Jeremy is always coming up with provocative notions about the way the evolving web is changing things … and fast. I hope he is right that we are on the verge of a new publishing paradigm that falls largely out of control of the “big guys”. He’s lucky and wins either way with one of the top tech blogs in the world OR as a Yahoo guy.

It’s certainly true that we are not yet close to “great” information environments for various groups of humans.

Forums were becoming great as niche interest sites, but many have become crap now that the smart people all went off blogging.

Blogs have helped to allow more of a focus on good thinkers thinking, but even good blogging is one sided, often superficial and fairly unstructured, and rarely “user centric”.

Websites are structured and often info rich but (I certainly include my own sites) working way too hard to please Google, & Yahoo & revenue sources. Money is definitely trumping quality on the web in a HUGE way, I think far more than most users realize. *Most* websites exist to turn a buck, and even great hobby sites are often co-opted by the profit motive. That’s not necessarily bad, but it’s certainly makes them less inclined to focus on what a user will NEED vs what a user will BUY.

Where are all the users in all this mess?

Surfing for something that isn’t there yet.

A lot of concern over this item at boing-boing suggesting Wal Mart is racist due to a recommendation that suggests an association of “Planet of the Apes” with Martin Luther King and other African American heroes.

…ONLY ONE PROBLEM… (prying the DVD from my cold, dead hands….)

As any fan of both Planet of the Apes and MLK would know, this association is reasonable and flattering if taken in the intended sense.

Yet another great example of how artificial intelligence (ie the algo choosing the similar selections) is better than human intelligence*, but we humans are just TOO STUPID TO GET IT.

The references ARE intentional, but not suggesting African Americans = Apes.

This clever algo has CORRECTLY determined that Planet of the Apes has a powerful allegorical theme suggesting that racism and discrimination are fundamentally wrong …. and that these are the same notions of … the people on the list!

I can’t wait for the computers to take over, there will be so much less explaining to do!

*Example TWO: Try playing chess against a modern computer.
*Example THREE Try playing ANY game of intellect, even those that have a large component of chance, against a computer.

Today’s profundity is this: We need to create charity giving and poverty reduction mechanisms that are easy to scale. I actually think it’s a profound idea. Companies like Wal-Mart, Google, and Ebay are masterworks of complex, scalable, problem solving architectures. The use interchangeable programs/parts/stores/data centers/etc to make it much cheaper and easier to build up capacity, production, and distribution.

Contrast this with, for example, the massive public works programs of the “War on Poverty” or Agency for International Development. Although it’s now common practice to avoid massive projects that tend to create their own problems and leave many concerns unaddressed, this may be getting replaced too often with thinking small which leads to labor intensive, small solutions that don’t really do much for the big picture.

This began as an exchange with Matt at Google when I suggested taking charity donations in exchange for Dennis Hwang’s signed Google logos, which have quickly become one of earth’s most viewed art forms. Matt correctly noted that this was a nice idea, but hard to scale (ie there are only so many Dennis Hwang original logos).

So, what are these scalable solutions? For the undeveloped world Micro loans appear to be one such success story. These are small loans that enable “small time” capitalists to get a start in areas where cultural and economic barriers are illogical and substantial. I’m not convinced this approach can work in the USA as well as 3rd world because the barriers here tend to be personal rather than institutional.

A good test of the scalability of Micro loans is in progress now that EBAY founders are pouring money into that effort. Good for them!

I just posted the points below note to the excellent Matt Cutts at his blog. Citing the official Google blog, even Matt is characterizing the fact that Google won’t change the algo for AOL as an indication they have not jumped the shark or done anything odd.

1) With all due respect to Marissa and Google officialdom, one of the reasons we read you, Zawodny, and Scoble is to get the “real story” rather than the one the PR mavens and corporate legal department have edited. I think I’m still with Battelle on this which means “concerned”.

2) The problem points were not clarified by Marissa. If AOL content has ranking problems and is reviewed by insiders it confers an incredible advantage to AOL content. Why? Because the algo has imperfections. If the insider review simply determines that “AOL’s dogfood section has 302 redirection problems” Google’s given AOL a LOT more than one gets by simply memorizing the guidelines and your posts. I understand this type of help has been given to large advertisers for some time but that is no consolation to the rest of us.

3) I hope Google takes Danny’s (SES) advice and initiates a paid review system for all sites. Charge the big ones more to help subsidize the mom and pop reviews. At the point where special treatment was given to the big guys Google slipped. Paid review is a way to regain that trust.

Call me old school, but I can’t help but think the current obsession with internet video will prove costly in terms of clogging up networks and will not gain mass popularity for some time.

The information internet is revolutionary while the video internet is simply a change in formats with probable reduction in the quality of signal and content.

I predict that the big deal Video thing Google is announcing tomorrow will result in “no big deal”, but… I’ve been wrong before.

Post moved to Technology Report, my new technology blog.

New Year’s Eve brought some great conversation to our dinner table last night.

My holiday tradition is to research things after these talks and send out emails clarifying my views. This year’s was a … long one… and I’m going to blog it over the next few days so all that effort is etched in the eternal stone of the active and archived internet:

The big picture. Geopolitical issues for us are somewhat abstract. Not so for people in Iraq, or the far, far greater suffering people in Africa, India and other areas of extreme poverty across the globe.

Although I engage in the politically charged debates about this stuff and enjoy it I’m increasingly and deeply ashamed and concerned by the polarization and roadblocks to progress that they cause. These debates, on a collective national level, interfere GREATLY with all of us coming together on the obvious “low hanging fruit” solutions to pressing global problems such as “better water supplies for developing world” and “Natural disaster relief”. Contention is fun but often it is not productive.

It’s ironic, tragic, and very fundamentally immoral that we Americans spend more time on the rights of Jose Padilla than the rights of a starving child in the Congo. We can help change this.

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.