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In May Google launched Google Health, and privacy advocates shuddered in fear. In the end, we found Google Health's privacy protections to be very strong. Perhaps it was because they were so strong that the whole application felt overly cautious, tame and unexciting. It's a difficult balance to strike.

Is data centralization in the hands of a single vendor an inherent threat to privacy? Yes. To draw an analogy, trusting the "Do No Evil" line is like saying you'd support a President that you like changing the constitution to allow warrantless wiretapping. Centralization of power, even if it's exercised benevolently at any given time, is not in our best interest in the long term. In fact, I'd argue that it's highly irrational.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 98 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they find the time?" when they're looking at things like Wikipedia don't understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of the cognitive surplus that's finally being dragged into what Tim O'Reilly calls an architecture of participation.

Now, the interesting thing about a surplus like that is that society doesn't know what to do with it at first... Because if people knew what to do with a surplus with reference to the existing social institutions, it wouldn't be a surplus, would it? It's precisely when no one has any idea how to deploy something that people have to start experimenting with it, in order for the surplus to get integrated, and the course of that integration can transform society.

I wonder if there isn't something similar happening in the church. For a good while now churches have been seen as religious vendors, giving people what they need spiritually, offering a form of entertainment that can be taken in passively, etc. But there are quite a few people that are realising that this has led to a sort of collective spiritual stupor. And when people come out of this stupor, what you find is people not wanting a passive, received religion, but a spirituality that they are a part of, or as the article says, an 'architecture of participation'. And this is ironic because this is exactly the same shift that needed to happen 2000 years ago - the shift from one priest to the 'priesthood of all believers'; the shift from a few select leaders to a plurality of 'gifts' making up the body as a whole.

The dialogue was indeed two-way. For instance, in June, Google introduced a tool called Ad Planner that shows media buyers sites their likely audiences might visit, based on criteria like demographics. Google previewed Ad Planner with some agency executives and is now seeking more feedback. (The day the product was announced, the share price of a competitor, comScore, dropped 22.5 percent.)

Ad Planner is one element of a bigger product called a media dashboard that Google is working on. It would offer media planners a data-rich screen that would tell them where all the ads for a campaign were running, how they were doing and how much they had cost.

Advertisers are grappling with the idea of Google, which spent many of its early years avoiding — and infuriating — advertising agencies, now shifting to embrace them.

During the last year, Google has built a 40-person group that is charged with courting agencies, trying to persuade them that their clients should buy ads on Google sites and use the search engine’s tools. The Google team — like any ad team — is visiting agencies to show off the company’s products, like video ads on YouTube and display ads from DoubleClick. Its representatives are even making regular visits to ad agencies, soliciting suggestions and fielding questions.

"EGS could be the 'killer app' of the energy world. It has the potential to deliver vast quantities of power 24/7 and be captured nearly anywhere on the planet. And it would be a perfect complement to intermittent sources like solar and wind," said Dan Reicher, Director of Climate and Energy Initiatives for Google.org. "EGS is critical to the clean electricity revolution we need to solve the climate crisis, but EGS hasn't received the attention it merits. That's why we're pressing for expanded support from government and increased investment from the private sector. We're big believers in EGS and we're looking for more opportunities."

For example, OpenWetWare.org started out in 2005 as Endipedia, a website that scientists in Drew Endy and Tom Knight's labs at MIT used to share information. But today the website is backed by a National Science Foundation grant, and more than 4,000 biologists and bioengineers from across the world have signed up to share techniques, get practical tips, and even detail their day-to-day work if they choose.

Science Commons, a nonprofit group based at MIT, works to Web-enable the scientific enterprise by working on other aspects of openness: trying to find ways to make inaccessible journals broadly available and developing Internet tools to ease sharing of information.

• Google is not going to start giving financial guidance (how it thinks it will do financially in upcoming quarters). “If we started giving quarterly guidance, the company would focus on the quarter rather than trying to change the world,” Schmidt said.

• Schmidt doesn’t think it was out of the realm of possibility that Google could one day be responsible for 10 percent of the all advertising and a high percentage United States’ gross domestic product (GDP). Right now the company accounts for .07 percent of the GDP.