I was sent a News.comÂ? article from my brother the other day, and although I didn’t understand the four letter abbreviation that came with it (wtf does rtcl mean?!), it was an interesting article that should be commented on. A lot of the article focuses on the Microsoft-Google battle that everyone enjoys debating, and even touches on the YouTube purchase last month. Although network computers and copyright infringement are great to discuss,Â? I’ll leave that to another writer for now.Â? The last bit of the article:

Schmidt said he would like users to be able to export their search histories between different search engines. “We want to give you essentially the equivalent of number portability,” he said.

Google respects the rights of its users foremost, Schmidt said. “As long as we don’t do something against their interests, we should be fine,” he said. “The more that we can, for example, let people move their data around…and not trap it,” the better.

Google is moving aggressively into new areas where advertising can be sold via its popular auction platform, Schmidt said. “We are investing very heavily in radio,” he said.

First, Google doesn’t really have users. For the most part, they are a search engine. It’s their core business, along with PPC advertising, and they do both rather well. However, most of the traffic Google generates wouldn’t be described as user traffic. People visit the site to find what they are really looking for. A userbase is so valuable that Google takes on these huge development projects and purchases to help catch-up with some the other big boys on the net. The Yahoo!’s, Microsofts, and AOL’s all have users, Google needs them.

Second, of course Google is very interested in radio, but will the efforts mirror that of Google Video? Although there are many admirable aspects of Google Video, an open-market platform for distributing independent media content to a worldwide audience, the results just weren’t there. I would definitely welcome the effort, and can appreciate that same model for digital video content, but enough of these corner-of-the-desk side projects. Digital media is important enough. It’s time to get that at least into the 20, if not a part of the 70, to effectively take advantage of the position Google has in the online universe. And yes, mobile is a big part of that.

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