A Kingly Adieu To The King Of Talk: Larry King

The king is not dead but we will miss his show.

Photo From CNN.com

After 50,000 interviews, 6,120 shows and 53 years of broadcasting, CNN's Larry King finally hung up his suspenders but of course, you cannot expect this extraordinary guy to just fade away. Its simply not the King's way of doing things and there's no way Ted Turner will let him go.

I practically grew watching Larry King Live. From the time we first got our cable connection (about high school or early college) to the present day whenever there's an opportunity, I was always fascinated and amazed on how this man makes his interviewee so at ease, so comfortable yet at the same time manage stick to the main interview topic like industrial strength glue.

He doesn't patronize his guests but at the same you can feel the connection & trust between both interviewer and interviewee without selling out his mission as a journalist.

Another thing you will notice with the King, he is always in control of his entire interview regardless who is front of him sharing his iconic mic, whether its a queen, a head of state, a celebrity or some big shot CEO. The King bows to no one except his audience who is his real king as far as he is concerned and that's why he rules.

And while it's pointless to compare Mr. King and some of our own local talk show host (oranges and banana), you cannot help but notice how most Filipino interviewers and host tend to talk more than their guests! 

I was expecting these celebrity hosts have learned the virtues brevity from their overuse and abuse of Twitter but then when you have inexperienced and untrained people taking on a journalists job, you cannot expect too much as far as professional results are concerned.

Maybe these talk show hosts should take their cue from Larry when he said: "...if it's more than 2 sentences, it's too long."

And so to the king, I bid you adieu and thank you.

The air is dead! Long live the king!

World News: Facebook's Zuckerberg - Time Magazine's Man Of The Year

If there's any more strong proof that Facebook and the rest of the social media world has gone mainstream, this is it.

Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg is Time Magazine's 2010 Man Of The Year. Image / Photo from Time.com

Just hours ago, CNN reported that Time Magazine has named Facebook founder, Mark Zukerberg as its 2010 Man Of The Year edging out Wikileaks.org's Julian Assange and a strong U.S. conservative political movement, the The Tea Party.

Time Magazine explains its choice saying:

"Facebook has merged with the social fabric of American life, and not just American but human life: nearly half of all Americans have a Facebook account, but 70% of Facebook users live outside the U.S. It's a permanent fact of our global social reality. We have entered the Facebook age, and Mark Zuckerberg is the man who brought us here."

Time Magazine's editors further noted:

"Zuckerberg wired together a twelfth of humanity into a single network, thereby creating a social entity almost twice as large as the U.S."

"For connecting more than half a billion people and mapping the social relations among them (something that has never been done before); for creating a new system of exchanging information that has become both indispensable and sometimes a little scary; and finally, for changing how we all live our lives in ways that are innovative and even optimistic, Mark Elliot Zuckerberg is TIME's 2010" Person of the Year. 

You can read the entire editor's choice summary at the Time Magazine website.

As I've noted earlier, social media is indeed mainstream and has never been the fad.

In 2006, Time also selected as person of the year: YOU (us..as in you and me) for:

"...for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game..."

This basically means we are the creator of our own content (social media) and we share and connect that content whether its our thoughts, feelings, convictions and opinions to the rest of the world.

Now, Facebook has taken that natural need to share several steps higher.

As humans, we always connected with each other with or without the tech.

How we love to talk and pass time with friends and relatives. We share stories, photos and experiences during physical gatherings like birthdays, weddings and even funerals. We tell people we trust how we feel and our opinions on what's happening all around us.

Facebook and the rest of the social media world just provided a platform for all us to connect better with our existing social circles. The social network has always been there and its only recently that technology has provided us the means to make it much easier.

This is the reason why people love Facebook and other social media platforms. It supplements and takes our our existingocial networking activities to faster and higher level. It is isn't a surprise at all to find people using Facebook on a daily basis (50% of 500Million users making it the most visited site in the internet, surpassing Google).

For providing this unique tool and a higher level of real life social networking experience, I say I agree with Time Magazine's choice for this year's Man Of The Year recognition.

How about you, do you agree with Time's choice?