There are other search engines, but googling remains my favourite -- perhaps because I have just about mastered the art of, more often than not finding the right keywords for the specific subject I am looking for. Perhaps because I can "google" -- legitimately 'google' (a word now in the Oxford dictionary as a noun) -- and until such time as I can 'orange' or 'jeeves' or 'blackdog', 'hotbot', lycos', 'webwombat', 'qango'............. no! none of them slip off the tongue and flow 'from the finger tips quite as smoothly as 'googling' does......
On the Spectator's blog, Coffeehouse Matthew d'Ancona writes about his "audience with the King of Google", Eric Schmidt.
"Just back from Google Zeitgeist Europe 2007 in Hertfordshire, as dazzling an assembly of those shaping the destiny of the web as you could hope to behold. The cast list reads like a who’s who of the media-political class: Sir Martin Sorrell, James Murdoch, David Miliband, Mark Thompson, Peter Bazalgette, Chad Hurley, Sanjiv Ahuja, Matthias Döpfner and many others. The ripple of power and cerebration outclassed any party political conference I have attended.
At the centre of it all, the quiet presence of Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google’s executive committee and CEO: some people don’t need to show off, and Schmidt is one of them. Why bother when you’re at the helm of a search engine company, capitalized at $149billion, and so culturally powerful that its brand-name has already entered the Oxford English Dictionary as a verb?
Schmidt says that the next question Google users will be asking is: “What should I do tomorrow?” And to that future question some of the answers could already be generated: “What should you read? We are going to do a pretty good job on that…We could give you a reading list on the hour.”
Politely, he prefers to refer to newspapers and magazines as “traditional media” than as “old media”. He resists the hyperbole of less Olympian webheads. That said, the world he describes is inescapably one of fundamental change: a world of social networking and zero deference, in which the authority of a relatively small number of information providers has been replaced by a much noisier marketplace and the permanent testing of reliability: “Everyone has a camera-phone, everyone is a blogger, everyone is a reporter.” The challenge for established media organisations, he says, will be to identify the stars: “One hundred million bloggers, and there are a couple of people you should have hired. And you screwed up when you didn’t!”
There is, Schmidt concedes, a risk of cultural balkanisation, in which online tribes communicate only with their fellows. But the likelier outcome is a blossoming of “self-mobilising” initiatives in which online communities form, seize the initiative and act together. Born in 1955, he watches with amazement as the young colonise the web and turn it to their own creative and entrepreneurial ends.
Schmidt carefully insists that the established structures of political life will not be overturned by the onslaught of Web 2.0: one senses that he does not want his awesomely powerful company to seem too powerful. Yet – by his own admission - the unprecedented level of e-scrutiny and the permanence of all digital records is “going to drive politicians crazy.” One only has to imagine what life will be like for the David Camerons of the future, their every youthful indiscretion caught on mobile phones and posted on Facebook: how will they mark out a boundary between their early private lives and their subsequent political careers when all the facts of their past are a click of the mouse away?
Schmidt’s suggestion is that – to take the US context – every single person running for the presidency should, two years before entering the race, interview every single person from their past and disclose every conceivable embarrassment, past and present, in one spectacular clearing of the closet. This, he says, will make news and buy time: “The cleverer politicians will understand they should ‘self-out’ or ‘self-describe’.” But woe betide those who miss anything out. What Schmidt calls “the standard for self-disclosure” will be unprecedentedly high.
Anyone who has followed Barack Obama’s campaign cannot fail to be impressed by the role the web has played in creating and sustaining its momentum (www.BarackObama.com, and many other unofficial sites). What Howard Dean began online in 2004, Obama has continued with much more sophistication – more, for instance, than Hillary Clinton. Schmidt will not be drawn on personalities, but speaks of a “new generation” of politicians who understand what is at stake – including, one assumes, Mr Miliband, who gave the keynote address at this year’s event, Mr Cameron, who has put the web at the very heart of his campaign strategy, and Nicolas Sarkozy, who held a weekly conference with 200 key bloggers."
Heady stuff! Interesting ideas.......... Google could be spearheading something that could change the political world? mmmmm Worth some thinking about.....
So what will we all be doing tomorrow? One leaves Eric Schmidt’s presence with a hunch that he has a clearer idea than most of us, says d'Ancona. I can believe that!
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