Google the Whish-Machine & The Natives of the Internet

Posted on November 18, 2006
Filed Under Maps |

During the “Safe Bets from Google” event at the Webmasterworld in Las Vegas, which by the way was a little too crowded for my taste, Chris Rand, Pascal Fantou and myself had a little chat which was quite some fun.
Chris Rand told us a little story about his, if I remember right 5 year old son, and his way to use the internet. Chris told us that for his son Google seems to be the source of more or less everything you need in life.

Things like games, books, information and movies seem to be in there. Whenever you need something you just go to Google type it in, do some magic, and two days later the movie, the game etc. will arrive at your house.

WOW that’s like the whish-machines you know from fairytales. One day his son asked him: “How do you spell chocolate?” So Chris wrote it down and his son entered the word into Google, but as you may imagine no chocolate jumped out of the PC. Anyway at some point little Rand will learn about the “you need to earn money to spend it” thing.

Pascal mentioned that he heard someone talking about the “Natives of the Internet” (and he mentioned the name but I can’t remember right now) But that expression hits the spot. And the littel story gives an idea of how different one might think about the internet if he does not know there has been a time without it.

Technorati Tags: , ,

  • Google buys AJAX mapping techology company
  • Google finally giving in on font page advertising
  • Yahoo’s way back to the top?
  • Abakus - SEMSEO 2007 Conference Mai 4th

    • Comments

    2 Responses to “Google the Whish-Machine & The Natives of the Internet”

    1. sanna on January 6th, 2007 10:41 am

      Hello Frank,

      check out a VC blogs in NYC here, if still interested: http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2006/06/net_natives.html

      two more expressions come up: net natives and born on the internet. If you have been using the web since 1999 you can still be a net native. :) (that’s sth)

    2. Patrick C. Price on November 27th, 2007 6:07 pm

      Hi Frank

      The term was coined by Rupert Murdoch in 2005 as he discribed the difference between “digital natives” and “digital immigrants” during an American Society of Newspaper Editors event.

      Saying “digital natives” would no longer be using traditional media as we (anyone born before 1980) do.

    Leave a Reply




    *
    To prove you're a person (not a spam script), type the security text shown in the picture. Click here to regenerate some new text.
    Click to hear an audio file of the anti-spam word