappropriate in the manner alleged by Which?, adding that Davenport Lyons has a 100% success rate for the illegal file-sharing cases that it has taken to court.”

We’d like to know: how many cases has it taken to court?

Amazon.com’s 1-Click patent confirmed following re-exam >> Techflash.com
Is it a software patent, or a business method patent? Either way, the USPTO reckons it stands. Until 2017, anyhow.

GDC: Sony’s Motion Controller Is ‘PlayStation Move’ – Gamasutra
It works like a Wii-mote but looks more like a sex toy. PlayStation Eye camera also required.

Geeknet at OSBC 2010 – Port 25: The Open Source Community at Microsoft
Scott Collison from Geeknet reports on the share of open source on Windows at Geeknet (which owns SourceForge, Slashdot, ThinkGeek, Ohloh, freshmeat etc). He says: “the amount of Open Source Software (OSS) that is Windows compatible has been steadily climbing over time, from 72% in early 2005 to some 82% in late 2009.”

YouTube – THE NEW DORK – Entrepreneur State of Mind
A geeky spoof of Jay-Z and Alicia Keys’ Empire State of Mind, from the guys behind Grasshopper.com. The lyrics and in the info panel

5 Emerging Social Media Sites to Watch in 2010 – Social Media Examiner
You mean there’s more to life than Facebook and Twitter? Well, there’s Foursquare…

Does HTML5 Really Beat Flash? The Surprising Results of New Tests – ReadWriteWeb
Tests at streaminglearningcenter.com confirm that Flash works better on Windows because it can’t use hardware acceleration on Mac OS X.

Flash and Standards: The Cold War of the Web – A List Apart
“Until we realize the foolishness of faith in technology, we’ll see the same cycle repeated,” says Dan Mall

Drudge Report accused of serving malware, again – CNET News
To be precise, it looks like a “malvertising” hit – malware served up via third-party advertising systems which have been conned by the bad guys. Drudge will be a huge target, which potentially means thousands affected. “”This will be a problem (for sites) as long as JavaScript and Active Content, like Flash ads, are allowed” on sites, said Mary Landesman, a senior security researcher at ScanSafe.” Quickly solved then..

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Google and the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage have reached an agreement to digitise up to a million out-of-copyright works at the national libraries in Florence and Rome, including some by Galileo.

And it’s just two weeks after an Italian court gave three Google executives suspended prison sentences over a video of bullying on YouTube that had been removed once the company was told about it.

Google is not only to work closely together with the Italian libraries, but also with the Italian ministry of culture – the first time that the search engine has had a government department a such a close partner on such a project. Google called it a “groundbreaking deal”.

“The libraries will select the works to be digitised from their collections, which include a wealth of rare historical books, including scientific works, literature from the period of the founding of Italy and the works of Italy’s most famous poets and writers,” says Google’s strategic partner development manager, Gino Mattiuzzo, in a blogpost announcing the deal.

While the costs will be covered fully by Google, the company will pass the scans on. The books will be available to groups including the EU’s Europeana project, which already has scanned 6 million digital items of cultural value.

“We believe today’s announcement is an important step, and we look forward to working with more libraries and other partners,” says Mattiuzzo.

Google has similar arrangements with Oxford University, Madrid’s Complutense University, the Bavarian state museum and others.

However, it’s not clear whether Google is creating the world’s biggest library or the world’s biggest bookshop. Some fear the search engine is exploiting cultural heritage as a cheap context for advertising.

Recently, a New York judge postponed a decision on whether the company should be allowed to display parts of books still in-copyright.

Google on the other hand claims good intentions: “We envision a future in which people will be able to search and access the world’s books anywhere, anytime. After all, Antonio Beccadelli and Anastasius Germonius – like Shakespeare and Cervantes – are part of our human cultural history.”

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