Mediaite’s Rachel Sklar Talks Snowmageddon, Google Buzz on CNN

This weekend I was on CNN’s Your Money with host Ali Velshi and CNN’s Richard Quest, talking about a variety of topics including Snowmageddon’s effect on jobs and the claim by various analysts that around 200,000 jobs would be lost as a result (which we all viewed with extreme skepticism), whether it was still a Snow Day for those in computer-enabled industries who could work from home and what Google Buzz would mean for the social media – and media – world.

Ali very kindly pointed out that I was a hardy Canadian — like him! — and we all scoffed at weather wimps. I also got to give a shout-out to Geekosystem, Mediaite’s sister site. Aw. Here’s the video:

Here was my take on Google Buzz:

SKLAR: It’s a little early to know whether this is just another thing that we don’t need or the thing we didn’t know we needed. At first I found it annoying and wondered what the use was, but I admit I’ve started finding it useful. There are a lot of sharing features. People already sharing links, stuff coming in from their RSS via Google Reader. You can integrate your Twitter stream, which is a point that Google actually made in their press conference. You can geotag stuff, so where you post from can be visible…I mean there a lot of possibilities. And I think what will be really interesting is when they open up the API, which they are planning to do by May, according to Geekosystem, which is where I get my geek information from, it’s Mediaite’s sister site. The said they’re going to open up the API by may so that other developers can come in and use the service to create their own private application.

VELSHI: Which has been a big success for Facebook.

Quest made the point that each of these various web apps had begun with “a unique selling point, and then the others decided they had to steal their clones” — but then boggled my mind by asking me a question that I thought we were done with ages ago:

QUEST: What I question and I question Rachel is, there was one phrase that people always talk about never use with social media, what is the social usefulness.

SKLAR: Are you serious? It’s incredibly useful for exchanging information and seeing trends. Just for, frankly, for being social. It’s an incredibly useful system of communication. It’s changing everything. That’s the short answer!

QUEST: I can see that. I Twitter and I love to Twitter. I can understand it with a small group of friends, but do you always want to know who you went to school with and what they’re doing now? Do you really care?

SKLAR: It’s all information. Like I always like to say, it’s just a platform and it’s what you do with that platform. It’s not just for what I had for lunch. It’s, “This is an interesting article,” “You were talking about this yesterday and here is an update,” “These are photos you might find interesting,” “This event happened, did anybody else experience it?” It’s crowdsourcing. It’s not just one way or two way communication, it’s all way communication.

Richard Quest is a smart guy who clearly gets it, which is why I was so flabbergasted at the question. There is just no excuse for questioning the value of social media because you don’t care what someone had for lunch anymore. Seriously. We’ve now been through Iran, Motrin Moms, Miracle on the Hudson and Tiger Woods to name just a few examples off the top of my head where social media played a major role in information-sharing, media coverage and, in certain cases, decisions made as a direct result. No one questions the use of paper because sometimes people print idiotic things. It’s enough already. p.s. Richard, I just had soup for lunch. Yum!

Full transcript here.

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