Nice CNN video on Google's Free Music Offering China

I blogged on this crucial development here; and just found this video to share.

The End of Control and the Future of Content: new Video of my Authors@Google Talk in San Francisco

The Google guys have just published a video with my talk at Authors@Google, in San Francisco, March 2, 2009 (see the details here Pdf: The End of Control Gerd Leonhard at Google SF PDF *22MB). Due to some technical issues my fancy slides (i.e. the stuff on the screen) come across very nicely in this video while I am left a bit 'in the dark' - but if you use the HQ version on the Youtube site you can still get a much better idea of what my face actually looks like (I guess always wearing black is not ideal when the lights are bad;).  Anyway, I do think this is one of my best talks, so... watch the entire 55 Mins 22 Secs.  As far as the End of Control Book is concerned, I will have an announcement on my plans within the next 10 days...stay tuned.

Here is the official Google Talks description: The End of Control & The Future of Content:  The tough issue of control emerges, again and again, as the key contention point within TV companies, publishers, record labels, and broadcasters: How can a commercial venture that is based on so-called intellectual property thrive and prosper in an environment that seems to continuously and progressively remove control from the creators/owners/providers of content, and hands it over to the people formerly known as consumers (aka the users), effectively making them more powerful every single day?  But the reality is that every click inadvertently makes another case for the consumers ever-increasing rise in importance. Within all the conversations I have had about things like commercial content versus shared content, about the read-only or the read-write web, and about copyright versus Fair Use, the crucial question always seems to boil down to WHERE IS THE CONTROL HERE, i.e., questions such as Who will control this new media universe and How much control do I need to run a revenue-generating business?

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Watch and think: TED video with Evan Williams, Founder of Twitter

Impressive talk - worth watching. Evan is very good at summarizing what Twitter is all about.

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• If you are not ready for Twitter actions just yet... just get my Tweet feed (mediafuturist.com)

Google Latitude: location-sharing is here. Think. Again. And Again.

Watch these videos... and think.

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• The Future Of Social Media Presentation by Futurist Gerd Leonhard Blogres Slovenia June 2008 (slideshare.net)
• The Secrets of Marketing in a Web 2.0 World - WSJ.com: Don't control, let it go! (mediafuturist.com)

Twitter is now my favorite micro search engine (context, relevance, timeliness built-in)

  Another 2 years and we'll have a viable Google competitor.

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iPhone users search Google 5,000% more than the nearest competitor | Computerworld Blogs

Very interesting (if not surprising) fact: iPhone users search Google 5,000% more than the nearest competitor | Computerworld Blogs.   The mobile web will dwarf anything we have seen so far - wait for 3.5 Billion people to be on wireless broadband.  Picture below from Flickr I believe (please tell me if you better). Is the new Nokia "Tube" device next?

How Twitter Can Help (via NYTimes.com)

Good column here: How Twitter Can Help at Work - Shifting Careers Blog - NYTimes.com.

"Like blogging, Twitter lets you write messages that other people can read. Unlike blogging, Twitter limits your messages to 140 characters. (The previous two sentences absorbed exactly 140 characters.) Readers can choose to receive your Twitter updates (sometimes called “tweets”) on their phones, via IM, RSS or on the Web. The brevity, combined with the variety of delivery systems, make Twitter a powerful medium. Here are five ways to harness it..." 

If you have missed my previous posts about twitter... go here

Is this the Future of Search? Adding rating, tagging, comments i.e. social tools * via Techcrunch

This is a video you must watch, about potential new search options within Google, below. Here is the link to Techrunch. Very interesting stuff indeed. Add 'play song' or 'watch movie' to the mix and then... well, we all knew that already: Search IS Media. Right.

Update: the Wikia guys just emailed me with this link "Google Tries to Copy Wikia Search" Wikia search is here

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Great essay by Nick Carr: Is Google Making Us Stupid?

I don't agree with some of the gloom in here, but this is all very good stuff to digest. Some snippets (hoping that Atlantic.com is not as badly misguided as the AP seems to be, lately ;)

“The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski....Still, their easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized. In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive...."

Some very good points here. Maybe this why still print about 100 pages per day and then read them on the plane, or why I still buy LOTS of books (incl. Nick's ;).

Twing - Search and Discover Communities

A new search engine, focused on forums and communities, looks quite promising: Twing - Search and Discover Communities.