An audience with the King of Google

Just back from Google Zeitgeist Europe 2007 in Hertfordshire, as dazzling an assembly of those shaping the destiny of the web as you could hope to behold. The cast list reads like a who’s who of the media-political class: Sir Martin Sorrell, James Murdoch, David Miliband, Mark Thompson, Peter Bazalgette, Chad Hurley, Sanjiv Ahuja, Matthias Döpfner and many others. The ripple of power and cerebration outclassed any party political conference I have attended.

At the centre of it all, the quiet presence of Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google’s executive committee and CEO: some people don’t need to show off, and Schmidt is one of them. Why bother when you’re at the helm of a search engine company, capitalized at $149billion, and so culturally powerful that its brand-name has already entered the Oxford English Dictionary as a verb?

Schmidt says that the next question Google users will be asking is: “What should I do tomorrow?” And to that future question some of the answers could already be generated: “What should you read? We are going to do a pretty good job on that…We could give you a reading list on the hour.”