Charlie Rose chatted with Ken Auletta about Google and emerging technology this week. Runtime is 38 minutes and recommended viewing. The conversation centers around Ken’s recent New Yorker piece titled The Search Party. During the interview Ken mentioned in passing Charlie’s interview with Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page back on July 26th 2001. Over Google’s first three years of operation it grew 20% month-on-month purely by word-of-mouth.

Six and a half years after bringing Eric Schmidt onboard as CEO Google are well on their way to becoming the first $100bn media company. Wireless is the business driver which will take them there. Key to enabling this is the arrival of handset devices which will deliver a remote control for life. Having been fortunate enough to use the N95 and iPhone over the last 6 months we are not there yet but we are getting there. Interesting times indeed.

Catching up on news over the last week three pieces caught my attention. The first was Draxtor Despres video report titled Media in SL : old vs new? An indigenous media sector was already well established prior to the arrival of Reuters, AvaStar, Sky News and iCNN over the last year. Draxtor speaks with representatives of each camp on how they view each other in this 5 minute clip.

The second piece was Sir Tim Berners-Lee commentary on the social graph meme doing the rounds. Paul Miller has an excellent post which follows the conversations which have taken place since and is recommended reading. Looking forward to seeing what semSL, a project to combine the virtual world of Second Life with semantic technologies, holds in store once it goes live.

The third was Anne Eisenberg’s NYT piece on EveryScape with details of its upcoming December launch. The mapping services provider will offer virtual street tours for ten urban areas including Aspen, Boston, Cambridge and New York. Unlike other providers within this space it will also offer interior views. Harvard Square was profiled with a preview of the browser based service here.

A video recording of Mike Liebhold speaking at the first Stanford Metaverse Meetup last week is now available for viewing. Mike speaks about the Geospatial Web, Virtual Worlds, Augmented Reality and how they all fold together. Runtime is 65 minutes. As Mike rightly points out and as Ronan continually remarks here at Mobil Avenue many of the concepts have been around for some 30 years now. Blended realities is something we are going to be writing alot more about in 2008.