'Googled': Biography Of A Company, And An Age

Interview on Fresh Air

[Robert Charlton]

There was an interview on Fresh Air today, sadly not one of their great ones, with NYer media critic Ken Auletta. Interview was about 45 min, with audio link available on the page I'm linking to below. Unfortunately, it stumbles for a while over some basic concepts like PageRank and algorithms, etc, before it ventures into the social implications of what Google is doing and it gets more interesting....

'Googled': Biography Of A Company, And An Age [npr.org]
Fresh Air
Nov 2, 2009

Whether you listen to the interview or not, it's worth reading at least the Preface to Auletta's book, which is quoted on the Fresh Air page. Here's an excerpt from one of several paragraphs that lay out his concerns in a very compelling way....

Excerpt: 'Googled: The End of the World As We Know It'

...In 2007, Eric Schmidt told me that one day Google could become a hundred-billion-dollar media company -- more than twice the size of Time Warner, the Walt Disney Company, or News Corporation, the world's three largest media conglomerates. That Google might achieve this goal in less than a generation, in a time when... [the world as we know it is significantly changing]... -- all this means that it's important to put Google under the microscope....

[Marcia]

Here's a short 5 minute CNBC video interview with the author:

The Google Juggernaut [cnbc.com]