Anthony Barnett (London, OK): In a swift meditation on the Microsoft bid for Yahoo, oD's Editor-in-Chief Tony Curzon Price concludes that we can now foresee the future of web search:
"Corporate, branded, consolidated, oligopolistic, fraudulent, and gradually emptied of meaning."
I could not resist trumpeting the words as a headline. Aren't they a description of modern life, rather than the future of one function on the web? Peter Oborne has just reviewed what is clearly a must read book by Nick Davis on the media. Davis's Dark Heart, a very uncomfortable investigation of violent poverty in Britain, has an honoured place on my bookshelves. If Flat Earth News does the same for the press we are in for some truth, which is what Oborne claims. My impression is that Tony's concise and compelling description of the future of web search has already arrived in media UK.
