I

• Total hits per month were about 1.05 million, up 10% from February (due almost entirely to a rebound in Filchyboy's hit count). Of that total, 760 thousand hits (72%) went to the top 11 (7%) of active blogs. Median hit count remains about 700 per month.
  
• Inbound blogs totaled about 4150, up 10% from February, with the top 11 active blogs accounting for almost exactly half of them. Median number of inbound blogs remains at 7.
  
• The approximate proportion of female Salon bloggers was 42%, the same percentage as in January and February.
  
• No longer blogging, it appears, are the passionate Toby's Political Diary (#1282), Asia Business Intelligence (#1319), Everything That Sucks (Come Back, Amanda! #1691), Patriotically Incorrect (#2379),.Lean for Dean (#2429), Doublethink (#2521), Life in LA (We miss you, Claire! #2608), and 16 relatively new bloggers. David Harris is on hiatus.
  
• Mambrino's Helmet is back as The Forge.
  
• Of the roughly 240 new Salon Blog numbers assigned this past two months (#3412-3642 and #3743-3757), about 90 made at least one post, and the following 36 appear to be posting regularly. That leaves the number of active Salon Blogs at 174, up 14 from February. Welcome to all new Sloggers.

• Total hits for the month were about 950 thousand, down 12% from last month (the decrease was due entirely to a drop in hits for two blogs). Of that total, 700 thousand hits (72%) went to the top 11 (7%) active blogs. Median hit count remains about 700 per month, or about 20 hits per day.
  
• Inbound blogs totaled about 3700, up 16% from last month, with the top 11 active blogs accounting for almost exactly half of them. Median number of inbound blogs remains at 7.
  
• The approximate proportion of female Salon bloggers was 42%, the same percentage as a month ago.
  
• No longer blogging, it appears, are Subdude Citizen, who I'll really miss, Scott Summers' Taiwan Weblog, the Return of the King Countdown blog, Paul & Chris' Paris Travel Commentary, the very stimulating Mambrino's Helmet, and four relative newcomers, Quakergreen, Struggle for Progress, Graphite Furnace and Gabriela's Radio Weblog.
  
• Storyteller Hugh Elliott's Standing Room Only is back, as is Short 'n Oblique.
  
• Of the roughly 85 new Salon Blog numbers assigned this past month (#3326-3411), about 30 made at least one post, and the following 12 appear to be posting regularly. That leaves the number of active Salon Blogs at 160, almost unchanged from a month ago. Welcome to all new Sloggers.

1. Select a Salon Blog from this list or this list, or any other Salon Blog you know of that has been updated since April 2.
   
2. Go to that blog and check to ensure that there aren't already eggs hidden in the last week's posts' comments on that blog. Then select one of the comments threads from the last week and type in (or cut and paste) as your comment this line of code:
   

BLOGS & BLOGGING:

Blogging advice
Surveys & directories
Other blogging posts
Blogs in Business
Technology

BUSINESS

Social Networking
Blogs in Business
Knowledge Management & Learning
Innovation
Entrepreneurship
New Collaborative Enterprise
Advice for Knowledge Workers

ARTS & SCIENCES

Literature, Language, Communication
Stories and Narrative
The Arts
Sciences & Social Sciences
Technology
Miscellaneous Posts

ENVIRONMENTAL PHILOSOPHY

How to Save the World
New Collaborative Enterprise
Other Environmental Articles
Overpopulation
Animal Rights
Activism
Environmental & Social Economics & Law
Stories and Narrative
Other Philosophical Articles

POLITICS & ECONOMICS

Liberty, Democracy and the World
The Bush Regime & US Politics
Globalization, Corporatism, Free Trade
Governance & the Political Process
Economics
Environmental & Social Economics & Law
The Education System
Canadian Politics
Iraq & the Mideast

CREATIVE WORKS

Dispatches from Here and Now
Short Stories
Poetry
Satire
Experimental Prose
Fables
Memoirs
Art
Photography

1. Map Layout: The table of contents would be displayed graphically, as in the top diagram above. Clicking on any of the 40 subcategory links would replace the map with a hotlinked list of posts in that subcategory -- showing title, date, author (if applicable) and a brief synopsis or abstract of each post.
2. 'Outline' Layout: The content would be displayed, possibly in the blog sidebar, in 'outline' mode: Clicking on the 'Table of Contents' box would open up the list of the 40 subcategories, and then clicking on any of them would display (probably in a separate window)a hotlinked list of posts in that subcategory -- again, showing title, date, author (if applicable) and a brief synopsis or abstract of each post.

1. Blogs are Personal: Each individual blogger must retain control over the content in his or her blog, and over decisions on what does and doesn't go into it. This is its unique selling point to front-line workers who are used to seeing all the knowledge they contribute disappear into an undifferentiated massive corporate content architecture with no personal ownership or responsibility for quality, currency or completeness.
2. The Taxonomy must also be Personal: Asking people to organize their content into standard categories is a square peg in round hole exercise. Don't let the CKO or the CIO presume to tell individual knowledge workers how they should organize their personal stuff.
3. The Blogging Tool must be Simple: Select the easiest possible blogging tool, and if necessary hide some of the tricky bells and whistles. People have enough to learn without having to master HTML and RSS.
4. Involve KM, IT, Learning and Marketing in the Project Team: All four departments will be needed to introduce blogs effectively into the workplace. Make this a joint project where each of the four departments shares in the work, and its success or failure. That may take some advance selling but if one department tries to go it alone they'll fail. And you need at least one Executive Sponsor on the Project Team. For that, you'll need an Elevator Pitch for blogs in business, which I'll talk about next week.
   

1. Educate the Project Team: Have a session where the KM, IT, Learning and Marketing people learn about blogs hands-on. Set one up for each member of the Project Team and let them play for a few days.
2. Identify the Pilot Group: Don't try to introduce this to everyone in a large organization at once. Pick a few cohesive groups that would likely benefit most e.g. newsletter editors, subject matter experts and others who are already 'publishing' stuff internally or externally. Focus on those who care more about content than style, those who produce a lot of content, and those who produce time-sensitive content often. Ask a sample of front-line workers this question: "Whose filing cabinet contents would be most useful to you in doing your job?" They're the people you want in the Pilot Group. If you have eager and experienced blogging zealots on staff, include them even if they don't otherwise qualify, but make them promise not to customize their blogs for three months, until the Pilot Group is up on their feet.
   
3. Develop a starting Personal Taxonomy for each Pilot Group member: This will be different for each person and should probably not have more than 20 categories and sub-categories. Start with the organization of their filing cabinets, or their My Documents folder. If that doesn't work, go on to step 4 for that Piloter and see if, once you know what the content is, a personal taxonomy suggests itself. But don't constrain the Piloters -- this is their content and they need to be able to organize and categorize it the way it makes sense to them. The categories and sub-categories will usually be subjects, customers or company products, rather than knowledge types (best practices, stories, policies etc.) Keep the librarians in check: This is organization by what people do, not how taxonomists think about knowledge 'domains'.
   
4. Develop a starting Personal Content Archive for each Pilot Group member, organized by their Personal Taxonomy. The archive should cover all information, documents and links that the Piloter thinks are useful or interesting and which he or she authored, customized or obtained from outside the organization. The types of content that each Piloter should be encouraged to include are shown in the top-right illustration above. If Piloters are worried about confidentiality of some of this information, tell them they will be able to restrict who has access to it.
5. Select a Blogging Tool: The tool you select must be easy to use but powerful enough to accommodate the categories and content you have identified. If the Project Team have been playing with different tools for a few days this will help in the selection. Don't leave the decision up to experienced bloggers. This will be hard for many users no matter what tool you choose.
6. Get IT to convert all the Personal Content Archives to HTML: This is not a job for amateurs. MS Office documents converted to HTML can get huge and ugly. At the same time, if you're an MS Office company, develop a standard process for converting documents to HTML going forward -- this will be an ongoing challenge, and not one you want to leave up to the Pilot Group.
7. Get IT to 'bulk publish' all the Pilot Group's Personal Content Archives: This one-time process will get your blogging project off with a bang, with a bunch of pre-selected useful content that the Pilot Group will be proud of and others in the company will want to see.
8. Get IT to create a Table of Contents for each Pilot Group member: While regular blog content may disappear into the archives without consequence, business blog content has a longer shelf life, and readers need to be able to browse the Table of Contents of each person's blog, organized according to their Personal Taxonomy. Like step 6, keeping this current will be an ongoing challenge, and will require developing a standard process for adding each new post to the Table of Contents. This may involve some work, but it's important.
9. Get IT to develop a password protection scheme for the blogs: Each Pilot Group member needs to be able to set who can and cannot view their blog content. The password protection scheme needs to be able to accommodate different needs for this, and include an e-mail based authorization system that will allow those who are initially prohibited from accessing a desired blog to get a password from the blog owner. Access should not be limited to those inside the company -- if at all possible, you should allow those outside the organization with the appropriate password to access company blogs as well. This may be tricky, but the potential benefits of exposing useful company blogs to customers, associates and other personal network members outside the organization are enormous.
10. Get your Learning group to offer a short seminar to everyone in the company on how to publish and subscribe to blogs: This will help the Pilot Group continue to publish new material regularly, will create an appetite for others in the organization to subscribe to Pilot Group blogs (and to other blogs outside the organization), and will probably identify second wave blog volunteers once your Pilot Group are on their feet. Having a blog should be voluntary, and the fact that it is will create a viral market and curiosity about blogs ("why are all these people setting up blogs when they don't have to?"). Let the size of your company blogosphere grow organically at its own pace.
11. Get your Marketing group to talk up blogs outside the organization: Create an appetite among customers and others outside the organization to subscribe to the blogs of their personal contacts inside the organization, as if this were a special 'channel' into the company. Let them subscribe to a few showcase Pilot Group blogs (ideally those run by people in Marketing) to see what they're missing.
12. Set Up a Blog Help and Monitoring Group: This cross-functional group could be just the Project Team, or a part of the IT or KM Group, but one way or another you need a clearly defined group to hold the hands of new bloggers, measure the volume and assess the quality and sufficiency of publishing and subscription, and handle the demand of the second wave of potential bloggers.
    

• Full House, by the late Stephen J. Gould. The presence of man on Earth was a random occurrence, and after the next Extinction Event life on the planet is likely to evolve differently. We are not the Crown of Creation.
• The Wealth of Man by Peter Jay. The life of pre-historic man was easy, idyllic, and very pleasant. Hunt big slow game an hour a day, relax and enjoy the rest.
• The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race, (online) essay by Jared Diamond Why the adoption of agriculture was 'a catastrophe from which we have never recovered'.
• Original Affluence, by Marshall Sahlins. If you wanted to defend a new society that featured rigid hierarchy, agonizingly hard work, suffering, frequent starvation and slavery, wouldn't you try to portray the alternative life as 'short, nasty and brutish'?
  
• Extinction, by Michael Boulter. Our planet's history is one of cycles punctuated by massive extinctions and new beginnings. Our only choice is whether to end this one sooner (a century) or later (several millennia).
  
• The Axemaker's Gift by Jame s Burke and Robert Ornstein. How innovativeness has been increasingly corrupted to concentrate and retain power, instead of making the world better.

• The Unconscious Civilization, by John Ralston Saul. How and why we've become helpless slaves of the political and economic system we built.
• Ockham's Razor, by Wade Rowland. What's wrong with our modern values, and where to look for new ones.
• People Before Profit, by Charles Derber -- How rampant corporatism ravaged the vast majority of people worldwide in the 1800s, and is doing so again.
• State of the World, by WorldWatch Institute, The 7 trends that most threaten eco-collapse: population growth, rising temperature, falling water tables, shrinking cropland per person, collapsing fisheries, shrinking forests, and the extinction of plant and animal species.
• World Scientists' Warning (online), by the Union of Concerned Scientists. "Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course. No more than one or a few decades remain before the chance to avert the threats we now confront will be lost and the prospects for humanity immeasurably diminished. A great change in our stewardship of the Earth and life on it is required if vast human misery is to be avoided and our global home on this planet is not to be irretrievably mutilated."
• Dream of the Earth by Thomas Berry. "We are in trouble just now because we do not have a good story. We are in between stories. The old story, the account of how we fit into it, is no longer effective. Yet we have not learned the new story."
• The Future of Freedom, by Fareed Zakaria Why we can't change another country's culture from outside it.
• The New Rules of the World, by John Pilger An accurate, devastating portrait of the world in 2003.
• The Demon in the Freezer, by Richard Preston. How vulnerable we all are to individual acts of terror, chaos and sabotage.
• Against the Grain, by Richard Manning. How grain monoculture evolved, and how it's ruining the Earth.
  
• Population Projections, by US Census Bureau. They're no longer assuring us that US and Global Population will level out at 300 million and 9 billion. Would you believe 1 billion and 12 billion by the end of the century, and still rising?
  
• Global Warming, by NOAA. An online synopsis of US scientists' consensus on the causes and consequences of global warming.
• This Overheating World - Worried? Us? (online essay) by Bill McKibben. Article in the UK journal Granta explaining the psychology, and cynical political expediency, of denial.
  
• Are Cities Changing Local and Global Climates?, (online) by NASA. Studies of urban microclimates and how they contribute to local climate change and instability.
• Restoring Scientific Integrity (online) by Union of Concerned Scientists. The Bush regime's distortion of scientific research to forward its own political agenda.
• Climate Collapse, by David Stipp (online article) from Fortune Magazine. The possibility and chilling implications of global warming producing sudden drastic climate shifts.
  
• Conservative Myths on Global Warming (online) by Blogger Carpe Datum. A brief but thorough explanation of the science behind global warming, and the reasoning behind scientists' connecting it to human activity and worrying about the risks of resultant instability
• The Empire Strikes Out, by Kenny Ausubel. Corporatism and acquisitiveness run amok are ruining our world, but nature always bats last.
  
• The Tragedy of the Commons, by Garry Harding. The commons, that which belongs in common to all of us, is disappearing -- Why nobody really cares.
• Elizabeth Costello, by JM Coetzee. Why we tolerate a holocaust against our fellow creatures on Earth.
• The Machine in Our Heads, by Glenn Parton. How the ecological crisis is rooted in a human psychological crisis.

• When Elephants Weep, by Jeff Masson. Compelling scientific evidence that animals feel deep emotions.
• Mind of the Raven, by Bernd Heinrich. Compelling scientific evidence that animals are intelligent, complex, rational and communicative.
  
• The Sacred Balance by David Suzuki. A passionate explanation of James Lovelock's Gaia Hypothesis, the need to redesign how we live, and the importance of spending more time in nature.
  
• The Hidden Dimension, by Edward Hall. We need space and a natural environment to be healthy and human. When we're deprived of them, we get mentally ill.
  
• The Spell of the Sensuous, by David Abram. How to reconnect with nature, and rediscover wonder.
  

Radical Analysis, Radical Solutions (these are the most important readings, but you probably won't 'buy' their arguments unless you've first read much of the material above)

• Ishmael, The Story of B, and Beyond Civilization by Daniel Quinn. Also the IshCon discussion forum. The first two of these three books are fictionalized stories about human history from a different, anti-civilization perspective, with penetrating, astounding analysis and insight. Ishmael is more popular but I prefer The Story of B which recapitulates the entire theses in a series of 'lectures'. The two critical lectures are online here. Beyond Civilization is about what we should do about all this.
• A Language Older Than Words, by Derrick Jensen. A profound and disturbing argument for why moderate answers to our current predicament won't work.
• The World We Want, by Mark Kingwell. Why we are best served by trusting our instincts rather than what we are persuaded is moral or rational.

Toolkit for Change: Knowledge We Can Use to Save the World

• Freeman Dyson's Brain (online interview), in Wired Magazine. The twin keys to building a better world are (a) establishing viable self-sufficient local communities to replace big centralized states and governments, and (b) selective more-with-less technologies like solar/wind energy coops and biotech medicines.
• The Developing Ideas Interview (online) with economist Herman Daly. An economic and tax program that favours communities and commons instead of corporations, and a 'contract' to reduce our population and ecological footprint.
  
• The Unconquerable World, by Jon Schell. Why non-violence and consensus-building are the only viable way forward.
• The Support Economy, by Shoshana Zuboff A model for a post-capitalist economy.
• Unequal Protection, by Thom Hartmann. The case for denying 'personhood' to corporations.
• When Corporations Rule the World, by David Korten. The need to get corporations out of politics and create localized economies that empower communities within a system of global cooperation, overcoming the myths about economic growth and the sanctification of greed, and focusing instead on overconsumption, poverty, overpopulation, and reining in untrammelled corporate power.
• Radical Simplicity, by Jim Merkel. How to free yourself from possessions and wage slavery without sacrifice.
• The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell. What makes things change.
• Ten Ways to Make a Difference, by Peter Singer. A pragmatic recipe for change.
  
• The Truth About Stories, by Thomas King. The truth about stories is that that's all we are. Want a new society? Write a new story.
  
• The Boycott List, by Responsible Shopper, and Good Stuff, by the WorldWatch Institute. What not to buy, and what to buy instead.
• The Corporation, by Joel Bakan. An action plan for undermining corporatism.
• Humans in the Wilderness, by Glenn Parton. How we might reintroduce humans, well-spaced-out, into a primarily wilderness Earth.
• At Home in the Universe, by S tuart Kauffman. How self-organizing, self-managing systems work.
• EarthDance (entire book online), by Elisabet Sahtouris. Eleven steps to cultural metamorphosis (my summary is here)
• eGaia (entire book online), by Gary Alexander. How to achieve of peace, cooperation and sustainability (replacing war, competition and growth, the fuels of our current culture) and a future state vision with vignettes from individuals' lives in a balanced and harmonious future world.

M

1. Search engines -- e.g. Google
   
2. Converters, voice recognition tools and translators -- e.g. Reverso Language Translation
3. Internet browsing tools and aids -- e.g. Firefox browser, Xne ws newsreader
   
4. Website composing and management tools -- e.g. HTML-Kit web page editor
   
5. Publishing tools - e.g. PDFCreator
   
6. Word processing and office productivity -- e.g. OpenOffice
7. File and desktop management -- e.g. FilZip compression software, Furl digital filing cabinet
   
8. Writing aids -- e.g. The 39 Steps, Rhymezone
   
9. Reference tools -- e.g. IMDB movie & TV show database
   
10. Music and book sellers -- e.g. FYE, CDBaby, McNally Robinson
11. Consumer information -- e.g. CNet product reviews
    
12. File sharing tools
13. Internet streaming radio/video -- e.g. ShoutCast
    
14. Connectivity and discussion tools -- e.g. Thunderbird e-mail, SightSpeed videoconferencing, Trillian IM and chat integrator, Skype VoIP
    
15. Multimedia tools -- e.g. PhotoPl us image editor, IrfanView image viewer
    
16. Website/RSS feed aggregation tools -- e.g. BlogLines site aggregator, Spurl online bookmarking
    
17. Network/community builders and expertise finders
    
18. Software download sites -- e.g. Download.com, Tucows
    
19. Investment tools and information -- e.g. MLS real estate finder
    
20. Electronic Payment and LETS tools
    
21. Anti-spam, anti-virus, anti-spyware/adware utilities -- e.g. SpyBot anti-spyware

• Our reaction when we hear that another couple's marriage has broken up, or suffered a sex scandal
• Our reaction when someone we know (but don't love) loses their job, or their life savings
  
• Our reaction when we hear of an unexpected death or tragedy outside our immediate circle of family or friends
• The pleasure we get from comedy that recounts the protagonists' stupid, catastrophic or pathetic behaviours and their consequences
• The satisfaction we get from hearing about criminals' dire, even cruel, punishments
  
• Reality TV
  
• The joy many felt at the bursting of the dot-com bubble
  
• Our media-pandered fascination with celebrities' scandals
  
• The pleasure we get from winning a game or sporting event, that we wouldn't get if there wasn't a 'loser'
• The popularity of movies that dwell on, and exploit war, suffering, and horror
  

• creativity (the ability to discover and apply new ideas),
  
• communication (written and oral),
  
• information processing (the ability to distil, analyze and interpret it), and
  
• interpersonal (listening, appreciation, connecting, persuading).

1. Copycat businesses: Thirty years ago I did some financial consulting for a small start-up cruise ship operation. They acquired and completely renovated a ship, which was lovely, got the licenses, hired the appropriate staff, set up the business systems, and then waited for the customers to roll in. After all, the competing operations on the same run were all fully booked. But this operation was an unknown quantity, and before they realized that just being similar to a successful and busy business wasn't enough to succeed, they sailed off into the sunset, empty. Franchisees beware.
   
2. Over-estimating the market: Consultants love to sell you spreadsheets that will 'forecast' your income and cash flow. An inventor friend of mine used one of these to persuade himself to produce and sell a new organic nutritional supplement he had developed. His research showed that the annual sales of this type of product North America-wide was $X billion. The spreadsheet encouraged him to plug this number in, along with his estimate of what share of this market he could capture over three years. Needless to say, he never sold anywhere close to this amount of product, because that's not how you go about forecasting sales.
   
3. Being too far ahead of or behind the market: A client of mine bought the North American rights to a new technology that would extrude a rugged, colour-fast plastic that could be used in decking, fencing, and other outdoor applications. He spent a fortune setting up the manufacturing plant. Problem is, he did this in the 1980s, when plastics were distrusted as 'cheap', wood was cheap, and creosote in pressure-treated lumber was not yet known to be a carcinogen. Being 10-15 years ahead of the market cost him his life savings.
   
4. Biting off too much: A company that I was brought in to help liquidate had been doubling its sales and employee headcount every nine months. They were providing turnkey computer networking equipment and installations to mid-size companies, and had recently moved upscale to large corporations, school boards and government departments. As its receivables and inventories soared, it started paying more money for qualified talent, and its suppliers and bank both put it on short leash. Finally, despite record monthly sales, it simply ran out of cash. The owner turned down two very opportunistic 'investors', who wanted control of the business in return for working capital, and the bank pulled the plug.
   
5. Not listening to the customer, or offering a solution in search of a problem: A lot of entrepreneurs are inventors, scientists, artists, artisans, administrators, teachers or managers. Sales is not their forte, and they're more comfortable working with ideas, materials, plans or systems than with those pesky people called customers. If you're not at home spending a lot of face time with customers, better partner with someone who is. If you want to see what happens if you don't, just browse any of the free software sites on the Web and see how many downloads most of them have. Some of them are quite intriguing, but because they don't meet a customer need, they'll never be more than that. Great prescription for a hobby, deadly for a business.
   
6. Not consulting with or listening to the right advisors: A client of our firm in the early 1990s, a company which had been in the commercial printing business for 80 years, brought us in for some technology and corporate finance consulting. As we learned about the business it became obvious, first, that they could not afford the new equipment they proposed to buy, and secondly, that their profit margins were going through the floor. They had built their reputation on high quality printing work, but the market was no longer willing to pay for it. The new equipment would allow them to automate and eliminate some labour costs (and keep up with newer competitors with no sunk costs), but the cost of the new equipment would exceed the savings. We advised the company they needed to find some new markets, new higher-margin products, and new customers who would pay more for their quality work, or else drastically cut costs. They were convinced their customers would stay loyal, and the market for quality printing would rebound. They didn't, and the company shut its doors two years later.
   
7. Blowing the budget: As most women will tell you (but many men seem unable to fathom), budgeting is simply a matter of ensuring that the cash going out doesn't exceed the cash coming in. The problem is, every start up costs more -- sometimes two or three times more -- than initially expected. It takes enormous self-discipline, patience, pacing, and sometimes financial creativity, to mete out dollars at a rate that will ensure there is enough cash to launch the business under the worst case scenario. I know of a dozen businesses that closed before they opened because they failed to do so, and others that lost control of their business unwillingly because that was the price for a late cash infusion. 'Risk Capital' might be more accurately called 'Heartbreak Capital' -- it is obscenely expensive.
   
8. Groupthink: Back in the 1970s I was appointed Deputy Receiver for a computer and peripherals distributor. They had been put on 'close watch' by the bank, and I had to get authorization for, and sign, every cheque. While I was there I attended and took notes at management meetings. I was assailed at each meeting when I presented my factual reports on profit and cash flow. I was nicknamed The Undertaker for my 'relentless pessimism', and almost physically ejected when I questioned the validity of some unsupported fees that had been paid by the much-loved CFO, who was on leave of absence looking after a very sick relative. The six-man management team, intact since the start of the company and each heavily personally invested in the company, used to come out of their meetings with cheers and high fives, confident, contrary to all logic, that the company was poised for turnaround and sales 'in the pipeline' would soon bring a return to happy days. They would feed off each others' boundless optimism. They just needed to work harder. Happier days never came, and the CFO, it turns out, had defrauded the company to pay for his relative's substantial medical bills.
   
9. Litigation: A small biotech company whose CEO I met at a conference a few years ago was bemoaning the huge cost of registering and defending patents. He said they had been forced to sell off one promising product to a competitor in order to pay their legal bills to defend their other intellectual capital. That had slowed them down to the point they now feared that another competitor would beat them to market, rendering the results of the litigation largely moot. Big companies can afford armies of expensive lawyers. For small companies, significant litigation can spell disaster. The competitive advantage of the entrepreneur is agility -- when products get mired in legal wrangles, it may be better to cut bait and move on to other ventures than to fight adversaries with much deeper pockets in court.
   
10. Buying the MBA hype: Graduates of business school are taught how to be middle managers of large enterprises. Unfortunately, that knowledge often don't translate well to entrepreneurial businesses. A client of mine brought in a young, very successful MBA grad (he had his own daily spot on one of the local radio stations), who had, it appeared, no experience at all with entrepreneurial business. The company, which was modestly profitable, bought the young man's well-delivered 'grow or die' message and decided to 'go upscale'. They spent a small fortune on advertising, and set up a sales office and warehouse in another country. Unfortunately, the media in which the ads appeared were not the ones used by the company's customers, and there was not enough money to properly penetrate the foreign market. The expenses produced almost no growth and almost sank the company. They salvaged the situation, and their business, by finding an enterprising competitor in the foreign country who took over the hemorrhaging 'branch plant', and then striking a reciprocal marketing alliance with them.
    

1. Personal content management tools -- to help people organize their personal information (and other information they've aggregated) their way, and identify who they will permit to access it under what circumstances ('permissioning')
2. Metadata tools (invisible to the user) -- to automatically reorganize this personal content for effective, permitted use by others
3. Social networking applications -- to help people identify other people (inside and outside their organization) with particular expertise or shared interests, connect and collaborate with these people and with people in the individual's self-defined networks, via Simple Virtual Presence, browse and subscribe to others' permissioned personal content, and publish their own permissioned content.

• "Knowledge-work"-in-process management entails the dynamic, three-dimensional shuffling of paper and documents in a workspace, usually a physical desktop. The organization of the workspace is highly personal and varied, and often opaque to anyone else trying to figure out "how X organizes his stuff".
  
• People learn, and add value to others' work, through annotation, also a highly-personal and varied process
• Conversations, overwhelmingly one-on-one and face-to-face, are the principal means by which almost all knowledge work is done. Even research is more highly-valued if it is 'primary' (derived from personal conversations), rather than 'secondary' (derived from library or database searches).
• Context is critical to most knowledge work. In business conversations I have observed, three times as much time is spent understanding the context for an opinion or fact, as is spent actually understanding or debating the opinion or fact.
• Knowledge work's ultimate purpose is usually to enable informed decisions. Most meeting time is wasted because the decision has already been made, or because no decision depends on the matters being discussed in the meeting, or because people in the meeting cannot relate what is being discussed to a decision that they have a personal stake in. The process by which most business decisions are made should terrify most stakeholders -- this process is frequently emotional, biased, impulsive and uninformed. The executive's gut instinct, and opinions offered by his/her inner circle (usually arrived at by the same flawed process) both trump objective assessment. Much knowledge work is therefore used only to justify a decision already made subjectively, and contrary evidence presented is usually either discounted or ignored. That's not necessarily a bad thing -- we do expect decision makers to be able to make good judgements based on their experience, and not always have to rely on outside empirical knowledge.
  

• Distribute d Social Software, by Eric Gradman via Seb Paquet at Many 2 Many: A grad student surveys the current generation of social software and agrees with me that it needs to be simpler, less centralized and more personal.
  

• Life in 2010 - Home and Work, by Patrick Dixon: A futurist who sees that new technologies are going to be smaller, more portable, more specialized, easier-to-use and more personal. Some excellent thinking here.

• Webl ogs and Journalism (jump to pg 59 of this pdf), features 18 articles by bloggers and journalists, that I've mentioned before, but are worth a second read because of their broader implications for the use of weblogs and other personal content management and personal publishing apps in business.

• WL Gore & Associates, per this case study by Cyndy Payne of the Foundation for Enterprise Development, is not only one of the world's most innovative companies (they invented waterproof, breathable, Gore-Tex fabric and a whole bunch of high-tech materials you've probably never heard of), but also are a prime example of a true partnership of equals (what they call a Non-Hierarchical Corporation and what I've called a New Collaborative Enterprise).
  

• Anna Zuchetti of OACA in Peru has pioneered a sustainable development program for environmentally sensitive areas near exploding cities that is now recognized as a model for Latin America, and has won Anna a Schwab Foundation award.
• Pisit Charnsnoh in Thailand has been honoured with a Rolex Associate Award for his work to preserve that country's coastal habitats, and in the process save the endangered dugong (sea cow).
• David Green in the US has won a MacArthur Grant for establishing an enterprise for the manufacture and delivery of health care technologies for the developing world.
• An international program, the Innovative Learning Initiative, is leveraging the successes and lessons learned by Ashoka fellows around the world who are focused on education of the young, identifying common principles and strategies that have effectively changed children's lives
  

1. Is there a new idea? If there isn't, the rest doesn't matter. If it's new, is the idea going to fly? And will it be big enough to truly change society?
2. Is this person creative? What is the quality of thinking? What is the history of her creativity? Experiences early in life are the best indicators.
3. Is this person an entrepreneur? True social innovators need to change a pattern across society. They are drawn to problems, constantly searching for the next advance.
4. What's the impact? Will it spread? Most entrepreneurs can easily seed their idea in one place. It's another thing to come up with a solution that will get traction elsewhere.
5. Is there ethical fiber? To be effective, leaders have to be on the up and up. They must change relationships -- and that won't happen if there's no trust.
   

1. Better time management - We need to learn to prioritize and provide better context of why tasks are important, clarify and simplify goals, improve our personal work organization skills, provide better definition of expected outcomes and of 'success', develop and provide better, simpler tools and resources to get the job done, and eliminate unnecessary tasks and bureaucracy.
2. Improvisational project stewardship - We must learn to focus people's attention on what's really important, communicate priorities and success measures, and learn from failures. Today's organization is more like a jazz combo than an army, and needs a very different kind of team facilitation and 'leadership'.
   
3. Quality conversations - We must learn to communicate a vision that co-workers can understand in concrete terms, and can buy into, to selectively tell people precisely what to do (but only when it's needed, and when you know), and to communicate the measurements of success and the resources available to help.
4. Effective listening - We need to learn, in the mass of messages, to filter out what's irrelevant, unimportant, and unactionable, and to focus on messages that clarify expectations and identify unmet needs and critical problems that we can personally help solve. That entails knowing when to intervene, and when not to, and learning how to say 'no' gracefully.
5. Engaging people - We need to learn to use stories and other techniques to clarify what is important, what needs to be done, and the consequences of success and failure.

• Better understanding of what different stakeholders need, and why
• Building trust, through openness, fairness, respect, attention, consistency, and clarity
  
• Designing the content of databases for effective (re-)use
• Designing project tools to focus on, and inform, the critical decisions and choices that must be made, and to surface potential landmines and potential innovations
  
• Designing tools to make it easier to connect with the right people and find the right information
• Making the objective of all infrastructure to make workers' jobs simpler
  

1. They fill an unmet business, social or consumer need.
2. The enterprise understood why the need wasn't already being met, and overcame those obstacles.
3. The enterprise has the competencies to effectively create and deliver offerings that fill that need.
4. The enterprise has the resources to bring those offerings to the marketplace.
   

• Look at changes and trends in the marketplace: What's hot, and what new needs will the demand for suddenly-hot products and services spawn? How are consumer attitudes changing? How are buying behaviours changing? How is the market changing to respond to changing consumption patterns?
  
• What are people complaining about? Every complaint reflects an unmet need.
• What problems are businesses facing? What's keeping executives awake at night? What could you offer that would let them sleep better?
  
• What do people think there's never enough of? Sustained shortages represent business opportunities.
• What are the gaps in products and services? In The Support Economy, Shoshana Zuboff describes the next economy as one where the customer's needs are met 'end-to-end'. People don't have time or patience to fill in the product and service gaps, like when the great product breaks down and there's no backup, or when the daycare service closes two hours before they get home from work. A gap implies an unmet need.
• Likewise, is there a new service that you could 'wrap around' an existing product or service to make it more valuable? (Offering haircuts and rinses in people's homes and offices, or dinner on the commuter train, for example.)
  
• In Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Peter Drucker identifies seven areas of innovation opportunity resulting from discontinuities, all of which can be used to unearth unmet needs:
  
• Unexpected occurrences (if Kerry wins in November, what new market opportunities will that present?)
  
• Perception/reality incongruities (when we realize that greenhouse gases will bring about massive climate and environmental change in our lifetimes, how will consumer needs change?)
  
• Process weaknesses or needs (some believe advertising has no future: if they're right, what will business need in order to get information to consumers in other ways?)
  
• Industry and market changes (what will $160/barrel oil mean to us all?)
  
• Demographic changes (with a huge number of people retiring in the next 10-20 years, what will they do with their time?)
  
• Buyers' attitude and priority changes (consumers see file-sharing as a work-around for CD price-gouging and TiVo as the solution to lousy program offerings and excess commercials -- what does that mean for these industries?)
  
• New scientific and business knowledge (how will RFID devices change the way we live, shop, work, and protect our privacy?)
  
• Look at basic, overarching human needs: Health, safety, education, time, decent quality of life, meaning, recreation. How are our experiences of these things currently unsatisfactory, and how might they be improved?
• What great ideas failed, and why? Maybe they were ahead of their time, and their time is now.
• What's happening to transform certain industries, or economic sectors like education, public health, and even defense, and how might those transformational ideas, products, processes, technologies and models be applied in other industries and economic sectors?
• What are big corporations looking to outsource? Could you offer them what they need in those areas?
• What small "niches of need" exist in big business that other big businesses can't be bothered to address? (Event planning for example).
  
• What small "niches of need" exist in consumer markets that big, unspecialized businesses can't be bothered to satisfy?
• What new regulations exist that need compliance tools, processes, advice on compliance, and assistance?
• Is there a market somewhere in the world for something we take for granted but they don't have at all? And vice versa, do people in some other countries take for granted things that we have never considered selling here? In Europe, for example, some movie theatres offer excellent cuisine and fine wine -- would that work in North America?

• What exactly is the need?
  
• Who exactly is the customer (the group that has that need)?
  
• What are the alternative solutions to it? What are the benefits and drawbacks of each alternative? Which, all things considered, are the best, affordable alternatives?
  
• Who is offering, and who could easily offer, each of those solutions? Why aren't they already offering these solutions?
• What competencies and what resources would your enterprise need to have to bring the best alternatives to market?

1. Our ecological footprint (EF) is modestly higher than the North American average. This is due primarily to the fact we live in a larger-than-average house (the average North American home size is 1700 s.f., up from about 1300 s.f. a generation ago), and, as Canadians, we use a lot more BTUs for heating than the average North American.
2. We actually buy less 'stuff' than the average North American, by a considerable margin. This is because we tend to save until we can afford better, more expensive, more durable products, so we 'turn over' what we own only half as often as the average North American, who disposes of clothing on average every 4 years, computers and small appliances every 3 years, major appliances every 8 years, and furniture every 10 years. This is a staggering amount of waste, and shows the false economy that our consumer culture and the Wal-Mart Dilemma push many people into.
3. Thanks to our progressive community, that recycles paper, plastic, glass, cardboard, aluminum, and organics ('green box' program), we produce much less unrecycled garbage than the average North American (who adds 3/4 of a ton per year into landfills). I am aghast at the lack of progress in both municipal and business recycling in many parts of the continent.
4. As Merkel's book progresses, it moves from very simple, logical, sensible steps that can lower your EF, to steps that only a die-hard and exceptionally devoted environmentalist would take. I'm not interested in growing most of my own food, living in a 100 s.f./person home and making my own clothes -- that's way beyond responsible living, even beyond austerity. Even I'm not that idealistic. After going through the workbook sections, I've concluded that our EF is less than I thought it would be, and a reasonable 'zero sacrifice' target for reducing our EF is more than I thought it would be. So while at first blush I'd pledged to reduce our EF by 80%, I'm lowering that pledge to 50%. That's still a worthwhile, and not terribly difficult, goal, which will reduce our EF to about 60% of the North American average. But it still leaves our EF at three times the current global sustainable per-capita level. In other words, if everyone in the world lived at our proposed lower EF level, it would take three Earths, and zero population growth starting immediately, to sustain us all, and that would leave no room for all the rest of the life species in the world. Merkel, like McKibben, urges us to pursue an average one-child family strategy to reduce and sustain human population at a billion people, which would allow us all to live at my target EF level (i.e. very comfortably) and still allow half the planet to be left in natural state for other life species.
5. The methods I propose to use to halve our EF are not rocket science:
   
• Make our home much more energy efficient. Either build a new, exceptionally energy- and space-efficient home on a lot that would be left 90% in its natural state. Or alternatively, as some readers have suggested, do a radical energy retrofit and functional redesign of our existing home, and close off or lease out half of it. Our existing lot is only 50% in natural state, so much of our lawn would have to be returned to forest.
• Change jobs to substantially home-based businesses, and sell one of our two cars -- an end to wage slavery.
  
• Learn to cook (though probably not as well as my wife) so we can become more vegetarian, and eat less processed and packaged foods.
• Learn to be more self-sufficient and self-efficient (fixing things instead of tossing them out).
  
6. Not only would these changes halve our EF, they would have a comparable impact on our utilities, maintenance, household, transportation, and other costs, allowing us to retire in seven years (if we want to) instead of the projected twenty.
   
7. The book also talks a lot about overcoming fears -- of striking out on your own, of being viewed as 'weird', of wilderness, of doing without the possessions that sometimes come to own us, of not having 'enough'. This is important because Radical Simplicity is about culture change, and while I'm convinced our lower-EF end-state will be idyllic, it's the journey, the 'letting go' that's difficult, and ultimately, in some ways, a leap of faith.

• The military dictatorship that governs Sudan is desperate to end US sanctions so that its newly-found oil, which came onstream only five years ago, can start generating revenue for the bankrupt nation, so much so that it agreed to end its long and savage civil war against the rebels in Southern Sudan (where the oil is), and exempt Sudanese Christians from Sharia law.
  
• That Southern war has cost two million lives, and the Bush Administration was active in brokering the peace for three reasons: (a) many of the casualties were Christians, which led to pressure from American evangelical churches, a bastion of Bush support, for US action, (b) the US would have access to an additional source of much-needed oil and (c) peace would have allowed Bush, in an election year, to portray himself as a peacemaker as well as a 'war president'.
• Plans to announce the peace were undone when the Western Darfur provinces, suffering from horrendous drought, rapid desertification, increasing tension between Arabs and non-Arabs for scarce land, and long government neglect, began to clamour for independence (Darfur was an independent Sultanate until Britain annexed it into its Sudanese colony); the government, tapped out militarily and not wanting to jeopardize the possible end of sanctions, responded by outsourcing military retaliation against Darfur's six million people to local Arab sheiks, warlords and tribal leaders, who they financed and armed heavily and supported with aerial bombing raids in key areas occupied by the pro-independence Sudanese Liberation Army.
• These local Arab leaders used this power and military might to launch a genocidal attack on all non-Arabs in Darfur, deputizing murderous gangs of Arab bandits called janjaweed, whose intimidation tactics include burning whole villages, gang-raping women, decapitation, burning children alive, mass public executions, ransoming community leaders, burying victims of atrocities and precious wells in sand, and kidnapping women and children. The bandits steal everything of value in the destroyed villages as compensation for their 'enforcement' of government authority. As a consequence over a million Darfur residents have fled their villages to massive refugee centres elsewhere in the provinces, where there is at least safety in numbers (50,000-75,000 per camp), and in neighbouring Chad.
• USAID estimates that the death toll from genocide, starvation and disease will, even with humanitarian and peacemaking intervention now, exceed 300 thousand and could, without intervention, top one million by the end of this year. The UN has already established a food program that has reached 900 thousand of the 1.5 million affected in Darfur, but the threat to the safety of both Darfur natives and humanitarian workers is severe.
  
• There are all kinds of reasons for Western reticence to get involved: Darfur is an all-Muslim area, so the genocide is ethnic, not religious, and it is resource-poor, unlike the oil-rich South. European leaders, not wanting to give Bush a smokescreen for his foreign policy blunders and rebukes of its allies, have been perversely reticent to support US humanitarian efforts in Darfur. Arab sheiks and tribal leaders in Darfur and elsewhere in Sudan have announced they will consider any intervention by the West in their 'internal dispute' as an unwanted foreign invasion, which they will liken to the US invasion of Iraq, and will use it to recruit zealous young Arabs to kill all foreigners, including humanitarian workers and peacemakers, producing a fiasco similar to the one that occurred in Somalia. One recruiting brochure says "We call upon you to head immediately to Darfur and dig the ground deep for the mass graves of the crusader army". Darfur's refugees say that bringing peacekeepers from the African Union won't work either, because "African troops are too susceptible to bribes". And the Sudanese government is probably both unwilling and unable to rein in the local sheiks and warlords and the rogue janjaweed gangs. And the only non-Sudanese body with authority to bring thm to justice for genocide is the International Criminal Court, which the US government has repudiated.

1. First, I calculated the Resource Use Index by taking the aggregate Ecological Footprint (EF) of each country in hectares (the per capita footprint from sources such as the Living Planet Report, times the country's population), and dividing it by the number of habitable hectares of land in the country (I used as a proxy for this the lesser of 80% of total land area and 200% of Oxford's 'arable land area' data). This very useful number indicates the number of times over each country's citizens are using the renewable and sustainable resources available to them. A Resource Use index of 1.0 is sustainable. An index of, say, 5, indicates that to restore the country to sustainability, it needs to do some combination of reducing population and reducing per-capita resource consumption, by a combined 80%. The table below shows some sample Resource Use indices I computed.
2. Then I multiplied this Resource Use Index by the estimated annual growth rate of the country's aggregate Ecological Footprint. For this, I started with the annual population growth rate as a proxy (the EF studies suggest aggregate footprint and population are growing at roughly the same rate), and then substituted more precise EF growth rate numbers when I could find them online (China's EF is growing much faster than its population, for example).
   

1. They're built with a pre-designed, set content architecture, and centrally-stored content, instead of harvesting content that individual users already have stored, in different ways of their own choosing, on their own machines.
   
2. They're being populated just-in-case, with all kinds of content that people with lots of time on their hands see fit to contribute, and no content from the very busy or technologically illiterate, rather than just-in-time, with content being accumulated only if and when there's a demand and need for it.
   
3. They're badly over-engineered, ranging in complexity from challenging to intimidating, so they take a lot of time, energy and intelligence to understand and use properly, and hence drive most potential users away.
   

• Ask them what's important to them (open-ended questions with no preconception of the answers) and listen to their answers,
• Tell them stories about how the political process has brought about important and positive change,
• Teach them how the system works, in the context of how it could work to deal with the issues they said were important to them, and
  
• Encourage them, starting with something small, to make the system work for them.

• A New Economy Forum sponsored by Credit Suisse First Boston attempted to develop a 'synthesis' of leading thinkers' innovation models that might answer that question.
• Forward-thinking publications like Fast Company and Wired have presented alternative visions of the future from some extraordinary minds in many different disciplines.
• And conferences of world political, social and business leaders like the Davos World Economic Forum try to grapple with the bigger questions of how the holders of power can make the world a better place, while helping out their particular stakeholders in the process.
  

1. Acceleration Model: The future will be a continuation of the recent past, only much faster
2. Chaos Model: The future will be utterly unlike the past, driven by radically new and discontinuous events
3. Evolutionary Model: The future will be, like the past, a continuous series of mostly predictable changes

1. Technology is Not Evil: Technology was, is, and always will be, about improving the quality of human life (though it has had some disastrous, unintended consequences), and
2. People Change Reluctantly: People change much more slowly than technology, and ultimately won't accept, adopt, or pay for any technology that they aren't yet ready for, or which doesn't fill a real human need.
   

1. If I put the wolf's head on my head, will I gain the wolf's acute senses, wiles and powers? (Not that different from the thinking applied many centuries later by the Ford Motor Company in the naming of cars and design of hood ornaments after various fierce animals)
2. If I eat the dead wolf, will I gain the wolf's acute senses, wiles and powers? (Many cultures still eat powdered horn and animal genitalia based on this 'logic')
3. If I strap a live wolf to myself, will the wolf and I become one creature, with both the wolf's senses, wiles and powers and my brilliant and innovative mind?

3. Need Drives Innovation: Necessity is the mother of invention, and as the fundamental human needs listed in the top row of Figure One above illustrate, the important innovations and technologies of human history have addressed the greatest human needs of their age. Without an urgent human need, a burning platform, a Business Case, there will be no innovation, since the preconditions for it, as John Kotter explains in Leading Change, do not exist. An obvious corollary of this principle is:
4. Innovation Starts with the Customer: If successful innovations must address an urgent human need, then the front-end of the innovation process should be situated at the point of contact with the humans expressing that need, i.e. the sales and customer service people in businesses, not the R&D laboratory or the marketing department. With some notable exceptions where the need for the innovation was only identified later, innovations coming from R&D tend to be solutions in search of problems, and those coming from Marketing tend to be solutions for which needs need to be artificially created through advertising.
   
5. Innovation Drives Technology: The solutions developed by companies' products and services are all technologies that apply one or more innovations.This is equally true of pregnancy test kits, tax preparation software, satellite-and-computer-based learning courses, futures options, automobiles and corn (whether genetically modified or not). So-called 'competitive advantage' comes either from offerings that better satisfy human needs (faster, better, cheaper etc.), or from new technology applications of new innovations that render the old offerings obsolete i.e. 'reinvent' the market. But as much as business would like to turn the model on its head (develop the offering, then use technologies and marketing to create a need for it), real needs like the ones at the top of Figure One cannot be created. They can be recognized, and they can change as more fundamental needs are solved, but they cannot be created. Need drives Innovation and Innovation drives Technology.
6. Innovations are Interconnected: Innovation is not a mystical creative process, explains Edward de Bono in Serious Creativity. It is a learnable, repeatable process. Great minds and great companies can learn to 'see the connections', provided they don't narrow their scan (across time and across different disciplines of business and thought) too much. Here's a great example of how broad scanning engenders innovation, an example which also shows how many innovations exist in nature awaiting our discovery, if we don't destroy them first:: Scientists have recently discovered that butterfly wings contain no pigment. They are covered by overlapping 'tiles' 50 times thinner than a human hair. Each tile contains multiple layers of cells, separated by air gaps. When the light bounces off the tiles, the layers reflect colors with an iridescent sheen. There is a whole industry of thin-film coatings, whose products are used in everything from spacecraft hulls to anti-counterfeiting devices on paper currency, that may be revolutionized by application of this innovative colouring technology.
7. Stories Transfer Knowledge: If you want to teach, or if you want to set up a killer database that everyone will contribute to and use, make sure your subject-matter is stories. Distilling stories to 'lessons' destroys the essence of their value by disabling the learner's ability to internalize, digest, and learn from, the contextualized experience of the teacher.
   
8. Innovation Requires Discipline & Patience: The strange fish-like organism pictured in Figure Two is the process by which almost all successful ideas are commercialized. It is a journey that, even for most great ideas, is rarely completed. It is essential to have the discipline, patience, and courage to follow this process rigorously.Without such rigour, a great idea can easily be buried by premature skepticism, unscientific criticism, dangerous complacency and fear of risk. The process works.

• business,
  
• politics & economics,
  
• arts & science, and
  
• the environment.

1. The Internet is a World of Ends - Doc Searls and David Weinberger finally explained to bloggers and to e-business what the Internet is and how it works. As a result, bloggers (and blogging tool developers) now realize that there will never be 'standards' for blogs, blog censorship, clear rules on what is and isn't appropriate in citing others' work on your blog, standard blog taxonomy and categories, an official definition or list of blogs, unarguable or untamperable rankings of blog popularity, or controls of any kind. It's a jungle out here. There are no rules. The blogosphere, like the Internet, is owned by no one, open to everyone, and made better by each of us. A cornucopia of unrestricted and open innovation. Its value flowers at the ends, and, fellow bloggers, we are the ends.
   
2. Blog popularity is subject to Shirky's Power Law - "In systems where many people are free to choose between many options, a small subset of the whole will always get a disproportionate amount of traffic (or attention, or income), by the very act of choosing". It's the old 80/20 rule. The later you are starting to blog, the harder it becomes to find an audience. Not impossible, just harder. There are anomalies: new blogging communities and new 'hot topics' can allow savvy bloggers to quickly galvanize a readership. But if you want to be popular in the blogosphere, it's more important to be first than best.
   
3. Blogs have Tipping Points and manifest the Strength of Weak Ties - Ever noticed how hard it is to get your family and close friends ('strong ties') to read your blog? That's because they see no incremental value in doing so. But friends of friends, people two or three degrees removed from your network, do. Weak ties probably got you your job, found your life partner, provoked your most innovative ideas, and sourced most of your blog's readership. And you can exploit these weak ties to push a new idea, find new readers, perhaps even save the world. It's easy: Just Test the credibility of and degree of interest in what you're saying by sending messages to selected mavens (bloggers who incubate new ideas and stick with them until they catch), A-listers (bloggers who already have a huge audience), and connectors (bloggers, like me, who have an audience that crosses diverse communities of interest); focus on a few subjects and address them profoundly and creatively, instead of talking a bit about everything under the sun; and believe: persevere until your message finds its audience.
4. Blog functionality is a critical component of Social Networking, and Social Networking will transform blogging (and also transform the Internet, the media, the way we communicate, and even the evolution of business) - Social Networking Applications (recently voted Technology of the Year by Business 2.0 magazine) will go beyond just allowing you to publish what's on your mind and browse what's on other people's. They will allow you to map and manage your networks, the communities to which you belong, your strong and weak ties. They will evolve blogging from clumsy, mostly one-way communication to a rich, two-way seamless multi-media communications medium that will allow you to identify and connect simply and powerfully with people you want to know better (for personal, practical or business reasons). Build deep relationships. Collaborate on awesome projects. Find the next president.
   
5. Blogs could be the platform for a proxy for each of us as individuals, our electronic filing cabinet and electronic identity - A blog consists of information about you, and knowledge you've accumulated. What if you expanded it to be a repository for all the information about you and all the knowledge you've accumulated, your 'locked' filing cabinet. You control it, you decide what does and doesn't go into it, and who can have a temporary key to what parts of it. Then at work, it could be your proxy, the repository of knowledge that shows your value to your employer and the value you've added to the company. And it could be your resume. At home it could be your medical patient record. Your bookshelf catalogue and refrigerator/pantry inventory and recipe book. Your bio for the dating service. Imagine the applications that could be built on this knowledge. Your intellectual property, under your control. Amazing. Scary.
   
6. The abandonment of 80-90% of blogs is a positive phenomenon - Media who just don't 'get it' have pointed to the abandonment of most blogs as an indication they're too technologically complex, or have no broad appeal, no staying power. What this abandonment really represents is a large number of people deciding that writing really isn't that important to them. The focus should instead be on the 10-20% who are still blogging. That's millions, potentially hundreds of millions of people regularly honing their writing skills, getting valuable commentary from readers on their writing and their ideas. Instead of a wasteland of abandoned effort, the blogosphere (along with perhaps IM) could actually be the most important development in written language since the printing press. As newspaper readership plummets and the next generation opts for oral communications over written, the timing of this phenomenon could not be more significant.
   
7. Blogging is increasingly a platform for achieving mainstream recognition - Just as the main readers of most business websites are competitors, not customers, the mainstream media are perusing blogs for new ideas and trends. So far they haven't really caught on to how the blogosphere works, so the process is serendipitous, creating brief fame mainly for A-listers who provide alternative viewpoints to stories of the day where no mainstream media pundits are at hand. But the mainstream media and bloggers are both learning how to use each other. Some bloggers have launched books based on their blogs, and some blogging self-promoters now have columns or spots in regular media. Those who think there's no money and fame in blogging are too quick to judge blogs' importance in the information society.
   
8. The culture of blogging is evolving faster than the technology - The frustration of bloggers with the tools available to them is palpable. That's not the tool designers' fault: They operate on a shoestring and their 'customers' all want something different. They'll eventually build tools that are both simple and flexible, as both the technology, and the understanding of its use, mature. In the meantime, impatient bloggers are working around the impediments, learning about HTML and CSS themselves. This is World of Ends innovation at work, producing a proliferation of new blog 'products' and hybrids. Group blogs are one example of a blog phenomenon that will only last until more dynamic mechanisms for cross-posting and guest privileging are developed in next generation blogs. The key is to go with the flow. Be part of the evolution or be left behind.
   
9. Blogs, like diaries, are a substitute for intimacy - Bloggers (and perhaps all writers) are a million voices howling in the dark. There is an inherent loneliness in writing, and the blogosphere provides an opportunity to make new connections with little risk. You don't need to reveal your identity. You can throw ideas out there that you might not dare voice face-to-face, for fear of being laughed at, or carted away. You can reveal things to 'strangers' that you might not be willing to tell those close to you. You can think out loud. You can test the waters, safely. The only consequence is that when you meet a fellow blogger or reader face-to-face, or even voice-to-voice, it can be psychologically jarring. It's almost as if you've broken the rules.
   
10. RSS is blurring the distinction between blogs and other media - RSS, the ability to syndicate your posts and let people subscribe to them, transforms the metaphor of a blog from a diary to a publication. That crosses the main divide that separates it from mainstream media. Although the future of any medium is impossible to predict, I believe RSS has played a pivotal role in forestalling, and perhaps completely subverting, the plan of many of the major print media to start charging money for their on-line editions. I know for a fact that was in the cards as recently as a year ago.
    

• To be a responsible citizen of that society we need to know as much as possible. Crows have fairly sophisticated and interdependent social structures, with 'travellers' that move back and forth between different crow communities, carrying information about the location of food and predators with them, and they have developed appropriately sophisticated languages to convey that second-hand knowledge. In fact, they have developed 'body' languages and sounds that communicate the location of food to other species (notably wolves and indigenous humans) on which they depend (since their claws are not strong enough to tear flesh and kill, they locate food for other species that can, and then eat the leftovers).
  
• To be an intelligent consumer we need to know enough to evaluate our choices. In a society where you don't just eat what you kill and live where your ancestors did, there are often more choices than we can try out through direct personal experience.
• To understand our purpose we need to learn as much as possible about our physical world and the history of life in it. We have an instinctive desire to understand how and why things are, which serves an evolutionary purpose -- it helps us to survive. As we assimilate more and more knowledge we assemble patterns and theories about how and why things are. These are belief systems (fig. 3). When early man observed how nature automatically corrected population and resource imbalances quickly and painlessly, he began to believe in a higher power. When more recently he invented civilization, a 'man-made' way to live apart from nature, he developed new, anthropocentric belief systems to justify and explain this new 'separate' purpose for living. Belief systems so powerful that they allow us to tolerate, and even celebrate, incredible suffering, and to ignore and disregard our intuitive knowledge, which is inconsistent with these belief systems.
  

• Because we did not know the degree to which extreme and sustained suffering and outrage perverts the human mind, and the malleability of those minds, we allowed the slaughter of nearly a million innocent civilians in Rwanda in 1994, and of nearly 3000 in the US in 2001.
• Because we did not know the consequences of reliance on catastrophic agriculture, we allowed millions to die in the Irish potato famine, eighty million more to die of starvation in China during Mao's Great Leap Forward, and the horrendous threats posed today by BSE (Mad Cow), the Asian bird flu, and as-yet-unevolved diseases and pests that prey on massive concentrated quantities of astonishingly homogenous, vulnerable human foods.
• Because we did not know that nature uses diseases to winnow overcrowding, and that these diseases will always evolve faster than we can prevent or treat them, we allowed half the people of Europe to die in the Plague, and more than one billion to die of Smallpox, and despite 'clues' like AIDS of what is to come, future diseases we do not yet know, we still have not taken drastic steps to reduce human overcrowding on our planet.
• Because we did not know the impact of our wasteful and thoughtless burning of hydrocarbons and forests on our planet's climate, we now face cataclysmic global warming and the paradoxical early triggering of the next ice age.

1. We need to communicate to everyone on the planet, one person at a time, that there is a better way to live: happier, healthier, safer, more egalitarian, more harmonious, more responsible, and sustainable for future generations. We need to tell everyone a new story of our planet's destiny.
   
2. We need to achieve, by a great deal of open conversation, discussion, and sharing of knowledge, a huge consensus that there are two root causes underlying all the problems we face today and preventing us from achieving that better way to live: Overpopulation and overconsumption, and to set and agree upon deadlines and targets for solving these two problems. Just as in past we agreed that slavery and imperialism and suppression of women were our global enemies, we need to agree that overpopulation and overconsumption are our global enemies, a threat to everything we believe in and a threat to our future. With the right mix of empirical and intuitive knowledge, we can achieve this agreement.
   
3. We need to organize six billion people to use their collective wisdom to tell us how to meet these deadlines and targets, and then free them to work in their communities to make it happen.
4. We need to help each other clear away obstacles to success. That means a lot of humanitarian and peacemaking assistance, helping to build new infrastructure that will work in the new community-based world, redistributing resources from the rich to the poor, and disarming those that will try to establish new wealth and power hierarchies.
   

• They perceive liberal governments to be based in, and focused on, the big cities. Even in the suburbs this anti-urban feeling is strong, and translates into an anti-liberal (rather than pro-conservative) vote.
• They are very proud people, who like to think they are independent and don't need government help. So a liberal saying he's going to provide more assistance for small farmers and small businesspeople might actually be insulting them rather than wooing them. To those that have never lived through a depression (or learned its lessons), government handouts "encourage laziness". Small business still buys the 'free market' myth, whereas big business knows it's a myth and perpetrate it strictly as a power lever.
  
• They really have no idea how government works, where the money goes, how they benefit from it, or how bigger corporations benefit much more than they do due to various government subsidies. The concept that tax cuts = service cuts, and that big corporations are at least as inefficient as big government, is lost on these guys. They don't understand that it's they who have to pay for that inefficiency, in inflated consumer prices and in taxes for big corporation handouts.
  
• Quite aside from economics, they are socially conservative, as Lakoff defines the term. Homosexuality frightens them, liberated women frighten them, immigrants frighten them, government frightens them. They are terrified by crime (and, by extension, 'terrorism') and see it as a sign of moral decay, in black and white terms. They know in their hearts that you can't turn back the clock, but emotionally they want to, and that nostalgia and fear is a powerful weapon that Republicans and Conservatives are using to their advantage. Many people vote with their hearts, not with their heads, a lesson most liberals still haven't learned.
  

1. Moore's Law yields to innovation: The long history of processor speed doubling every 18 months without changing price looks to be coming to an end, not because it can't be sustained, but because other innovations, like dual cores, can accomplish the same ends without having to deal with the growing problem of overheating that fast processors must contend with.
2. VoIP makes distance irrelevant and increases the functionality of telephony: Although carrying sound over the Internet is most famous for killing phone companies that charge outrageous long-distance rates, and making all telephony flat-rate, it's also increasing the traditional PBX phone system's functionality, allowing people to dial others by clicking on their name instead of having to look up numbers, and providing 'presence awareness' (telling you before you 'dial' whether the person is available for your 'call').
3. Explosion of authentication and automatic identification systems: Increased need for security and the cost of maintaining password lists is driving this change, but authentication and identification systems, if they can walk the line between convenience and breech of privacy, could also simplify and streamline the process by which we get permissioned for almost everything, allowing us to access both physical and intellectual property without jumping through hoops.
4. Commercial gene therapy breakthroughs: RNA-interference therapies could soon be used to suppress messenger genes that cause diseases from AIDS to diabetes. But while the technical problems in making such therapies seem to be solved, the anti-innovation US patent laws remain a huge stumbling block, and patients may have to wait while greedy corporations sue each other to death or patent law reform enters the 21st century before the therapies can be brought to market.
5. Micro fuel cells' last change to prove themselves real: Small fuel cells that recharge or even power small portable electronic devices off-the-grid have been promised for years, but technical and performance problems have delayed their coming to market. Next year may see the first few commercial releases, though they will be unfriendly to the environment (another 'disposable', and in need of constant refilling), and initially very expensive (as much as a dollar per hour's worth of fuel).
   
6. Desktop search and desktop management heats up: Software vendors are finally realizing that the up-to-30% of people's work-time spent 'looking for information' is often spent looking on users' own hard drives, not on the Internet and Intranets. Google Desktop arrived with a splash this year, and many more desktop search tools are coming. But will vendors realize that search is just the tip of the Personal Content Management iceberg?
7. Medical equipment comes 'of age': Baby boomers are fueling the demand for new medical equipment that offers therapy for patients without the use of drugs (expensive, invasive, prone to side-effects, and slow-to-market) or hands-on treatment (even more expensive, and temporary). But while self-administered treatment is exploding, baby boomers are even more enthused with self-diagnosis, doing their own on-line research and using new diagnostic kits to avoid the doctor's office entirely.
   
8. Web services allow small companies to grow up fast: New web service companies are providing, in small, affordable packages, the capabilities that big corporations developed in-house or bought from hugely expensive systems integrators and ERP vendors.
9. Asia and Europe extend their wireless lead over North America: Where 3G technologies dominate in Asian and European markets, North Americans still use their phones for voice calls and go online using cables or phone lines. Only 28% of Americans own laptops or cell phones with wireless data capability, and only a little over half of them have used that capability. The digital divide grows, on many fronts.
10. PC/TV convergence and the battle for the living-room: The much-ballyhooed convergence of the PC and the TV, and promised ubiquity of 'smart' digital appliances everywhere hasn't really happened. Why? Because for most of us, it doesn't meet a need. Too many tech vendors are overly infatuated with their own technologies, and have no appreciation of the average consumer whose main consumer electronics purchases remain the traditional 'dumb' TV and telephone. 'Smart' devices will only succeed when the companies that make them smarten up and understand the mainstream customer and his/her needs and low tolerance for complexity.
    

1. Tens of thousands seek refuge in Chad from wars in Sudan and Central African Republic
2. Ongoing oppression of civilians, war and dislocation in Chechnya
3. Tenth year of civil war in Burundi lowers life expectancy to 40, causes massive dislocation
4. Three million displaced in Columbia, infrastructure destroyed, violence & disease rampant, 'drug war' ruins economy
5. Daily terror and disease in Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo pushes 20-year death toll past three million
6. Annual death toll from malaria in sub-Saharan Africa reaches two million because $1 treatment is too expensive
7. Twelve years of violence, displacement, flooding and drought make Somalia the world's most destitute country
8. Millions of refugees fleeing starvation and terror in North Korea struggle in fear and deprivation in hostile China
9. 'Free' trade agreements deprive millions of AIDS victims in Southern Africa and elsewhere of affordable treatment
10. War, displacement and lack of medical care produces massive malnutrition in Ivory Coast and Liberia

1.  Depression is a 'natural' consequence of stress, and, as the illustration above shows, it is somewhat self-reinforcing: our DNA programs us, in situations of intense or chronic stress, to flight or flee, and if neither of those works, to shut down, withdraw, give up -- and suicide is one manifestation of shutting down and giving up;
2. If you haven't lived with the Noonday Demon, you can't possibly know what it's like, and you can't possibly know how it can lead someone to take their own life; and
3. Moral judgement of those who commit suicide is repugnant -- no one has the right to tell another human being that their personal decision to terminate their own life is 'cowardly', 'irresponsible', 'lazy', "petulant', 'immature', 'self-pitying' 'self-indulgent', 'murderous', or 'cynical and cruel'. To call someone who commits suicide a 'self-murderer' is indistinguishable from and as morally reprehensible and outrageous as calling a woman who terminates an unwanted pregnancy a 'baby murderer'.