I’m lucky to meet some really sharp folks at internet conferences. One such clever fellow is Andy Edmonds – Mozilla Hacker and Microsoft’s search relevancy researcher who writes in his blog:

The technological and attentional commons of the internet has created a radioactively boosted level of technology evolution. It sputters and backfires, but through a nefariously faceted backbone of communications, competition, and collaboration infrastructure is resulting in interesting new forms of business and user activity.
In fact, one might view the rise of Firefox in this light.

You might need to read it again to digest it, but these are simple yet profound points:
The internet is increasingly fertile ground for an explosion of technological evolution.

Variations on this theme are what I’m hearing from many of the clever guys at Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. Both the companies and the engineers are passionate about what they are doing and, for the most part, recognize that many of the old rules of carefully guarded proprietary software developments are pretty much out the window.

As if to hammer this last point home Amazon just released the Alexa Search Engine API for pretty much anything anybody wants to do with it. This was not front page news, even online, but reflects what Andy’s talking about in a big way….things are changing….fast.

Well, I think I’ll consider this my first “real” day in the new office. I did work a bit here yesterday but mostly played speed chess. Wireless here is much faster than downstairs, probably due to signal coming through windows vs walls.

I thought I was NOT going to get to speak about Travel internet at SES Nanjing China in March but they may change their minds – apparently they are making it very bilingual and will have translator help. In any case I’ll get to China in some capacity over the next two years because it’s where the action is going to be – perhaps for the next 100 years. Also a wonderful travel place – or so I’ve heard.

I started two new blogs today and hope in doing so to create a better system for organizing my interests. The Founders Blog is resurrecting the architects of the American Experiment and has them commenting on the news and events of today. The Founders are BACK.

Actually the founders are pleased with the success of the American Experiment as an engine of entrepreneurial capitalistic success, but deeply concerned about the degree to which both liberal and conservative governance now obstructs their original ideals. These obstructions include an incomprehensibly monstrous socio-military beauracracy, a bully like American Empire, the erosion of personal and collective liberties in the name of homeland security and global hegemony, taxing the country’s golden geese as well as the middle class to pay for grossly inefficient implementations of health, social services, and military systems, and perhaps most importantly failing to inspire Americans to make our country a shining beacon of freedom and prosperity in a troubled world.

Yup, The Founders are BACK, and boy are they PISSED!

The second blog project is “dialog“, where I’ll be experimenting with a …. better way to use blogs.

Starting to read Tom Friedman’s “The World is Flat”, which in some ways is about my own little world of technology, change, global economic realities, and how things are changing at the speed of cash and technology.

Advertisers at my travel websites over the past few years have come from all over the world – in addition to Google ads which cover the globe, money will sometimes come in from England, Japan, and other places – easily wired into my bank or sent via Paypal. I’ve never met or even spoken with most of the people who pay for advertising at the sites.

At Online Highways we have a team of data / text editors working for us in the southern state of Kerala. Language has been an issue and it’s not clear that the quality of English is high enough to justify outsourcing for writing, though it appears programming quality is equivalent in all but cost.

So from a business perspective the results of my flat world are mixed, but I’m very optimistic for the poor of China and India who, over time, will increasingly fill the thousands of niche service and industrial markets in USA, Japan, and EEC, bringing a higher standard of living and better infrastructure to many in those countries.

I’ve never been very sympathetic to the socialist notion that the developed world prospers by exploiting the undeveloped world. On the contrary I think it’s the absence of advanced capitalist markets that keep the downtrodden … down. Excellent “experimental” evidence supporting this comes from a comparison of the “capitalist free” economy of North Korea with the capital intensive economy of South Korea.

There are exceptions to the rule that capitalism is the answer for the poor, but I see globalized entrepreneurial capitalism as a solution far more than a problem, especially for those mired in undeveloped world poverty. The sooner they can get a higher level of participation in the globalized, developed world economies the faster they can bring needed infrastructure improvements to their countries and raise the standards of living.

I expect the forces now swirling in these directions to slightly lower the standard of living in the developed world, but this is a small price to pay and may even have benefits that are hard to anticipate. Are Smoking, Obesity, and Alcoholism correlated positively with affluence? A good research project for later.

A fine Christmas Day here in our cozy little world of nice food and family, presents and cheer.

Yet I hope we will all choose to reflect now and into the future about how to better meet the needs of those in this world less fortunate than us, especially the millions who live in abject poverty. Most are victims only of the circumstance of their birth in nations challenged by corrupt rulers, natural disasters, and poor infrastructure.

Edison suggested “There is a better way – find it!” I think…I know…we can.

Tonight I helped the Access Food drive in Medford by dressing up as Santa while food donations were collected on a street whre every house is beautifully lit with Christmas lights. The neighborhood has made it it a tradition there and the event, which gets many thousands of cars over several nights, raises thousands in food and money for the needy. When the guy came in for the next shift and I gave him the suit and he took over, I noticed how I’d passed the celebrity on to him the moment he stepped out, and realized how being Santa, even for just a few hours, was really something special.

Being Santa is a very unique experience, especially fun with the kids who are about 2-4 who think “wow, this is REALLY Santa Claus”. Most of the kids have seen enough Santas that they are polite and enthusiastic, but the look from those few little ones who figure you really are the big guy himself are absolutely priceless. Also nice is the friendliness of almost everybody who drives by, old and young, waving back and wishing Santa a Merry Christmas.

HO HO HO, MERRRRRRRRY CHRISTMAS!

I was going to skip posting today but ran across this clever little tool – The Internet Anagram Server. Type in your name or any other word combination and get a huge number (all?) possible variations on the letters.

How far are we from an advanced crossword completer? My most excellent mother-in-law Rhoda and friend Devora insisted you could not use Google to complete any but a simple Crossword. I disagreed but when they sent me a NYT I was stumped very quickly.

I’m hoping this is a step in the direction, since I always root for the machines to win over we humans.

Signed,
Junes Hips Honk

I’ve been testing two new ideas in search: Yahoo Answers and Squidoo.com.

Yahoo Answers shows a lot of promise – it allows users to post questions, answer questions, and score points and eventually perhaps payment for participation. However I’ve been disappointed in the low quality of many of the answers to my test questions and other questions I’ve reviewed. Projects like this need people to take the project very seriously or it won’t have quality.

SQUIDOO is a very interesting idea – basically a variation on the ABOUT.com concept where experts offer high quality articles about all sorts of topics and are ranked and paid as users interact with the information.

I’ve been testing it a bit and developed a “lens”, or Squidoo web page, for Las Vegas. The system is easy to use, but I kept getting the feeling I was just setting up Squidoo to make most of the money from work better put to use on my own websites. Their total claimed revenue share payout is a pitiful few hundred dollars to what must be hundreds and hundreds of “lensmasters”.

Unless Squidoo has some great way to optimize for search engines (and I doubt they do), the articles there are probably no more likely to get good ranks than, for example, a blog at Google’s blogger.com on which the publisher can run adsense.

Since Squidoo has financing by a major VC firm with a bunch of heavy hitters like Marc Andreesen, a large percentage of the value will flow to them and not publishers.

Verdict so far: Squidoo doo is a no do.