Tag Archives: senior business product manager

paidContent.org: Interview with Google News’ Josh Cohen

A timely interview with Google News’ Josh Cohen, senior business product manager, following Google’s submission of a micropayment model for newspapers.

paidContent asks Cohen about publishers’ attitudes to Google, whether its become a scapegoat for the industry and about the search company’s discussions with publishers.

He also talks about adding more ‘sources’ to Google News – following experiments with adding Wikipedia to the aggregator:

“As new, different sources for news and information begin to develop we will want to try to incorporate that as much as possible. What is a news source? It is increasingly grey. As much as possible we try to stay out of any sort of editorial or qualitative judgments. [The] aggregation of public information data – that certainly didn’t exist a few years ago.”

Full interview at this link…

Google European Public Policy Blog: On working with newspapers

Josh Cohen, senior business product manager for Google, helpfully reminds news publishers that they can stop Google from indexing their webpages by usint the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP). Publishers can also set a time period for indexing, for example if content goes into a paid archive after a certain time.

Cohen’s comments follow a declaration from the European Publishers Council last week demanding new intellectual property rights protection.

“Some proposals we’ve seen from news publishers are well-intentioned, but would fundamentally change – for the worse – the way the web works,” he writes.

“Our guiding principle is that whatever technical standards we introduce must work for the whole web (big publishers and small), not just for one subset or field.

“There’s a simple reason behind this. The internet has opened up enormous possibilities for education, learning, and commerce so it’s important that search engines makes it easy for those who want to share their content to do so – while also providing robust controls for those who want to limit access.”

Full post at this link…