It would be nice to be able have only today's posts open, with previous days collapsed.

Not easy... but I guess I won't have to wait for long

Adam Wendt's Agnostic Audiophile Smorgasborg: "I have already used google 25 times today, its only 12:40 and I didn't get up till nearly 10:30. At that rate by 10pm when I go to watch anime I would have used google over 100 times. Already up to 27 times just writing this post.

I guess that isn't directly related to the economy but still interesting. :) "

I think that this is related to the new economy.

Web sites first and weblogs later have given to everybody the power to express themselves, which is cool.

But google is the glue that's holding all this together. Over 90% of traffic coming from search engines on the sites we manage is now coming from google. This means that somehow they have now a monopoly as far as web searching is concerned. Luckly they cannot do evil things this this monopoly (at least... none that I can think of at the moment), and they could very easy loose this position if they did.

But let's not understimate the power of Google: for some reason I have been removed from Google once for a few days, and I felt like I had dropped of the face of the web.

I was discussing with my wife something related to all this while shopping at a super market this morning.

We were reading various products ingredients on their labels, trying to understand which are the best, or at least which ones don't pose some kind of threat to our health. While trying to figure out what was something written on a shampoo bottle, I said "I would like to have google available now".

The new economy brought this to us: freedom to access information, from anywhere, from anybody. To me this is a particularly important issue, especially at a time when here in Italy the three main private TV network are controlled by the Prime Mininster, and the three other main public networks are controlled... uh... by the Prima Mininster. I'm not saying that there's currently lack of freedom in Italy, but having access to the web and thus to ideas and opinion from people allover the world, makes me feel definitely more comfortable.

But access to information does not mean culture. What need to be done (and I'm afraid is not the top priority now among governments of most Western countries) is to create the cultural bases for the new generations. Having access to this world of information will do no good unless we'll provide the tools to decode and understand this huge amount of data that the new economy helping us to create.

Otherwise we, as individuals, will loose.