I cover a lot of subjects on my weekly CBC Radio column, and I'm always fascinated by which ones garner the greatest listener response. Something that is particularly interesting to me, and apparently a lot of listeners, is the upcoming explosion of wireless devices making use of the spectrum called White Space.

For those who missed it, or want to hear it again, you can download my CBC Radio Toronto appearance on Metro Morning with Andy Barrie.

And these are some of the articles that came out around the time of the announcement.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/11/05/fcc_approves_white_spaces/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7709775.stm
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/11/06/BUDO13VRLV.D...
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/05/technology/internet/05spectrum.html
http://www.efluxmedia.com/news_Google_Prepares_Its_Strategy_For_Attackin...

If you're a friend of mine on Facebook I have a video on my profile from Newsworld that was recorded in the spring on the same subject.

I use a lot of Google's services, in part cause they tend to work really well, but also to try them out and share my thoughts with friends and colleagues. About a month ago Google announced their Chrome browser, which nicely coincided with my purchase of a new windoze desktop computer. So instead of installing any additional software on it, I just started using Chrome.

A month later I'm still using Chrome, but it is far from perfect. YouTube doesn't always work with it, and Google Docs is kind of buggy. The irony of course is that these are both Google owned applications, so they're supposed to work seamlessly with Chrome, and yet they don't. With that said, Gmail is super fast, and I tend to browse the web with dozens of open tabs at a time. In this regard Chrome is great.

However I have had to install Firefox to load certain pages and do certain things on the web due to Chrome's overall flakiness. I'm going to continue using Chrome, and hopefully it will evolve and improve like all Google products.

I do of course have to mention the whole controversy with Google's user agreement, although it too seems to be evolving, yet personally I'm a little acclimatized to less personal privacy and tend to engage the surveillance society in strategic and chosen situations.

The past two weeks have seen a number of announcements by Microsoft, Google, and Facebook that have set the stage for an incredible clash of the titans when it comes to the future of the Internet.

Recently Privacy International came out accusing Google of being the greatest threat to privacy due to the fact that their massive Google machine is constantly absorbing and cataloging information. I had a chat with Nancy Wilson about this on CBC News Today:

I have to admit I was rather pleased to hear that Google had purchased YouTube for U$1.65 billion in Google stock. I personally love YouTube, and have been uploading dozens of videos there. The concern of course was that YouTube was growing too quickly, and like many great Internet startups could collapse under it's own weight. Now with Google's backing YouTube is sure to continue as the premiere video site on the net. I went on CBC News Morning to discuss the acquisition:

As many of you know I've been a Google Watcher for some time now. My main attraction to Google is that they are actualizing many of the theories I've developed over the past decade and a half. Similarly they are bringing the model of network-centric computing to the average consumer, which I feel can be quite empowering. Personally I've been using Google's Calendar for quite a while, and am now starting to use their Spreadsheet program. For professional reasons I've also learned quite a bit about their advertising programs, which are their core sources of revenue.

Today the price of Google's stock reached a new high that set their total market value above any other publicly traded media company. This literally means that Google is the number one media company in the world.

Just as Sept 11 is regarded as the political/military start of the 21st century, so too will the Google IPO in time be regarded as the start of the economic/technologic side of this century.

Google represents a business model based on AI. Further, they've been the most successful at making AI a relevant and ubiquitous part of mass society, certainly at the individual consumer level.