First published in GCD’s The Circular, December 2006

Those of us involved in the media industry to any degree – from students to staffers – know that we are living in a time of change. A time of technological change, of change in ownership and change in how we receive our information. Googlezon is the product of all three of these changes.

The Museum of Media History in the US came up with an eight-minute film recently detailing how a merger between two of the biggest Internet powers – Amazon and Google – to form Googlezon would rock the fourth estate of the media. Googlezon also includes other Internet powers such as Friendster – a social networking site – and the new found power of blogging.

Googlezon works by taking users preferences and constructing the news sent to the user’s email account around these, so the news they receive is not what is important to the world but what is important to the user. The end for the media comes in 2011 when the New York Times loses a copyright infringement case against Googlezon and in protest it withdraws from the Internet and becomes a print only publication.

The thought of news media not telling the public what they need to know but what they want to know is a scary prospect for many of us. But how much of this is already happening without our knowledge? Well, Google is definitely becoming a more potent online power having just bought YouTube, which at the time was the most hit website on the internet. Google then struck deals with Vivendi’s Universa  Music Group, Sony and Bertelsmann’s jointly owned Sony BMG Music Entertainment and the Warner Music Group to take small stakes in YouTube as part of video- and music-licensing deals.

Google also has had huge success with Gmail, which comes under criticism from time to time for its privacy policy, but this doesn’t really stop any of us from wanting to have 2GB of online storage, so we ignore it.

As for Amazon, well the company started small, when Jeff Bezos decided to start selling books online because no bookshop could physically stock all titles in print. Since then the company has grown into another Internet mammoth, and the company’s HQ now dominates the Seattle skyline. The software that fictional company Googlezon makes such use of – the social recommendation engine – is already up and running on Amazon. This offers products for shoppers to buy through end of page recommendations and the Gold Box that sits on top of the webpage, which are full of tempting offers for the wily consumer. These offers are chosen for you based on your past purchases, just as Googlezon’s news is sent to users based on what they have read in the past.

How about Friendster then? And blogging? Well, Friendster is a social networking website that was started in 2002. Since then, many more similar sites have come online and in 2004 Friendster was overtaken in terms of page views by the Murdoch owned MySpace. The owners of Friendster turned down a $30million take over offer from Google and since then their popularity has waned. This is not to say that social networking sites have gone out of fashion, quite the opposite. MySpace has more user accounts than there are people in the world and newbie Bebo is definitely catching up with them. So maybe Friendster turned down the Googlezon image of the future but who’s to say Bebo will do the same?

Blogging is a way of keeping a journal online; it can be public or private and sometimes is linked to pages from networking pages like MySpace or Bebo. Many people have decided to report their version of the news this way and represent their version of events. This has led to the rise of the “citizen journalist” – the person on the street reporting the news for whoever wants to read it. The problem with this is that while this is independent it can also be inaccurate, as editors do not read blogs before they are posted online.

So how far away are we really from Googlezon becoming a reality? When looking at the patterns of media ownership in recent years it seems only a matter of time before Google and Amazon join forces to share their software and dominate the Internet. But some people are not convinced; news.com’s readers’ comments in response to the Googlezon film are mixed and varied.

Some users believe that Googlezon is inevitable while others believe that Googlezon’s fact stripping robots used to assemble the news for individual readers are pure artificial intelligence and therefore will never exist. Either way, we as a people are facing a time of unprecedented technological development and only time will tell if Googlezon will become a reality.