Why Google’s new AI-saturated search page will be a disaster

With the latest incarnation of its search engine, Google is making the World Wide Web as we have known it for over 30 years invisible, and therefore increasingly irrelevant to most people, who will be happy to let Google become their universal user interface to everything. And yet Google still depends on the Internet to supply all the information it is analysing and repackaging. It risks killing the very thing that sustains it.

From Walled Culture.

Blooks Like the Future

Blooks are generally blogs turned into books, but I suppose we can stretch the term to include books that are available from blogs. Here's a heartening story about the latter type.

A novelist became fed up waiting for an agent or publisher to deign to acknowledge his existence (don't we all know it?). So he did the obvious thing: bunged it up on his Web site for anyone to download. His reasoning?

I'm putting this full-length novel online and encouraging you to read it, send it to your friends, blog about it, distribute it on your blogs, etc. and we'll all see what happens. Maybe nothing. But maybe ... something. In fact after weighing the pros and cons of doing this, I can't find any actual downside.

I wrote The Agency Delta because I had a story. Now I want people to read it. I think it's a great story. Now tell me what you think.

This is the future, you writer people. (Via Self Publish Blooks.)