I had been wondering if I would manage to live blog and get any posts up during PDF. How much time would the chat backchannel take up? What role would Twitter take? Initially, there weren’t a lot of people on the backchannel. It wasn’t displayed on the screen. Twitter was doing much better, and I added many attendees of PDF to my Twitter friends list. Unfortunately, I wasn’t sitting anywhere near a power outlet and my network connectivity got spotty as my batteries started going.

So, I didn’t live blog. Instead I started writing my notes of the conversation between Tom Friedman and Eric Schmidt on my laptop and then later in the notes section of the program.

It was an informal discussion and I’m sure that others will write more detailed descriptions of the talk than I will. Eric observed that this felt a lot like a Google meeting, with everyone online, and no one looking at the speakers. Tom asked Eric questions like where Google is going and if he thinks Moore’s Law applies to searches. Eric responded by talking about the focus on searches, advertisements and applications. He spoke about a network effect where more information was constantly becoming available.

They talked about efforts by Bahrain, China, and Thailand to limit access to Google. In Bahrain, the issue was about citizens seeing how much land the royal family had using Google Earth. Google was asked to shut this down and it generated a larger blacklash than simply ignoring the issue probably would have. In Thailand, there were issues about criticizing the King who is revered and it is illegal to lampoon. The generals who took over the country in a recent coup attempted to apply this to them as well. In China, Google restricts searches, but lets people know when there are items that they couldn’t return in the search. With all of this Schmidt believes, users find ways to adapt and get the information that they need.

This got to a key issue. With improvements in searching and personalized searches, how do we make sure that we don’t get stuck with people finding only information to reinforce their biases? Schmidt spoke a bit about the need for better media education. He spoke about people developing truth detectors, about people looking at politics in a television and a post-television way. He spoke about people wanting to connect and to be greeted in a personalized way. He felt that people will be less likely to take something as unquestioned truth when they first read it.

Schmidt was asked about how Google hires and what his interview was like. Schmidt spoke about a fairly rigorous algorithm looking at GPAs and how well respected the university was. He spoke about the importance of having a passion beyond work, noting the amateur rocket scientists and astrophysicists that they’ve hired. This fits with my thoughts about finding people who are passionate about what they are doing, about people who love what they are doing, who are, in the original sense of the word, amateurs. More on this when I talk about one of the later sessions.

When Schmidt went to his first interview at Google, the person interviewing him had his picture and lots of biographical information that had been retrieved from the web. This led to a lively discussion about personal privacy and the problem of kids putting up online information that they might not want potential employers to see in the years to come. It was suggested that if President Bush’s college years were on Facebook, with plenty of pictures snapped from cellphones at parties, he never would have become President. Schmidt suggested that everyone should be able to change their name at 21 and start with a clean slate. I think 21 is a fairly arbitrary number, and we would be better to recognize that we all have youthful indiscretions, even as we get older, and we need to stop focusing so much on these sorts of things.

There was a discussion about how we defend our reputations, and one idea suggested dismissively was that we could simply live our lives the way Paris Hilton does and let it all hang out there. I think we need to be careful about too glibly dismissing this idea.

Friedman observed later on that when it comes to comments about public figures online, “Whatever can be done, will be done. Will it be done by you or to you?” He repeated this in a later session and I think it is an important point. To the extent that you are a public figure, you should probably be actively defining who you are, your identity needs to be done by you. The problem of Paris Hilton, isn’t that it is being done by her, but that she is doing it to herself.

Perhaps some of this relates to a different part of the discussion. It was noted that people behave differently when they have a camera in their face. They tend to think in terms of television and it was wondered how much this is generational. Online video needs to be shorter, more informal, more entertaining. It was noted that YouTube viewers tend to select five to ten videos of three minutes each as their watching preferences.

There were many other interesting topics touched on during the discussion, but these were the ones that jumped out at me as the most interesting.

(Tags: pdf2007)