At the end of November, Joe Sjoberg went missing. He was last seen by his roommate on Monday, November 29, in Madison, Wisconsin, where the two shared a home. A graduate of Carleton College in Minnesota known for his extroversion and warm, welcoming personality, his disappearance was a shock to those who knew him. Distraught, Joe's family filed a missing persons report, and a case was opened with the Madison Police Department. But while the Madison Police conducted their investigation in the usual manner, Joe's family and friends refused to wait by the phone for news.

The family started a Facebook group entitled "HELP JOE SJOBERG MISSING." The Facebook page has since become a home base for a Web-wide mobilization effort, a call to arms to find Joe and bring him home safely to his parents and friends. But Joe's brothers, Robert and Patrick, didn't stop there, pushing a flyer with Joe's face and standardized message onto Facebook, Twitter, and social news forums throughout the Web.

"Beginning on Thursday, Dec. 2, we launched a massive social media campaign, spanning forums from Facebook to Reddit to Craigslist to Twitter, with retweets and posts numbering in the tens of thousands," said Rachel Mandell-Rice, a friend of Sjoberg family, via email. "Celebrities such as Jimmy Fallon, Craig Ferguson, Sports Illustrated writer Peter King, and ESPN commentator Matthew Berry have posted this news on their twitter feeds. The sheer magnitude of the campaign has prompted one blogger to refer to it as a "Social Media Amber Alert."

While even the most casual observer understands the boost that a mention from Twitterati like Ashton Kutcher or Kim Kardashian can provide to a cause, the campaign to find Sjoberg extends far beyond mere awareness to coordinated action.

"On December 4, 2010, we learned that Joe had researched private airstrips in Wisconsin. Within 90 minutes of posting a request for help on the 'Joe Sjoberg Missing' Facebook page, volunteers had contacted the almost 600 private airstrips in Wisconsin, and faxed or emailed flyers with information," Mandell-Rice told me in an email.

"Subsequent posts for help have received an overwhelming response, allowing us to contact over 200 Wisconsin-area hotels and more than 200 local hospitals. Volunteers have emailed or faxed hundreds of flyers to gas stations and local businesses. They have also searched miles of airport parking lots in Milwaukee, Madison, and Chicago. Without social media, this process would have taken police weeks to complete."

On Reddit, where Redditors have for years been responsible for enourmous acts of charity and benevolence, the AskReddit thread generated more than 400 responses suggesting methods of tracking down Sjoberg, including accessing his bank records and emails.

Within 90 minutes of posting a request for help on the Facebook page, volunteers had contacted the almost 600 private airstrips in Wisconsin

The disappearance of Joe Sjoberg is more than just a human interest story about a community spontaneously built around finding one man. Social media has proven an incredibly effective resource at tracking people down, even those who don't want to be found. In August 2009, Wired writer Evan Ratiff tried to disappear completely; he bought prepaid cell phones, disguises, and gift cards to avoid being recognized or tracked through his bank account. He shaved his head. He carefully monitored his phone usage and IP addresses so as not to leave a digital footprint. He took on a fake identity and created a new life for himself in New Orleans. Wired offered a reward to readers who could track down Evan, say the code word ("fluke"), and snap a picture. After several months of cat-and-mouse with casual readers and participants from communities like Reddit and 4chan, Ratiff found himself cornered. "You wouldn't happen to know a guy named Fluke, would you?" The game was up.

But the everyday citizens after Ratiff were motivated by a monetary prize. What drove thousands of complete strangers to lend their efforts to hunting Sjoberg? Compassion and sympathy are obviously answers: many Redditors shared similar stories of friends and family who had simply disappeared. In the digital world, the faintest sense of horror over a distant family's pain is incentive enough for a stranger to help. As Clay Shirky noted in Here Comes Everybody, social media has drastically reduced -- if not totally eliminated -- the costs of participating in collective action, especially those costs associated with distance. The search for Joe Sjoberg "has gone global," Mandell-Rice said. "People as far away as Egypt, Spain and Thailand pitching in to help." With conventional police departments often overburdened with heavy caseloads, the capacity to crowdsource support from a vast online network may serve as a useful resource for future instances like this. "You don't need a background in public relations or technology to do something like this," Mandell-Rice said.

As I write this story, there's no certainty as to Joe's fate. Concerned friends and family swoop into the Reddit and Facebook groups to share updates and support; many reach out to their existing networks, for retweets and Facebook posts. But the scope and strength of the response has proven invaluable to Joe's family and friends. "In all honesty, we don't know if we will ever find Joe, or if he's even alive. What we do know is that the more people who see his picture and read his story, the more likely we are to get some kind of closure from this," Mandell-Rice said.

"While our hope is to use our story to spread awareness of Joe's disappearance and to get him home safe, we understand that his disappearance alone is not national news. We believe, however, that our ability to leverage social media into immediate action is a compelling and timely story. Our search has been extensive and wide reaching, yet conducted completely through the Internet," Mandell-Rice said. "It is an experience that offers hope to all families who suffer this kind of a tragedy. There is something that can be done. There is hope."

Today, Google spent hours and hours unveiling its latest products, software, and features, but it all could have been summed up as follows: Chrome is the future of Google. The search giant introduced a new iteration of its Chrome Browser, the Chrome Web Store, and the Chrome OS, a browser-based operating system designed for networks in the cloud. Here are the bells and whistles.

Chrome Browser

Sundar Pichai, who headed up today's presentation, began with a few stats on the browser's success. It's grown to about 120 million active users, he said, up from about 70 million not too long ago. The single most common conversion factor: Chrome is fast. Now the Chrome team is trying to make it faster.

Google Instant integration. We already have Google Instant, the real-time search engine that shows results with each letter typed. The Chrome team has brought that to its browser, and now results show as they do on Instant when searching from the address bar. What's more, commonly visited websites load automatically in real-time, without having to hit Enter. Usually visit ESPN, or Twitter, or CNN? Typing E will  load ESPN instantaneously, T for Twitter, and C for CNN.

Built-in PDF reader. One of the worst parts of the browsing experience is loading PDFs. They either pop-up out of the browser or require a plug-in to load. Regardless, PDFs are slow. The Chrome team developed a native reader; now PDFs as large as the recent health care legislation load just as fast as a one page document.

Hardware Acceleration. Web pages are becoming more and more graphically intense, and Chrome--following the example of other browsers, such as Internet Explorer 9--is amping up its efforts to provide better hardware acceleration and HTML5 support.

Crankshaft. Google has worked hard at improving its Java support, and according to Pichai, a new service called Crankshaft has allowed the browser to become fifty times faster over the past two years.

Google Inc. is in the final stages of launching its long-awaited e-book retailing venture, Google Editions, a move that could shake up the way digital books are sold.

The long-delayed venture—Google executives had said they hoped to launch this summer—recently has cleared several technical and legal hurdles, people close to the company say. It is set to debut in the U.S. by the end of the year and internationally in the first quarter of next year, said Scott Dougall, a Google product management director.

In recent weeks, independent booksellers, which are expected to play a big role in Google Editions, began receiving contracts from their trade group. Several publishers said they were exchanging files with Google—a sign that it is close to launch, publishers say.

"Because of the complexity of this project, we didn't want to come out with something that wasn't thorough," Mr. Dougall said.

Google Editions hopes to upend the existing e-book market by offering an open, "read anywhere" model that is different from many competitors. Users will be able to buy books directly from Google or from multiple online retailers—including independent bookstores—and add them to an online library tied to a Google account. They will be able to access their Google accounts on most devices with a Web browser, including personal computers, smartphones and tablets.

Key details of Google's e-book project remain unanswered. Foremost is what percentage of revenue Google will share with independent bookstores and other retailers. It also isn't clear how many bookselling partners it has lined up and who they are. More than 200 independent booksellers in the U.S. could sign up, according to the American Booksellers Association.

Because of Google's reach—its search engine attracts 190 million U.S. Internet users per month, according to comScore Inc.— many believe Google Editions has the potential to transform the burgeoning e-book market. Digital book sales are expected to more than triple to $966 million this year, according to Forrester Research, from $301 million in 2009.

Google says it is on a mission to reach all Internet users, not just those with tablets, through a program in which websites refer their users to Google Editions. For example, a surfing-related blog could recommend a surfing book, point readers to Google Editions to purchase it, and share revenue with Google. Through another program, booksellers could sell Google Editions e-books from their websites and share revenue with Google.

"Google is going to turn every Internet space that talks about a book into a place where you can buy that book," says Dominique Raccah, publisher and owner of Sourcebooks Inc., an independent publisher based in Naperville, Ill. "The Google model is going to drive a lot of sales. We think they could get 20% of the e-book market very fast."

The strategy of not having its own e-reader device could actually give Google a competitive advantage, says Brian Murray, CEO of News Corp.'s HarperCollins Publishers Inc. As the number of mobile reading devices—including tablets and smartphones—proliferates, Google Editions will benefit "because their technology may be the least dependent on specific devices," he says. News Corp. owns The Wall Street Journal.

Google has signed deals with many major book publishers, and is expected to offer hundreds of thousands of titles for purchase, and millions more for free.

The majority of titles that currently are available in other e-bookstores would be available on Google Editions, "at launch or shortly after," said James Crawford, an engineering director at Google. Retail prices will be similar to those at Amazon and Barnes & Noble Inc.

But Google is also facing considerable hurdles due to its late start and different model.

Many digital book buyers have long-established retail loyalties based on proven shopping experiences. Google's retail experience has been largely limited to selling ads.

The company is already facing resistance from some major booksellers who say they don't need its services. "I don't see the advantage in pushing their content, especially since it may be small in terms of total revenue," says Michael Edwards, chief executive of Borders Group Inc.'s bookselling unit, which sells e-books through an agreement with Toronto-based Kobo Inc.

View Full Image

AFP/Getty Images

Nevertheless, some independent booksellers that can't afford to open their own e-bookstores believe that Google Editions could be their gateway into the digital marketplace. The independents will install Google technology on their websites so they can sell e-books and receive a percentage of revenue.

"If I don't change with what is going on, I am going to be behind," says Liz Murphy, owner of the Learned Owl Book Shop in Hudson, Ohio, who is eager to see what Google will enable. "People are getting e-books but they aren't getting them from me."

The e-books store is an extension of Google's ambitious—and sometimes controversial—plan to scan the world's 150 million or so books and make them accessible to users of Google's Web-search engine. Thanks to several book-scanning centers located near major libraries, Google executives say the project, dubbed Google Books, is 10% complete.

Google's launch, which publishers cautioned has been delayed before and could be delayed again, comes at a pivotal moment in the digital books transformation.

E-book readers have become much more affordable. When Amazon launched its Kindle reader in 2007, the device cost $399. Today, new e-readers can be found for $150 and less, pushing them into the mass market. Spurred on by the launch of Apple Inc.'s iPad last April, more than 15 million e-readers and tablets will be sold by the end of 2010 in the U.S., compared with an estimated 2.8 million e-readers sold in 2009, Forrester predicts.

Unlike many speakers at GigaOM's NewTeeVee conference Wednesday, Google TV product lead Rishi Chandra did not take the stage to showcase his company's latest technology. Many in the television industry--broadcasters, content providers, advertisers--are wary of Google's arrival in the business, but Chandra spent his talk soothing them, arguing the product is nothing more than a TV supplement.

"Our goal is not to replace cable," he began. Rather, Google TV plans to deliver "incremental" content--that is, access to video-on-demand through Amazon, subscription services such as Netflix, and mounds of media via YouTube. "What we're trying to do is take all that great cable content today, and bring in the millions of channels on the Web," Chandra said.

Chandra also spent time assuring the audience this was not an "overnight" change, though he agreed Google TV would help accelerate the process. "Cord cutting is not happening anytime soon," he said, before again adding, "We want to take al that great cable content--and extend it."

Still, Chandra was clear: The current television experience is "limited," and Google wants to change that. He discussed how Google search would help "rethink content discovery," and that while the archetypal TV guide might make sense for today's cable boxes, "it doesn't work when you go from 300 channels to one million channels."

That idea might scare broadcasters and traditional content providers, who would probably want to avoid getting lost in the void of the Web's endless media production. When moderator Janko Roettgers asked whether Google felt it had to "play nice with broadcasters" before finding success, Chandra was quick to agree.

"We need the industry to adopt this platform," he said.

Bill Gates thinks something is going to die too.

No, it’s not physical books like Nicholas Negroponte — instead, Gates thinks the idea of young adults having to go to universities in order to get an education is going to go away relatively soon. Well, provided they’re self-motivated learners.

“Five years from now on the web for free you’ll be able to find the best lectures in the world,” Gates said at the Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe, CA today. “It will be better than any single university,” he continued.

He believes that no matter how you came about your knowledge, you should get credit for it. Whether it’s an MIT degree or if you got everything you know from lectures on the web, there needs to be a way to highlight that.

He made sure to say that educational institutions are still vital for children, K-12. He spoke glowingly about charter schools, where kids can spend up to 80% of their time deeply engaged with learning.

But college needs to be less “place-based,” according to Gates. Well, except for the parties, he joked.

But his overall point is that it’s just too expensive and too hard to get these upper-level educations. And soon place-based college educations will be five times less important than they are today.

One particular problem with the education system according to Gates is text books. Even in grade schools, they can be 300 pages for a book about math. “They’re giant, intimidating books,” he said. “I look at them and think: what on Earth is in there?“

According to Gates, our text books are three times longer than the equivalents in Asia. And yet they’re beating us in many ways with education. The problem is that these things are built by committee, and more things are simply added on top of what’s already in there.

Gates said that technology is the only way to bring education back under control and expand it.

The QR code, or quick response code, is simply a two-dimensional bar code that came into being in 1994 and found a large audience in Japan. Stateside, however, QR codes — while clever for tying real-world objects to online content — have always remained on the outskirts of public awareness.

Nonetheless, we’ve seen QR codes employed for creative purposes. The Detroit Red Wings interactive programs and the giant QR codes in Times Square come to mind. Each of these serves as prime examples of how QR codes could be on the verge of their breakout moment.

What the technology needs in order to finally make it to the mainstream are applications that take the nerd-factor out of the QR code scan, and drive home the potential rewards of seeing a code, scanning it, and then engaging with the served-up content.

Stickybits and SCVNGR are startups that integrate the barcode scan in intelligent and fun ways. They’re poised to propel the movement of the next generation QR code, and here’s why.

---

The Potential of Collective Scanning

---

Stickybits brings context to real-world objects with its next generation approach to the QR code. The mobile app is primarily a barcode scanner — powered by Red Laser — but it takes the technology into the realm of fun by creating a social and shared experience around any item in the physical world that possesses a barcode.

Download the iPhone () or Android () application, scan your favorite cereal box, add an item — maybe a related recipe, but any video, photo, audio clip or comment will do — and you’ve just started a digital thread around that item.

Where Stickybits succeeds is in making the scan feel familiar. People have already caught on to using Red Laser to scan barcodes on packages for comparison pricing. So Stickybits is nothing more than a barcode scanner for comparison multimedia conversations. Same idea, different application.

It’s this approach that could finally help to bridge the gap between barcodes on packages and the still unfamiliar QR codes popping up in the real world. It certainly doesn’t hurt that Stickybits scans standard barcodes and QR codes, which eliminates the need for users to hunt down other QR code scanner apps.

Of course, Stickybits offers tons of potential for both brands and marketers. The service essentially creates a social graph around things (products), so that alone makes it a new platform for digital exposure.

The brands and marketers that can motivate fans to take to product-related conversation chains via Stickybits, with or without a nudge in the right direction, could find a distinct advantage over competitors. This is especially true for brands that find meaningful ways to participate, even it if is just by listening or following along. In this way, Stickybits is like a new frontier for savvy early adopter brands.

Stickybits also makes more aggressive brand plays possible. Pepsi, for example, signed on as a sponsor. Stickybits users who scan Pepsi cans and other Pepsi products will see a sponsored message from Pepsi atop the bits threads. It’s somewhat akin to Twitter’s () Promoted Tweets, and could prove to be both a money-making vehicle for Stickybits and an alternative way for advertisers to get exposure.

Success in this realm will certainly depend on the branded message that scanners see. Anything too pushy will discourage app users from scanning product barcodes, which would be a lose-lose for everyone.

For more guerilla-style street campaigns, Stickybits sells barcode stickers, and users can print codes onto gear or download and print their own codes from home.

---

Gaming and QR Codes, A Perfect Match

---

Location-based services have been around for years. Loopt and Brightkite () were early pioneers in encouraging mobile owners to share their location with friends via GPS-enabled devices.

Both services are still around today and each have their own appeal, but Foursquare (), the second coming of Dodgeball (), has pushed location-sharing into mainstream hands. Foursquare did it by hooking users with simple and engaging game mechanics, and now everyone, especially Yelp (), is anxious to follow suit.

SCVNGR — which bills itself as a mobile way to participate in place-based, scavenger hunt-like challenges — is in part a checkin application, but with the gaming experience at the core of the service. Users can check-in at a venue using the SCVNGR mobile app, but it’s what happens after the checkin that makes this an application worthy of note.

SCVNGR is all about activity, and while it can be used as a Foursquare alternative, there’s so much business appeal here that it kind of exists in a new category of its own. Cities, museums, small businesses, universities and even brokers have already turned to SCVNGR to create their own location-based treks for customers or fans.

goSmithsonian, for instance, used SCVNGR to build a trek through nine of the Smithsonian museums that require solving clues and completing challenges. More recently The Boston Globe’s trek involved five different content-driven, city-based challenges. Treks are about mobile, challenge-based discovery, so they’re certainly Foursquare and Gowalla ()-esque in nature, but as the Smithsonian and The Boston Globe examples demonstrate, there’s more here than just checkins.

It’s within these challenges and treks where QR codes make their appearance and find real-life relevance. SCVNGR supports QR code challenges, so players can be tasked to scan a QR code to complete the challenge and earn the points. Of course, the QR code challenge is also a nearly fail-proof way to ensure that a player is where they say they are, which means it adds verification to the checkin.

Since the application doubles as a QR code scanner, the scanning activity happens right within the game and helps to familiarize users with the foreign notion of a barcode scan. It’s this familiarization that will help make QR codes recognizable and decodable to the human eye.

Obviously marketers and brands alike have shown an increasing interest in creative location-based initiatives. As interest continues to grow in this space, SCVNGR has a solid shot at becoming the de facto mobile application to facilitate mobile scavenger hunts, and propel QR codes to mainstream adoption.

---

Challenges Still Remain

---

Amidst all the possibilities, barcode scanning apps and services still face a number of obstacles before the general public will embrace them.

The biggest hurdle is the fact that there are so many disparate applications that support QR code scanning, each with their own purpose or twist. Of course, there’s also custom barcode/scanner services like Microsoft Tag, which is progressive in its own way but requires that users have a special app (they can’t use generic QR code scanners) to process Tag codes in the real world.

It’s asking too much of people to make them distinguish between a regular barcode, a QR code and some other custom code. We need simplification and standards.

The barcode scan is also heavily dependent on the user wanting to interact with it. They have to pull out their smartphone, load up an app and scan the code in question. It’s a matter of a few seconds, but the barcode is likely a missed opportunity, lost in the real world as real people race to get from point A to point B. Thankfully, Stickybits and SCVNGR both tackle the “why should I scan this?” problem, and we’ll be watching closely to see if that’s enough to push this edgy technology beyond the niche.

"More people are engaged with music than ever before," said Tom Silverman, founder of Tommy Boy Records and the New Music Seminar. "It's a hockey stick going up; it's an incredible opportunity that so far has eluded us." Silverman was speaking this morning at the New Music Seminar in New York City, where he and Eric Garland, CEO of Big Champagne (who also unveiled the Ultimate Chart today), gave a State of the Music Industry address. Even if you aren't a player in the industry and only an avid music listener, the figures that Silverman and Garland culled will surely surprise you. Here are a few of their key findings.

A shift from albums to singles

Of the some 100,000 albums released last year, 17,000 of them sold only 1 copy; more than 81,000 albums sold under 100 copies. In fact, just 1,300 albums sold over 10,000 copies, an astonishing figure given that these numbers combine physical and digital album sales. And for physical sales alone? Only 2% of new albums on Soundscan sold over 5,000 copies--that's a skydiver's plummet from the golden era of the music industry.

"The music business historically has been built around albums," explained Silverman. "This album-centrism is like saying the sun revolves around the Earth. We don't listen to albums now; we listen to collections of songs."

Of course, the reason for significant single-growth and slowed-album sales is due in part to iTunes hawking every song as a single for 99 cents. "Historically, the price of an album was five times greater than a single," said Silverman, who believes setting the price at a tenth of an album's cost was a mistake and that even $1.29 is too low. "It should've been a $1.99, and then we would've seen higher digital album sales because it would've been a bigger discount for buying an album." But both Silverman and Garland agreed that this is changing, citing the fact that about 14% of all of Universal Music's digital sales are for complete albums, which suggests that the $9.99 price-tag is becoming approachable for consumers.

Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter: Track your FFF number

According to Garland, industry folks today are obsessed with "FFF numbers"--that is, an artist's friends, fans, and followers. "It's a race, but to what end?" he wondered. Garland showed through a series of charts how Twitter and especially Facebook are ballooning in popularity for artists like Lady Gaga, while once popular Myspace's numbers are stymied.

However, Garland points out that Facebook recently forced most users into converting their profile favorites into "fan" data, which arbitrarily inflated the social network's numbers. For example, Garland tells the story of how when Susan Boyle's performance first blew up, a friend of his added the YouTube star to his Facebook profile. When Facebook imported this data though, he instantly became a "fan" of Susan Boyle. "[He] had no interest in it--[he] liked her for like 30 seconds, once!" Garland relates. "It doesn't really indicate any consumer activity--it's automated," added Silverman.

Garland's story serves as an indicator of just how difficult it is to figure out the influence of an artist through his or her FFF number. After all, even if Lady Gaga starts losing friends on Myspace, that's less of an indication of her popularity, and more a sign of Myspace's falling use.

Google and YouTube more important than iTunes?

Interestingly, it wasn't Apple that Garland viewed as the most important name in music, even though the company's iPods, iPhones, and iTunes indicate otherwise. "YouTube is increasingly the category killer," argued Garland. "When people ask me what is the biggest name in music in my opinion, they want me to say Apple. I usually answer: YouTube."

Garland told audiences that if you actually look to where people are listening to music--not even just looking at videos--consumers are turning more and more to YouTube, which he calls the "largest catalog of on-demand music on the Internet." If only Google could make this service profitable, right?

Internet radio: Pandora

Garland and Silverman pointed out that Pandora is now the most popular Internet radio service, with a 52% market share, close to 60 million registered users, and more than 1 billion stations.

And in a sign of just how much the Web has impacted music, Silverman told the crowd that Pandora now represents 1.7% of all radio listening--really a shocking figure to think about. Obviously, traditional music media is going away. But is the music industry ready for the change?

If you were wondering what cloud computing was from the last infographic’s reference, Wikibon does a good job laying out the basics of Cloud Computing and Software as a Service (SaaS):

Via: What is Cloud Computing?