Competition in this half-million person market comprises a single major newspaper and 2 local TV channels – that's 3 significant online presences. On many regional topics (those I can cover) my non-profit one-person amateur cardboard mockup news website equals – or out-rates – the others in Google searches, where almost all new visitor arrive from.

Such bemused visitors wonder what the heck it is, and who runs it (I do, anonymously) and why they never heard of it before (which is how I deduce it successfully appears to be what it's not).

The death of professional journalism (at the hands of fleeting bloggers) is what I unintentionally contribute to, and I'm conscious of that.

What does it all mean and where, or how, will it end? Let you know if I actually steal the big guys' readership.

Also, Dannysullivan is right, Google arn't the providers of content they only facilitate peoples searches. It's not Google that steals content but the people who post replicated material.

It costs a lot of time and dedication to write content. Good content. Viable news. The reason bloggers will never be airlifted into a war zone or take iconic pictures. Is that it takes so much money to create a story, a novel. To pass on snippets of complicated breaking news. Often takes much time, research and dedication.

That is what should be valued. Writers and news organizations need money to survive. Or we will be left with nothing but crying babies and cute kittens on You Tube.

You don't charge the search engines to send people to articles on your site, you pay them.

If you can't make money from attention, you should do something else for a living. Charging money for attention gets you neither money nor attention.

Shel, provoking, but I think you miss the macroeconomic argument that the supply of content is rising (millions of blogs/tweets/etc.) while demand is falling (consumers are creating content, not just watching, limiting their willingness to be passive recipients), pushing down the value (price) people are willing to pay to content producers.

Google is just an intermediary in this new marketplace — a proxy for efficiency in finding what we want. Search engines help us find this new infinite supply of answers, so the margins people like Mr. Murdoch hope to protect are eroding as they can no longer limit content inventory. (This is what newspapers used to do — "only we have the news, and you must wait to have it delivered to your door, and pay for this limited precious material.") If every house on the street starts giving rolls away, the price of bread will fall.

If Google stopped helping us find content tomorrow, another technology would step in. Technology enables efficiency and efficiency is a threat to business models that make bacon by limiting market access to material. Sure, it's not fair that those intermediary search technologies don't pay a toll to the actual content producers. But they're not really businesses — they are a new market force.

If indeed Google served up you content, not only would I think you should get some of the revenue — I'd also think you should get damages for copyright infringement.

However, they don't do that. I didn't read this story on Google. I read it on your blog. Potentially, I could have found a link to it on Google. In this case, I followed a link on Twitter. But if merely linking to your content is "serving" it up, then does Twitter owe you money, too? And does anyone who links owe you money? And if I do a blog post and summarize some of what you said, do I further owe you money?

That's what clouds the case about the compensation Murdoch is entitled to. Not that Google is seen by some as cool or Murdoch is uncool. Those are factors with some, but the core issue is whether linking alone is content theft. If linking requires licensing. Or is it the manner in which you link — compiling links on a similar topic, does that make it worse or not?