jeff jarvis

It ought to be reassuring that while governments are living a day-to-day existence trying to prevent a global financial implosion, some people are thinking centuries ahead.

The British Library is hosting a conference of more than 250 experts from 33 countries to work out ways of preserving for future generations the huge amounts of data we store online.

Since practically everything we write or watch these days is in digital form - from newspapers or state documents, to the minutes of the banking crisis or the latest edition of Grand Theft Auto - this is a task of mind-boggling proportions.

When we had the government's verdict on Phorm's ad-targeting technology two weeks ago, and the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform had decided, in its infinite wisdom, that the service does not breach European data laws and is "legal, appropriate and transparent".

With the Justice Department getting closer and closer to going after Google for supposed antitrust violation, we're going to see more and more articles like the one in the New York Times this weekend that tries to highlight the story of a company "harmed" by Google's market power.

Jeff Jarvis is working on a book called What Would Google Do? Since Google just did something good for me — and for a market that needs help desperately — I thought I'd share my experience with Jeff and the rest of you.

What Google Did for me was radically improve one of the most annoying experiences in the Webbed world: registering a domain name.

US news agency Associated Press has found itself at the centre of a furious debate over the fair use of material by bloggers after its lawyers issued a takedown notice to a small, independent news site that it claims had quoted too heavily from its news stories.

AP said six instances of copyright violation have taken place on the Drudge Retort, a leftwing comment site, including one post that pasted 18 words from a story on Hillary Clinton followed by a 32-word direct quote.

Last Monday, when an earthquake struck China's Sichuan province, word of it spread quickly from witnesses on the shaking ground via Twitter, the mobile-and-web microblogging service where users share brief, 140-character-long updates with friends.

Prolific blogger and Twitterer Robert Scoble at scobleizer.com insists he saw news of the quake on Twitter minutes before the US Geological Survey posted the tremor and an hour before other news sites reported it.