brian clegg

This is a great TED Talk my dad sent through to me earlier today. It deals with content curation in the digital world - who/what is deciding what we see (and don't see).

This is something that most people in the Internet, communications, or marketing industries would already be well aware of - however the speaker does a great job of presenting the issue with clarity in under 10 minutes.

Google I/O is on right now, and Eric Schmidt isn't letting Steve Jobs steal all the headlines when it comes to trashing old friends. Google made 3 major announcements that will compete directly with Apple:

• Android 2.2 with big-time Flash support
• Chrome Web Store for apps AND music (also notable the Google acquisition of Simplify Media - a music syncing service that competes with iTunes)
• Google TV (previewed below), which will come installed on new Sony TVs

In my opinion, it's great to see this competition as both companies are getting scarily huge and are dominating more and more of our daily lives. However, a lot of this is just a childish pissing match between two ego-driven CEOs. My hope is that this battle ends up being productive and will also allow for smaller players to come up and compete with some innovative products. For example, it would be great to see Apple stop giving lip-service to "open" and allow more openness within the iPhone & iPad OS. It probably won't go that way but one can dream.