This is interesting. Why would Google pay somewhere between $100 million and $200 million for Zagat, the restaurant guide? Why didn’t they just crowd source their own reviews or aggregate other peoples’ content rather than buying a company that still puts ink onto bits of dead trees?

OK, Zagat have an OK website and an iPhone app and that will mesh nicely with Google maps, but, again, why not use user generated and user filtered content? Why buy it?

I think it’s due to two things, one obvious and one perhaps less so.

The obvious thing is the growth in local search and information. This fits.
Most of Zagats reviews are written by locals and Google needs to create original content too.

The less obvious thing is, perhaps, that Google wants to be known for the quality of it’s information and millions of potential people with too much online time on their hands is no match for a few hundred passionate people and a handful of editors that actually know what they are talking about.

Agree?

Disagree?

More here and here.

A research study by OfCom, the UK communications regulator, says that children and adults are becoming addiction to smart phones. Apparently, 27% of teens use phones in areas where they’re not supposed to while about 20% of adults admitted to using phones when they’d been asked directly or indirectly to switch them off. 25% of adults and 50% of teens now own a smart phone in Britain.

The report also says that smart phones (as opposed to regular mobiles) are raising a series of questions about social etiquette and manners and are also altering work-life balance. About 16% of adults admit to talking calls on holiday while 33% of teens will use a smart phone during family meals. 40% of teens would also answer a phone at night even if they were asleep. Most worrying is the impact of reading – something I write about in Future Minds. 15% of teens say they are reading fewer books due to the use of smart phones.

Full report here.

Feeling out of control? No time to think nowadays? Fed up with people you don’t know asking to be your friends? Try these five simple steps.

1. Switch your mobile – or computer – off after 6.30pm or 7.30pm each night. It’s interesting to me that we try to set boundaries around screen use for our kids, yet we do not restrict our own usage.

2. Have two phones rather than one. Keep one for business calls and use the other for family and friends. At weekends – or when you go on holiday – switch the work phone off or leave it in a drawer at home.

3. Once you have done 1 or 2, go to places where calmness and serenity can find you. In my experience scale seems to be important. You need to feel physically small to relax or reflect. Perhaps this is why so many people like empty beaches, mountains and cathedrals. In such situations our minds seem to expand to fill the available space. Seeing a distant horizon also appears to help in that our thinking is projected forward.

4. Create the time and space to think. When, for instance, was the last time that you told someone in the office that you were going off “to do a bit of thinking.”

5. If all else fails visit the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine, a website that enters all your online accounts and deletes all of your data. Privacy restored.

6 million people in the US and 100,000 people in the UK have given up using Facebook according to the website Inside Facebook. The Social networking website currently has around 690 million users worldwide, but some commentators worry that its novelty status is starting to fade and that early adopters are starting to adopt other things.

Consequences? Possibly the “inevitable” float will be brought forward.

I remember some time ago someone telling me that doing a Google search used more energy than boiling a kettle. I was unable to verify this  so I’ve never used this ‘fact’. However, there now appears to be some evidence to support this and similar claims.

A study by Ademe, the French government energy savings agency, says that using email rather than paper might be saving trees but is hardly saving the planet. Each email sent uses about 19g (0.7oz) of carbon dioxide and group emails can increase this figure by 400% while adding a photo attachment could increase it 1000%.

The study also claims that a company with 100 staff generates almost 14 tons of carbon dioxide, which is roughly equivalent to 13 return flights from Paris to New York. This calculation assumes that each member of staff sends 33 emails per day, which creates 136 kg (300 lb) of carbon dioxide. The data factors in the energy required to make the computers and also emissions from data centers.

This is very interesting. Thierry Breton, CEO and Chairman of Atos Origin, recently stated his vision for an email free company within 3 years. On the face of it this seems a little crazy. Email is, after all, so central to what people do all day nowadays. On the other hand, what people do nowadays seems to be read and write emails all day long and this isn’t especially productive. Email used to be a productivity tool, but now it’s just an obstacle to productivity and deep thinking.

To quote Breton: “The volume of emails we send and receive is unsustainable for business. Managers spend between 5 and 20 hours a week reading and writing emails”

Information overload – the facts:

* By 2013, half of all new digital content will be updates to existing information
* Online social networking is now more popular than email and search
* Middle managers spend  25% + of their time searching for information
* 2010 : Corporate users receive 200 mails per day, 18% of which is spam

More here- Atos blog

Now, back to my email….

Email is bad for you – it’s official. A study by Ashlee McGuire, a graduate student from Queens University in Ontario, says that walking over to a co-worker rather than sending them an email has long-term health benefits. Well, yeah, if all you do all day is sit at a desk and look at a screen attached to a box it’s likely that you will end up inside a bigger box sooner rather than later. But don’t give up email, just do some exercise nit wit.