Maps have always been important.
Since the era of the great adventurer explorers, Vasco de Gama, Captain James Cook, the map was the crews only link to home.
The maps were the basis of explaining to the royalty what new discoveries had been made.
The maps became the expansion of the empire.

Google made a decision last week to start listing Real Estate via their Google Earth property.
Many would say it was a natural extension of the “Today ve kontrol ze maps, tomorrow, ve control ze vorld!”

Media companies should be used to this mindset, after all, for years they have controlled what we eat, drink, drive, where we live, what we wear, who we should vote for and what we should think.

In a story entitled “Google sparks real estate listings brawl”

Julian Lee, Staff reporter for the Herald, stated that :
Domain, which is owned by Fairfax, and Realestate.com.au, which is controlled by News, dominate the market for properties being searched for on the internet and the $144 million of classified advertising revenue that goes with it.

Advertising revenue is what this all about. As reported in Murdoch says papers should charge on Web by saying that “search engines like Google Inc and Yahoo Inc help users to find stories by aggregating links to newspapers websites and blogs — but then wrest ad dollars from them that they think should be theirs.”

The SMH story continued:

“Fairfax Media and News Limited are independently weighing up whether to pull the millions of dollars they collectively spend on buying key search terms on Google following the latter's decision to list properties for sale on Google Maps.”

Are weighing up ? As if they have a choice?
Googles response is obviously to take back what after all is theirs… the maps.
The Copyrighted Maps. (Interesting, nes pas?)

If you have every country of the world mapped, satellite photographed and horizontally photographed, it’s only logical that the product of that intellectual property could be used to find and sell real estate……

According to the article, Google were making conciliatory noises:

A spokeswoman for Google, Lucinda Barlow, said it had received “great feedback” about its site to date and would like to work more closely with Fairfax and REA to take its listings – which both groups are refusing to do.
“We are partners and we would like to discuss this [issue],” she said.

For years the News Media owned every soul on planet earth. Now it would seem that a couple of college kids devised a system that will either break the media’s backs or force the media to take Google out.

Back in 2006 in an article entitled “The Pacesetters Dilemma; Google”
we said:

This is the first time a company is able to lead, dominate and create a
totally new area of business (monetizing information) as it leads
dominates and creates the very idea (finding information) that is the
business.

Why did all this happen?

Well possibly the “deal”
that Rupert and Google cut a few years ago soured. Why? Well just maybe
Fox couldnt deliver the traffic it contracted and suddenly Google
realised that it had more of the market than the Media Giant.

If I was a Google Exec and wanted to retire early to grow bonsai plants, I guess I would start disrupting the business model of the folks that needed to buy me to survive.
And of course, every-time I did so, my share price would go up.

If all the media baron’s and governments got together now, they could almost afford to take out the Internet 600lb Gorilla.

Anyone shorting Google against a long on News Limited? I’ll take that action……. Put me down for 20 billion long on Google.

Although, the last few Internet acquisitions by the Australia entrepreneur, all seem to be heading south. Maybe News Limited needs some new thinking advising the direction towards safe waters.

Safe waters? Well that would be P2P of course.

Is Rupert scuppered? We dont think so and there are other ideas out there. The News community seem to like this one….. adshare from Internet start-up company “Attributor” where the adverts on the pages  of Web 2.0 “scraped robot news services are shared with the original content creators thereby creating automatic syndication rather than consumer killing litigation although with only one advert player signed up to date, it may only be a marginal solution to what for the News Media services is growing into a huge a problem.
 
In How to Defend Your Empire, or Not
  we said:

Well, the popular alternative [think P2P and the RIAA] to politics is litigation.

During one’s lifetime, one learns a few tricks. Like which
lawyers will take something to the wire and use every means to win.

Rupert is now blaming Google for offering him a zero sum
choice. Either convince the Yahoo Board of Directors to give me their shares or
I will board your ship with every lawyer I can find.

Unfortunately Rupert, as proven in the Telephone Directory model – that stable and long lasting Advertising model so loved by the Telcos, nothing lasts for ever. And the days of $10,000 for a little wee corner on the bottom of page three are probably gone for good.  We think that's a good thing. The fact that Google have over 50% of the search business and the subsequent click through business, well we think that could be a bad thing, if Google abuse their market domination, like the media companies used to abuse theirs.

At the moment, the bottle is pointing to Google, tommorrow, it might point somewhere else, although we think that the “Let your Mouse do the Clicking” might last longer than “Let your fingers do the walking”.

Besides – think of all the trees we are saving without those big thick ugly Yellow Directories that these days appear to be left abandoned
in front of apartment buildings. 
The same ecological thought applies to Newspapers.

Although that might not be good for the paper mills.

Johnny Consumer doesnt really care. Gimme my “relevent” content, give it to me now. 

The scoreboard says 15 all with Murdoch to serve.

The winner in this cat and mouse posturing game will be the company that can serve the most relevent content to the individual consumer with the least fuss in the fastest time.

P2P would actually seem to have the Trust equation nailed down there.

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