A stupid guy made a PC from an Apple G5
Stupid. That is what this guy is. He replaced the internal parts of a G5 with a PC motherboard. "All I wanted for Christmas was a Dell". PC G5 pictures available, what a nightmare.
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January 30, 2004
Reducing the size of the Obesity Problem, another Davos 2004 session
Here is a raw summary of a very interesting session in Davos this year about Obesity.
The issues raised by obesity are increasing across the developed world and touches developing countries as well.
Medical costs for diabetes and hypertension are growing, so is litigation against food and beverage companies.
Do we have to tax fat and sweet food ?
The short and straight answer from a representative of a huge food and beverage company is NO.
In the US obesity as become a serious topic for the Health and Human Services Administration: a huge problem. "We need to educate people to do exercise, eat better and learn how to do diets."
Some statistics :
- In 1991 1 US State only had 15% of obesity
- In 2003 all US States but colorado have 15% of obesity !
Government needs private sector's help with companies such as Pepsico and Unilever to cope with it.
The administration point of view is also that taxation would have a bad impact.
Role and responsabilities of marketing and advertising:
The opinion of the advertising sector is that we have to change the food we produce and what children want to eat.
We must work with the marketing guys to put pressure on our children.
For example can you imagine an automatic pop-up in Microsoft Windows every 30 minutes saying "have you done some exercise today?".
Obesity is not a individual choice because it has a big impact on health economy.
Department of US Health speaker: colaboration of public and private sector is fundamental.
Food industry representative : This collaboration has not existed since 1950's. The fish fingers were invented in the early 1950's because the UK government asked for kids to eat more fish which was crucial for their health.
Unilever has a health institute which works on how to reformulate the products to adapt to the world diversity. There are some sensitive topics such as sugar reduction, reorientation of advertising and marketing to deal with an healthier life.
95% of the food products advertised in Europe are for children and are junk food. We have a strict control around alcohol why not to do the same regarding ads for kids ? Progress is very slow because of lobby groups.
There is no Black or White: we need an enormous collaboration and a supportive environment.
Some goals for the food industry :
- Less sugar
- Less Salt
- Use of fat substitution components ( Finland reduced dramatically several heart deseases by doing so)
- Simplify Labelling
- Explicit energy balance (calories monitoring)
- Make it easy for people to choose the right product for their health.
There is also a deep change in the way we eat :
- 1950's : 2 hours to prepare dinner
- 2003 : 15 minutes to prepare dinner
Poverty is related to obesity:
In the poor districts you find mostly low grade supermarkets (no fruits, no vegetables), fast food restaurants...
In conclusion, to fight obesity all key players need to make a platform to solve this complex issue:
- Governements
- Food industry
- Private sector by promoting diet and exercise in their own teams
Take a look to this article which explains what Australia Post did in 2002 to fight obesity and the limits of it.
What is in your opinion the best way to address this issue ?
January 29, 2004
I blogged for the Guardian today - new blog powered media appearing
I am not a journalist, for sure. I am a blogger and I blogged today for The Guardian, on
"Minding your own business
French entrepreneur Loïc Le Meur offers seven golden rules - for doing nothing"
Few weeks ago, Neil McInstosh who is Online Deputy editor of The Guardian, London, read some of my notes about creating a company and what bloggers say about it.
Neil sent me an email asking me if I would agree to write an article for him about the value of the idea in the process of starting a business, for a fee. What was very strange for me is on the one hand the fact that he found me on my blog and on the other hand it was the first time I would get my ideas published directly in a newspaper without going through the mind of a journalist.
It is very interesting how I see two type of journalists or editors emerging. The ones who get the blogging and the others.
Here is what Neil says about blogging and journalism:
"We're finding that blogs are a very useful source for us to find new and interesting people to write for us. Late last year, we even got a reader of our own weblog to write a comment piece for us, after he left some very interesting comments on one of our entries. It's all part of the wider discussion that weblogs are provoking, both about the news and the nature of news."
I also met Tony Perkins , of Always-On in Davos. I will soon blog about Tony and Always-On in more details but clearly he is inventing a new form of media based on bloggers, with the people behind Weblogs-Inc (I would love to meet them too by the way) and more recently TJ who just launched in Germany Creative Weblogging. It seems TJ is also trying to launch a new type of media, blogs powered, here is what he says about it.
Interesting. There is only one thing that I am sure about, the traditional media companies that do not get it will lose some of their audience to the ones who get it, like The Guardian.
What do you think about that ?
My weblog featured on French TV Channel France 2 !
Thanks to all the comments I had from French bloggers on a post I made about my meeting in Davos with a French TV journalist, Jean-Paul Chapel talked about weblogs and showed my blog in his morning high audience broadcast, France 2's Telematin.
Here are good quotes: "somebody blogged me in Davos and announced that journalists will disappear"
"No, we will not disappear" ;=)
Jay says there is no demand for messages and there is no mass. Well mass media still have nice days ahead of them but careful, the consumers become producers !
Thanks NiKo for mpeging the TV broadcast.
January 28, 2004
(updated) Finally here are the videos of the Davos blogging panel !
This is my second Video Blog post ! Please forgive me for the darkness
on the first videos, it took Geraldine the few first shots to
understand where the low light button was ;=)
Update: Dr Burda's videos are on-line too. My apologies again for the poor quality, I will do better next time, at least sound is OK.
So here are the videos, enjoy and let me know what you think of what we said in the comments !
Panel 0, (Mpeg, 5,3 Mo)
Panel 1, (Mpeg, 11,9 Mo)
Panel 2, (Mpeg, 11,6 Mo)
Panel 3, (Mpeg, 7,3 Mo)
Panel 4, Joi speaking (Mpeg, 19 Mo)
Panel 5, Loic speaking (Mpeg, 17,1 Mo)
Panel 6, Orville speaking (Mpeg, 25,5 Mo)
Panel 7, Jay speaking (Mpeg, 15,6 Mo)
Panel 8, Joi speaking (Mpeg, 7,81Mo)
Panel 9, Loic speaking (Mpeg, 17,3 Mo)
Panel 10 Loic speaking (Mpeg, 9,75 Mo)
Panel 11 Jay speaking (Mpeg, 11 Mo)
Panel 12 Joi speaking (Mpeg, 7,2 Mo)
Panel 12 Loic speaking (Mpeg, 10,8 Mo)
Panel 13 Joi&Loic (Mpeg, 5,3Mo)
Panel 14 Jay speaking (Mpeg, 15Mo)
Dr Burda's comments:
Dr. Burda - 1, (Mpeg, 13,6 Mo)
Dr. Burda - 2, (Mpeg, 19,8 Mo)
Dr. Burda - 3, (Mpeg, 8,5 Mo)
Dr. Burda - 4, (Mpeg, 20,4 Mo)
January 27, 2004
Davos secrets are out
Thanks for the notice, Joi, and Thomas for the article on us blogging in Davos !
From Joi's blog:
 Three chief executive officer participants at the World Economic Forum prepare public Internet blogs about their experiences in the ultra-exclusive retreat of the world's wealthy and powerful. Seated from left to right Loic Le Meur, CEO of Ublog, a Paris-based blog company; Yat Siu, CEO of Outblaze, a Hong Kong-based email service company and Joichi Ito, CEO of Neoteny Company Limited, a Japan-based venture capital firm. PHOTO AND CAPTION BY THOMAS CRAMPTON No... I'm not about to punch Loic. My fist is an expression of our solidarity. -- Joi |
[Joi Ito's Web]Thomas Crampton @ IHTWith bloggers inside, Davos secrets are out
Tell-all accounts proliferate on the WebDAVOS, Switzerland This year the barbarians were not protesting at the gates of the World Economic Forum; they were inside and blogging.
The World in 2014: China, India and the networked economy
One of the greatest sessions we had last week in Davos. I took most of my notes inspired by Peter Schwartz, of Global Business Network and was extremely impressed by Peter's thoughts and charism.
The two stars of that session and actually of the whole annual meeting 2004 were India and China.
If we take a closer look at Asia, they are the stars because Japan is not anymore, with its population getting old (20% of the Japanese population will soon be more than 65 years old. China will be the center of Asia despite the need for reforming its banking sector and its currency.
Peter Schwartz says we will soon call Asia "the greater chinese zone of prosperity", even though one can believe Indian can sustain its growth.
Another center of the world will be the Caspian region for energy and sources of conflicts.
Europe's greatest challenge will be to have Russia join the EU. Russia in 2020 will have great opportunities but also a great burden. Europe is not seen as a high growth zone as it will take a very long time to continue integrating all its members and build a common culture. Europe continues to be seen as "old Europe".
Peter Schwartz: about Brasil: "Brasil has a great future and always will" made the whole room laugh.
The productivity revolution sees no end in the USA. Its economy will power on but politically the US will begin to be more and more isolated.
"Kyoto is dead", global warm and all environmental challenges create enormous risks of isolation for the US.
The networked economy without physical reality
The most important regions of the world will not be regions, but online networks. Most important people and companies, especially originating from Singapore, India and China will not be based in a place, but in the Internet.
It is a fundamental paradigm shift and performing in the next 20 years is about global competitivity in the networked economy.
"Let's make the Cyberspace a country and join the UN".
Major risks of the next ten years:
- Major spread of disease. SARS is only an early indicator of what could happen.
- Abrupt climate change. First global warm, then global cooling.
- Africa becoming the greatest tragedy of humanity with poverty, AIDS and war
- Significant part of the world is de-developing
And now random notes from other panelists:
- "don't follow what we say, follow where we invest" (India and China).
- one region could be a surprise, it is middle east
- The current attractive regions of the world such as the USA will change. The new emerging hubs will be "where people want to live and work"
I was so impressed that I briefly asked permission to Peter to blog his above ideas and I will start reading his latest book, Inevitable Surprises: Thinking ahead in a Time of Turbulence.
January 26, 2004
In German in Swiss newspapers
Heiko (thanks !) pointed me to that article that talks apparently about me.
Unfortunately I do not understand German, can you help me get what it says ? Thanks in advance...
Pictures taken in Davos...
Here are the pictures I took at the Annual Meeting 2004.
I know it is on Typepad, it is always good to test the best competitors (what do you think, Joi ?) ;=)
We do not have photo albums (yet) at Ublog...
Of course that picture of Jay Rosen and me will ruin our reputation...
Mel Young, Social Entrepreneur, launched the first homeless football World Cup !
It was such a pleasure to meet Mel again at the World Economic Forum.
Mel is one of the most impressive Social Entrepreneurs I know;
Mel launched 10 years ago The Big Issue in Scotland, a street paper for homeless. Before that he was a journalist and decided to become a Social Entrepreneur. Everything he does is self financed, but the profit never goes out of the company. It is "managed in a business way, with a social outcome". The Big Issue sells 40000 copies in Scotland every week.
With The Big Issue, homeless are self employed, they sell the street paper for a pound and buy it from The Big Issue. It is not about begging anymore, the key thing is that the poor in the street are working, are self employed and beginning to save with the margin they make.
Mel says "the world is changing rapidly, we promote the use of business practices to create social change and it works".
As a "work for profit" entrepreneur, I always thought I was adding value to the Society by creating jobs and pushing other people create companies. Until I met Mel thanks to the World Economic Forum. Now I feel different. I feel I should do more to help improve our world.
I asked Mel how he decided to become a Social Entrepreneur. Mel says: "I have grown inside, I have changed. I could earn much more than I do, but I get so much everyday from homeless people, this is much better than money".
With the success of The Big Issue, Mel thought it should become an international initiative and Mel launched the International Network of Streetpapers (INSP). It is interesting to understand why a great social initiative like this adopts the globalization trends of business. When so many people are against gloablization, here is an example of a global social initiative that just works and would not be that rich without it.
At INSP, that gathers about 60 Streetpapers around the world and growing, the value of being global is permanent. Mel says "We support each other every day, we do all kinds of partnerships.
A great example of a concrete result in INSP is through lobbying. It has been a long time Mel and his friends knew that Russian police was killing homeless people. Three years ago Mel did something concrete about it. All Streetpapers around the world started writing in their front pages that the Russian police was killing the homeless. Thanks to the pressure on the Russian authorities, Mel got an appointment and went to see the police chief in Russia. 50 papers wrote about the story and they stopped.
Mel says "We have power".
The INSP has an international conference every year, the "Davos of the Streetpapers". Mel and his friends in other countries realized they were learning a lot thanks to this conference and Mel thought of a way "to get the poor experience the international conference". In a bar in Cape Town, on the beach, Mel and his friends had a crazy and impossible to execute idea, create the first football World Cup !
They wondered what was the best international language they could use for the homeless to understand each other, Football was perfect. The first World Cup last year was hosted in Austria. They found sponsors to pay the airline tickets to fly the homeless in Austria, from all around the world. The toughest challenged they had was to fly the homeless who were most of the time paperless and had to negociate hard with customs.
4 homeless players were hired by professional football clubs. Most of the others got their dignity back through Football and found jobs after the World Cup. There is going to be a second edition this year, bigger, with incredible media coverage and poor people getting out of the street to become suddenly Football stars and get their dignity back.
Impressive. It makes me think about my own role in the society and puts pressure on me to take Mel as an example. Who said the World Economic Forum is only about business ? Meeting Mel makes me see my life into a different perspective.
It is also an proof that even the craziest and most creative ideas can become reality.
Mel, thank you for what you do and how you inspire all of us. I will be happy to help you as much as I can. Let's talk and meet again soon.
January 25, 2004
Davos Blog panel update: got half of the approvals to post videos
I had a very interesting meeting with the WEF organisation that totally gets the blogs. They agree I put the videos on my blog as long as all panelists agree. Orville should be no problem, I will contact Mr H. Burda tomorrow, that may take some time.
Videos will be on-line soon !
There are no more gate keepers
The session I had with the music Industry leaders and all the discussions we had on blogging with Rebecca and Thomas make me think that the greatest news blogging provides is that there are no more gate keepers,
-no more editor to convince to publish an article
-no more "not enough space" in this edition to publish long thoughts
-no more needs to be selected by people to share with others your creation (music, cartoons, movies)
I love it !
Blogging helps my brain have more bandwidth
Blogging the World Economic Forum this year helps me understand what I enjoyed, the most important moments, makes my brain work to gather my ideas and write the posts. I also feel that I am downloading my brain, like synching my palm pilot.
It also makes me write in English everyday and that helps too. The problem I see is that I keep making the same english mistakes. As James Maclean corrected my english in a comment, I would be very grateful if some of you can correct me sometime, I would learn each time ! Thanks James.
Breakfast with Religious Leaders
On Thursday we had breakfast with Religious leaders of the World. This is one of the most inspiring moments I had in my last three Davos.
I think that many people in the World hate each other because they do not know each other, and the WEF is increasing every year the religious leaders presence in Davos which is great. I was each time very surprised on how these leaders from totally different religions of the world understood each other and very often agreed with one another.
It made me think as well about how we actually chose religions. Most often, it is just linked to where we were born and our family's religion, very few of us actually chose and/or changed religion.
The best would be to study them all very carefully, spend time with people of these religions, and finally chose. Having seen here more than 10 religions represented in one breakfast room, I cannot help thinking: how can any single religion be right about God and Humanity if we take into account the fact that there are so many on Earth ?
What do you think ? Do you think that raising children we should give them more choice and teach them more about all religions before they chose one ?
Rebecca MacKinnon from CNN to blogging and techjournalism
Rebecca MacKinnon of CNN is deeply into blogging now, check her excellent blog here.
Thanks for the time we spent together in Davos, Rebecca, it was so cool to see how you got the blogs phenomenon and how you feel like Jay, Joi, and me that it is changing the way we work and live. What is very interesting is how young journalists understand the phenomenon compared to many "traditional" journalists I have met in Davos (and tried hard but unsuccessfully to make them understand what it is).
Rebecca says "At CNN we say we are great everywhere and all the time. People think we have more means that we actually have" and Rebecca says blogging will be a good alternative source for journalists "better worse than nothing". I would have actually loved Rebecca joined our panel. Rebecca has comments about it here.
For those of you wondering if my wife knows I was with Rebecca in Davos, the answer is yes Geraldine actually took the picture ;=)
Hope to see you soon Rebecca, your blog is one of my first read now !
Jack Hidary the GLT Globe Trotter
I start a series of blogging my friends (to motivate them to start their blog) and I thought I could start with Jack Hidary of Vista Research
Jack is...
#1 in the GLT community for visiting GLTs around the world
#1 in number of contacts in his palm pilot (he carries more than 5000)
#1 in number of contacts out of his palm pilot (he has another 6000 home)
#1 in having fish AND meat at the same time in Restaurant Costes, one of the hot spots in Paris
#1 in mixing ketchup and mayonnaise with his chicken dips in Davos
See you again very soon Jack, I hope in New York to test one of the hot spots there and start a blog !
January 24, 2004
An official Summary of the Blog Panel in Davos
The WEF has released an official summary of the Blog panel here (pdf).
Blogging makes the front page of the WSJ and I am a "Small Fry with Big Dreams"
OK I know, this is very egocentric to blog about this, but I cannot help sharing that with you, please forgive me for my ego ;=)
Yesterday, the day after our blog panel, I read the Wall Street Journal Europe as usual with my coffee but this time was special.
Front page of the Wall Street Journal:
Neophytes Court Powerful Attendees;
On the Agenda: Blogs, Bovine Beats
About 50 people talked to me about it in Davos and many asked me what was a blog after having read the article.
For those of you who subscribed to the Wall Street Journal on-line, here is the link to the article.
For those of you not subscribers, I hope the WSJ and the author of the article, Erik Portanger, will have nothing against me posting some quotes below quotes.
Thank you Eric again for this article and I confirm that the big fish in Davos is really open to the small fry, I had lots of great talks with world leaders and I tried hard to make them understand what blogging his and its impact on our world.
The opportunity that the WEF gave me to participate as a GLT is incredible and I feel the need to give back as much as I can. I am thinking of launching a non-profit project soon to give back and capitalize on the networking I made in Davos to participate my way to the Forum's target, "improve the state of the World".
I can feel the pressure on me to not only take advantage of my participation to Davos, but also do something non-profit with it.
"For WEF organizers, inviting small companies isn't just an act of altruism. "We want to expose some of our bigger members to disruptive technologies and influences -- people that are altering the dynamic of their industries," says Kevin Steinberg, a WEF spokesman. "One of the ideas that really concerns them is that challenging and provocative ideas often don't reach them."
For those people with small businesses, being at Davos can be a little intimidating at first.
When Loic Le Meur, a 31-year-old entrepreneur and CEO of Ublog, a Paris-based Web-log company, attended the conference for the first time three years ago, he was thrown in at the deep end.
"On the second day, they asked me to speak on a panel about the future of Europe," he recalls. "That was tough."
This time around, though, the affable Frenchman has already struck a few partnership deals through "random networking" -- otherwise known as wandering around in the halls -- that will help him launch his Web site in Brazil and China within the next few months.
One person who hears from plenty of start-up entrepreneurs at Davos is Sir Ronald Cohen, chief executive of Apax Partners, a global private-equity firm that invests as much as 35% of its capital in mainly small technology and biotech companies.
"There are not too many of them, but they flood us with requests for meetings," Sir Ronald says. He tries, though, to make time for people that are still starting out. "The entrepreneur who makes it to Davos clearly has something going for them," he says.
Of course I also met yesterday with leaders of the Wall Street Journal and talked to them about making it blog friendly with short summaries of articles available for free in RSS, with permalinks, and the full articles in RSS for their online subscribers. They got it, and offered me a meeting shortly to discuss it. As a Wall Street Journal subscriber I would love to have it as RSS.
Davos day 3
I thought I would be blogging again 6:00 to 7:30 yesterday but I could not wake up ;=)
I started getting emails from people reading my blog asking for more live feedback, this is also due to the new links (thanks !) I got, such as Boing Boing probably coming from the link that JLR made... I am sorry for not having been able to blog more regularly.
8:00 - 16:30 Random networking by walking around in the Forum (this works incredibly well, just walk and you will make all kinds of fantastic meetings. I was a little tired of so many sessions yesterday.
Here are some of the meetings: Mel Young, Tony Perkins of Always-On, Richard Attias, Robert Yung and the young regional leaders in Asia and so many others.
16:30 - 18:00 Great session on the World in 2014
18:30 - 19:00 Poverty
19:30 - 20:30 French party, quick meeting with Francis Mer, our Minister of Industry
20:30 - 22:00 Silicon Valley and Google party
22:00 - 00:30 Happy Birthday Waya, dinner with fellow GLT friends
More blogging about these topics very soon !
The Davos panel on blogging
Sorry for not blogging this earlier, but Joi fortunately did it here quicker than me.
The session was "sold-out" (participants have to sign up in Davos for certain session, and we got this one full !).
I have recorded in MPEG the panel and was about to video blog it but I am checking with the WEF if that is OK. In fact, there are many sessions in Davos where only selected journalists can go (some where no journalists can go) so that discussions can remain quite confidential within an industry and participants can openly express themselves.
Of course the WEF is not used to participants blogging so I am careful in what I say, what people I quote, and clearly video blogging needs a special authorization that I am not sure I will get.
Here are some ideas that we brainstormed before the panel, some of these were not discussed during the panel as we did not have the time so I thought it would be useful to write them here.
Jay was very clear and extreme about how he thought traditional media was in danger "your audience is becoming producers, this is not mass media, all kind of things must be rethought". Jay explained how all his life as a journalist he has been fighting to get his ideas published, now he has is own media.
There are no gate keepers anymore, anybody can express itself publicly and easily.
During the brainstorming, we discussed that most journalists that we discuss blogging with tell us that generally the content of the blogs were of bad quality. Joi explained how he sees himself as an editor in some way, filtering the content that other bloggers publish and pointing to the best content he saw. He also insisted on the high quality of content of the most popular blogs, as well as the fact that on a blog it is a person speaking generally under his own name (and therefore accepting the possible consequences).
Blogs and Journalists can work together
-Media firms often do not have enough resources to cover an event that suddenly happens in a small country and bloggers can be in this case an excellent source of news
-Even though the quality of these sources can sometimes be of poor quality, "better worse than nothing"
Media firms should make their publications blog friendly, using permalinks, RSS and trackbacks.
Joi explained how blogging that he quit drinking has created a whole community around him of people who have quit drinking and others that wish they would. Some associations to help people in this situation appeared on his blog saying either he cannot use a blog to help people quit drinking, others that agree, but the most important is how a discussion started around it.
Many people will think I guess that Joi jeopardizes his public image by saying he quit drinking as it of course means that he WAS drinking. I disagree and think that Joi was very courageous to do that and that blogs are a way of helping people that have this type of problems solved. Making them public helps as it puts pressure on you to keep solving the issue.
I said at the panel that blogging was like open sourcing myself and I like that idea. It is very weird to share our minds openly and in public to many people but brings so many good ideas and opportunities that I like it more and more.
I also shared my thoughts about virtual identity and online reputation.
I was very impressed by how Mr Burda understood the blogs and agreed it was something important and big, and how his thoughts were clear on the subject. I guess we will see more and more German publications be blog friendly in the future !
Two journalists in the audience were really upset against us and strongly disagreed with our ideas that blogging will get so much audience and bloggers so much influence. I discussed with one of them the day after, and what he strongly disagreed with is that the press as an industry would not be seriously hit.
Of course Jay was very provocative with his speech around the end of mass media, and I was very provocative as well with my metaphor about the press being hit as bad as the music industry with Napster and P2P.
We are not saying the print press will disappear, of course. What we think is that the impact on the traditional press will be huge.
I like a lot the transparency that blogs provide and journalists are not used to get immediate comments to what they say. They are not used to the "Fact check my ass" all the bloggers get.
What I keep explaining journalists is also that the articles they write will get richer if they prepare it on their blogs. How can any journalist pretend he his an expert of a subject (or has interviewed the experts) on a particular topic ? The article generally is written with the sources he thinks are the bests, the experts he thinks are the best. Through blogging and after a blog gets some authority, the experts show up and contribute to the discussion by themselves, if they are the experts then their ideas "survived the net", survived critics, comments, facts checking.
I really think the best journalists will understand blogging more and more and use it for their work to write better articles.
I hope to be able to publish the video blog of the session in the next days as soon as I am authorized to do so.
How to compete with free: Digital Rights Management and the Music Industry
How to compete with free. This was an extraordinary intense session.
I can blog much about it because it is one of these sessions where the press is not allowed to get in and the industry leaders express their concerns and point of view openly. It is the spirit of Davos to have these sessions remain confidential.
What I can share with you however is how it was fun for me to suddenly become the bad guy as I was the younger in the room and introduced myself as an Internet entrepreneur.
Peter Gabriel, who participated in the session, and myself
The whole room agreed on the fact that downloading an mp3 was exactly like stealing a CD in a shop. I challenged my table with the comparison of mp3 and radio. Radio stations as I understand pay a flat fee to play music and the audience does not pay anything to listen, it has been like this for years. In some way mp3 is just radio.
However, I agree a business model should be found that allows the artists to make money and continue creating. Of course.
We discussed possible business models.
After the session, my feeling is that traditional media firm do not get the fundamental "bottom up" of the Internet. The role of music companies in finding, selecting and then promoting artists is losing value every day as artists can just publish their work on the Internet and get popularity by themselves. If what they do is great, it will survive the Internet and get a lot of audience. A business model will appear that preserves the artists. The role of majors as filters and gate keepers will be less and less important.
I think that traditional media firms should just try to forget about their current references, the way they think the industry, the way the artists get known by their public.
It is an incredible opportunity for new players to appear and invent a new business model, as itunes did it. And this is not only music, but also movies and TV. It is just a question of time and bandwidth.
I made a comparison with open source during the session and how MySql for example is extremely successful, how the music, movie and TV industry should take open source as a reference to reinvent their business model.
I should say I had little success in getting these ideas discussed in the room as few people understood open source, or just wanted to understand it.
What kind of business models do you think will appear ?
How to spam Davos and discuss Internet governance
We had a dinner session on Spam on wednesday with about 20 people. Below my random notes.
The table was split into two sides, one side of the table explained why spam was getting better or affecting less and less their companies because solutions had been implemented, the other one by those insisting on the fact that it was getting worse and worse.
An African women helping women entrepreneurs in Africa said it was a disaster for them because of the low bandwidth they generally have in Africa. On account of the numerous spam emails they get, people have to try three or four times before being able to get their email as their pop accounts are so full. Another consequence is that Africans use a lot the web based email services such as hotmail which is bad for the local ISPs business.
Spam has become a subject in the USA that hits general opinion.
A Rabi in Israel created a special prayer if you hit a porn site or get a porn spam email !
It takes very few money to buy straight from the Internet spam software or find it free of charge and it is easy to get and setup. A whole industry in Russia has emerged around spam. Many kids look at it as a multi user game.
The worst thing developing is probably your identity being stolen, Yat Siu insisted on the fact that it is very easy to send email as if I were you, your assistant, your wife, anybody, due to the weakness of the email protocols. Yat also quoted numbers from his company specializing in email, Outblaze, they went from 40M spams a day to 80M spams a day in the last six months. "We cannot beat spam until the protocol is changed".
We talked about few solutions such as spam filters but everybody agreed that many emails that were not junk email are marked as spam and you do not get them, or they are lost in hundreds of real spam emails and you never read them.
Opt-in email marketing was discussed with some companies explaining that the newsletters their clients agreed to get (and wanted to get opt-in) were filtered by the spam filters.
We did not talk about syndication as a way to avoid spam. If more people used RSS to publish the content they send in email marketing and more people used RSS readers to get them, these newsletters would not be spam filtered, the clients who want them could get them. Spam would be decreased as I would not have to leave my email address when I want to get the newsletter and therefore it would circulate less.
It was interesting during the whole Davos how many people gave me their card and immediately said "but let me give you my personal email as this one is getting too much spam, please do not give it to anybody", especially as they were very popular or important which is normal.
So now maybe I have to add in my address book a field "public broken email of that person" and "confidential personal email". We joked with Pierre Omidyar of Ebay on the fact that Joi and I would blog the personal email he just gave us.
Joana, a Silicon Valley VC, said yesterday that the average american had 4 email addresses in average.
We also discussed Internet Governance and there were great thoughts exchanged, here are some quotes (I am not saying from whom as I did not ask permission):
"It could be people regulating the Internet. Bottom up governance using bottom up Internet"
"the only solution to govern the Internet is the have the Internet become a country and make it join the UN"
Preparing the April WEF European Summit
We had an interesting brainstorming with about 20 european leaders on what should be on the agenda of the next European summit the WEF is organizing in April in Poland.
Here are some random topics we discussed:
-How to integrate as fast as possible the new members
-What are the greatest challenges the EU is facing ?
-Which sectors of the economy should be the focus of the summit ?
-EU Institutional issues
-How to develop ways to get higher competitiveness, with the Growth of China and India
-Consequences of the introduction of the Euro currency
-What is Europe ?
I insisted on these ones:
-offshoring growth and how to make offshoring in the new EU members and eastern Europe rather than Asia
-promote entrepreneurship in Europe
-how can we create our own Silicon Valley and gain competitiveness in the Internet industry with the USA
-promote learning and speaking English in Europe as too many europeans cannot speak english
-define and create european culture
-how can we make the young more aware and interested in European institutions ?
-I want a European President !
I am very excited by a panel that the WEF could do on Entrepreneurship in Europe, who do you think the WEF should invite to speak ? We have great European entrepreneurs, look at companies like Virgin, RyanAir and EasyJet for example.
Davos Day 2
Here is my agenda for my second day in Davos
-6:30 - 7:30 blogging
-8:00 - 9:00 breakfast with religious leaders of the world
-9:00 - 12:00 closed session about Digital Rights Management and the shape of the music industry with P2P
-12:30 - 14:30 open source lunch, random networking with Michael Dell
-14:30 - 16:00 what lessons in business can we learn from terrorists
-16:30 - 18:00 my panel on blogging (we were "sold out" !)
-18:00 - 20:00 random networking in the Forum
-20:30 - 22:00 magical dinner (some fun with two magicians at dinner)
-22:00 - no time GLT party with Peter Gabriel and then McKinsey party
January 22, 2004
Joi is explaining what Google juice is
This is my first Video Blog post !
So please see Joi in action explaining what Google juice is and how stupid people who think they have a network should use it ;=)
Update: the cartoon was made by Hugh MacLeod
. We met on this blog entry, check other cartoons of Hugh here.
Here is the video:
Joi's Google juice (mpeg, 3Mo)
Save the Earth. Meeting with Yann Arthus Bertrand, who made Earth from the Above.
This is one of the good things at Davos, you never know who you will meet and when and suddenly great meetings happen.
I already knew Yann Arthus Bertrand as he made a great work by making incredible pictures of tens of French people to show their occupation and finally gathered them in a monthly magazine called L'Express in France. I was very proud at the time to be chosen as the "startup guy".
Yann has sold millions of copies worldwide of his book "Earth from Above" and more important than the fantastic photographs that you probably know, Yann is helping all of us understand the challenge of preserving our planet and the damages we are constantly doing to it.
Davos is also about becoming more aware of the environmental challenges we all face. We are all busy with our current tasks and tend to forget that the Earth gets spoiled by pollution every day, species disappearing, etc.
Last year in Davos, I had a scaring lunch with key climatologists in the world who explained us the impact of pollution and industrialization on the Earth. Especially the high rate of increase in temperature of the Earth will cause all sorts of nasty effects that we do not realize. The session was just scary.
It was a year ago so I do not remember it all but basically one scientist used the metaphor of a frog to compare it to what is happening to us right now. If you take a frog and put it in a receptacle that is full with very hot water, it will immediately jump out of it as it will feel the pain. Now if you take a frog and put it in the same receptacle but in cold water, and then you heat the water with the frog in it but in a progressive way, the frog will not jump out, stay in the receptacle, and finally die in it as the water gets hotter and hotter.
We are living right now this frog's story. We are in the receptacle, it is our planet, and the temperature is getting higher every year.
The effects of that rise in temperature are difficult to predict and were tough to understand for me. They have to do with the water circulation in the oceans and how cold and hot water move around the globe. One of the scientists present insisted on the fact that we actually have less information to analyze the phenomenon today than in the 50s, because at that time there were thousands of war submarines around the globe that were sending environmental analysis to their headquarters.
I remember very well one scientist started explaining a possible scenario that could happen within the next 100 years (that means your children may see it). Basically he explained that above a certain latitude (a line New York to Amsterdam), all oceans will start getting totally frozen. He described the harbor of New York completely frozen. Life in this latitudes would become extremely difficult with ice and cold everywhere and one of the consequences would be massive population relocations in the south with people packing in southern Europe and North Africa.
Scary. It puts things in perspective. Think about the consequences that may have on our life, the economic consequences. This scientist may be wrong and I hope he is wrong but clearly this session and meeting with Yann today help me think that we do not respect earth enough and we do not take enough time to understand the problem and do something about it.
Yann is especially focusing on two projects right now.
After the Earth, Yann focuses on people, with the same goal, help us understand better our planet and preserve it. Yann is going to most countries in the world to shoot and interview people "in the street", the way they live and what their concerns are. Yann shared with me a very deep thought about poor and rich people he met. He said that as he met so many different people from so many different countries he noticed our references were totally different. In some countries people care less about money than water, in others he discovered how happy some very poor people in developing countries were compared to others in developed countries. Their references are different. We had very deep discussions about what is happiness and its relationship with wealth.
So Yann needs some help at very high level in most countries to give him and his team access to people and means to interview them. If you can help him or want to donate for this amazing project, let me know and I will pass him your address.
The other project Yann is working on is helping the children understand these challenges. How to preserve our environment, how to give back to our children a planet in good shape. He is preparing the opening of a place in Paris that will be a permanent "showroom" on the beauty of earth and the challenges ahead of us to preserve it. He wants children to visit this place every days, possibly with school teachers, to make them aware of the problem. For those of you who know "La Vilette", Yann wants to do a "La Vilette of environment". Great idea.
This meeting was as interesting for me as it was frustrating as I realized again how ignorant I was about these issues and how few time we all spend on understanding them and doing something with the issues. Thank you Yann for being so inspiring.
We discussed about the Internet and how Yann was using it. We will have another discussion around it and I cannot help thinking about a blog written by tens of people about the Earth. Any of you know of some that already exist ?
Thanks again, Yann, for taking us all to see Earth from the Above and our daily lives from the Above.
I could not resist to publish this one Yann, even though you said people would not understand. I am sure they will understand that having fun was also part of our good time in Davos and this picture shows it...
A lunch with Bill Clinton
A great speech by Bill Clinton.
The Forum has made it available here in streaming media. I will comment it later.
L'avenir des technologies en 2004
Voici quelques notes des propos des panelistes lors de ma première session sur les technologies, des points de vue intéressants quoiqu'un peu généralistes.
4 tendances incontestables se dessinent :
- Une explosion de l'e-commerce, très forte croissance particulièrement dans le BtoB
- L' émergence de l'Asie en ligne : Akamai y délivre 20% du contenu Internet. Le trafic a doublé l'année dernière
- La 2ème révolution des télécoms
- Un "big bang" de la délocalisation. En perdant les emplois hautement qualifiés, irons nous vers une amélioration ? « L'autre partie du monde programme des logiciels et cela aura indéniablement un impact sur les US »
Quel est l'impact des technologies sur les pays en développement?
Comment les pays en développement apréhendent-ils ces évolutions ?
- certains y voient une fracture technologique de plus en plus importante et ne peuvent pas suivre le rythme
- d'autres rebondissent sur les opportunités nouvelles que les technologies apportent (La Chine a aujourd'hui plus de 300 M de téléphones mobiles, l'Inde en est aussi un exemple).
Les attentes du monde sont elles en phase avec la réalité des choses ?
- Il faut avant tout faire fonctionner correctement l'ensemble des technologies à notre disposition à l'heure actuelle
La technologie destabilise : beaucoup de promesse technologiques n'ont jamais été tenues. On sous-estime la complexité. La croissance est telle que personne ne saurait garantir la capacité du réseau à tout absorber.
- Les avancées technologiques viennent déranger notre intimité :
la sécurité devient un concept négatif,il s'agit de se protéger de choses inattendues, de protéger les donner et le domaine privé .
Le domaine privé est un point essentiel. Si vous lisez un livre, personne ne va avoir accès à sur votre manière de penser cela reste sur un plan personnel, intime. Par contre avec un accès Internet vous donnez beaucoup d'information sur votre état d'esprit, sur votre vie, simlplement en surfant.
Quelles évolutions à attendre dans le domaine logiciel ?
Exemple évoqué de salesforce.com:
inutile d'investir dans un enorme logiciel, la formule permet d'avoir un logiciel à la carte que l'on loue en focntion du nombre d'utilisateurs. Flexibilité totale. C'est l'avenir du logiciel : plus de boite, plus de mise en place couteuse.
nous allons assister à la fin de la distubution dans des boites. L'internet ne tuera pas pour autant les modèles traditionnels de distribution mais devrait changer radicalement le marché.
Comment construire un environnement créatif dans le domaine IT ?
Il y a encore beaucoup de startups et il est très encourageant de constater qu'elles générent la plupart des nouveautés technos. C'est un environnement particulièrement créatif. Nous ("grande société US") essayons de nous impliquer dans des start up, tant financièrement qu'humainement pour éviter de nous limiter à l'innovation interne qui est forcément moins rapide et moins créative.
Et la délocalisation ?
La délocalisation est une thématique clef du business IT.
Les pays en développement y voient un moyen de rattraper les pays développés et cela commence à être le cas dans une certaine mesure avec la Chine et l'Inde.
Un des participants (multinationale) : "80% de notre R&D est en Chine. En tant que chef d'entreprise je me concentre sur les endroits où les forces vives sont les plus dynamiques".
Il y a un risque certain pour les US: les hommes et femmes de tous pays qui suivent un cursus américain développent ensuite leurs compétences dans leur pays d'origine et l'élève dépasse le maître dans certains domaines... Un jour peut-être Chinois et Indiens viendront enseigner aux USA !
Davos Day one
So many things happen in one day in Davos.
Here is how the first day of my week in Davos this year looked like:
-9:00 a sessions on the futture of technology
-11:00 preparing my diary on the interactive kiosks and the Davos Companion
-12:00 interview with a journalist from the Wall Street Journal
-13:00 lunch with Bill Clinton with some other participants (about 300 !)
-14:00 random meetings, meeting with Yann Arthus Bertrand, the famous French photographer who made "Earth from the Above"
-15:00 private session to prepare the next WEF Summit on Europe in late April, brainstorming about the EU
-17:00 preparing my panel with Jay Rosen and Joi Ito on thursday and discussions around blogging with Rebecca and Ethan
-19:00 random meeting with the head of one leading French press title, talks about blogging and the press
-20:00 dinner with 20 other participants around the Spam and Internet regulation issue
-22:00 Focus party organized by M. Burda who speaks to represent traditionnal media at our blogging panel
January 21, 2004
LLM Pictures
High definition
(right click on the above link and "save as" - it will take time to load, about 850 Ko)
Low definition
Picture 1
Picture 2
Picture 3
Picture 4
Another low def picture
January 20, 2004
Off to Davos
I will participate in this year's Annual Meeting in Davos. If you want to meet there, I am reachable via email and staying at Hotel Europa.
It is going to be my third annual meeting. This year I am on a panel with Joi and Jay about how blogging will affect Journalism, that is on thurday. The exact title of the session is "Will Mainstream Media Co-opt Blogs and the Internet?".
Participating at the World Economic Forum is incredibly rich and, as Joi puts it, being in a place where everybody else is more important that you is a strange feeling.
I learnt a lot since I joined the GLT community three years ago. Each Annual meeting or GLT summit has been intense in very interesting sessions and even more intense is of course the networking.
Here are the most intense parts of my past experiences in the WEF events:
-the first Annual Meeting in New York, following September 11th events. a strange ambiance in this special Annual Meeting
-discovering what a Social Entrepreneur is. I was extremely impressed by my friends Social Entrepreneurs, and especially by Mel Young. Mel founded The Big Issue in Scotland. Is is a weekly street paper sold by homeless people in Scotland. Building on the success of Big Issue in Scotland, Young helped launch a global association - International Network of Street Papers (INSP) - to provide support to 50 similar street papers in 30 countries across five continents. And Mel organized the first World soccer Cup for the poorest. Extremely creative and impressive.
-the breakfast with the Clintons we had in New-York with fellow GLTs. Hillary Clinton demonstrated a rare charisma and deep thoughts.
-the yearly GLT meeting at the Annual Meeting with the Religious Leaders of the World. This was an experience that I will always remember, I learnt a lot about religion and respect between religions. We had leaders from all main religions.
-the speech of Colin Powel at last years Annual Meeting. This was just before the war in Irak, here is a quick quote ""We will not shrink from war if that is the only way to rid Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction."
-the speech of Brasilian President Lula, who just came back from the World Social Forum to Davos -the peace speech and incredible charisma of Queen Rania and King Abdullah of Jordan -Nestle president, Peter Brabeck, who said in New York "The only purpose of a company is to increase value for its stockholders"
So many things happening lead by friends GLTs too. I just met in Zurich Daniel Lubetzky, who launched One Voice, he is uniting the vast majority of Israelis and Palestinians who prefer co-existence to violence (join his foundation if you like).
This is an important point that the general public does not understand often about Davos, there are so many non profit initiatives leaders, religious people, people from the education sector that join the WEF and discuss about how to improve the state of the world. Davos is not at all about business only. Its commitment to improving the state of the world is clear and works.
For those of you who read French, I had written my impressions of my first Davos here.
I will try and blog as much as I can this week.
January 19, 2004
Kodak Halts Cameras with Film. this is just the beginning...
Not a surprise Mathieu, I agree, music out of CDs, pictures out of Film, movies out of DVDs, TV Broadcasts in .mov files on blogs without TV...
The content and its quality becomes the only thing that matters, the universal container becomes the Internet. I love it.
Kodak Halts Cameras with Film: North America, Western Europe [O'Reilly Network Developer News]
One day you'll see music company stop selling CDs and Video game publisher stop selling boxed products...
[Mathieu Nouzareth's Weblog]
Kodak Halts Cameras with Film. this is just the beginning...
Build and check your virtual identity and online reputation or you will be in trouble
Build your virtual identity, fast.
I know most of you know all the below already, I just tried to put together what was online reputation for the beginner in blogging.
The two main trends of the Internet 2.0 are blogging and social software. Beware, in this Internet everybody knows more and more about you. There is less and less privacy.
Here some the components of your virtual identity as I see it:
-Google your name. If you have never written anything on the Internet, other people may have done it (press, bloggers, etc). Check what is there, more and more people will check that before or after meeting you, to get a sense of your reputation
-Become a member of Linked In. Thousands of people in the world every day are joining it. You do not care ? Well, I guess you should because they start talking to their network more than you do and have quicker connections to the people that matter to what they are doing. They will go faster than you with these connections. They will also know better than you who they should work with or hire and as important as that, who they should definitely not trust, because there will be always a friend a click away to tell them not to work with somebody they had troubles with.
-Start blogging, of cours, even if you still ask yourself the following questions:
I am not such an egocentric as you are, Loic ;=). Why would I write anything about myself, what I feel, what I learnt, what I do ? Because you cannot expect to get rich contributions and ideas from others than can only happen with blogs if you do no start sharing someting with them.
No way, I have no time for that. I already take so much time answering email.
Honestly, did you think you would take that much time reading and answering email ten years ago ? Well think about blogging as emailing to your whole network and to anybody interested in anything you say. Most business conversations are not confidential, a small portion of it only is really confidential. Then blog some of what is not confidential and you will see your network will start reading it and you will get a lot of new interesting contacts out of it.
You will be surprised, just a month after having started your blog, how many people of your network read it. You will also be surprised how many searches from Google and other search engines lead to things you have said. You still do not care ? OK wait a minute.
-Identify the key words that identify your identity
On your blog you will get readers on particular posts mostly because you appear high on these themes. For me, create a company is clearly a key word that leads to what I think and it is good news because it is an important part of my life. You may want to get audience and good Google rankings on the keywords close to your business, like my French friend Christophe Cousin from Cafe CRMgot after just three weeks of blogging. Now the fun part, you will also get some surprises, as when I discovered I was #1 worldwide for best sushi restaurant in the world. There are also some words that you really would not like to be referenced for and hum, you still get them. I sware I did not (and still do not) want to be on the first page for call girls and please believe me I did not know it would do that when I blogged about the blog of a call girl.
And, well, be careful that influencial bloggers do not start to hate you because you may well end up with a bad Google bumb on you like the one on Georges Bush (miserable failure) or the first French one, on the deputy Jean Dionis who wants the ISPs in France to check the content of the blogs before they publish it, well his new name is deputé liberticide.
-Check what people say about you with your Technorati Cosmos
Posting an idea on your blog will let others comments it. What is more dangerous though is if somebody strongly disagrees with you and says is on his own blog. You have to answer or your identity may get affected. At least you should know about it in your Cosmos.
Of course there are other things but these are the ones I consider the most important. Any suggestions ?
Don't want a virtual identity ? It is going to be difficult to hide... What is also interesting is the online reputation of products, services and companies starts to appear as well.
I actually like this transparency very much. It will be easier to know who is a trustable person and ban from your business relations any company or person that you heard way faster than before that you should not trust.
Update: Seb has very good suggestions about Google Alerts, Feedster and Rate my teacher here.
January 12, 2004
Steve Mann, the cyborg
This is an excellent article indeed, I would love to have Google available all the time, as I said already here, dreaming about computer glasses.
"The wearable computer allows me to explore my humanity, alter my consciousness, shift my perspectives so that I can choose -- any given time -- to see the world in very different, often quite liberating ways," Steve Mann wrote in "Cyborg."
Thanks for the link, Howard.
Salon has a great article about Steve Mann, the pioneer cyborg, that for many years has been mediating reality with his wearable apparatus. I'm convinced that computer desktops will someday be extinct and we will be free from desks and workstations. People like Steve Mann are the ones trying to prove this is possible despite today they might face the cumbersomeness of the devices and most importantly their poor social acceptabilty.
And in a world of ever-increasing surveillance cameras for security, and strong database-mining software for government intelligence and corporate marketing, Mann believes regular people ought to have cameras and powerful computers on them, too. It's all about leveling the power dynamic.
"People feel they're masters of their own destiny when everything they need is right there with them," he says.
A cyborg could, say, take pictures of hostile police officers during a political demonstration and instantly post them on the Web — to spur others to join in the protest, perhaps, or to simply provide alternative documentation of the scene. Mann calls such postings "glogs"— short for "cyborg blogs" ("blogs," of course, is itself shorthand for "Web logs").
In more everyday language, Mann advocates "using a bit of the machine against itself."
For example, Mann has created performance art by shooting video in stores that prohibit it, using handheld cameras more noticeable than the "EyeTap" ocular computing system he normally wears. When employees tell him filming is not allowed, Mann points to the stores' own surveillance cameras behind darkened domes in the ceiling.
Then he tells the employees that "HIS manager" makes him film public places for HIS security — how does he know, he tells them, that the fire exits aren't chained shut? — and that they'll have to talk to HIS manager. [Howard Rheingold]
My So-Called Blog
Excellent article, thank you Howard for the pointer.
New York Times columnist Emily Nussbaum spent time with suburban American teens and wrote a poignant column about how Web logs shape their lives. Nussbaum calls these infospaces "a kind of online Breakfast Club." (Free registration required).
[Howard Rheingold]
Digital Democracy Tech-in
Hey Britt, looks great, I will definitely be there and blog it ! I have tried to convince French politicians here but with no success up to now...
Teach In with Teachout
With any luck, the O'Reilly Digital Democracy Teach-In will have Zephyr Teachout virtually onstage. I've been helping with the planning and it appears that we may have Jim Moore and the legendary Zephyr join us through iChat AV. The logistics precluded anyone from the Dean campaign attending in person, though Joe Trippi was genuinely enthusiastic when Doc asked him to keynote last month.
You may recall that the invitation happened when I was carrying Doc around Dean HQ embedded in my PowerBook via iSight.
Let's see. The campaign will be in the middle of its entire raison d'etre, and Joe or a designated thriver is supposed to fly from Burlington to San Diego for an hour session? Well, telepresence probably should have been our original plan, and we've got a great agenda now, so I'm optimistic about the conference.
The O'Reilly folks have been using me as a placeholder until some things got resolved in our conference call today. If you look fast before they revise the schedule, you'll see my service as the body double for the real Dean team, now to be present virtually, since we all knew that I, the virtual Dean teammate, could really be there (sort of a reverse bait-and-switch):
Sessions
These sessions will be part of the Digital Democracy Teach-In. Please check back often as we will be adding sessions and panels in the days to come. For more details about specific speakers, see the Speakers page.
Internet Campaign Magic
Britt Blaser, President, Blaser and Company
Time: 8:30am - 9:15am
Location: California Ballroom CHoward Dean has rocked the political establishment by raising more than $40 million over the internet, mostly in small donations, by harnessing the power of weblogs, meetup.com, and email. Pundits now say that the 2004 presidential election will be shaped by the internet as surely as the 1960 election was shaped by television. In this session, key technologists involved with the presidential campaigns will explain how to build a grassroots campaign -- what some people call "Open Source democracy" -- using the net to empower local activists.
Y'all C'mon Down, Y'Hear?
Admission is just $100, the weather will be great, and it coincides with the Emerging Technology Conference, which was moved to accommodate our teach-in, as Tim O'Reillywrites today:
Wes Boyd of MoveOn.org is keynoting, but we've also got key people from the Dean and Clark campaigns, a bunch of noted bloggers, Scott Heiferman from meetup.com (which has become a critical political organizing tool), and other online activists. We've also got a panel on the critical issue of transparency and trust when using electronic voting machines.
We actually moved eTech to this earlier date (from its usual April time slot) because we wanted to have the Teach-In early enough in the campaign season to help make a difference in getting people involved.
Whatever your politics, the increased use of the internet for everything from fundraising to activism is extremely interesting. I'm looking to hear more about success stories in this space, and especially about tools that can be adapted and used by others, not only for campaigning, but for making government more responsive after the fact.
We're Peddling the Electoral Cycle - Buy in Now!
Tim's last point is crucial. The fuel for American governance (sort of its Krebs cycle...:) is the electoral cycle. This seems to be the only time when politicians look at what good they might do. Then they spend their time in office to weasel out of their insights into governance, or pandering, depending on your viewpoint.
That's why we democracy groupies need to get involved in politics now, not after government goes back to business as usual. Perhaps that won't be true of a Dean administration, since no one tells the Dr. what to think, which he does on his feet, and has the self-confidence to develop his diagnoses in public. He honors us by treating the public as co-producers of democracy.
As some wag said the other day, "To Washington insiders, a gaffe is what they call it when they think you should have lied."
Dirty Politics
I don't speak for the O'Reilly folks, but I have a closely-guarded secret few people know about Governor Howard Dean. He intends to do precisely what he's describing, since he's on to the one dirty trick politicians can't deal with:
Candor.
[Britt Blaser]
January 11, 2004
The power of self publishing in politics
Victor has a very good post about Doc's comments on "Consumers being transformed into producers" by Apple Ilife.
I agree and I am very impressed by the result in MoveOn and how the contest of amateur 30 second advertising videos let us discover so good advertising, in the Bush in 30 seconds site.
I like very much