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Google have found themselves in deep water after being found guilty by a court in Paris, France of digitizing books without the permission of the authors. The plan by Google was to try to make all of the world’s information sortable and digital – but their latest try (which involves scanning millions of books into their archive) has been riddled with controversy.

Google loses French legal case over book digitization

At the heart of the argument is the question as to whether Google has the right to scan and use the extracts from books in its online searches. Some people believe that by making the texts of some literature available to people over the web, they are depriving publishers of the right to sell those books on to customers, which in turn will make those publishers lose profit.

Google does not agree, and they claim that they do not actually make the whole book available, just extracts which can be found in short snippets. They say that there is no difference between going to a library and reading through the archives there and checking online for a quotation from a printed book – it may even be better for the publisher if they make their books more available on the web.

The court was not convinced, however, and this leads to a bigger question – will Google’s quest to put all of the books in the world online fail due to the court actions of publishers across the globe? It is possible the benefit to Google of this experiment may start to be outweighed by expensive legal action and fines – and they could even consider slowing down or stopping entirely.

Twitter recently introduced a feature called Lists, which integrates user made collections of Twitter users into its system. At first glance this seems to be another popularity contest from Twitter, trying to reinvent itself as it is facing stiff competition from Facebook and Friendfeed.

If we peel back the layers, however, we can see that it is actually a very well thought out way of adding a layer of user-based vetting to Twitter accounts. Follower numbers have increased hugely recently, sparked by the Ashton Kutcher v CNN Twitter race to 1,000,000 – and so have the number of accounts which have tens of thousands of followers. This makes it difficult for normal users to tell who is worth following and who is simply ‘making up the numbers’.

Twitter lists

The list function also allows a large amount of customization to each person’s account – you can show what or who you are interested in, in different categories and fields. The possibilities are endless.

Twitter lists just recently also introduced a description field – 100 characters for you to describe your list and the criteria for adding to it. This type of innovation is very good for people who are trying to market their lists or get other people to follow them. The lists previosuly seemed a little bit too lacking of information, especially if the titles of the each user’s list was cryptic or not straightforward. Now we can see the background and justification – it’s another good update from the Twitter team!

Recently many people have started using special chat symbols in their MSN and Facebook chats, and also in blog comments. These special symbols are free to use for everyone, and you don’t need to download anything or pay for anything – just copy and paste them from websites!

Some people, however, have taken this even further – to the next level! They have begun to combine symbols to create new pictures, larger images which can then be put into Web 2.0 comments sections and on Myspace pages and Facebook walls. The creativity of these individuals is amazing – and you can see from the example below that there are some really amazing pictures!

Home Simpson ascii art

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So what would you put into your Facebook chat or on your website if you could make a picture of anything? Here are some ideas:

- Make a special character image of yourself, using an old photograph! It will look really cool in black and white!
- Draw the robot from Wall-E! He’s really cool and obviously would fit very well in any technology blog or website.
- The Windows 7 logo in special characters – this might be good to show to people who made the mistake of installing Windows 7 before it was properly tested what they really should have done instead – copied some special characters or symbols from here!

If you know of any other special characters or symbols that can be made into cool faces, paste them in the comments section here!