Bill Gates’ Critics – they just can’t handle the truth!

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I get so tired of reading the innane drivel criticizing Bill Gates’ excellent vision of global prosperity through more innovative approaches to global capitalism.    Gates is right on, and this should be obvious to those who care about capitalism OR who care about bringing prosperity to the billions who suffer in developing countries.

Over at TechCrunch people are ranting irrationally about bootstrap prosperity in the selfish and foolish way US technophiles often do, oblivious to the causes and circumstances of poverty in the developing world and without any compassion for the *hundreds of millions* of children mired in poverty around the world.  

Here’s how I vented over there:

Bravo to Gates. Many of the comments here floored me with their lack of insight.
First, to suggest Gates is not sincere is nonsensical. His record of philanthropy is clear, focused, and brilliant. Whatever you think of Microsoft’s history of sometimes ruthless corporate dominance you simply are not paying attention to think Gates vision of global prosperity is not genuine. I’d even go so far as to suggest Gates fortune was made largely through the purchases of other affluent people, and now he’s giving most of it to the poor. That is a virtuous cycle if I ever saw one.

Second, the notion that unfettered capitalism is the most expeditious way to feed the poor and improve the infrastructures of poor countries is naive and dangerous. Even Adam Smith noted that types of intervention are needed to preserve the integrity and power of free market forces. In nations that suffer from corrupt or short sighted leadership and cumbersome bureaucracies (that is to say, all nations), we need to bring modified capitalism to bear ASAP if we want to stabilize prosperity and lift the billion+ people who are simply out of the virtuous globalized capital loop. Gates point is that more innovative approaches to capitalism will benefit everybody, and he’s spot on.

Meanwhile Open Sourcer Matt Asay is conflating open source issues and Microsoft with global development, seeming to suggest that the fastest way to global prosperity is to bring Open Source to the world and kill Microsoft.   Here’s what I wrote over there:

No. Emphatically. You are correct that Open Source is great, and also that Microsoft has strategically fought against open source. But Gates is correctly working to reallocate personal and corporate responsibilities. He’s saying that more of the big profits and big innovation should be focused on improving the lot of those in the developing world. This is a profound approach and a virtuous one.

I don’t think it is reasonable to ask Microsoft to be a key player in dismanting decades of their corporate dominance, even though I’m happy to see that fade. It’s also unreasonable to suggest the benefits of Open Source development will necessarily flow to the world’s poorest people. More likely they’ll flow to those of us in first world who are able to take advantage of them. I’m big on Open Source, but hardly think Microsoft should be a leader in that space. I’m even bigger on focusing attention on developing world problems and the kind of conflation of issues here simply confuses people.

Gates is speaking today at the Davos conference.   It would be nice if  people actually listen to what he is saying.

Bluetooth prosthetics for US soldier

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A Double amputee will walk again thanks to bluetooth enabled prosthetic legs which can walk naturally in part thanks to using the wireless signals.   News report.   

I find it frustrating that  people are on the one hand very comfortable supporting great technologies like this for those with disabilities, but as soon as somebody suggests we should also use technology to enhance our own “normal” and feeble abilities people seem to get worried and object.       There will be an inevitable trend to enhancing out lives using technologies we place in our bodies, and this is nothing to fear.   We’ve used *external* technologies for many years (e.g. specatacles) and many people already use many internal high tech devices (heart stints).   

So, bring on the brain chips!

Scoblegate? No – Scobleizer ads are NOT a sellout.

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Mike Arrington, hanging in Davos with the global power elite, has a great title today with “Scoble Sells Out“, a fake jab at his pal Robert Scoble who is finally putting ads on his hugely popular blog (and is also lounging in Davos with the power elite!).

No big deal in my view – Scoble has been good about disclosure and perhaps even more importantly is a basically stand up guy, so I hardly worry that he’s going to start misleading readers in favor of sponsor B.S. 

That said, the blogging community would be well advised to develop disclosure standards if people want to maintain credibility and avoid the huge ethical gray areas that come about when socializing, economics, and blogging come together as they have over the past few years.

My view on corruption in politics (and blogging is similar) is that the challenges don’t come from basic dishonesty or payola – there is some of that, but the key problem is  more subtle.     In systems where economic support flows to those who *already* share the set of opinions with the money folks you don’t need any dishonesty to have a major distortion of the process in favor of those groups that can fund the people who share their ideas.    Often people wrongly suggest that votes are “bought”, when this is rare.  Rather support flows to the candidates who share the views of the supporters.     This system would actually work OK if the contributions were small, but loopholes have allowed certain groups to have hugely disproportionate impact on our system.    

This is why the conversational marketing model is bogus.  Bringing businesses into the conversation is a good general idea.  But if it only involves those businesses who can afford to buy a conversation  it’s just a step away from basic advertising, yet disguised as real dialog.   That isn’t corruption, but it is distortion. 

Video Games Rulez!?

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Video Gaming is a substantial economy.   Last year saw over 18 billion in US gaming sales, about 9 billion each from games and 9 billion from the sale of the consoles – gaming computers like XBox360 and WII.  

Gaming saw a whopping 28% gain over 2006 which is particularly conspicuous in a year where music sales saw a 10% decline and motion picture revenues were flat at about 9 billion.

Ars Technica Reports

Virgin Galactic’s Open Source Spaceship

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What a great concept!   Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic is launching a spaceship project where they’ll apply to space flight the principles from Open Source software development – ie shared development by community without the encumbrances of profitable ownership.  Profit works best for some things, but in a space as innovative as space this is probably the best approach to get the job done faster.   Space Kudos to Branson!

Pownce vs Twitter

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I’m experimenting with Pownce, on which I’ve had an account for some time but which is now taking off as a social application after public release a few days ago.     So far it seems a lot like a “prettier” twitter with a few more features.   I’ve been very impressed with the way you can import friends and contacts from Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, and many more applications.    I still don’t like the fact that no productive person has enough time to really engage with any of these networks – thus the idea application would be one that would carry me around as I’m online rather than force me to log in and off and participate on the applications terms rather than mine.    MyBlogLog still – for me – offers the best functionality of all of them and now with their new API I think it might be the best platform for our US History and Travel website where we are hoping to build something of a travel community from the many users who just drop in for a bit of info.

Death by Google

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My Airport Codes Website, AirportCityCodes.com , was completely removed from the Google index last month.   Not at all clear why and I’m hoping it’s just a a fluke.    The site was very stable and although it was somewhat uninspired it offered airport code and other information on about 9000 airports.     Google traffic has become so critical to a website’s success that without Google a site is generally almost “dead” in terms of traffic and revenues.

The site had enough sloppy construction and odd duplication across directories – problems that I had simply left intact after taking it over several years ago – that there could be hundreds of reasons the index didn’t like the site, but usually Google reserves a complete deletion like this for a major transgression against Google guidelines.    

I’ve posted questions over at the Google forum and the answers should be interesting.  

LEDs in Contact Lenses? Cool!

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Technology continues to blur the line between our bodies and helpful gadgets.  CNET reports that the University of Washington is experimenting with embedding LEDs into contact lenses, a step in the direction of creating vision correcting contact lenses.  

In his powerful book “The Singularity is Near”, Ray Kurzweil notes how powerfully the technologies involved with Nanotechnology, Robotics, and Genetics will enhance our understanding of the way our human attributes work to create  awareness, intelligence, and consciousness. 

Another shot in the Blog Revolution? Few links if by land and none if by sea.

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Louis Gray is rightfully pissed off at the way Mashable, a major tech blog, did not properly handle some stories written by Gray.   Basically they under-attributed Gray’s reporting of Robert Scoble’s PodTech departure.   I’m not familiar enough with Mashable to know if Gray is reasonable to suggest that they’ve built the whole site on this type of secondary reporting, but I certainly agree that blogs are now doing what mainstream media has done for decades – sacrificing good quality reporting in the interest of monetization.   Also I think the great and thoughful voices of several big blogs have been largely replaced by marginal writers and writing as those sites struggle to become “media companies”.  

Another defect of the new web is that linking practices and linking strategy have become very critical to success – A list sites simply don’t link out appropriately because they (correctly) view their links as valuable and (incorrectly) choose not to give that value away.   

Matt’s got a good post on this story, noting how attribution is a cornerstone of good journalism and Mashable and others should do a better job of attribution, though I’m not clear if Matt would agree that insufficient linking is part of opportunistic linking strategies more than journalistic oversight:

I wrote over there: 

…. but monetization is trumping journalism all over the place and I think the blog community should think about this a lot more than we do.

I don’t know about Mashable’s practices, but often it is marginally paid and marginally talented writers who feed the big blogs that originally had really thoughtful voices.

Also, natural linking has effectively become a “web currency” and many “A list” sites are very reluctant to link to sites outside of their frames of reference – I believe they see it as too big of a favor where even 5 years back it would have been done without a second thought.

I see this as a growing problem with many large, heavily monetized tech blogs. They are (slowly) trading profit concerns for journalism and web concerns. An inevitable thing, but a bad one

The video revolution will NOT be televised, because it’s boring.

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OK, I officially don’t get it.  Don’t get all this talk about how online video is the next big thing.  Perhaps more accurately I do get it, but don’t understand why so many bright and well connected folks don’t seem to understand that there is a very important challenge with video that makes it far less significant of an online force than most of the early adopters seem to understand.     Online video has a role to play in the information landscape, but it’s not nearly as significant as many seem to think.

Here’s a BBC story about the very clever Loic Lemeur and his clever SEESMIC project.   We’ll see more of these stories over the next few years as mainstream press slowly figures out that the early adopter online community is very enthusiastic about videos, video blogging, and pretty much any moving pictures that you can pump online.   Seesmic is a combination of video and community and thus offers the killer combo if you buy into the idea that the online world is going to revolve primarily around two key components: social networking and video.     

I’m very skeptical.   Not about the internet, which continues to rule.   Not about social media, which clearly has become and will remain a key driver of online life.  The internet has always been about people far more than technology, and the best definition of “Web 2.0” is an internet driven primarily by people and their needs rather than technology and its constraints.   But I’m very skeptical about online video, and I think the early commercial challenges of companies like RocketBoom, PodTech, and YouTube are an indication that it is very difficult to build a business or a community around video, let alone create a highly profitable environment that will drive future innovation in this space.

The biggest single challenge to video is obvious but overlooked by most of the sharp folks I see working that angle:  Most video clips are very boring.   Unlike a wordy blog entry you can quickly scan for the quick info buzz, and unlike pictures which you can review at the speed of an eye blink, with a video blog entry of video clip you’ll need to pay a lot of attention, and take up much of your attention span to glean the nugget or two of interesting content you’ll be lucky to find.     

Video online enthusiasts often agree with this, but then suggest the answer will be better video indexing services – applications that chop up the video into dialog chunks or “ideas” that are then indexed and easy to search and easier to surf.    Sure, that is an improvement, but if I want the goods I’d rather have a transcript and/or a few still pictures than a video any day, because unless you are a very slow reader a transcript is going to be easier to deal with efficiently than a video.

So, is there any room for video online?    Of course, it’ll continue as a major force for cheap little entertainment bits and perhaps even could become a minor social force as tech enthusiasts use tools like SEESMIC to communicate in a more robust and intimate fashion than you can do with writing.      However the lack of monetization potential combined with the fact that 99.99% of all video clips will bore to tears means that ultimately video will NOT create the kind of sea change in internet focus many have been waiting for.  

In fact, the video revolution is so boring it’s not even online yet, and it may never be.