NY Times Sues Huff Post

Lisa Belkin, an AOL employee for nearly 30 years, writes on subjects of motherhood and parenting in a 3-year old blog. She calls her blog Motherlode, and distributes her work through The New York Times. 

Last month, after leaving her position with New York Times, she began writing for Huffington Post. Her new blog called Parentlode is an attempt to create interest and readership from other sources, "in an era when fathers are every bit the parent" and in hopes that her new blog will encourage equality through changing parental roles. 

A lawsuit filed late Friday in US District Court in Manhattan, claims the blogs' names are too similar for readers to distinguish her current work, from her previous work. 

The lawsuit claims that Belkin clearly intended to create confusion for readers who followed her work through the similarly named blog, and requests that her new blog be renamed in an attempt to avoid having readers mistake authorship. 

NY Times' Motherlode blog, according to Belkin's final post on October 7, 2011, will continue.

Both companies which are based in New York, declined to comment.

Google+ Launches Pages

 Google has now launched Pages for Google Plus. It is similar to Facebook fan pages where companies, celebrities and other “brands” can interact with their customers and followers by engaging in discussions.

But Google brings the power of open Web search by adding Google+ Pages to Google search results.

One can find any company's Twitter or Facebook page by searching on Google and find those pages at the top of the results.

Google has a shortcut called Direct Connect wherein typing a “+” in front of the company name gives the Google+ Page of the company. Moreover, just by typing “+A” into the search box can get a listing of Google+ Pages for Amazon, AT&T, Angry Birds and ABC News.

In these terms, a Google+ Page becomes a must-have for any company looking to establish a presence on the Internet, just as a Web site itself was the must-have a decade ago and Twitter and Facebooks accounts have been in recent years. Google has always been open, a place that anyone could visit to conduct a search without having to first log-in.

It’s definitely a one-up on Facebook and Twitter - but also must have Microsoft thinking again about the connection between social and search and how Bing, its own search offering, suddenly feels like it’s missing an important piece of the puzzle.

This is the face of the new interactive Internet, a one-up over the traditional Web site. These Google+ pages are powered by search, share and followers. This is a dynamic environment where companies host live video “hangout” sessions and engage in discussions with their followers. Google owns YouTube and, aside from the embedding videos into Google+ posts, you can imagine that Google+ Pages and YouTube channels might soon become chummier.

Google admits threat from Apple's Siri technology

Eric Schmidt, Google Chairman admitted to the US Senate antitrust subcommittee that Apple's Siri is a significant development in voice enabled search and could pose a threat to Google Search. He thinks that Siri might supplant Google's search engine.

Schmidt even went so far as to cite two publications for calling Siri a "Google killer" and Apple's "entry point" into the search engine business. In the letter, Schmidt backpedaled from a previous statement in September 2010 where he had denied that Apple and Facebook were a "competitive threat." However, now Eric said that his previous statement was clearly wrong and accessing answers through iPhones demonstrates innovations in search..

Google has many strong competitors and competes against search engines (Microsoft's Bing, Yahoo!), specialized search engines (Kayak, Amazon, WebMD, eBay), social networks (Facebook, Twitter), commercial software companies (Apple, Microsoft), mobile apps and direct navigation.

Apple unveiled Siri in October as a new feature of the iPhone 4S. The software, which Apple originally purchased in 2010, is currently in beta, though, and has experienced some embarrassing outages in the first weeks of usage.

Schmidt also downplayed Google's role in the search engine market, instead attributing it to hard work and luck. "I would disagree that Google is dominant," he said after senators asserted that Google is approaching a monopoly. 

"By investing smartly, hiring extremely talented engineers, and working very, very hard (and with some good luck), Google has been blessed with a great deal of success."