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Free thinking: I speak to Chris Anderson

One of the projects I’ve been working on in my day job is to write a series of interviews with some internet ‘celebrities’ and entrepreneurs.

It’s fair to say that I wasn’t massively optimistic about being able to secure big names, but it’s actually been easier than I expected. So far I’ve persuaded five or six interesting people to take part, and the first piece has just been published.

It’s an interview with Chris Anderson, Editor-in-Chief of Wired and the guy behind The Long Tail. Yeah, I was surprised he had the time to talk to me too.

You can read the full interview over on the 123-reg blog. He talks about the idea of ‘free’ – how the internet is making it possible for companies to make money by giving stuff away – and uses Google as an example:

“It started with search and then software and services of various sorts and now they’re rolling out telephony and communications. They’re a sort of tsunami of ‘free’, which disrupts every industry it touches.”

You’ve got to love a phrase like “tsunami of free”. It could never have been coined if the internet hadn’t been invented.

Although it’s been done to death, we also touched briefly on The Long Tail. And before he dashed off I managed to squeeze in a quick question about what he thought of the Facebook craze:

“Fundamentally, social networking is going to be something that every site has. You’re going to go from having one place for social networking to it being devolved to a very granular scale, where your social network is not a subset of Facebook, but instead something that you expect to find as a feature in every site you visit.”

In all, an interesting chap. And very friendly too.

Be careful what you say

BBC headline - Symbian dismisses GoogleJust spotted a rather portentous headline on the BBC technology news site: ‘Symbian dismisses Google Android’.

I know that Google has next to no experience of producing a mobile platform. And I know that Symbian has plenty. But given Google’s track record, I do wonder if Symbian might come to be haunted by that headline in a couple of years’ time. Google just seem to be good at virtually everything they do.

NewsTube

Newsnight are going all-out with election speculation tonight. It’ll be really interesting to see what happens early next week.

Michael Crick’s report was excellent. He went round the major parties’ HQs in Chester. And he filmed it in a very ‘YouTube’ kind of a way. It looked off-the-cuff and genuine, with a hand-held camera, Tory party activists interrupting shots and the Lib Dems struggling to find the light switch.

I’m no expert when it comes to video, and not 100% sure it was genuine, but it looked great to me. Really engaging, and maybe an interesting side effect of this YouTube revolution thingy the mainstream press has been going on about.

You should be able to watch the whole show here, for 24 hours after about 11.30 tonight.