With over 700 fun and geeky custom logos adorning Google’s international homepages, doodles have become synonymous with the Google brand. Join Marcin Wichary, User Experience Designer, and Ryan Germick, Doodle Team Creative Lead at Google as they examine the history, popularity, and controversy of Google doodle. Because this is SXSW Interactive, this podcast also highlights the ingenuity behind special doodles like the playable Pac-Man and animated Rube Goldberg / Fourth of July doodles.

Take a look behind the scenes of the H.G. Wells mystery doodles, the week that the Sesame Street muppets took over Google, the action-packed Olympics series, and more ways Google plays on their homepage.

Click here to listen to the
Google Doodles: Burning Man to Pac-Man and Beyond session.

In this video highlight reel, Icelandic representatives from the gaming, home entertainment and app development industries and a representative of the Best Party, discuss how Iceland pulled itself up by its bootstraps after the collapse of their banking system, using the methodology of the wisdom of crowds to capture the heartbeat of the their nation's creativity.

In 2009, a loosely-organized group calling themselves the Anthill, wondered "What is the vision of this nation?" and convened a “National Assembly” of 1,500 citizens to formulate a coherent set of values, vision and ideas for Iceland's future. Iceland's politicians took notice and responded by holding a second National Assembly in 2010 as a preparatory step in the development of a new national constitution! Watch the video above to see how these citizens are rapidly prototyping new forms of democracy using the web and open innovation.

Today in our thrice-weekly podcast feature, we bring you Clay Shirky's presentation, Why Would We Think Social Media Is Revolutionary? In this podcast, Shirky discusses the most recent examples of effective use of the Internet and social media to effect political change in authoritarian countries from the Green Wave protests during the 2009 Iranian presidential election to Tunisian insurgents' recent ouster of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. Learn how revolutionaries and reformers have always used the most effective communication tools to distribute their message to the masses, going as far back as the printing press.

How does TED do it? You can't help but wonder at the high quality of their content and their obvious dedication to sharing with a global audience. In this SXSW Interactive 2011 video highlight, June Cohen, Director at TED Media, talks about TED's openness projects, particularly focusing on the Open Translation Project.

An enormous effort, encompassing 16,000 presentation translations in 80 languages with more than 6,000 volunteer translators from around the world, TED launched Open Translation Project for the simple reason that their audience asked them for it. Watch the video to hear Cohen's special SXSW announcement about the latest exciting openness project from TED.