Your privacy online? Who cares about it? Google CEO Eric Schmidt, that’s who:

Those concerns are real – I’m not trying to move away from them. The fact of the matter is that if you’re online all the time, computers are generating a lot of information about you. This is not a Google decision, this is a societal decision. In Britain, you all allow yourselves to be photographed on every street corner. Where are the riots?

100701 You can trust us: Shane Richmond: Daily Telegraph

Zap those economic blues. Seven shiny tech tips from CeBIT 09

The global economic crash getting you down? Take the talking cure.

The population of Hanover in northern Germany pretty much doubles once a year when around 500,000 computer and IT industry movers and shakers from all over the world click over to CeBIT, the world’s biggest technology expo.

With thousands of exhibitors and hundreds of product launches and demonstrations, CeBit 09 (3-8 March) is about trying out new technologies and thinking around new trends.

It’s also about gossiping and partying and getting the face-to-face contact that the stutter of the video conference just can’t match.

And, naturally, these days, it’s about analysing the global economy and what its collapse means for tech business.

Tip 1: “No Problemo”

Adding some Hollywood glitz to CeBIT 09’s launch today, bodybuilder, actor and Governor of California Arnold Schwarzeneger said that the best businesses would view the global economic crisis as a challenge.

You can use a crisis as an opportunity to shine, an opportunity to leap past your competitors who are taking it maybe easy and taking the easy way out.

Linz, a sleepy provincial Austrian town? Cuckoo clocks and the sound of music? Where Hitler went to school with Wittgenstein ? Never mind the cobblestones. As the venue for Ars Electronica , one of the biggest digital arts festivals in the world, Linz is heaven for geeks right now, is overclocking with tech-driven spectacle.

Back in the 20th Century, when Vienna marked the cutting edge of things, Austrian sophisticates cracked that Linz rhymed with province. Say “province” in an Austrian accent and it ends in “z”. Just like Linz. Geddit? Dear pretty, provincial Linz. No bright lights, no big city: what Linz offered was small-town zzzz.

Wander over to Linz’s main square, the Hauptplatz, a virtual chocolate-box cover, one of the largest squares in central Europe, elegantly lined with pastel coloured Renaissance buildings.

Fast forward past the plaques commemorating visits by Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert, past the imposing column, past the friendly, back-slapping locals lapping up beer and torte, the trams trundling by, the cobblestoned backstreets winding off towards pubs and cafés in sleepy squares, towards the nearby Danube. The same as it ever was: Linz, a typically Austrian town with a big heart?

When in Rome, do as the New York Times tells you. A recent travel feature about Rome at Night comes attached with not only the usual multimedia map but an MP3 walking tour as well.

Great. Unless you happen to depend on the tourist dollar…

Riffing off a recent Wired item enthusing about a crowdsourced GPS tour of Namibia, Geoff Manaugh sees downsizing ahead for locals as tourists start turning up preloaded with everything (they think) they need to know about a place:

… You fly down to the Amazon to try ayahuasca, but you don’t hire any local shamans or native botanists because you’ve got everything you need to know already saved on a 300GB iPod – as if that might be the atomized fate of the West in general: desperately seeking visions, alone in the wild, surrounded by portable gadgetry.

“Your tradition is right here,” the tourist says, holding his Garmin GPS loaded with Traveler’s Africa version 8.02 over the heads of impoverished villagers. “I don’t need you anymore.”

- BLDGBLOG: The Digital Replacement of the Natives

Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert plan to return to TV on 7 January while their writers stay out on strike. Off air for two months, the latte-drinking (probably), liberal-leaning (certainly) presenters, funny men, princes of political satire etc say they would much rather return with their comrade writers — beyond this, words (as well as their principles, perhaps) fail them:

If we cannot, we would like to express our ambivalence, but without our writers we are unable to express something as nuanced as ambivalence.
- NY Times 071221

Just published, graphic novel Shooting War by Anthony Lappe and Dan Goldman: it’s 2011 and anti-corporate blogger Jimmy Burns is working as an embed for Global News – ‘Your home for 24-hour terror coverage’ – in President McCain’s Iraq… And boom. The beta online version is available here.

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