Google Doodle for Dizzy Gillespie's 93rd Birthday


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Google Doodle for Dizzy Gillespie

Dizzy Gillespie's Google Doodle

The second Google Doodle dedicated to a musician’s birthday debuted today, for Dizzy Gillespie. Once again, the doodle links to enhanced search results. With John Lennon‘s birthday just a few weeks ago, it seems like this is the company’s subtle way of inculcating its users to their upcoming Google Music product. I believe that Google Music will ultimately incorporate most of the products and services already under their umbrella.

We have already seen how Search might be used in a music context, but imagine if Google also had your music on file, and started gleaning data from your use of Gmail, Books, Maps, Documents, Search, Demo Slam, Voice and other areas to inform your listening and purchase decisions. For example, if I’m writing emails to Jody about seeing the Peace Tower in Iceland, Gmail tells iTunes to pull some Bjork, Royksopp and John Lennon music.

An analytics chart shows how “hot” Dizzy Gillespie is as a search term, an ad for how effective Google is at popularizing something. It may be hard to detect the effect in the middle of a John Lennon onslaught, but no one was thinking about Dizzy’s 93rd until they went for it today. (Tomorrow is Shelby Lynne’s birthday btw). Once again, John Birks “Dizzy” Gillespie is associated with the cutting edge of music.

We have all had moments where songs seemed to play very coincidentally, more than just “Ruby Tuesday” on a Tuesday… and they are exciting and attention-grabbing. Music is the ultimate leanback experience – we usually listen in conjunction with another activity. If Google starts playing records while people surf their sites, and the music is programmed to us, we will probably like it a lot.

Music has already been proven to increase productivity, and for all we know, that’s why Google is into it at all – to make us all faster and happier!

Some things I would add to the Google Dizzy Gillespie search results of Songs, Images, Books and Videos from YouTube include Google Maps (show his homes and famous clubs, such as Birdland, or even Tunisia, which he wrote a famous song about); Documents, so we can listen while we write and edit; and a Diagram/image map of related artists including Charlie Parker especially; a few museums showing his famous bent horn (is it in the Smithsonian?) and more I won’t disclose here!

In other exciting news, tonight at the Guggenheim Museum, the winning videos from YouTube’s Play competition will be shown at a gala event.

To see what’s up with Dizzy Gillespie, click here.

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