Technology

Media critic Ken Auletta tracks the development of Google from a search engine to the provider of all things Internet in his new book Googled: The End of the World as We Know It.

Critic-at-large John Powers discusses two new works — one a documentary, another a novel, that blur the lines between public and private lives.

Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired magazine, talks about his new book Free: The Future of a Radical Price. Anderson theorizes that businesses can profit by giving it all away on the internet.

Transportation expert Daniel Sperling estimates that the world's car population — which currently stands at 1 billion vehicles — is likely to double in the next 20 years. Sperling is the co-author (with Deborah Gordon) of Two Billion Cars: Driving Toward Sustainability.

John Yemma, editor of The Christian Science Monitor, discusses the paper's new publication model: It's moving the daily operation to the Web and converting its print paper to a weekly.

Sixty-eight percent of all web searches take place on Google.com. But as journalist Randall Stross found when researching his new book, Planet Google: One Company's Audacious Plan to Organize Everything We Know, the company's business extends well beyond basic web searches.

Many people generate an immense amounts of digital data during a single day — often without a second thought. But Stephen Baker, a senior writer at BusinessWeek, warns that the information generated is being monitored by a group of entrepreneurial mathematicians.

Digital media — including MP3 players, peer-to-peer networks and music websites — are changing how we discover, listen to and share music. Wired.com journalist Eliot Van Buskirk joins Fresh Air to discuss the new, digital landscape of music, and the resulting changes in the music industry.

Counterterrorism expert served for 30 years, under several presidents; he joins Dave Davies to discuss what he describes as a culture of mediocrity in U.S. national-security programs.

Jimmy Wales helped create Wikipedia, the interactive online encyclopedia founded in 2001. Users write and edit Wikipedia entries themselves; the site also has a dedicated corps of editors. There are often "edit wars" over entries — some, including the one headlined "2006 Lebanon War," have been edited and then re-edited thousands of times — and Wikipedia's accuracy has been questioned by some professors and colleges, who forbid students to cite it as a source. But Wikipedia, with versions in 250 languages, is one of the top 10 sites on the Internet.