We’re all inhabitants of planet Google; the web search company that has become so successful that its" stated ambition to "organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful"  perhaps seems less hubristic than it did when they spelt it out in their  press release after the first injection of equity funding in 1999 that set the company on the road to such staggering global success within a few years.

But, as Randall Stross in his excellent study of the company, Planet Google: One Company’s Audacious Plan to Organize Everything We Know, notes, by the company’s own reckoning they currently only have access to about 3% of the world’s available information. To organise all of it – i.e. to digitise and index it – will take them, by their own estimates -  more than 300 years!!!!

Achieving the first (relatively small) step in their ambitious masterplan -  searching the textual information available on the  World Wide Web – has been relatively simple. The founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, made two brilliiant strategic decisions from the outset which enabled them to transcend all the established rivals in the web search business. The first was to rely on a neutral mathematical algorithm entirely, instead of drawing upon human editorial input. This meant that their system was inherently scalable so it could grow together with the explosion of the web itself. In fact, the search algorithm at the heart of Google’s success gets more effective as the amount of data increases. It is designed to "scale without limit", which could be a synechdote for the broader amibitions of the company itself.  By contrast, Yahoo, which was previously dominant in web search business, relied upon teams of human editors to catalogue information. With the explosive growth of the Web, the Yahoo model was unable to cope. As  a result, in 2006, Yahoo was forced to outsource its websearch function to Google. Truely, a sign of the times.

The other vital strategic decision made by the young founders of Google was to build and manage their own hardware. It’s remarkable how few studies of Google pay attention to this issue.  Google’s success, and their abilty to enter into areas such as video (YouTube) and satellite imaging (Google Earth) have all been possible because of their staggering computational capacity.  By contrast, their rivals in the search arena all saw themselves as software specialists and looked to specialist hosting companies to provide the hardware necessary for their search activities.  Perhaps part of the reason for this blindness is because of Google’s own secrecy around their hardware.  Stross, who was allowed unprecedented access to company meetings and financial records, was never allowed even a glimpse into the interior of a Google computer centre. He estimates that Google are currently running "as many as a million computers for its operations, harnessed together to create effectively a supercomputer, the world’s largest".  These data centres, consuming vast quantities of power, are what makes it feasible for Google to turn "cloud computing" into a reality and to offer free web-based applications such as Google docs, spreadsheets, and presentations.

"Cloud computing" wasn’t possible when Page and Brin launched their web search algorithm but their commitment to building a physical infrastructure with excess capacity has enabled them to challenge the behemoth of the personal computing industry, Microsoft.  It is a common observation that each phase of the computer revolution has been dominated by one (American) company which as failed to keep its place in the next. Main frame computing was dominated by IBM who in turn were overtaken in the mini-computer era by DEC, who in turn were overtaken by Microsoft in the era of personal computers. As with so many of their innovations, it would seem that Google have moved from the already challenging goal of cataloguing the world’s information, to providing computing services at a cost and ubiquity that will vanquish the company described as "the most profitable and legendary monolpoly in history".

The Kalahari Surfer a.k.a.  Warrick Sony, has just started his own blog entitled, not surprisingly, Kalahari Surfer.  Warrick has been a key figure in the SA music underground since the late 1980s when his collaborative albums used humour and subversive cut-ups to expose the sonic contradictions of life under Apartheid. Unlike many artists from the era, Warrick has continued to develop and play an influential role in SA music; most recently through his involvement with African Dope records to his activities as a dubstep DJ (under the name DJ Ballard).  With his wide range of music interests and his attention to obscure phenomena such as plunderphonics and early futurist sound experiments, the blog promises to be interesting reading. re this extract:

I also spent some time listening through the "Baku:Symphony of Sirens " double CD and book which I received from Chris Cutler yesterday. subtitled: " Sound Experiments in the Russian Avant Garde original documents and recreations of 72 key works of music poetry and agit prop – 1908-1942 . An incredible body of work that rescues from obscurity some amazing Russian accomplishments. One forgets the energy and enthusiasm that greeted the initial, pre Stalin, communist revolution. The title piece is by Arseni Avraamov, a man who " in the twenties proposed an order to burn all pianos, because he considered the piano to be symbolic of the well tempered system of tuning…which mutilates people’s and composers musical sense."
described on thr RER site his piece is thus:
" The Symphony of Sirens. In 1922 Arseni Avraamov composed and conducted a visionary public sound event, activating the entire port city of Baku: its factory sirens, the ships horns of the entire Caspian flotilla, two batteries of artillery, several full infantry regiments, trucks, seaplanes, 25 steam locomotives, an array of pitched whistles and several massive choirs. Constantly referenced but forever lost, this extraordinary event is here painstakingly reconstructed and spatialised to approximate the original experience"
totally amazing – - Russia always seems to dwarf what the rest of the world accomplishes whether it be large scale genocide, Nuclear disasters, arts and formidable culture.