Not that most people are unaware of Google and its products, but as this Advertising Age article shows, the company has decided to use an old media – television- to promote Google Chrome. Its small market share (currently 1.42% vs. Internet Explorer 66.1%) may be one of the reasons why Google Chrome is going to be shown on TV. The article mentions Dish Network and NBC Universal cable networks as the television venues, and this is the ad that will be shown.

Even though companies usually consider television promotion to be a major investment, Google’s spokesman considered it a “small experiment”.  In my opinion, it seems that Google is running several video experiments to improve its market share numbers with Google Chrome.  Another of Google’s video ad experiments can be seen on Zooppa’s website. Google is running an ad competition (including videos) for Google Chrome on the Italian site, open to all in the Italian speaking community.  The public brief for the competition asserts that Google goals include “increase awareness of Google Chrome and communicate the benefits of using Google Chrome.”

We all love Google already. It helps us to find books, scholarly articles, weather information, maps, news, videos, and almost everything else you can imagine. It provides an excellent e-mail service, it has a nice social network, it offers a dynamic chat, space for pictures, blogs, and the list goes on… Google is already taking care of almost all our online businesses, academic, and social life, and now it is also going to care of our precious health.

Today Google.org launched “Google Flu Trends”, a web tool that tracks flu-outbreaks by considering the number of people searching for keywords like “flu symptoms” or “muscle aches” (read The New York Times article by Miguel Helft for more information). Read more…

Illustration by Matthew Hodson

The Economist (October 25^th – 31^st) published an interesting report on corporate IT and global cloud computing (look at “In this special report “on the right of the page for more). According to Ludwig Siegele, The Economist’s technology correspondent, nowadays it is easier for companies, especially start-ups, to try new applications since they can easily buy a server service and not to worry about space and installation. The report estimates that in four years, the number of servers will increase by 10 million worldwide. Siegele believes that many companies will move into the cloud as a way to save money, since the IT infra-structure is very expensive, and the server can be shared. However, he emphasizes that there will always be reasons to not move, such as regulatory and privacy issues.

The popularization of weblogs, the free access to all kinds of online content, and the reduction of advertising prices in the online environment compared to traditional media are just some of the reasons why journalists freak out about their professional future. However, it looks like media companies are battling with their old formats and trying to come up with new ideas and tools to stay alive.

An article published today on The Guardian by Jemima Kiss tells that BBC is finally getting closer to taking a more technological approach to its business using collaboration tools. Since 2004, there was a proposal of creation of the BBC Public license. The idea was that the public and businesses would be able to use company content and code to build on, play with, and share.

Steve Bowbrick, who is working on the debate about openness at BBC, declared that “The broadcast era is finished”. He affirmed that BBC has to provide web tools to increase its capital. In one sign of the changes, the corporation is already using blogs to boost dialogue.

Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams wrote in Wikinomics that openness, peering, sharing, and acting globally change everything. Let’s see if the implementation of these concepts inside media companies can prevent their extinction in the near future.

They were not very creative, but if you are a 2.0 journalist, you may like ReportingOn. Instead of answering the Twitter famous question “What are you doing?”, you will answer “What are you reporting on?”, using the same 140 characters. The website was launched last Wednesday and it is very fresh.

ReportingOn is a project of Knight News Challenge, open beta, and it doesn’t restrict access only to professional journalists. It totally fits the ”We are all journalists now” concept.