Wednesday, March 23, 2005

EuGoogle advances: Jacques Chirac is signing up with Jean-Noel Jeanneney's campaign to launch a European competitor to Google Print [...] French Minister of Culture Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres ... denied the French initiative was an 'anti-Google operation'.... "It is about a desire for everyone to be able to put forward their talents, heritage, history and culture," he told French newspaper Le Monde. "There's nothing hostile about it." (Via Language Log.) Nice spin. If so, why only now? Google needed to become successful to have the resources to do Google Books. The European Union could have afforded what is now being proposed any time in the last five years or so. It's not as if the technical means have not been basically around for quite a while, or if the idea itself is new. Even better, a Frenchman led the development (oops, in the US) of some of the earliest and best technology that could have been used for this. 10:36:40 PM