Where the Internet Lives is a podcast and mini-documentary series about the unseen world of data centers. Our objective is to demystify data centers and dig into issues around data centers, such as what benefits do they bring to the world by providing the internet, Al, and Cloud-based services to scientists, cities and individuals, and what challenges do they face that require innovation, such as energy and water consumption.
For Season 4, our theme is resilience.
As communities all over the world grapple with extreme weather, natural resource protection, food security, and protecting public health, the role of data centers is more important than ever.
A number of data pioneers at Google are bringing data into the hands of policymakers, grassroots organizations, and individuals who are using it in easy, natural ways to tell stories, inform policies and programming, and increase transparency to solve problems like hunger, food waste, deforestation, climate financing, grid reliability, health and safety. Google’s data center infrastructure makes these tools powerful and accessible to all.
Our stories bring in a wide range of voices: founders and innovators who are creating these tools: farmers, food banks, and community organizers who are tapping into them to solve problems; and individuals who benefit.
We take a journalistic approach. Each episode features selections from interviews from multiple guests, inside and outside Google, woven into a cohesive narrative facilitated by our host, Stephanie Wong.
Our accompanying films put a human face on data, each one focusing on a single person making a difference in the world through their use of data. Our stories show we can use data and AI responsibly to help solve some of the world's greatest challenges. Our hope is to that these stories give hope.
Our films and podcast worked together in such a way that the video pieces take the topics and a character from the podcast episode and show a day in the life of one person, really personalizing and humaizing the tehchnological issues we are exploring at a more heady level in the audio.
Narrative is king and the films showed the struggles and the victories of the human beings behind the technology in emotional and meaningful ways. We saw their childhoods and their children. We saw the friendship and the fondness our characters forged by collaboration on audaciously ambitious projects.
Beyond the depth of the characters and capturing and selecting the right material, and showing it at the right pace, the film team stretched itself to provide us pure visual delight. For example, the interview style the team employed is known as “Down the Barrel,” a documentary style made famous by documentary filmmaker Errol Morris. This extra special more technically skilled approach made it possible four our audience to look our characters right in the eye and connect with them. The team shot the films in a widescreen 2.35:1 aspect ratio. The incredibly cinematic approach is something you simply do not often see in branded films This is the joy of working with artful filmmakers.
We conducted dozens and dozens of pre-interviews to find the right voices at Google and outside Google who are both working on making the world (the grid, our climate, our food system, our health, our environment) more resilient. Once we found and recorded the most compelling pieces, the challenge was to weave them all together, along with news clips, to bring our listeners into the issues. We challenged ourselves to tackle the thorny issues, such as how much energy AI requires, head on.
For our films, we faced challenges such as a hail storm knocking out all the crops of the farmer we hoped to feature. The food and ag industry is one of the last sectors to embrace data and we went down many paths before we landed on the best story. Turns out is was worth it. The food episode and video are the most popular pieces we produced this season.
The show has brought in more than 607,000 downloads over 30 episodes, with an average of 20,000 downloads per episode – a 25% increase from last year. This puts Where the Internet Lives in the top 1% of all podcasts.
Where the Internet Lives also broke into the Top 20 Technology podcasts on Apple Podcasts for 25+ days during Season 4, with a peak rating of #4.
The average completion rate for Season 4 was 53% – meaning listeners consistently made it through more than half of the episode.
