Landscape and portrait photographer Brian Moore started his career in the late 70s and early 80s in India and was the “official” photographer for houseboat owners on Dal Lake in Kashmir at the time.

This year he took inspiration and travelled back to India to take a series of inspiring, real life reportage-style photographs, covering the length and breadth of the sub-continent, some of which he has published in his first book titled “Sadhus, Beggars, Gypsies and Others”.

At times a photographer’s life is a nomadic one. With a hint of colour and vibrance, mixed with the assiduities of grace and humanity, a photographer stakes out their own internal, artistic territory: from the resonating prime colours of Rajasthan to less majestic images of indifference and survival, Brian Moore uncovers a life besieged by desire and acceptance.

In his first book, he tells endless tales of the sub-continent’s culture, its people and environment, allowing his story to billow and bluster in the power and momentum of trips into the Great Indian Desert, the Bombay slums, its soothing shorelines, its rural life and of the hardships of Himalayan mountain village life.

Before leaving his native Australia, Brian acquired a Nikon camera with a range of lenses and, with his playful armoury of anonymity during intimate moments, this approach gave him the edge in overcoming starched and unnatural poses of the people he chose to photograph. His shots include the people and landscapes of Rajasthan, Varanasi during the recent the nightly aarti (fire) ceremony, Nepal’s mountain people and breathtaking views and, to a lesser extent, other destinations he chose to shoot in.

His majestic colour and black-and-white landscapes are given depth by a devotion to clarity and precision; and his portraits set out his stall for how he views the country to be at its very heart. Brian shot exclusively on a Nikon digital and, in so doing, has made archival fine art landscapes and its people come alive.

The flexibility of shooting digitally enabled Brian to experiment. With his impressive photographic style and technique, Brian Moore’s talent and experience of exploring the colourful characters of India, with his almost anonymous approach to its people, captures images that are the embodiment of India’s life, emotion and environment.

Brian Moore details his real life reportage-style photographs in first book, being showcased on Blurb, which profiles the people of India and Nepal. It is for sale on http://www.blurb.com/books/1219016.

Let’s  take a look at recent events in the corporate world of the internet, mobile phones and social media; what I refer it to as corporate twisty-turny things of value. For a start, Google and Microsoft. This time it’s not the Chinese government but the unruly Microsoft that is being accused by the mighty Google of being the “invisible hand” behind the European Commission’s (EC) preliminary anti-trust inquiry into its practices. The US Justice Department and European regulators declared, much to Google’s irritation, that Microsoft’s partnership with Yahoo was fine by them.

Hence, Microsoft Deputy General Counsel Dave Heiner opined on the case: “This is the way that competition law agencies function: They look to competitors [and] the practices of dominant firms and the competitive significance of those practices … Ultimately what’s important is not … whether or not the challenged practices are anti-competitive.” The last bit he surely didn’t mean, did he, when he went on to admit that Microsoft had told the EC that Google’s behaviour “may be harming publishers, advertisers and competition in search and online advertising”, which although may not be “challenged” as anti-competitive practices, were most certainly declared to be so.

Yahoo must be mightily relieved, as it views this partnership as going a long way in its bid to cutting costs and raising its operating margin to 20% within two years from now. So, mysteriously, back in its silicon ranch and in tandem with the Commission’s findings, Microsoft is funding Yahoo’s internet search service as part of this “newly-formed partnership”, with the company commenting that Microsoft is to “reimburse us for the costs of running our algorithmic and paid search services,” with reimbursements in addition to the $150 million the company has already agreed to pay to help fund Yahoo’s transition under the partnership.

So, not only does Google have ongoing issues with the Chinese government and the Microsoft-Yahoo partnership, Yahoo has now entered into an agreement with Twitter. Only six months ago, Carol  Bartz, the president and CEO of Yahoo, announced: “We have never been a search company”, which at the time sounded decidedly bizarre as its core business was search. However, as competition in the search and mobile markets ratchets up, Yahoo has now entered into another bout of in-fighting, this time in the social media ring, which will allow tweets to be directly accessed within all Yahoo-related sites. It also comes at a time when the company announced a similar deal with Facebook, who don’t really do search either.

Not to be out-routed by these acts of corporate treachery, Google launched Android, an iPhone lookalike in direct competition with Apple, with its own services, of course. So that’s three of them ganging up on Google now. Further, Google has launched its own Twitter-based service, dubbed Google Buzz, which essentially copied most of Twitter’s social networking features in the hope it will tweet a verb into a buzz.

Twitter, of course, is far more buzzier, and Yahoo has said its search engine results will display tweets in real time with a marginally different approach to its results, announcing that there will be two tweets and displayed alongside related YouTube links. It is here that we can clearly see the culmination of corporate innovation at its zenith of awakening.

It certainly seems congested in those unscaled heights, with so many similar services being placed on competing platforms. Where, for self-reference, I concluded, could I find an rational description of this unromantic pragmatism? I liked Lord Melchett’s quip in the BBC’s Black Adder series, which was abstractly and drunkenly delivered as: “You twist and turn like a … twisty-turny thing”. That helps. A bit.

But if anyone finds no cogent correlation between Lord Melchett and the corporate labyrinthine muddle above, then good. If so, try Rorty. His vision was of an anti-representationlist transformation of common sense, where no real attempt whatsoever should be made to name any concrete instruments that could serve as the means for the realisation of it. Instead, he merely hoped for a lucky turn of history which could one day lead to idiosyncratic mutations that, once in a while, seep down into common sense. This is the realm in which the spin-offs of twisty-turny things hope to turn into genuine social utility.

Let’s hope he’s right, but I doubt it.

Since the “Great Mexican Standoff” between Google and China appeared in the Press last month, Google is still censoring its results a month after its executives took to provocative public outpourings on China’s laws that demand the removal of search results that China’s government considers either “subversive” or “offensive”.

Now, Google officials are keeping “mum” about the company’s position, although they now say it might “parse its Chinese search results” for several more months while it looks at “steering through this political and cultural minefield” in search for compromise.

From the very beginning, it did seem to me that Google was playing along with the US government’s concerns about China throwing its weight around, which it is increasingly prone to do. Google, it seems, wants to find a way to stay and the Chinese government doesn’t want Google to leave because that would mean a “loss of face”. Last month’s announcements may have been sheer bluff, backed up by the US position of China being seen as increasingly unruly global bully, but the stalemate continues to bite.

From blocking or closing down thousands of Western blogs and social-networking sites with accusations that the US is seeking “information hegemony”, the Chinese government made it clear that its media policy platform is to isolate its population from “negative opinions” from the West.

While it is illogically inconsistent that China’s political model, which combines free-market principles with spoon-fed state enterprise, intolerance and human rights abuses is viewed by some as an alternative to disillusioned Anglo-Saxon casino capitalism, it is no answer to retreat into socially hermitic seclusion.

Maybe this pseudo-alternative is attractive to the dispossessed, but it is worth noting that the Chinese have copied the West’s social media models to fuel its own online social discourse. And while market pressures feed on the need to continue with its double-digit economic growth to ward off any possible backlash and a redux towards social instability, its central bank has still had to apply the brakes in the New Lunar Year on its overheating economy.

There have been reports over the growing signs of conflict among its people, with a higher crime rate and a growing gap between the rich and poor. So it is no wonder that the internet has become a primary medium for anti-Chinese forces to “subvert” the State. This has led to overriding social supervision in applying new standards for public security agencies to enforce, which Google is now caught up in.

Last week, the launch of Google Buzz sparked news agencies into reporting that it is highly likely it will be censored alongside Facebook and Twitter, which have already been banned. It is worth noting though that, according to a Netpop Research study, the Chinese are twice as likely to use chat and three times more likely to micro-blog, blog and use video conference than American users.

According to socialmedia.com: “The demand for social video site Youku, Facebook-like site Kaixin, and instant messaging service QQ have seen a surge in popularity over the past year alone, with Youku experiencing a five-fold growth in its revenue over last year, bringing in the equivalent of 29 million dollars in 2009.”

While we in the West may shrug our collective shoulders that what happens in China is of little interest to us, the country’s online population is expected to reach 500 million in 2015, and that is of great interest to global corporations like Google, whatever the restrictions.

But neither isolation nor opprobrium is the answer. It may take years to resolve but as Lord Mandelson, First Secretary of State to the British government, summed up in an op-ed on Sino-Western co-operation: “…A billion-person blocking minority is not an obstacle to global governance; it is the end of global governance.

“The dilemma for Europe and America is this: We cannot dictate China’s development or the solutions to its problems. But we do not have the luxury of ignoring them either.

“Europe and the US need to recognise that China will not simply accept a model of global governance or multilateralism that it played no part in designing, or which it feels does not reflect the imperative of its growth and stability.

“But China needs to make it clear that it understands that China is too big, the challenges too great and the global village too small for China to retreat into inflexibility or insularity. We may have to show some patience, and nerves for the occasional friction, but one way or another, we all need China to succeed and we all need China to start leading.”

Ideally, both the Chinese government and the West — including Google excutives — would be wise to heed these fine words and start working towards some form of co-operation that can one day be accommodated into a global, homogenised social-media contract of understanding.

But just understanding China and its culture is a one-way street that is doomed to fail. Instead, China has to understand Western values also. It is not just a “handful of Western reporters” who support human rights in China, but all of us. This is one of the prime reasons behind the discord and why China finds the need to censor the internet so intensely and therefore set up proprietary clones of Western-based social media sites.

China would do well to get off its high horse and stop bossing countries around, like the US. Threats on sales of arms to Taiwan, the meeting of the Dalai Lama and kicking Google into touch are adolescent and primitive means of establishing a workable detente.

The almost religious delirium expressed by the self-appointed high priests of the Mac world, devotees that have dubbed the iPad the “Jesus Tablet” (more like Moses in my view), could be the solution to the crises the computer, print, music and telecoms industries.

This tablet-shaped device is, amongst everything else, to be the answer to the recent paywall controversies between Google and News Corp and the revival of sluggish advertising revenues.

In my various blog attacks on Mr Murdoch’s big business aims in transforming the web from a free-for-all to subscription-based, it is tempting to repent. But has Mr Job’s vision been transformative enough to convert this blind Lazarus into a true believer? And, if it ever does take off as the media have hyped it to pass, will it be the answer to the incessant squabbles between sinner and sinned against?

Not only is the iPad a colour eReader, it is also a music/video player and games console. Add to the list Apple’s online stores and this device could prove to be a winner, especially for newspapers, magazines and books.

To date, consumers have been highly reluctant to pay for online content and advertisers have been hamstrung by eReaders that cannot display their ads. In contrast, the iPad now offers this and more and gives multi-industries the opportunity to bring their corporate online strategies into the 21st century.

According to The Economist: “Apple has already attracted some blue-chip media brands…with leading publishers such as Penguin and Simon & Schuster…” and gives users “access to electronic versions of newspapers such as the New York Times.”

But with all the fizz in The Economist this week, Doubting Thomas’s abound. The newspaper, of course, has a vested interest in getting paid-for content into people’s heads, but it seems as if consumers don’t entirely share their optimism.

Within hours of Job’s introducing the “internet-changing” iPad, it was reviewed and instead of beseeching Jobs with praise from on high, they delivered a list of its pitfalls. This permeated the internet community very quickly and the general reaction to it was negative. From a former rise, Apple’s shares dropped over three per cent.

Mike Gartenberg, vice-president of strategy and analysis at research firm Interpret, told BBC News: “Everything they [Apple] have done up until now is in this device — the iPod, iTunes, multi-touch, the applications. And then they added new features like the iBook store and productivity.”

However, on the dark side, Blogger and TechCrunch took a different view: “Is it a must have? The quick and dirty answer is: for many people, right now, no. Unlike the iPhone, which filled an already well-established need, there is no existing need the iPad fills.”

One comment on TechCrunch  went even further: “I cringed at the hate being directed its way on sites such as Slashdot and Digg. Even the guys at Penny Arcade, whom I normally agree with, said ‘that iPad presentation had to be the worst thing I’ve even seen on on the Apple stage’ and that Apple had failed to make a case for the device.’ If you believe them, the iPad is going to be a massive flop. Well, the unwashed masses on the internet also predicted that the iPod would be a failure. They were wrong then, and they are wrong now.”

So, perplexing and contrasting views on the subject. It all made perfect sense to me as someone who is keen to see resolution in the newspaper and magazine industries. And yet, consumers seem not to agree.

David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer, announced on its official blog last week, there is to be “a new approach to China”, which means, we want out. What the ultimate outcome of this furore will be is not yet clear, but according to sources China is said to have persuaded Google to stay on and announced that: “Beijing is trying to persuade Google to stay and give up plans to pull out its Chinese version from the country.”

On the same blog, Google said: “Like many other well-known organizations, we face cyber attacks of varying degrees on a regular basis. In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google.” Therefore, we quit? That simple? Not quite.

China’s foreign ministry said last Thursday that: “China welcomed international internet companies to conduct business within the country according to the law”. Well, that’s all well and good if the Chinese authorities are protecting users from viewing porn and overt sedition but the assumption of the foreign Press has been that the hacker attacks were orchestrated by the Chinese government to carry out investigations against human rights activists.

That sort of practice is, of course, unacceptable to us in the West, but doesn’t it smack of hypocrisy? There’s something awkwardly deceiving about Google’s moral stance on China when its corporate motto “do no evil”, an anachronism now but perhaps a catchy shibboleth in its time, is an almost obscene declaration of double standards while it retains data mining to service ad revenues, coupled with surveillance, digital profiling and personal intrusion.

Getting ever more involved, the issue has now become politicised, with the US government saying it will lodge a formal complaint with Chinese officials to express its concern about cyber attacks on Google’s Gmail service in China after Google announced it will no longer censor its content.

In the spirit of appeasement, China Internet Network Information Center, another official agency, said on Saturday that the number of internet users had reached 384 million by the end of 2009, a 28% jump in one year. In January last year, China also issued 3G licenses to major telecom operators, resulting in a massive hike in internet users. Now, around 8% of all internet access in China is through mobile phones, and growing exponentially.

Google is also apparently in trouble for copyright theft of Chinese writers without obtaining permission. Add to this the valid criticism by censors for allowing its site to be used for the distribution of pornography: Google should know better than to let that type of content through in China.

According to Techcrunch last week, “Google has had more success in China than a lot of other big Valley names, but [it] isn’t and will likely never be the market leader…Valley elites erupted into applause on Twitter and blogs saying Google was showing more backbone than the US government and was a model of integrity for the world.” Moral integrity and Google? A non-sequitur if there ever was one, surely?

But perhaps there are other factors at play: Google was not making a lot of money in China and played second fiddle to Baidu; and it was never going to make any substantially increase in its market share. Maybe economics was at the forefront of its decision, as last year China accounted for just under 1-2% of Google’s US$21.8 billion revenue.

This is not just a Google issue though: all foreign media companies have found it very difficult to penetrate the Chinese internet market; they make only modest returns. What the backlash may be within the country and without is yet to be revealed, but media censorship is deeply unpopular, even with the Chinese people themselves, and some have suggested  that if Google goes ahead and pulls google.cn, the Chinese may yet stage protests against the government, citing Google as the catalyst.

One statement I read that came out of Google’s statement of intent was from Warren Cowan, CEO at Greenlight, a UK-based search engine marketing agency, who told TechNewsWorld: “China doesn’t need Google as much as Google needs China . China’s got the sophistication, the strength and the will to do whatever it wants.” Not so, methinks, or China would not have held out the olive branch this weekend; the “need” is perhaps better described as mutual.

But surely there must first be some resolution between Google and the Chinese authorities, as blocking access to sites such as Blogger, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and millions of other “undesirable” websites, is excessive use of their censorship “laws”. It was perhaps the hacking attack on Gmail that was the last straw.

The Chinese are still very sensitive about images of Tiananmen Square, the footage of Chinese police beating up Tibetan monks and the social unrest in Qinghai. It was these scenes that prompted the shutdown of foreign social-networking sites. Also, the scare of the footage on Twitter about the Iranian election protests saw them further retreat into their protective shells.

All this, together with the political overtures of President Barack Obama’s sharp slap on the wrist in his thinly-veiled criticism of Chinese internet censorship during his recent visit, and that the US is to receive the Dalai Lama and to sell arms to Taiwan, doesn’t exactly aid Google’s cause.

Of course, there is also the argument that whether or not Google leaves China, the Chinese have become adept at circumventing these Orwellian blocks to foreign websites with the installation of “virtual private network” software.

But let’s look at some social and economic perceptions of the international press: it has recently taken up the mantle of China’s economic ascendancy on the world stage and of its future dominance. But there are negatives in this narrative. First, intransigence was China’s hallmark during the recent climate change talks in Copenhagen which turned to condemnation; and there has been an international outcry about the jailing of a human-rights activist and the execution of a mentally disturbed British drug-smuggler.

China’s strongest asset, its booming economy, has also been damned by many a reliable source, with one describing it as “Dubai times 1,000, or worse”. According to the Economist, “China’s smooth ascent is exploding because its economic miracle has proved partly illusory. In fact, China’s government may be right to see the economic gloom as in part wishful thinking from outsiders repelled by its repressive political system… China is no Goldilocks economy. Bank lending is growing too fast, which may be fine if it is flowing into useful investments, but not if it is fuelling asset prices. The risk of bubbles and excess capacity will grow unless policy is tightened soon.”

Analyses have drawn a mixed crowd: there are those that think Google is morally right to withdraw from repression; others view it as financial suicide; others still see China’s ascendancy on the world stage as an entity it simply must engage with at whatever cost.

But let’s look at a few excerpts of Will Hutton’s “China, the West and the Credit Crunch”, regarding this new utopia: His lecture reversed some common expectations that the 21st century belongs to China and asserted that its extraordinary growth has been taken out of context. He contends that China’s growth offers no new paradigm for development, and its success is based solely on high savings and low-tech manufacture, having come about as a consequence of its One Child Policy, which effected a phenomenally high savings rate of around 40% as means to ensure old age financial support.

The other point to mention here is Chinese businesses mask pervasive state control. According to Mr Hutton: “Of the 1,105 enterprises floated on the stock exchange, 81% are actually state controlled; of the 6,000 restructured state-owned enterprises, the members of communist party committees have become non-executive directors in 70%.” These figures go a long way to explain Google’s and other multinationals’ treatment by the state.

And talking of economic growth and what the board of google.cn might have realised is, as Mr Hutton states: “…economic growth requires an educated and productive workforce, discerning consumers, property rights and the capacity to innovate. A telling statistic is that China currently accounts for only 0.1% of international patents.”

To conclude, this appears to be a Mexican standoff, with reports that Google’s China operations may be “officially terminated” in February, leading the Chinese government to block the company’s main site, according to Credit Suisse Group. But their decision to withdraw should rather be a precursor in raising a meaningful dialogue with the Chinese authorities. If not, who else is to contribute in becoming a “key enabler of a better-informed world” in China?

The West has a lot to learn from the Chinese and vice-versa, but it will not be an easy task while the Right continue to hold political and economic sway in the country. Although Google will hold more talks with Chinese authorities “in the coming days”, it would also do well to remember its own fuzzy logic: don’t be evil; in other words, be up-front about what personal data you collect. People in glass houses, and all that…

If it does eventually go sour, the biggest losers in this fiasco will be Google and China; both would lose face if the withdrawal proves to be true, with China deprived of Google’s innovation, international visibility and respect and Google’s visible global hand will be impaired.

Kafka: Gregor awakes one morning in his family’s apartment to find himself inexplicably transformed overnight into a gigantic beetle. Gregor does not immediately recoil from his insect form, but instead chooses to lament his job by saying, “How am I going to get to work?” and the general misery of the rainy weather outside. Indeed, the narrative establishes the poor conditions as the cause of his bed-ridden state. Gregor works as a travelling salesman, and, as it is usual for travelling salesmen to move constantly from place to place, he is accustomed to waking up in unfamiliar surroundings and various circumstances.

Monbiot: On “US left behind in technological race to fight climate change”. The occasion was a speech by the US secretary of energy, Steven Chu. He is, of course, a Nobel physicist, brilliant, modest, likeable, a delightful contrast to the thugs employed by the previous administration. But his speech was, in the true sense of the word, pathetic: it moved me to pity.

Kafka: Because Gregor can’t provide financially any more, the other family members get jobs: Gregor’s father comes out of retirement to work at a bank, his mother sews fine underwear for a fashion house and his sister works in a shop and gets a position on a secretarial course. One day, when Gregor emerges from his room, his father chases him around the dining room table and pelts him with apples. One of the apples becomes embedded in his back, causing an infection.

Monbiot: Yesterday afternoon in Copenhagen – where the UN climate talks are entering their second week – Professor Chu unveiled what would have been a series of inspiring innovations, had he made this speech 15 years ago. Barely suppressing his excitement, he told us the US has discovered there is great potential for making fridges more efficient, and that the same principle could even be extended to lighting, heating and whole buildings. The Department of Energy is so thrilled by this discovery that it has launched a programme to retrofit homes in the US, on which it will spend $400m a year.

Kafka: Although he imprisons himself within his room voluntarily at first, his family later become the jailers, locking Gregor in from the outside, partly to hide him from their new lodgers. Devoid of human contact, Gregor alternates between concern for his family and anger at them for neglecting him.

Monbiot: It can’t all be blamed on George Bush: this technological backwardness pre-dates him. The real problem is the terror of all modern US governments of being seen to interfere in the free market. It’s ironic that the lack of effective regulation in the US has not ensured – as the free market fundamentalists prophesied – that the US came out in front, but that it has been left far behind. Just ask the car manufacturers. The truth, too uncomfortable to be discussed by US officials, is that government regulations are among the main drivers of technological innovation.

Kafka: The sister then determines with finality that the insect is no longer Gregor, since Gregor would have left them out of love and taken their burden away. Gregor returns to his room and collapses, finally succumbing to his wound and to his starvation. The point of view shifts as, upon discovery of his corpse, the family feels an enormous burden has been lifted from them, and start planning for the future again. The family discovers that they aren’t doing financially badly at all, especially since, following Gregor’s demise, they can take a smaller flat. The brief process of forgetting Gregor and shutting him from their lives is quickly completed. The final sentence echoes the first.

For a quick peek into its usefulness, I took a look at the Copenhagen Climate Summit as an example.

In the twenty minutes or so I had real-time results updating, there was slurry of entries, including:
•    Bangladesh to seek 15 percent of any climate fund – Reuters
•    Copenhagen climate summit issues: money – Telegraph
•    US rock star sings to save shrunk Kashmiri glaciers – Xinhua
•    They opened climate talks in Copenhagen today and not a single polar bear showed up. If they’re not worrying, why should I? – StephenAtHome

But topping the bill was a story published on the Telegraph’s website – Copenhagen climate summit: 1,200 limos, 140 private planes and caviar wedges.

Majken Friss Jorgensen, managing director of Copenhagen’s largest limousine company, said that during the “summit to save the world”, the total number of limos in Copenhagen had already broken the 1,200 barrier. She remarked: “We haven’t got enough limos in the country to fulfil the demand…We’re having to drive them in hundreds of miles from Germany and Sweden.”

What’s even more alarming is that the number of electric and hybrid cars totals a paltry five: “We don’t have any hybrids in Denmark, unfortunately, due to the extreme taxes on those cars. It makes no sense at all, but it’s very Danish.” A very Danish sense of humour is it, to have organised a critical environmental event that prices out alternative energy? Anyway, the result is that the conference, including participants’ travel, will create a total of 41,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide, equivalent to the sum produced by a small European city over the same period.

Not to be discouraged in their efforts to avoid the next Armageddon, Denmark is expecting up to 140 private jets, which is so far above its capacity to cope,  the planes will have to be parked next door in Sweden. To soften the effect, perhaps the limos being driven in can give hitchhiking participants a ride?

Unlikely though, as in attendance will be 15,000 delegates and officials, 5,000 journalists, 98 world leaders, Leonardo DiCaprio and Prince Charles, who are said to be already mulling over their sustainable scallops, foie gras and sculpted caviar wedges. The Great Unwashed (a term coined by Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, describing the protagonists), will be tactfully located elsewhere carrying out a “funeral of the day” to mark their deep contempt for the Great Satan of all “heatist” concepts, economic growth.

According to the Telegraph, “Denmark has taken delivery of its first-ever water-cannon…plus sweeping new police powers. The authorities have been proudly showing us their new temporary prison, 360 cages in a disused brewery, housing 4,000 detainees.” Sounds promising.

To top it all, Ed Miliband, Britain’s Secretary of State at the Department of Energy and Climate Change, delivered a speech in which he said: “If Martin Luther King had come along and said ‘I have a nightmare’, people would not have followed him.” But no doubt they will follow those that declare: “I have a limousine (because my private jet’s parked in Sweden)”. At least the billowing hot air that will fire the conference’s central heating systems this week will be personally sustainable.

But I digress. This story is surely about real-time results and how useful this addition is to Google search. I have to say that Spiked Online’s Tim Brown, who once remarked Twitter was “…a seething mass of self-affirming emotional incontinence…” was mostly filtered out and the information was relevant to subject. And after pressing the pause-button to stem the flow and analyse the results, the entries came variously from the Twitter accounts of the major dailies.

Google’s “Real Time Search” does, after all, seem rather useful.

Only last week we heard of an “exclusive deal” to list News Corp’s content on Microsoft’s Bing, but today a happy compromise has been suggested by the plaintiff. To many, dropping the company’s content from Google’s indexes was slated as a septuagenarian not understanding the concept behind the internet, while Hooray Henry newspaper chiefs curtsied in front of the great agitator-in-chief for taking on the titan of search.

Google, meanwhile, mused over the “kleptomania” furore and, according to a report in the NYT, said it, “provided news organizations’ websites with 100,000 clicks a minute, every one of which offers a business opportunity for the publishers to show ads, win loyal readers and sell subscriptions.”

As I have argued before, it is not easy for online news to make much revenue and an advertising model is perhaps the best anyone can ever achieve with regard to the established modus operandi of content provision and the monetisation of it.

In support of this and in a recession such as the one that has just descended on the world, vast volumes of online traffic do not necessarily translate into significant advertising revenue. Furthermore, news is a fickle business in that unless the entire industry pulls together in the same direction, people will read the news somewhere else — and that has been Mr Murdoch’s major gripe about the BBC.

So, with ad revenues slashed, Mr Murdoch’s great new architectural plan was unveiled to introduce subscriptions, which also flies in the face of how people use the web. This week Google seems to have softly entered the debate, looking at ways to appease Mr Murdoch and accommodate paid content.

As the NYT dismissively commented: “Critics of News Corp said last week that Google should just let Mr Murdoch walk away, and that he would be shooting himself in the foot by doing so. News is a commodity on the web, and the loss of one of many sources of it will make little difference to internet users…”

A Guardian article (you see how much I need the web for quotes and information that is published for free?), quoted Josh Cohen of Google News saying: “Media companies that want to erect paywalls around their online content still need to be visible on search engines. In fact, they have an even greater need for their content to be listed.”

He added that: “Google had achieved this by updating its First Click Free programme, so that publishers can limit Google News users to looking at no more than five pages of content a day without registering or subscribing.” The Financial Times is also using this service.

However, as always, there is a hitch: all a user needs to do is to go back to Google each time; and it is this “loophole” that Google is seeking to address so that it will limit you to five pages per day before registration, regardless of how you get to the website.

Arianna Huffington, whose site is largely known for aggregating content, said at a recent Federal Trade Commission workshop on “Journalism and the Internet Age”: “Murdoch is confusing aggregation with theft…” and added: “Aggregation is part of the web’s ‘DNA’ and that Murdoch plays both sides, noting that some of Murdoch’s own sites also aggregate or ’steal’ content.”

Others think the move is a significant initial victory for publishers, as Rory Cellan-Jones of BBC News said: “By playing hardball, [Murdoch] appears to have got Google to blink.” But as Mark Cuban, an HDNet exec, put it: “Platforms allow news sources, like Newscorp, to post breaking news and gain value from their brand. Google does not.  In other words, if I trust a newspaper, TV or any brand, I can follow it on Twitter and expect the news to come to me…Having to search for and find news in search engines is so 2008.”

So, the phoney war may just stay that way if the compromise is broad enough to placate Mr Murdoch. All said and done, the changes put forward by Google seem fair enough given the territory that’s at stake. But some observers have commented about the long-term sustainability of the model. One said: “The internet is open source at its core, is it not? So is content. Revenue models back to the drawing board…” Maybe, but the draughtsman’s contract has been gathering dust for over a decade now, still with no firm resolution in sight.

In “O’Reilly: The Web is at war, and it’s making me sad” (see http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-10399710-36.html), we have seen over the past few months that News Corp has stepped up the stakes in its battle to block Google from indexing content from Rupert Murdoch’s online media titles, and that now Microsoft is said to be willing to pay Time Warner and News Corporation, among others, to make these sources available exclusively through Bing, it’s new search engine.

During this time, and many articles later, Rupert Murdoch has criticised Google for “kleptomania” and has threatened to cut them off from all his online publications. That is not quite as easy as he thinks, though, as nearly a quarter of all traffic to the Wall Street Journal’s website, for example, comes via Google. Microsoft, for their part, is willing to spend up to 10% of its operating income over the next five years, which could add up to a sum somewhere around $US11bn. Tim O’Reilly, who coined the term Web 2.0, questions the war for the control of the web, which directly contradicts his “interoperable platform” concept.

Not all agree though, as the Economist argues that, “a handful of well-funded and powerful platforms, locked in heated competition, could be better for consumers and generate more innovation than Mr O’Reilly’s vision of an internet made of many ’small pieces loosely joined’.”

The bursting of the dot-com bubble in 2001 was a turning point for the web and, with it, the concept of “Web 2.0″ was born. Its web pioneer Tim O’Reilly warned an audience at a recent Web 2.0 Expo that he thinks “we’re headed into another ugly time”, meaning that the corporates are ganging up on Google’s dominance, with Rupert “Dr Evil” Murdoch leading the charge and threatening to pull News Corp’s content carpet from under Google’s feet.

In the same CNet article, it says that: “O’Reilly’s attitude isn’t ‘bring it on, and get me a large popcorn with extra butter, while you’re at it’. Rather, he hinted that at least in some cases, he’s willing to embrace Google as a big, cuddly, benevolent dictator in the midst of it all.” Rather like Stalin dressed up in a Winnie The Pooh fancy dress outfit, maybe?

But with all fancy dress parties there are reactionaries in the mix, as Barbarian Group executive Rick Webb announced: “Setting aside the boo hoo, the internet is becoming a bunch of walled gardens arguments, when rational people have conversations about how to make the web actually usable and not 95 percent piracy, spam, and fraud…”

All this aside, it is becoming clearer by the day that the web is heading into a full-frontal period of bloody competition that could kill the concept of the web’s interoperability as we know it today.

In radar.oreilly.com, Mr O’Reilly clearly states that: “And so we’ve grown used to a world with one dominant search engine, one dominant online encyclopaedia, one dominant online retailer, one dominant auction site, one dominant online classified site, and we’ve been readying ourselves for one dominant social network…

“It could be that everyone will figure out how to play nicely with each other, and we’ll see a continuation of the interoperable web model we’ve enjoyed for the past two decades. But I’m betting that things are going to get ugly. We’re heading into a war for control of the web. And in the end, it’s more than that, it’s a war against the web as an interoperable platform. Instead, we’re facing the prospect of Facebook as the platform, Apple as the platform, Google as the platform, Amazon as the platform, where big companies slug it out until one is king of the hill.”

In a postscript, he predicts that: “Microsoft will emerge as a champion of the open web platform, supporting interoperable web services from many independent players, much as IBM emerged as the leading enterprise backer of Linux.”

As an opener, let’s look at this lady’s credentials and then find out what she has to say on the subject: Stefana Broadbent is a digital ethnographer who, over the past twenty years has been investigating the evolution of digital activities in the workplace and at home to monitor the changes in social practices. Her TED biography describes her as: “a cognitive scientist, [who] has spent decades observing people as they use technology, both at home and in complex workspaces such as air-traffic control towers…that speaks volumes on the way we think about our relationships.”

Here I summarise five main aspects of Stefana’s research:
•    A typical user spends 80% of his or her time communicating with just four other people;
•    People use different communications technologies in distinct and divergent ways;
•    There has been a diminution of voice communication and an increase in written channels;
•    Instead of work invading our private lives, our private communications are now invading the workplace;
•    People in general do not like to work while on the move: hotel rooms and airports are not valued as appropriate environments for substantive work and are mainly used for email.

Based on her in-depth research about the changing relationship between work and social relationships that has irreducibly altered, there are now around one billion people in continuous technological contact. However, as Ms Broadbent’s research shows, up to eighty percent of these exchanges, regardless of the channel, are with only five people.

Among the psychological community, the worry is that these new forms of communication has led to emotional dependence, which for the obsessive is perhaps true; while the concerns of the sociologists are that “tele-cocooning” has bred a “retreat from public engagement”. Personally, I enjoy extreme use of communications technology during my time at work and then leave it alone entirely (except for the mobile in arranging venues with friends) and then enter entirely into verbal dialogue in the evenings and at weekends. What, may I ask, is so dependent and introverted about that?

Thankfully, I work for my own company so I can choose what method of communication I like, but that is not the case for the majority whose companies have long been concerned about the excessive use of company time to catch up with people using their own, private, digital space.

In Ms Broadbent’s video, she points out that workplaces, administrations and schools have for a very long time set limits and regulations on the amount of time employees are permitted to use devices and websites to communicate with their friends and family.

Being that an employee is paid to be there, that comes as no great surprise. But introducing penalties ranging from confiscation, fines, blocking access to social networking sites, instant messaging, private email accounts and cell phone usage, it all seems a bit stringent in this age of advanced digital communications.

Socially, what seems to be happening is that today’s employees are challenging the need for companies to block their digital interactions, in direct contradiction to company policy that forbids it in order for them to be “productive and effective”. But does that necessarily mean companies are subverting people’s relationships?

Subversion, Ms Broadbent argues, has been going on over the last 150 years, and that the private sphere has always been banned from the workplace. Society in general, she says, has functioned on the inculcating principle that “attention, isolation and productivity” are all interrelated and that employers have enforced these principles so that communications can only be directed towards the external rather than internal. So is it now the case now that private communication is somehow threatening these entrenched “ethical” values of the school and workplace?

The revolution of the personal perhaps started in earnest from the mid-1990s when people started to use email on their PCs, followed by mobile phones. It has since advanced into strands of a social media milieu that so threatens the educational and corporate hierarchies that they have moved to restrict access to such usage. Not in my back yard but I believe what she says is true.

Her research seems to empirically demonstrate that personal communication at school and in the workplace is more about trust than lost production. Perhaps it has always been that way, but haven’t people always found ways to circumnavigate the status quo?