India, China and BitTorrent

I have been thinking about the interview with the CEO of WiPro Azim Premji. This is the reason that globalization is so interesting. Azim understands that the United States is making all the wrong investments. We are not investing for the future. We are not investing in education. We are not getting to work on a coherent energy policy. Instead, Bush wants to push conservative judges, wage war in Iraq, etc.

I have a feeling about India. I think India stands poised to be the next great economic Super Power. They have the ultimate resource: educated human brains.
Out of years of weakness and decrepitude India has begun an ascent. It's hard to imagine if this will continue. But the pieces are all in place.

BitTorrent is Free Speech Tool

I'm excited by this one. I'm just now beginning to look into this one. But so far it seems like something worth delving into. The biggest question I have about something like this is how does the Chinese government feel about it?

What I like about BitTorrent is something that should be at the heart of every economic endeavor:

Cooperative distribution can grow almost without limit, because each new participant brings not only demand, but also supply

With that, you see, it is not a zero sum game. It is more like perpetual motion machine.

Peer to Peer networking is, and always has been, very exciting to me.

Microsoft bought Groove Networks. I wonder what they are doing with it. Is there some technology that they are going to use at the OS level or the Office level.

Google Me Google

Google has become something of smash hit. It is due, in fact, to the success of google that I am writing this blog. When I started seeing so much news about Google, I decided that I had to explore Google. I had to understand what they were doing and why.

I got a gmail account, I got a blog on blogger.com, I downloaded Picasa2. With all of these I'm impressed. The gmail account was interesting. I really like the fact that Google get's the fact that information should not be destroyed. It should be searched. IBM thinks keeping data around is a big waste. So emails disappear from your inbox after three months. I hate that. IBM get's angry when my email file gets close to 300MB. Google gives me 2GB of space for free. Hmmmm....

So I am corresponding with my friend and we are trying to decide on a restaurant in Boulder. And as the back forth emails and replys gets going I begin to notice advertisements in the right hand side of my email for, you guessed it, resaurants in Boulder.

So I read the T&C's and, with certainty, Google's robots read my email and dish up advertisements based on who they think I am. Interesting.

So then, I have an idea. You can set up your blog to send your postings to an email address. So I set it up to send each posting I make to my google email address. And then I look at the advertisements generated by the google in response to my posting. That turned out to be great fun. One of them had psychologists, suicide prevention and loneliness counsling advertisements. Ha Ha! I wonder what advertisments this post will generate?

Podcasting

I just watch Steve Jobs announce to the world the next great shift in the Macintosh, the shift to intel. Well done, Steve! I admire Steve Jobs. He is clearly capable of sustained genious.

Podcasting is one of the technologies that really excites me. That changes things and makes things so much more democratic. What I love about podcasting is that it truly threatens (I hope) organizations like Clear Channel and Sinclair. Certainly, from an American perspective that is important. But think about it from a Russian (or Chinese) perspective. I think of Berezovsky and Gusinsky. Those media empires (although, they have since crumbled) are far more the victims of such technology.

I remember, back at that school in Vermont, pouring over volumes of Samizdat. Samizdat to Podcasting. Wow.