In a recent post Robert Scoble explains why he believes Mike Arrington is wrong for about hating it so much. Interesting discussion.

I’m probably with Scoble on this one but for a different reason. See, I don’t believe Google have added this feature to make me spend more time on their page so they can make money from advertising. An easier route would have been to add some ads on the search page (Schmidt told Cramer on Mad Money recently that they could have made good few millions per day just from that but obviously decided against) or make the search result page more cumbersome on purpose (ridiculous, I know).

Time on page is not Google’s game. After all their utility, from an end-user perspective, is to help users find the things they are looking for as quickly as possible. Their game is accuracy and relevance and so far it played well at the static (albeit fast changing) page level. The problem is that this is becoming more and more difficult. As information chunks are getting smaller (blog post to twitter messages) the intrinsic ‘information value’ in those submission is very illusive. Augmenting the underlying text with user comments helps to beef up the indexed body making it more ’searchable’ and easier to handle by AdSense. Google’s new SearchWiki does just that!

If you are near Montreal between now and January 19th you have to check out the Andy Warhol exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts (fellow Ottawans, 180km is close enough!).

It’s a phenomenal exhibition of this amazing artist (and I have seen a few) as the focus is not on his actual art but rather his influence on Dance and Music – two art forms he was not engaged in directly.

Curator did a great job going slightly out of the box with two experiential rooms: one giving a taste of the Silver Factory and another tributing the Velvet Underground, one of the groundbreaking bands of the late 60’s.

Other special sections describe Warhol’s relationships with Merce Cunningham, Rudolf Nureyev, Martha Graham, John Cage, Mick Jagger, Debbie Harry, Madonna and others.

If you have not yet found a good enough reason to visit Montreal this winter (as if), then this is it! Go see it!