blog de notas de juan freire

Mar 4

Organizational charts: The comic is a set of 6 organizational charts, edges with arrows show who reports to whom. Amazon’s is very traditional, each manager has exactly 2 people below her. Google’s is colorful (nodes are colored red, green, yellow, blue) and is extremely messy. Edges are overlapping all over the place, it’s unclear who reports to whom. Facebook looks like a social network with bidirectional arrows and a distributed structure. Microsoft’s is divided in three sub-structures that are pointing guns at each other. Apple’s is a circle with a large red dot in the center, and everyone around it reports to that red dot — the arrow heads are particularly large and even the people two levels away from the center red dot also have arrows point at them coming directly from the red dot. Oracle’s is divided into two sections, the first section is labelled ‘Legal’ and is huge, the second section is labelled ‘Engineering’ and is tiny.

Dic 27

Google’s Earth - William Gibson - New York Times

…

Science fiction never imagined Google, but it certainly imagined computers that would advise us what to do. HAL 9000, in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” will forever come to mind, his advice, we assume, eminently reliable — before his malfunction. But HAL was a discrete entity, a genie in a bottle, something we imagined owning or being assigned. Google is a distributed entity, a two-way membrane, a game-changing tool on the order of the equally handy flint hand ax, with which we chop our way through the very densest thickets of information. Google is all of those things, and a very large and powerful corporation to boot.

We have yet to take Google’s measure. We’ve seen nothing like it before, and we already perceive much of our world through it. We would all very much like to be sagely and reliably advised by our own private genie; we would like the genie to make the world more transparent, more easily navigable. Google does that for us: it makes everything in the world accessible to everyone, and everyone accessible to the world. But we see everyone looking in, and blame Google.

…

we are its unpaid content-providers, in one way or another. We generate product for Google, our every search a minuscule contribution. Google is made of us, a sort of coral reef of human minds and their products. …

We never imagined that artificial intelligence would be like this. We imagined discrete entities. Genies. We also seldom imagined (in spite of ample evidence) that emergent technologies would leave legislation in the dust, yet they do. In a world characterized by technologically driven change, we necessarily legislate after the fact, perpetually scrambling to catch up, while the core architectures of the future, increasingly, are erected by entities like Google.

Cyberspace, not so long ago, was a specific elsewhere, one we visited periodically, peering into it from the familiar physical world. Now cyberspace has everted. Turned itself inside out. Colonized the physical. Making Google a central and evolving structural unit not only of the architecture of cyberspace, but of the world. This is the sort of thing that empires and nation-states did, before. But empires and nation-states weren’t organs of global human perception. They had their many eyes, certainly, but they didn’t constitute a single multiplex eye for the entire human species.

…

Mayo 31

Data Mining: How Companies Know Your Personal Information - TIME

Mayo 25

España cONnecta: Transformación de la economía española a través de internet

Informe realizado por Boston Consulting Group por encargo de Google (informe en pdf):

Internet aporta 23.400 millones de euros al PIB español de forma directa.

…

El impacto de Internet en nuestra sociedad se extiende ya a lo largo de la mayor parte de actividades que realizamos tanto en nuestro tiempo de ocio como en el entorno profesional.

Por ello, España cONecta ha sido realizado con el objetivo de comprender la naturaleza y el tamaño de la actividad económica relacionada con Internet en España.

Ene 13

Official Google Blog: A new approach to China

… We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.