Category Archives: Globalization

TechMeme, paid blogging, and Zunes

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Lots of interesting tech news today from TechMeme which is starting to distinguish itself as “the place” for tech insiders as Digg and Technorati increasingly seek to cater to a huge audience and Slashdot remains problematic because it’s not as robust with community input.

The New York Times reports that Huffington is adding “original” reporting to her extremely popular political blog. I wonder if this is as much for advertising credibility than quality, which clear thinking people know is not a function of whether you get paid to blog or not. Hey, wait a minute. A lot of bloggers (including me) are skeptical that paying people for blog posts, reviews and other online content serves the best interests of the blog community.

Yet nobody seems to frown on a journalist when they get paid to blog. Or, for that matter, run copious amounts of expensive advertising beside quality content as Mike does over at TechCrunch. For the time being I’m refiling my pay per post concerns under the folder “maybe right, but maybe just hypocritical pseudo-elitist nonsense”.

Also at NYT is this piece on the Third World Laptop project bringing cheap computing to the poor all over the world. It’s a very exciting concept that will certainly bring about big changes and also many unintended, unpredictable consequences. I remain confused as to why Bill Gates has opposed the laptop project because even though clean water and health and food are more immediate needs, the Laptops will connect the first and third worlds in ways that will *demand* more proactive participation in third world development by us rich folks. Also this project brings some of the best thinkers – people who often dwell in abstract and expensive first world problem solving realms – into the of “global poverty and development” department of innovation. Gates’ outstanding contributions in this realm are of global and historical significance so I hope he will eventually see how the laptop project is part of this excellent trend that is connecting the rich and the poor.

Aleks Krotoski has a great piece about digital violence over at Second Life where that blossoming virtual community is now under attack by opportunistic and malicious … programs. It’s not only art that imitates life, it’s virtually impossible to escape our human inadequacies even when humans are not physically present in the environment.

And those nifty Zunes can’t seem to crack the IPOD dominance in digital MP3 players. I often wonder how much of the tech trends are habit and how much innovation. Zunes seemed to offer better features yet they appear to be losing the battle. Ironically the neat song sharing feature using DRM restrictions seems to be backfiring on the Zune.

Bravo Branson

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Richard Branson, in this Forbes article, does a fine job of articulating how and why entrepreneurial capitalism and social responsibility can work together in vibrant ways.   Branson recently pledged to give *all profits* from his tranportation companies to projects that are working to alleviate global warming.     Although I’d rather see the money go to global health initiatives it’s admirable and exciting to see how socially proactive the “super rich” like Branson, Gates, and Buffett have become.     In fact it almost seems to be “infectious” which bodes well for a world desparately in need of innovative thinking combined with big money to fund clever projects.

I’d like to see a study of what may be a natural tension when Governments do a “really good job” at eliminating significant problems because it puts bureaucrats out of work and shrinks budgets.   Could this help explain why governments often seem to spend so much and accomplish so little when it comes to solving significant problems?

China – Lenin had it backwards

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This note from the China Venture News:

… nearly 75 percent of Chinese employees would prefer to work for wholly-owned foreign companies rather than joint ventures companies and wholly-owned Chinese companies according to Manpower research.

Lenin is often quoted as suggesting that capitalists would sell to communists the rope the communists would use to hang them. Sorry Vladimir but you had it pretty much backwards. Communism in both Russia and China is in the process of evolving into a new form of capitalism, and the workers of the world are uniting with … us (aka the capitalists),  preferring the stability of US capitalism to the challenges of neo-capitalist communism.

There goes the neighborhood Mr. Lenin dude!

Pope on Global Economic Injustice

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I don’t think the Pope is the best source of inspiration about how to structure the world but I certainly respect the fact that’s he’s sincerely interested in alleviating suffering and is a very sharp fellow.    Here, the Pope has suggested we need major structural changes in the global economy to stem the tide of poverty.

My working assumption has been that globalization is, on balance, a hugely positive force as well as an inevitable one.   In simple terms I believe this because as I travel and look around me it is the highly capitalistic and globalized environments of the USA and western democracies that  provide for their people better than the “anti capitalistic, anti westers globalization” economies of Cuba, North Korea, etc.

Socialists suggest that our higher standards are a result of exploitation of the underdeveloped countries, but if this were true we’d tend to see a LOT more flow of goods and capital from, for example, Africa to the USA.   In fact we see that Canada and Europe, Japan and China are the huge trading and economic partners of the USA rather than the suffering countries.  In fact the striking thing about US interaction with the poor is that it’s non-existent rather than exploitative.

The Pope’s comments notwithstanding, clearly it seems we should be working to bring the poor into the globalization loop, rather than do things that might destabilize the capitalistic global goose that lays so many golden eggs.

We don’t have a crisis of economy, we have a crisis of indifference.

Blogs are killing journalism? So what’s the bad news?

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Wow, talk about missing the point and the future.

Kent has a post about the running “blogs vs mainstream journalism” debates which seem to be heating up again lately, but he suggests that bloggers have their place and it isn’t an honored place as citizen journalists.
>>> It will be the same journalists who get paid for doing it now <<<

I think he’s really missing the key blogging advantages. Most importantly, this is not about ONE journalist vs ONE blogger, it’s about ONE journalist vs TEN THOUSAND bloggers.

Even the most virtuous journalist:

1) Needs to sleep. Expert bloggers are collectively around 24/7/365

2) Makes far more than is needed to get quality informed commentary from bloggers, who work for … hmmm, let me go check … oh, that would be ZERO dollars per hour.

3) Does not live in the affected areas and can’t get there the instant news happens. . This personalization and localization is a key reason blogs are already replacing mainstream, and rapidly.

4) Is not even remotely as good as people like Kent suggest. My god, try spending 15 minutes watching the jingoist FOX babes or even the very competent CNN world reporters. They cannot possibly match thousands of citizens who speak the language and are smack in the middle of the line of news fire (and gunfire).

Sure, I’d take an Ed Murrow in New York City over Joe Sixpack in New York City, but not when reporting on Hawaii earthquakes, or Peoria, or Berlin, or Kabul, or Tashkent, or Baghdad, or …

Prediction: Google will buy Facebook for about 1.1 billion

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Irrational exuberance in the dot com shopping aisles?

No, it’s a chess game and Google’s winning….again.

I’m really starting to understand what seems like irrational exuberance on the part of Google and the major players. A Google aquisition of Facebook would be consistent with what Robert Scoble suggested is happening: Google is building a moat around it’s advertising business.

Steve Ballmer also suggested this notion in his recent BusinessWeek interview, ironically fretting that Google could monopolize the media business. Yikes, Steve would really run out of chairs then?

I can almost hear Ballmer to Schmidt:
“Hey Cowboy, there’s only enough room in this here internet for ONE monopoly you, you, you dirty monopolistic sonofabitch BASTARDS!”

Schmidt to Ballmer:
“HEY! DROP that chair and step AWAY from the Vista Browser!”

Google, with tons of cash to burn and a staggering market cap, has far less to lose in the high stakes internet poker game than Yahoo, Ebay, or even Microsoft. Microsoft is bigger than Google and theoretically richer, but unlike Google Microsoft has yet to figure out good ways to monetize their (improving) search services and (not improving) content services.

Ballmer’s juggling how to preserve his big ticket MS Office and Vista projects. Yahoo’s worried about plunging valuations and people leaving and the fact that a billion represents a lot more to them than it does to Google.   This is almost certainly complicating the Yahoo Facebook negotiations right now.  Ebay’s pretty fat and happy where they are. Meanwhile, Google can focus in laser-like fashion on keeping Google in the driver’s seat with it’s superb contextual advertising monetization.

The best defense is a good offense, so they are buying up properties to increase their control over the advertising space and keep those hundreds of millions of eyeballs out of the hands of MS and Yahoo.

Will this work? I say probably not for similar reasons it was stupid for Yahoo to buy Broadcast.com years ago. Video is junky and won’t monetize well. It’ll be more of an encumbrance to Google’s core competencies than an asset. But … things change, and in the meantime it’s fun to watch this high stakes game of chess unfold.

It’s a show you won’t see on YouTube.

Hugo Chavez and Noam Chomsky

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Thanks to Hugo Chavez, Noam Chomsky’s book Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance (The American Empire Project) is now number one at Amazon.

Chomsky has always bothered me … a lot …. He’s a good linguist, a foolish economist, and a terrible social scientist / political commentator. Ironically it’s only the last two topics where Chomsky gets any attention and he’s an expert in neither.

He’s the the guy who suggested back in the 70’s that the regime of Pol Pot was not a great threat to the people of Cambodia. When it became clear that Pol Pot’s communist government, the Khmer Rouge, had murdered by many accounts over a million Cambodians Chomsky’s tune changed to suggest it was American destabilization of the region that was to blame.

Although this latter argument has some merit, clear thinkers will note that Chomsky’s failure to hold ruthless Communist regimes accountable while at the same time holding America “overly accountable” for virtually all the bad in the world is a very suspect political philosophy. Here’s a good critique of Chomsky’s hypocrisy.

However, I should caveat all this by pointing out that in a world where so many people and countries are challenging GW, Dick, and the Neocons imperial vision of the USA it’s very important to have more points of view out there than our commercialized media allows. Chomsky is one of the most articulate spokesman for an intelligent radical vision of the world and I’d like to see more of him rather than the inane ranting of intellectually lobotomized right wing radio talk show hosts.

Perhaps careful consideration of many points of view will lead us to some answers. We sure need them.

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Millions die. Millions more wait to die. All due to our narrow and irrational focus. Man do we suck!

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Another one for the “narrow focus kills millions” department:

Wikipedia on Rotavirus Vaccines, which are improving and will save *millions* of people:

An earlier vaccine, Rotashield by Wyeth-Ayerst, had to be taken off the market in the late 1990s after it was discovered in rare cases to be linked to a severe complication called intussusception. This event was so rare that widespread adoption of Rotashield in developing countries would nevertheless have saved millions of lives, but use of a vaccine deemed unsafe in the U.S. was seen as unacceptable.
Also notable is the fact that the new vaccines are very expensive in USA but heavily subsidized in developing world.  However still it appears too expensive for widespread use.   I remain unclear on how the pharma industry fits into the big picture but it’s a topic I’d like to take on soon as personal research.

When I’ve looked into specifics it generally appears they actually are NOT profiteering from the poor (though certainly they milk the rich like crazy, manipulating people with TV advertising and doctors with freebies). However it seems to me that in developing countries the big pharmas often do the right thing and either give away or heavily discount life saving drugs.  But many activists argue they are the major part of the problem – I think due to big pharma’s opposition to widespread generics.

Unfortunately much of that debate is mired in socialist economic diatribes which often suggest that anything corporate is evil, and therefore not reasonably considered part of a solution, rather than looking for the optimal solution point.

Clinton Global Initiative

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The Clinton Global Initiative is tackling the world’s major problems. It’s a great effort with the backing of one of the world’s most effective superpower schmoozers, Bill Clinton. Although I’d suggest that the Copenhagen Consensus is a more rational way to prioritize spending, Clinton’s group is far more likely to bring big money and big corporations and Government interests to the table.

Today’s announcement is that Richard Branson will donate 3 billion towards reduction of Global Warming via the Clinton Global Initiative. Although I’d much rather see the group put more towards current catastrophes at least this donation is consistent with the notion that big providers of greenhouse gasses like Branson’s many transportation interests should do the most to alleviate the effects of those gasses on the environment.

Perhaps my friend Linda was right to suggest that some people will support Global Warming initiatives in ways they won’t get behind those confronting global poverty. If we can do it all that’s great and for the first time in my life I do think there is a great, driving force on the part of most people, policy makers, and even Governments to initiate “Global Improvements”. Let’s do it!