The Google Search for God

Long read but well worth it.  A couple of passages to whet your appetite:

What is God? It is only a subject that has inspired some of the finest writing in the history of Western civilization—and yet the first two pages of Google results for the question are comprised almost entirely of Sweet’N Low evangelical proselytizing to the unconverted. (The first link the Google algorithm served me was from the Texas ministry, Life, Hope & Truth.) The Google search for God gets nowhere near Augustine, Maimonides, Spinoza, Luther, Russell, or Dawkins. Billy Graham is the closest that Google can manage to an important theologian or philosopher. For all its power and influence, it seems that Google can’t really be bothered to care about the quality of knowledge it dispenses. It is our primary portal to the world, but has no opinion about what it offers, even when that knowledge it offers is aggressively, offensively vapid.

And this ending…

And when an adolescent asks us about God? We can at least answer in the negative, by holding up our phones and saying, “It’s not this.”

What it Takes to Broadcast Live

This is the gold standard, obviously. The NFL on broadcast TV is the best of the best. But after designing and installing two new web broadcast systems this year, this makes me happy. What we did was so far from this, but so much of the “live” aspect is the same.

Best line: “Ultimately when it comes down to it everything that we’re trying to do is all about telling a story and giving the producers and directors the tools that they need to tell that story. We want to give the viewer the best experience graphically, visually, orally, audio, everything is all for the viewer.”

Now if I could just get my volunteer team members to think like this….