Google goes down the drain

The other day, I noticed something new on Google, a new in-home wireless broadband service for FREE.

Now, your money does not have to go down the drain.

Well, rethink that for a minute.

Google offers the TiSP service with a free installation kit including a fiber-optic cable and gloves.

Apparently, there are access points hidden down in sewage lines. You basically take a wire with a sinker and send it down the toilet. The sinker will then be taken care of by the "Plumbing Hardware Dispatchers, who will remove the sinker and plug the line into our global data networking system."

How can Google offer this service for free?








"We believe that all users deserve free, fast and sanitary online access. To offset the cost of providing the TiSP service, we use information gathered by discreet DNA sequencing of your personal bodily output to display online ads that are contextually relevant to your culinary preferences, current health status and likelihood of developing particular medical conditions going forward."

Maybe this is a part of Google's April Fool's Day joke, which provides a service to print all of your e-mails and have them shipped to your home. Pretty clever, Google.

The wave of the future

Our guest for COMM 361 today was Adrian Holovaty, who is the editor of news innovation for washingtonpost.com.

Holovaty discussed how journalism right now is broken. It needs to become "beautiful, clean data that gets written into the blob." It includes the unstructured and structured information. We can use tools like Google, LexisNexis and Excel spreadsheets to break down data. The only problem with structured information, somebody (a human) has to compile it.

The tragedy:

The news organizations have infrastructure to collect info, edit and verify info, get info out to people (printing presses, TVs, etc), reputation for fair and accurate information. He also spoke about the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting as well as chicagocrime.org

• Automated information retrieval
• Does not replace writing, video, photos or storytelling

How is this journalism?

• Gather, distilling, present it
• Call sources, do research; decide what’s worth writing about; write the article
• Write programs to fetch data, decide which queries are worth showing; design the Web site

Anyone that needs more information can contact Adrian Holovaty at Holovaty.com or e-mail him directly at web@holovaty.com. Click on the image below to see another one of Holovaty's projects, Django. He describes it as: "A Python framework that makes building database-backed Web sites fast and easy. I'm lead developer."