[tt] Fobers: The Power of Networks

[Premise Checker]

Fobers: The Power of Networks

Here are several articles from the 7.5.7 issue of Forbes in a special
report called "The Power of Networks." I went by Googling <05.07. 07
"special report" site:forbes.com> and picked off the free ones. So I
may have omitted some and may have included others that were not part
of the series. Thanks to Jeff for the tip.

These are in Google order, not those in the magazine itself. So Dr. 
Warren's article was not the first. It is quite significant for 
Establishment followers that this noted Evangelist would appear in a 
business publication. I have seen Dr. Warren's book and think it 
unworthy of a free people, since it calls for submitting to God's 
will, not man's will. Not only does this flount Scripture: "And hee 
[Jesus] said vnto them, The Sabbath was made for man, and not man
for the Sabbath" (Mark 2:27 (original spelling)), this attidude is 
just like Mahometanism. Remember that Islam is the Arabian word for 
submission.

I only spent a couple of hours with the book, but it does preach hard 
work or Weber's worldly aeseticism. Now a problem arises if Samuel 
Francis' thesis about the managerial establishment's promoting 
hedonism is true, namely Dr. Warren's article should not be appearing 
in Forbes. Or unless the managerial elite has realized that hedonism 
has gone too far and must be replaced if America is to remain 
"competitive." If that is so, we can expect big business to change its 
attitude toward low IQ immigration.

Hey! I am being little different from the Sovietologists of yore who 
would study the lineups of Soviet bigwigs at reviewing stands for some 
great Soviet holiday or another. These experts would decode the lineup 
and tell us who was in and who was out or on their way out among the 
Soviet nomenklatura. Likewise, I'm discerning major trends by noting 
who is getting published in Forbes. The Sovietologists missed 
predicting the collapse of the U.S.S.R.

Dr. Rick Warren
The Power of Parishioners
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2007/0507/210_print.html

Utilizing the largest global network--the Church.

One of the great lessons of the 20th century is that centralized
planning and control don't work. They lead to bureaucratic
stagnation and collapse under their own weight. Decentralization is
fast, fluid and flexible. It allows exponential, viral growth.

The network is a far older and more basic organizational pattern
than the hierarchy. Our bodies, families and the environment are
just a few examples. What's different now is that technology turns
this organic paradigm of networking into a global force. It
transforms every social structure that was previously organized by
command and control. Whether in the war on terror, the presidential
campaign or American Idol, the power and effectiveness of
networking--for good or bad--is undeniable. Right now our structured
armed services are learning to fight an unstructured, networked
enemy. It's a new day and a new battle.

If drug smugglers and terrorists can use networks to their
advantage, certainly we can do the same in attacking spiritual
emptiness, corruption, poverty, disease and illiteracy. I call these
five giant problems the Global Goliaths because they affect
billions, not just millions, of people. Only a global network can
take on problems of this size.

Most readers will be surprised to learn that the largest
international network is not Wal-Mart (in 14 countries, with 1.8
million employees) or McDonald's (in 119 countries, with 465,000
employees). It is a network that links people in every country,
every social or ethnic group and every economic stratum together.
This network was global hundreds of years before Magellan. It
includes one out of every three people on the planet. It is the
Christian Church.

The Church, in all its expressions--Catholic, Evangelical,
Pentecostal, Protestant and many others--has 2.3 billion followers.
That makes it almost as large as China and India combined. The
Church speaks more languages than the United Nations and is
represented among thousands of subgroups of people that you've never
heard of.

I could take you to millions of villages around the world where the
only civil institution that exists is a church. The hamlet may have
no school, no clinic, no post office, no store--but it has a church!
In many nations, outside of the capital, the only service
organization you can find anywhere is a church. Because of the
Church's size, diversity, universality, credibility and motivation
to serve, neither business nor government can afford to ignore this
network if we are serious about working together to defeat the
Global Goliaths.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos you will hear endlessly recited
the importance of public and private partnerships in attacking
global problems. While that is certainly essential, it is not
enough. Neither business nor government has the universal
distribution, the army of volunteers or the credibility in villages
to get the job done. A one- or two-legged stool will fall over. You
need three legs.

Governments set national priorities and agendas. Their role is to
protect the people, preserve freedom, provide opportunity and
promote prosperity. Businesses and the rest of the private sector
provide capital, expertise, technology and management skills, all
vital. But the Church also brings several critical missing elements
to the table: The worldwide network of congregations offers
universal distribution, a local presence everywhere, a large pool of
motivated voluntary manpower, long-term grassroots commitment and
built-in credibility with villagers. Governments are limited by
geography and the sovereign rights of other nations. Businesses,
even multinationals, must deal with the barriers of local customs
and languages. But indigenous congregations face none of these
barriers.

For 27 years I have had the privilege of being the founding pastor
of Saddleback Community Church in Orange County, Calif. After I
completed college and seminary, my wife, Kay, and I began the
congregation in 1980. What started out as 7 people meeting in our
living room has grown into 77,000 names on our church roll, a
120-acre campus, a paid staff of more than 400 and an average
weekend attendance of 21,000. In addition our church has helped
hundreds of other new churches get started. I have gone through
every one of the typical phases that an entrepreneur goes through in
building a business.

Our church's biggest challenge is nurturing personal relationships.
I knew the names of everyone up to the first 3,000 members, then my
brain fried. The church outgrew me a long time ago. Of course, there
is no way today that I can personally meet the needs of all our
members. But I don't have to! From the start, we built the
congregation on the network principle.

Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, detailed Saddleback's
network organization in a 2005 New Yorker article. He pointed out
that one secret of our growth is our network of small groups, or
cells, that meet weekly in homes all across southern California.
While many churches sacrifice community for growth, we wanted both
and used a network structure to achieve both.

People who attend one of our six weekend services see only the tip
of the iceberg--the large group-worship celebrations. But most of
the congregation is unseen beneath the waterline. Close to 30,000
people meet weekly in 3,300 home groups spread out over 98 cities
across southern California, from Santa Barbara to the border of
Mexico. This network structure is geographically unlimited,
infinitely expandable, costs nothing, provides personal care and
contact, affords accountability and develops leadership faster than
any other approach. Our church has 9,000 commissioned lay leaders.
The small-group network structure is a leadership factory. In our
church it has turned spectators into participators, consumers into
contributors and an audience into an army.

A few years ago we took on an enormous task. Our members committed
to providing three meals a day, for 40 days, to the 42,000 homeless
people living in Orange County. The undertaking required us to serve
5.8 million meals in 6 weeks. How did we do it? With our network.
Each small group assumed responsibility for the homeless in its own
neighborhood. By decentralizing the operation among 3,300 small
groups, we accomplished what had never been done before.

Now extrapolate that potential to include the members of millions of
congregations worldwide. You can see why churches are a vital leg of
the stool.

In the early 1980s we used phones and faxes to communicate to our
network of members. In 1992 we became the first church on the
Internet. Today we use podcasts, blogs, Webcasting, text messaging
and even YouTube and MySpace to keep in touch with members.

The Church has always used the best technology of the day to
disseminate the Good News. Remember that the first book to come off
Gutenberg's press was the Bible--and within a few decades Europe
experienced the Reformation. The early Christian Church was the
ultimate viral network. Through contagious gossiping about the
Gospel, what started as a small band of believers in Jerusalem
eventually overtook the Roman Empire and grew to include one-third
of Earth's population. As Peter Drucker, my mentor for 20 years,
used to tell me: "Businesses ought to be learning from churches!"

What can business learn from churches? How to the spread the word.
My church has, in conferences and dvd training, taught 400,000
pastors around the world. I have also shared my thinking with chief
executives. Effective churches know far more about motivating
volunteers, organizing by small groups, assimilating new people,
casting vision, managing conflict, releasing talent, adopting
innovations and communicating widely than most business people
imagine. The most difficult leadership task is leading volunteers,
because you don't have the wage incentive or the threat of firing.
Volunteers only do what you inspire them to do with values and
vision.

Three recent crises demonstrate the effectiveness of the Church in
responding to problems--and why government and business must
consider it as an equal partner in humanitarian efforts: the
Indonesian tsunami, Hurricane Katrina and aids in Rwanda.

When the tsunami hit Southeast Asia, enormous amounts of resources
were delivered to the ports of those countries. But many of those
resources sat unused and rotting at the docks because there was no
grassroots distribution system in place.

In contrast, I heard about the disaster within minutes from a Sri
Lankan pastor's e-mail. We immediately notified the Southeast Asian
churches in our network to send their members from inland areas to
the coastline. Saddleback contributed $1.6 million and began
mobilizing volunteers in our network within seconds of the wave.
Residents in Asian villages were amazed at the speed with which our
network moved into action.

A similar lightning response occurred nine months later after
Hurricane Katrina. Nearby churches were the first in and the last
out. They were best prepared to help the communities because they
were the community. Articles in newspapers, and even the
government's own official assessment of Katrina, noted that churches
could provide resources and relief far more quickly than the Federal
Emergency Management Agency or the Red Cross, because they were
already on the ground and knew their own community.

For that matter, the Red Cross gets much of its labor from church
volunteers. During our work in Baton Rouge after Katrina the Red
Cross leader told me that 90% of their volunteers were church
members. The Texas Baptist Men sent in 30,000. That was just one
denomination, from one state.

A week after Katrina I spoke to the refugees camped out in Houston's
Astrodome, and I noticed all the coverage about what government
agencies were doing for those thousands of folks. But the real story
was the more than 100,000 refugees in Houston, a large number of
whom were quietly assimilated and cared for by hundreds of
congregations.

A third example is the Purpose Driven Network's work in Rwanda. At
the invitation of President Paul Kagame and a coalition of church
and business leaders in Rwanda, we created a system of cooperation
and collaboration that not only improves life in Rwanda but also
serves as a model to help neighboring countries like Burundi.

We began by listening to every segment of Rwandan society, taking
notes and asking questions. We especially listened to African
pastors and priests. Because he is one of the villagers without a
self-serving agenda, a minister has first-hand knowledge of the
village's needs. There is a saying in Africa: "The pastor sleeps in
the same blankets as the rest of the villagers."

The three-legged model of cooperation is something we call the
P.E.A.C.E. plan (partner with congregations; equip leaders; assist
the poor; care for the sick; educate the next generation). This is a
response to the five global problems I mentioned earlier: spiritual
emptiness, corruption, poverty, disease and illiteracy. To date
Saddleback Church has dispatched more than 4,000 members to more
than 65 countries to participate in P.E.A.C.E. projects, in addition
to 3,500 other members who served overseas before we launched the
plan.

In Rwanda a collaboration between the country's ministry of health,
American aids experts Dr. Robert Redfield and Dr. Robb Sheneberger
and a network of African churches came about because of the
willingness of the three sectors to work together to fight hiv. An
important fact about Africa is that many villagers are hours (on
foot) from the nearest clinic but only minutes from the nearest
church. So churches are handing out the antiviral pills.

That is the kind of thinking that has been missing in so many
previous humanitarian plans and projects. Let's use the grassroots
network that is already on the ground. It's time to lay aside our
prejudices and work together.

Dr. Rick Warren is the founder and senior pastor of Saddleback
Community Church in Lake Forest, Calif.


Chris DeWolfe
The MySpace Generation
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2007/0507/072_print.html

  How a project to feed burritos to the hungry in L.A. spread all the 
way
  to Damascus.

Last year two guys in Los Angeles came up with an elegantly simple
idea. Why not hit a grocery store, load up on tortillas, rice and
beans, go home to make burritos and distribute them to the homeless?
It's cheap, it's easy and, while it may not precisely comply with
health code regulations, it's an immediate way to feed hungry
people.

As they started their work, what would come to be known as the
Burrito Project acquired a few more friends in L.A. who liked the
idea, were up for chipping in a few bucks now and then and were
excited to cycle around town helping the homeless.

The Burrito Project guys created a MySpace page
(www.myspace.com/burritoproject) to share their work with others.
Without spending a dime on advertising, their MySpace community grew
to 4,800, and word spread to other cities. In short order burrito
projects were launched in nearby San Bernardino, Calif. and across
the country in Charlotte, N.C.

In November MySpace launched the Impact Awards
(www.myspace.com/impactawards), a program honoring individuals and
organizations having a positive effect on the world through the
site. In just days we received tens of thousands of nominations for
deserving groups, including dozens of nominations for the Burrito
Project. The MySpace community voted in overwhelming numbers, and
the Burrito Project was a landslide winner, taking home a $10,000
check and a hefty package of promotion on our site.

As a consequence the Burrito Project has gone global. There are now
projects not only in Phoenix, Detroit and Denver, but also in Mexico
City and Damascus, Syria, where MySpace users created a Falafel
Project (www.myspace.com/falafelproject).

At MySpace we've expanded rapidly overseas, launching in more than a
country a month since June of last year, but we don't have a site in
Syria and we're not yet translated into Arabic. Still, Syrians
learned about the project through MySpace and were moved enough to
act. All of which just blows me away.

People have come to expect stories about musicians or filmmakers who
get the big breaks because they were discovered on MySpace. But the
mainstream media have so far missed the boat on the extent to which
MySpace serves as a platform for doing good.

The generation that has flocked to MySpace is thought by many to be
so self-involved that it has no idea what's happening in the rest of
the world. Understandable judgment, perhaps, but it couldn't be
further from the truth. They care about community, and they're
actively engaged in civic causes. Young people balance their
interests in the latest fashions and the hottest clubs with intrigue
about going carbon-neutral and concern for entire villages being
wiped out in Darfur.

We created a site and a community that offer a truly level playing
field. It's free, it's easy and it has an equal chance to work for
everyone. We offer a democracy of ideas and tools to communicate
them.

As we create avenues for the consumption of culture, we are enabling
people-powered politics in new ways. If Thomas Paine were around
today, he wouldn't be pamphleteering, he'd be vlogging (video
blogging).

In January we ran a contest called MyState of the Union, asking
users to submit a minute of video giving their own views on what's
going on in our country. A panel of judges that included former
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and onetime White House Chief of
Staff John Podesta selected the best submissions. The day before
President Bush's address our community chose a 32-year-old from
Boise, Idaho as the winner. His message spread through MySpace, and
his appearances on broadcast and cable news outlets allowed him to
reach a broad swath of the American public (www.myspace.com/
mystateoftheunion).

The recent launch of a recut version of Apple's famous 1984
advertisement illustrates how user-generated video puts political
power back in the hands of everyday people. The defining ad of this
upcoming political cycle may not be produced by a group of Beltway
campaign hands or even this election's version of the Swift Boat
Veterans--it will come from a young person with a $100 digital
camera and Final Cut software (see story).

The MySpace generation is not reinventing political communication on
its own; modern day politicians are doing their part, as well. The
leading candidates for President have MySpace pages; some are
offering users customized banners, wallpapers and news feeds,
creating, so to speak, digital yard signs for their campaigns. But
unlike cardboard posters, these signs can be interactive, shared
virally and spread rapidly through an intricately connected virtual
neighborhood.

The MySpace generation doesn't really read newspapers or watch a lot
of television. This group shapes its views of the world through
networks of friends. In past elections it was almost impossible for
young voters to touch candidates, to interact with them directly, to
get a feel for who they are. Now citizens of the Web have the chance
to discover the issues by getting to know candidates just as they
interact with their buddies, as well as with comedians and bands.
That's why John McCain was smart to post his March Madness picks,
and John Edwards did well to offer a candid behind-the-scenes video
that didn't have an overproduced feel.

We offer a far more immediate and intuitive means of two-way
communication than has ever existed. It has the potential to
re-democratize politics--not just in America but around the world.
This is social networking at its very best. And we're only at the
very beginning. This revolution will not be televised--it will be
Webcast. It's already happening.

Chris DeWolfe is cofounder and chief executive of MySpace.


Jonathan Fahey
The Soul Of a New Laptop
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2007/0507/100_print.html

  Can a network build a potentially huge new product?

Nicholas Negroponte knew he would need a lot of help. when the
former director of the MIT media lab announced in 2005 the idea of
making $100 laptops for millions of children in the poorest nations,
his support group consisted of a couple of professors in cardigans.
The project was ambitious: This machine was not a knockoff of a Dell
or an Apple but a complete rethink, from the motherboard to the
escape key.

His solution was to open every aspect of the product's development
and design to gearheads around the world who wanted to pitch in.
Negroponte eventually negotiated formal agreements with designers
and suppliers. But at the start he envisioned a wiki undertaking and
set up a sprawling Web site (wiki.laptop.org) with dozens of pages
dedicated to the laptop's every detail--its goals and technical
specs, downloads of the latest software and problems with the latest
prototypes. Wild ideas, practical applications, skin-peeling
criticism--it's all part of the process. A loosely connected
alliance of staffers, suppliers and volunteers work out the kinks.
"There would be no way to launch and ramp in any way other than open
and viral," Negroponte says in an e-mail exchange from Taiwan, where
he is dealing with manufacturing. "A command-and-control model, the
way one runs an army, is not well suited for new ideas."

Negroponte is bound to get much of the credit or blame for the
success or failure of this laptop. But, with 1,423 people registered
on the wiki, there's really no single author. The $100 laptop,
called XO, is the result of broad collaboration, sometimes forced,
sometimes serendipitous. The same could be said for many familiar
designs, products and processes commonly attributed to a single
brilliant mind. The design of an automobile assembly line came from
a Henry Ford associate who had visited a Chicago slaughterhouse (and
might have been influenced by an assembly line created by Ransom E.
Olds a few years earlier). The iconic Jaguar E-Type of 1963 (one of
which now sits in the Museum of Modern Art in New York) was largely
the result of a designer who applied mathematics he'd learned while
creating aerodynamic World War II fighter planes, which themselves
came from many different sources.

Design often comes about through a network of ideas--some borrowed,
some stolen--that cross-pollinate. That's more easily discerned in,
say, medieval cathedrals than in art deco architecture like the
Chrysler Building. It took 500 years to cobble together St. Mark's
Basilica in Venice, beginning in 1063. Traders and crusaders going
East and West brought columns, friezes, statues and mosaics from
far-flung places that were incorporated into the church.

Now, let's compress the cathedral-building to a year or two. XO had
difficult requirements: It had to sip power, be readable in bright
sunlight, be extremely tough and sport a much more powerful antenna
in order to pick up and emit signals in isolated areas. In addition,
the laptop had to be adapted to one of eight languages and four
alphabets. Its overall appearance had to be striking enough that
kids would want one. And it had to be cheap.

One laptopmaker refused early on to get involved because, it
claimed, success would require "ten or twenty" miracles, according
to Mary Lou Jepsen, a former Intel executive now serving as the
project's chief technical officer. But the miraculous has mostly
occurred--thanks to contributions from Hawaii and Haifa, China,
California and Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Italy, Taiwan--even from
Nepal. "It's breaking all the rules of designing something," says
Jepsen. "And it's working better and faster than anything I've ever
worked on."

Negroponte's nonprofit group, One Laptop Per Child, has raised $31
million from donors such as Google, News Corp., Red Hat, Nortel and
AMD. The XO is being built by Quanta, the giant Taiwanese
laptopmaker, with AMD and Marvell chips and Red Hat--Linux-based
open-source--software. The supplier companies plan to make a small
profit on the machines. One Laptop will scrounge for grants and
other funding to help foreign governments buy and distribute the
machines to children. Thousands of late-stage prototypes have been
built in preparation for full production starting late this summer.
Nine countries have signed on to deliver several million computers.

Many technical challenges have been addressed through unlikely
collaboration. Example: access to the Internet in nations without
much dial-up or DSL or cable or Wi-Fi. One of the hardware
designers, lamenting that the antennas of traditional laptops were
buried in the display screen, asked if he could liberate them to
increase range. But industrial designers worried that external
antennas would be too fragile. At about the same time, Quanta
suggested a locking mechanism for the laptop that designers thought
was not child-friendly or durable enough. After several iterations,
the antennas now stick up like rabbit ears, but they also serve as
latches to hold the laptop closed. And they fold down to cover the
USB ports and microphone jacks, acting as dust covers. As of the
last test, the antennas could survive a 5-foot drop, open. Best,
they pick up signals from a half-mile away and then act as routers
to bounce signals along, even when the computer is off. The idea is
that a single connection in a school could reach an entire community
by bouncing from one laptop to the next.

Early in the project the laptop included a hand-crank generator to
power the battery. But designers soon found that the size, weight,
cost and torque needed to power the machine would be too great. Now
the battery is easily removable and can be charged in all sorts of
ways, like clipping it into a charger powered by a car battery or
solar panel. A Bay Area firm called Potenco came up with a handheld
accessory that charges the battery with a pull cord like the one
that starts a lawn mower.

The screen was a problem because a typical one costs $120 and uses
lots of power. So Jepsen changed the pixel layout, eliminated some
costly color filters and changed the electronics so the display
could be read even if the computer processor were dormant. Also, she
designed the display so that it could be seen in black-and-white or
color. It uses one-seventh the power of a traditional screen and
costs only $40.

Smaller parts of the computer have come from all over--from so many
sources Jepsen & Co. doesn't bother keeping track of who provided
what. An engineer in Chile wrote a piece of code that governs a
keyboard light. A group in Argentina came up with the calculator
application. The user interface is being designed in Milan. Key
parts of the operating system are being developed in Brazil.
Negroponte says an unknown wiki contributor suggested that the caps
lock key be eliminated to save space. And so it was.

Of course, not everyone who pitches in is helpful. To create a
custom wireless system, the group had to agree to use proprietary,
non-open-source software. That displeased a few, but very vocal,
folks in the open-source community. They felt so betrayed by the
decision, says Walter Bender, a One Laptop founder, that they
vilified the entire project and convinced other software designers
not to collaborate with it. But it's been nothing like the
horrendous process of designing the structure now being called the
Freedom Tower, the edifice that will stand on the site of New York
City's former World Trade Center. Tortured by demands from
developers, police departments, governments and survivors, the
building scarcely resembles the original design by Daniel Libeskind.
The current plans have been skewered by critics as the "Fear Tower."

The laptop has taken its share of hits. Bender, who is in charge of
software, says that operating in such an open manner has subjected
his project to withering criticism because so many people were
invited to see early versions nowhere near completion. "We put ideas
and machines out in the world long before a company would--we are
exposing all of our warts," he says. The computer has a thousand
bugs, all detailed for anyone to see online. "There's a risk in
showing something that isn't finished," Bender says. "But there's a
greater risk in waiting." He expects there to be 500 million laptops
in the hands of poor children five years from now--both the XO and
other low-cost models under development.

A few miracles haven't yet occurred. They haven't hit the $100
target yet; the machines still cost roughly $150 to produce. And One
Laptop Per Child hasn't figured out yet how to get the laptops to
all those kids. "We need to think about deployment as creatively as
we thought about the hardware and the software," says Jepsen. Ideas
are welcome.


Larry Brilliant, M.D., M.P.H.
The Spreading Epidemic
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2007/0507/173_print.html

  We're destroying the web of nature. Can we knit it back together?

The earth--and the delicate balance between humans, animals,
insects, air, soil and water--is the mother of all networks. But
centuries of degradation to our ecosystems are causing dramatic harm
to that web of life. In the computer world Metcalfe's Law rules: The
value of the network increases with the square of its membership
count (see story). On the planet, scale does not always increase the
value of an interconnected web.

If anything, we are the victims of what I'll call Fatcalf's Law. The
more of us there are and the more we consume, the more nightmarish
the megatrends we produce. Let's focus for a moment on Africa. Each
year Africans consume 600 million-plus wild animals-- or 2 billion
kilograms of bush meat. As the natural boundaries between humans and
animals disappear, people and game share every element of their
ecosystems, including the microbes that cause Ebola, Lassa fever,
West Nile virus, bird flu, plague, monkeypox and AIDs. In such
conditions the probability of deadly bugs hopping from animals to
humans approaches 100%.

Don't think the danger is limited to Africa. Global warming is
already having a very bad impact on health--everywhere.

Most scientific experts agree that a certain amount of global
warming--say, between 2 degrees and 3 degrees Celsius--is now
unavoidable, baked in, as it were, from the sins of the past. Even
if we stopped all carbon emissions today, we would continue to
suffer environmental effects for years to come. Heading down this
frightening path, could we see malaria reestablished in Miami (where
eight endemic cases were reported in 2003)? Or cholera in New
Orleans? Or monkeypox in Manhattan? Not to mention the ever present
threat of a bird flu pandemic.

Signs of catastrophe abound. The nonnative tiger mosquito, a vector
for diseases including dengue, yellow fever and encephalitis, is
expanding its range across North America and is set to displace more
benign native species on the back of climate change. Now able to
thrive at higher altitudes, malaria-carrying mosquitoes, which cause
1.5 million to 2 millions deaths a year, are about to spread into
northern Europe and the highlands of tropical Africa.

Over an unknown number of years rising seas will attack coastal
communities, making some regions uninhabitable and creating refugees
on nearly every continent. Saltwater will contaminate drinking
supplies and diminish harvests. Currently 1 billion-plus people do
not have access to safe water; waterborne diseases kill 5 million a
year. Roughly 1 billion people are chronically undernourished today.
As the world's population approaches 9 billion by midcentury,
demands on water and food supplies cannot possibly be met. Get ready
for resource wars. Genocide in Darfur started out as conflict over
diminishing supplies of water. Last year the Chinese government
reported 85,000 conflicts, mostly over resources, in which it called
in the military or the People's Armed Police.

Exacerbating the locked-in problems of global warming, humans today
are straining every conceivable ecological boundary. We are
displacing animal habitats, importing nonnative species when we move
or travel on exotic vacations, feeding meat products to herbivores,
dining on exotic predators and experimenting with animal
hybridization. Increased populations of humans have led to swelling
populations of animals as food sources, living in closer proximity
to one another. People are living in closer quarters, too: After
centuries of migration in search of work or a better living, 51% of
all human beings now live in cities or slums. The green barriers
that once separated humans and animals, as well as microbes peculiar
to each, are quickly disappearing.

The modern economy's advances in logistics and transportation only
accelerate these frightening trends. Thanks to the ease of
transcontinental travel, an unheard-of communicable disease from an
animal in Africa can show up in North America. Such is the dark side
of globalization. Two or three dozen newly emergent communicable
diseases are lingering, ready, with a boost from Fatcalf's Law, to
jump onto center stage.

What are we to do? We need to reduce population growth through
education, choices and widely available contraception. We must
invent better desalinization methods and prepare for a new Green
Revolution with seeds that will thrive in a brackish world. The
attack on climate change must dramatically increase financial flows
to clean energy--particularly in the developing world, most
vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Carbon trading systems
can spur this clean energy transition, as well as restore forest and
agricultural lands. And we must develop an
early-disease-detection-and-response system, a sort of AWACs for
epidemics. That requires networked technology plus a human network
of cooperative efforts by scientists, governments, nonprofit groups,
businesses and ordinary people.

There is some hope. In late 2002 and early 2003 epidemiologists in
Ottawa, Ont. were able to draw on such an Internet-based system to
identify and help stop the spread of an outbreak of SARS (severe
acute respiratory syndrome) that began in China. This particular
system is a Web crawler (the Global Public Health Intelligence
Network) that constantly scans multiple sources of information
around the world--general media, newspapers, health alerts--in
several languages. A couple of articles in China about otherwise
healthy people falling ill from unknown diseases scooped official
reports by weeks or months.

Today we have even better electronic trolling services. Google has
invested billions of dollars in search capacity. The company is
providing these tools to a consortium of disaster-response
organizations to provide earlier detection and coordinated response
to pandemics and other disasters.

Here's something else that will assist with early warnings. New
features of the International Health Regulations, which go into
effect in June, for the first time permit the World Health
Organization to accept reports of new diseases, and new cases of old
diseases, from sources other than government officials. This is big.
It will allow scientists like Nathan Wolfe--a professor of
epidemiology at UCLA who has spent most of the last five years in
Cameroon establishing a network of hunters to supply blood samples
from themselves and the animals they eat to check for new
viruses--to report quickly any novel animal diseases. Even more
critically, the new regs empower ordinary people to notify the right
authorities, without getting snarled in politics, commercial
interests or bureaucracy.

Help, at last, may be on the way for the mother of all networks.

Larry Brilliant, M.D. and Master of Public Health, is executive
director of Google.org.


Frederick W. Smith
A Budding Network
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2007/0507/064_print.html

  The many hands--and connections --that go into overnight delivery

Information about the package is as important as the package
itself." I said that in 1978, five years after FedEx created the
modern express industry. Please don't misunderstand me. We care a
lot about what's inside the box, but the ability to track and trace
shipments and thereby manage inventory in motion revolutionized
logistics. Of course, back then I couldn't have imagined what we'd
be witnessing today: the vast and steady integration of the world's
economy into one giant interdependent global network.

Global integration is not a new phenomenon. It happened in the Roman
era, over a network of roads; it happened during the Renaissance,
when trading and merchant companies crisscrossed oceans; and it
happened in the 19th century, with help from railroads and
telegraphs. But today it's happening faster than ever before and it
means the dispersion of products and services of the widest breadth
imaginable to every corner of the world.

We can now get our computer problems solved in minutes by a phone
rep in India or get a same-day medical consultation by doctors in
Tokyo, London and New York. And we can ship high-tech and
high-value-added goods within one to two business days,
door-to-door, virtually anywhere on the planet.

We couldn't do any of this without complex information networks.
FedEx spends roughly $1.5 billion a year on information technology.
Some rough numbers will give you an idea of why. Every second of
every day we have to handle 3,000 transactions, as well as 1,000
inquiries on the status of a package. Orders go out to 70,000
handheld devices carried by our couriers and contractors and
millions of our customers' desktops. Every day FedEx handles 6
million shipments around the globe. We have close to 7,000 people in
IT overseeing what Rob Carter, our chief information officer,
understatedly calls "an intense computing environment."

Our networks link 275,000 team members and help operate 677 aircraft
and 70,000-plus trucks worldwide. These systems have recently helped
deliver some unusual shipments:

   Penguins and sea otters back to their aquarium in New Orleans
almost a year after Hurricane Katrina destroyed their home.

   504,000 bottles of Beaujolais Nouveau from Lyon-Saint Exupéry
Airport to wine buyers in Japan.

   40 tons of valuable artifacts from the doomed ocean liner R.M.S.
Titanic, which were marooned at customs in Athens, Greece, to
Atlanta, in time for an important exhibition.

However, the complexity of our job is best illustrated in a
deceptively simple task: sending flowers to your mom for Mother's
Day. Talk about something that absolutely, positively has to be
there overnight. Let's follow that order along the physical network
of roads, airports and fiber-optic cables, as well as the economic
networks of business partners and social networks on the Web.

You're in New York City, and your mom lives in Phoenix. You go
online to place an order for two dozen roses from, say,
ProFlowers.com. (The company is headquartered in San Diego, but its
roses may come from Rio de Janeiro and arrive, with precustoms
clearance, in Miami.) ProFlowers generates a shipping label and
notifies FedEx Express, which assigns the order a tracking number
and dispatches a courier who scans that number, triggering a
notification event to the FedEx and ProFlowers networks and to the
customer that the roses have been picked up in ProFlowers'
distribution center. Once in FedEx's hands the flowers will be
worked into our network and will head to our World Hub in
Memphis--which accommodates 400 flights and 1.5 million-plus
packages every day; more than 15,000 employees can sort up to
500,000 packages an hour.

Your mom's roses have a distinct bar code that signals they're
headed for Phoenix. At the Hub the flowers are scanned and sorted so
they can make their final destination. After a cross-country
journey, the flowers arrive in Phoenix. By the time they reach your
mom the roses will have been scanned at least 14 times, so that you
can track the flowers as they move through our system. The roses are
delivered by a FedEx courier and, depending on which service you
choose, the entire transaction--from online order to signed box of
flowers--can take as little as 24 hours.

As revolutionary as it was to provide customers the visibility to
track packages online, which we introduced in 1994, customers now
expect such service. But a pilot initiative we're working on will
soon let you see the progress on a real-time basis, with the aid of
tools like Google Maps. Packages will become "smarter." That is,
they'll be able to communicate to FedEx if their environments become
too hot or too cold, or if light has penetrated the package,
indicating a possible security breach. FedEx SmartPackage, or active
sensor technology, has the ability to dynamically locate, track and
provide information about shipments.

This networked world makes for interesting times. At FedEx our
ultimate product is access. It's always been that way, since people
first began trading with each other. Except today the network of
commerce is virtually everyone, everywhere--right now.

Frederick W. Smith is chairman, president and chief executive of
FedEx.


Rupert Murdoch
Mixed Media
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2007/0507/138_print.html

  Traditional companies are feeling threatened. I say, bring on the
  changes.

Everyone knows that networking--once a face-to-face affair,
sometimes captured in a Rolodex--is now worldwide, instant, and
impervious to constraints of distance, time or cost.

Those of us in so-called old media have also learned the hard way
what this new meaning of networking spells for our businesses. Media
companies don't control the conversation anymore, at least not to
the extent that we once did. The big hits of the past were often, if
not exactly flukes, then at least the beneficiaries of limited
options. Of course a film is going to be a success if it's the only
movie available on a Saturday night. Similarly, when three networks
divided up a nation of 200 million, life was a lot easier for
television executives. And not so very long ago most of the daily
newspapers that survived the age of consolidation could count
themselves blessed with monopolies in their home cities.

All that has changed. Options abound. Fans of small niches can now
find new content they could never before. Going elsewhere for news
and entertainment is easier and cheaper than ever. And people's
expectations of media have undergone a revolution. They are no
longer content to be a passive audience; they insist on being
participants, on creating their own material and finding others who
will want to read, listen and watch.

Consequently the old media are threatened by the erosion of our
traditional profit centers. Certainly we can't count on things like
print classified advertising being around forever. Similarly, DVRs
undermine the mainstay of broadcast television's business model: the
commercial.

Nonetheless, it would be wrong to conclude from this that the age of
content is over. On the contrary, people want content more than
ever, and there is a role for companies that can provide good
stuff--"good" being the operative word. Quality is more important
than ever, because the marketplace is more ruthlessly competitive.
Options are not merely one click of the remote away; devices
undreamed of a few short decades ago are at least as tempting as a
change of the channel.

Old media can survive--and thrive--in this new environment, but they
must adapt. We must learn how younger generations of consumers
prefer to receive their news and entertainment, and we must meet
those expectations.

The good news is that we are learning--and fast. Take the type of
media I know best--news. News is in more demand than ever, but the
vast network of Internet-savvy news junkies want their news with
several fresh twists: constantly updated, relevant to their daily
lives, complete with commentary and analysis, and presented in a way
that allows them to interact not just with the news but with each
other about the news. They won't wait until six o'clock to watch the
news on television or until the next morning to read it in
isolation. This plainly provides a challenge for news providers but
also an opportunity to be far more engaged with the audience.

Companies that take advantage of this new meaning of network and
adapt to the expectations of the networked consumer can look forward
to a new golden age of media. Far be it from me to suggest that
either I or my company have all the answers. No one does. But the
future of media is a future of relentless experimentation and
innovation, accelerating change, and--for those who embrace the new
ways in which consumers are connecting with each other--enormous
potential.

Rupert Murdoch is chairman of News Corp.


Janice Roberts
The New Girls Network
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2007/0507/116_print.html

  Talent goes a long way in Silicon Valley. So does staying connected.

Melissa McJannet joined the Mayfield Fund seven years ago after
getting a degree from Stanford Graduate School of Business. In no
time she distinguished herself from new hires in the venture
industry. She was willing to look beyond the obvious for investment
possibilities. She worked closely with me on Convedia, a firm that
produces IP media servers and was our first Canadian investment.
Mayfield sold that to Radisys this year. We also collaborated on
Mobileway, an early mobile-messaging company in France, which we
sold to Sybase last year for $400 million.

Melissa and I sifted through stacks of business plans, flew to meet
with prospects and spent hours discussing the relative merits of
entrepreneurs, as well as what kinds of experts--from customers to
suppliers--to pair them with. They were among my most exciting years
at Mayfield. Melissa's network of young professionals helped me
realize the importance of text over voice. As a native Canadian, she
helped navigate us through governance issues.

Today Melissa is a principal at TD Capital, a Toronto firm that
manages $2 billion in private equity assets on behalf of pension
plan sponsors, endowments and financial institutions. On her
recommendation TD Capital invested in Mayfield's first fund in
China, which closed in January with $200 million in capital. I have
no doubt that our relationship will prove increasingly valuable to
me and to my firm.

You could call it the New Girls Network. It's growing one
introduction at a time and often by serendipity. It's a small,
informal but thriving group of competitive and talented women who
respect but don't revere tradition. They look to performance more
than pedigree; their idea of chat is a conference call between Menlo
Park, London, Shanghai and Bangalore.

A few things have changed since I arrived in Silicon Valley from the
U.K. 16 years ago after selling my company, BICC Data Networks, to
3Com Corp. Well-meaning friends and colleagues congratulated me on
my good fortune. "It'll be so much better for you in the States,"
they assured me. "Professional women are embraced there." Well, that
was not quite the case. Europe was more traditional but
group-oriented; the U.S. was--and still is--much more focused on the
individual. But I adapted my style and must say that I have never
felt compromised by being a woman.

Nor, I suspect, have any of the pioneering women executives here in
the Valley. Among them: Carol Bartz, executive chairman of Autodesk;
Judy Estrin, former chief technology officer of Cisco Systems, who
sits on the boards of Walt Disney and FedEx; Audrey Maclean,
Stanford University professor and angel investor; and Heidi Roizen,
a managing director of Mobius Capital. Many of these women are now
involved in entrepreneurial pursuits--by example and
coaching--encouraging the next wave of women to excel in the
high-tech world.

My experiences and network served me well by the time I joined
Mayfield in the summer of 2000. Now I handle investments in
communications, networking and mobile applications. As a venture
capitalist I can give support and guidance by way of an investment,
a reference or an introduction. And I often find that the favor gets
reciprocated. We do it not out of obligation but because it's good
business. The girls rarely disappoint.

Julie Meyer of Ariadne Capital, a global investment and advisory
firm in London, came to see me in 2005 after hearing me speak at a
conference. She was accompanied by the founder of a company looking
for an American investor. I didn't invest--not then, at least--but
hit it off with Julie instantly. I was impressed with her energy,
determination and knowledge of her portfolio companies.

We stayed in touch, and Julie continued to introduce me to
entrepreneurs in her transatlantic network. Eighteen months ago she
brought me to William Barhydt, who founded Sennari, a Cupertino,
Calif. company that provides mobile customer-relationship
management. Mayfield led Sennari's next round of funding; I now sit
on the board, and Julie continues to be an adviser to the company.
She and I are jointly working on new deals, and I expect at least
one to lead to an investment.

Patricia Nakache of Trinity Ventures and I got to know each other
through a joint investment in PlayFirst, a publisher of casual games
largely targeted at women and families. We were brought together by
another network girl, Dana Settle, at that time a partner at
Mayfield. (Women partners are still scarce at VC firms.) Since
working on PlayFirst, two Mayfield partners (men) have invested in
two more deals with Patricia: Jobster, a job and recruiting search
engine, and Affinity Labs, a portal serving nurses and policemen,
among others.

Our network continues to adapt and grow. The Forum for Women
Entrepreneurs & Executives provides 350 members with introductions,
mentorship and funding. It has a heavy weighting to Silicon Valley,
but programs like "Entrepreneurship from the Perspective of Women,"
organized by Stanford's business school, have become international
in scope, and so have the discussions. Women no longer talk about
glass ceilings and balancing children and careers. They want to know
about running companies, how to get capital and from whom, and
whether an overseas stint is vital to a curriculum vitae.

Recently I hosted a Six Degrees of Separation dinner for roughly
three dozen women at a Moroccan restaurant in San Francisco. No one
complained about the difficulties of being female in Silicon Valley.
How far would any of these women have gotten if they had dwelled on
obstacles rather than on possibilities? No, this was a celebration.
At the end of the evening I had a case of Moët & Chandon from which
to award bottles to the women who could claim connections to six
others at the table. Two guests walked off with a bottle. The dinner
will become an annual event, a chance for us to commemorate how far
we've come. Someday I'll carry home an empty champagne case.

Janice Roberts is a managing director at the Mayfield Fund.


Jimmy Wales
Open-Door Policy
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2007/0507/190_print.html

  How do you create a new search engine based on trust--and still keep 
out
  the creeps?

Who doesn't love Google? When it comes to search' there are few
better models.

But I can imagine a better one. That's why, in December, I announced
Wikia Search, a new service we hope to launch sometime in the fourth
quarter. Why go to all that trouble? Because the typical search site
operates by secrecy. Since no one publishes the all-essential
algorithms that produce the results, you really don't know who's
ranking a particular category or search like "cell coverage in Palo
Alto" or on what basis. With Wikia Search you will. We will publish
all our algorithms as open-source software' and we will explain our
ranking system in plain English. The Internet functions best when
its protocols are available to everyone' when the entire system is
open and transparent.

One other important difference from what's already out there: Just
as with Wikipedia, we intend to turn over full editorial control to
our community of users. A free culture is part and parcel of free
software; it relies on trust and friendliness. And there is wisdom
in crowds, even--perhaps I should say especially--in crowds of
volunteers and amateurs. Google is proud of its Ph.D.s and its
eigenvectors. So be it. But mathematics can take you only so far. At
some point you need a more human touch--gut instinct or wild
imagination.

A six-year-old can look at a screen and recognize spam. Algorithms
aren't yet very good at that sort of detection (check your e-mail
inbox to see how easily the antispam software is fooled!). Perhaps
our community of users can come up with novel ways to solve
pattern-matching problems like that. And maybe the volunteers can
invent algorithms to overcome one of the biggest problems of
existing search services: ambiguity. If you type in a search for
"Paris Hilton," for example, do you mean the celebrity or a French
hotel?

Openness and trust are at the core of Wikia Search. But how do you
maintain a friendly system and still keep out troublemakers? Pretty
much the same way Wikipedia is policed. Curse words, blanking pages,
false inserts and other forms of delinquency are pretty easy to deal
with. Admins, the thousand or so cops on the site, can block
difficult users, delete entries, take away editing privileges from
certain users, revert (or restore) entries. The core community of
contributors is vigilant, too, and fixes improprieties
quickly--often within seconds. That's because this community rallies
around a couple of core concepts: neutrality and quality. The system
isn't perfect, of course, as anyone who has followed various
Wikipedia news headlines knows. There are errors, and sometimes
quite embarrassing ones. But the system has a way of ferreting out
errors and correcting them.

As it happens, the hardest areas for us to keep an eye on are
noncontroversial subjects that don't draw a lot of interest. It can
be harder to detect a serious error about an obscure Chinese emperor
than about the war in Iraq, because fewer contributors are
constantly watching and debating such entries.

Wikia Search will undoubtedly draw vandals, too. We expect spammers,
folks with a grudge or bias, or simply self-interested people who
hope to skew a search result to their economic advantage. We have
some idea of the things that could go wrong' and we have ideas for
tools to correct them. We will use a combination of software, the
reputation of the participants and a deep knowledge of good and bad
behavior patterns on the Internet.

But the great lesson of the Web 2.0 era is that to control quality,
you don't lock things down; you open them up. Dmoz.org, the open
directory project that aimed to organize the Internet, responded to
repeated spam attacks by becoming a closed community, by requiring
applicants to wait months or years before being accepted as an
editor and by making the system less transparent. This was a
reasonable response in the Web 1.0, but it prevented Dmoz from
achieving its early promise. As a result, the site has become less
influential over time.

Leave your doors unlocked and your windows open' and creeps will
sometimes come in. But the way to chase them out before they cause
harm is to have plenty of friendly neighbors who are looking after
your interests, which turn out to be remarkably similar to theirs.
We all have a fundamental interest in liberty and openness, for
ourselves and for others, and as much so online as in the real
world.

Jimmy Wales is the founder of Wikipedia and chairman of Wikia Inc.


Chad Hurley
YouToo
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2007/0507/068_print.html

  Where content is king--and little-known talent gets launched

We are at an unprecedented time in the history of entertainment
media. Never before has the opportunity been so great for
independent writers and actors, musicians and producers to create
compelling content on par with the studios, networks and labels.
With easy and affordable access to cameras, editing software and
computing power, the playing field has been truly leveled.

Since the site's earliest days we believed YouTube would play an
important role in this new paradigm. We have built a distribution
mechanism that has an unrivaled ability to get content into the
hands of consumers anytime and anywhere, effectively democratizing
entertainment. This has been the key to building the largest and
most passionate community for online video.

The relationship between online video and the big media companies
has been in the news a lot these days. Many people reporting on this
seem to feel that there is a dividing line between old media and new
media. We don't see the world in those terms.

We believe, and our current content partners agree, that we can help
these companies evolve, build their audience and establish new
revenue streams, enabling us to enjoy a symbiotic relationship. We
are thrilled that so many forward-thinking media companies and
content creators have already partnered with us, and we expect these
partnerships to be an important part of our growth in the years to
come.

On the flip side, undiscovered talents have built audiences on
YouTube big enough to generate serious interest from the traditional
entertainment world. Production companies, talent agencies and
record labels are embracing this new era.

LisaNova, YouTube name for the Los Angeles actress Lisa Donovan,
uploaded her first video to YouTube less than a year ago. In that
short amount of time she has attracted a cult following. Her skits
satirizing people like Rush Limbaugh and Keira Knightley have had a
combined 11.4 million views. A network of loyal fans anxiously
awaits each new post and shares those videos with their friends.
Recognizing this passionate built-in fan base, Fox's MadTV recently
signed LisaNova for four episodes.

YouTube represents the first time media has become truly democratic
for both the audience and the content creators. For the big
established entertainment companies it's also an opportunity: It
lowers the risk in taking on new talent. We believe YouTube is
helping the big media companies expand their audience and stay
relevant in a marketplace that is changing quickly. The site allows
both sides to exploit a low-cost entry, a vast worldwide audience
and an unlimited supply of entertaining content. It's the ultimate
audition venue.

Consider how the comedy team of Luke Barats and Joe Bereta, a.k.a.
BaratsAndBereta, got their start. The pair, who began collaborating
in 2003 at Gonzaga University, had never performed outside their
native Spokane, Wash. before NBC signed them to a one-year deal to
develop series programming in January. They started uploading comedy
sketches to YouTube on Dec. 28, 2005 and have so far drawn 16.4
million views for 26 videos lasting from 39 seconds to 5 minutes.

YouTube is more than a library of clips. It's also a network of
audience members who engage content in a different way than
previously possible and spread success stories by word of mouth.
Some rise to fame because of one viral hit, others build a
consistent following over time.

In addition to the stars we have had the pleasure of watching rise
to fame in the past several months, there are many professional
content creators (and marketers, for that matter) who have smartly
fashioned content specifically for the YouTube community and have
already begun to share in the revenue earned against that content.
We have well over 1,000 partnerships with outfits such as the BBC,
the NBA and Sundance Channel, each of which makes use of YouTube as
a platform for distribution, promotion and monetization while
reaching a vast new audience.

The market for content is now much larger than it was before, and
that expansion has put us in a unique position. No one media company
will make or break this business. It's going to take the thousands,
possibly millions, of skillful content creators throughout the world
coming together in new ways to build the YouTube experience over the
next several years.

As this model evolves, we will see benefits to the creators and the
users that have never been possible before. We are exploring a
variety of options for monetizing this model, similar to the
revenue-sharing mechanisms we already have in place with our
partners, rewarding our loyal community and recognizing the most
popular content.

In the next three to five years this growth will only increase,
whether on mobile devices, among our broadly expanding international
audience or anywhere that people enjoy an online video experience.
YouTube is at the forefront of a rapidly emerging marketplace, and
those who embrace this change, helping us to define and shape it,
will reap the greatest rewards.

Chad Hurley is cofounder and chief executive of YouTube.


Philip Rosedale
Alter Egos
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2007/0507/076_print.html

  Second Life is a hot place to try out new business ideas.

With a growing commercial real estate business, you are meeting with
your people around a huge mahogany table to discuss a proposed art
gallery. Everyone looks fairly human, but someone is wearing a fox
suit, and there's a guy who looks like one of those colonial marines
from Aliens. You can learn a lot about everyone this way--by seeing
whom they have chosen to become with a few mouse clicks. You ask
whether a particular piece of property has yet been developed, and
the person next to you vanishes into thin air and reappears 60
seconds later with a report; he has just gone "there". Through the
windows you can see a gigantic blimp cruising by, trying to steal
your employees with video ads of job offers. It can't come into your
office, but it can hover at the edge. A model of the gallery floats
in the center of the table for everyone to inspect.

You are the only one in the group who lives in the U.S. Your most
trusted partner is someone you've never met face-to-face: a
20-year-old woman from Portugal. There is more laughing and fun than
in a normal meeting, and bad ideas don't live as long. The room is
paneled with live screens showing every detail of the business and
painfully accurate readouts of how everyone is doing with different
aspects of the project. You have known them only a few months and
probably won't work together longer than another six, but you will
have learned more about collaboration, communication and culture
than you would in a half-dozen years in New York.

This isn't the Matrix, but it's in the same neighborhood. This
virtual world, where 3-D software and broadband networking let you
download a small application that transports you to the surface of a
new planet, is a digital re-creation of reality, where everything
you see, like the Web, is owned and created by hundreds of thousands
of people from around the world. But unlike the Web, this is a
living space filled with other real people behaving much as they do
in the real world. In other words, it's a lot more than a videogame.
It's a place where real companies and real entrepreneurs can try out
new product designs, hold press conferences and get feedback from
customers. You can go on to Second Life and test-drive a Toyota
Scion.

In the world of Second Life, a rich network connects innovators and
their ideas to help each other create better products. Here, a Los
Angeles toymaker prototypes new toys; a violinist from London
becomes a successful virtual architect; an entrepreneur sets up a
business to create real-world 3-D replicas of your avatar (or
onscreen alter ego) to sit on your desk; and a Brooklyn supermarket
manager quits his job to design virtual clothing full-time using the
name Crucial Armitage. Second Life has become a sort of singles bar
for entrepreneurs--an inexpensive place to test your ideas and show
your results to other like-minded people.

How do you join? Go to the site, register with your avatar and go to
an orientation island to meet other new members and find out how to
navigate, dress yourself and buy and sell virtual goods and
services. You can buy an island and set up a golf course, movie
theater, hotel, summer camp--to have fun or make real money.

There's a virtual economy underlying this phantom world. To buy and
sell things, you first acquire Linden dollars on the Lindex, a
currency exchange market: Hand in a real U.S. dollar (via PayPal or
a credit card) and you get 266 Linden dollars. That's a free-market
price determined by supply and demand, just as in the real-world
market for yen and euros.

What would L$266 buy? A couture outfit, a car, a pair of boots, a
sofa or a small house. A 16-acre island costs $1,695 of real money;
from there you can promote real goods and services.

Every object in Second Life starts with a cube--a.k.a. a
"primitive," or "prim"--that you can stretch or bend into any shape;
we provide the 3-D modeling tools. If you create a pen, say, you can
choose to copy it for sale. Your buyer's Linden dollars go into your
virtual account. To pull real dollars out of Second Life, you can
sell them on the Lindex. Over the last year the number of people
receiving money for goods and services from others in Second Life
has jumped sevenfold to 209,000. Recently the total (virtual) money
supply was L$1.9 billion.

The real-world San Francisco firm that developed SL, Linden Lab,
gets its real dollars in three ways: selling virtual real estate
(islands, plots of land, a city block, for example); monthly fees,
which range from $10 to $295, to "maintain" a piece of property; and
a small fee on currency exchange transactions. Participants who
merely visit without owning property pay nothing.

The world inside the host computers is an ideal environment for
entrepreneurs, who can expect low barriers to market entry, few
natural monopolies and an ability to rapidly develop new ideas that
can turn into real products and services. American Apparel, for
example, opened a store that let members' avatars try out
clothes--and, via a link, to buy them in real life.

Transparency and reuse of content make Second Life more hospitable
to innovation than real life. It is very easy to see how your
neighbor's business is doing and to share product ideas. Many
interactive objects in Second Life (for example, a wristwatch with
moving hands that tells the correct time) are built on small chunks
of scripted code that can easily be passed among builders. For just
about every interesting type of interactive content, there is
someone hosting a "sandbox" with free examples that innovators can
work from. Second Life is being built not just by the dozens of
programmers employed by Linden but also by the thousands of
computer-skilled participants who have contributed bits of code.

Flying machines in Second Life illustrate the point. In early 2004
Linden released a set of programming interfaces that would allow
users to take any object you were sitting on and turn it into a
"vehicle." It could move over the ground or through the air while
realistically responding to mouse or keyboard controls. We released
two very primitive vehicles--a motorcycle and a flying
surfboard--that were freely transferable between users and contained
programming code (in the Linden scripting language, which is
comparable to C++) that everyone could examine. It was very easy to
pop the hood and start making changes, modifying the hoverboard,
say, to fly like an airplane. That's just what was done by an
intrepid software writer working under the screen name Huns Valen.
He created a Flying 1.0 program that modified our original examples
to allow nice airplanes to be made--and gave it away.

Three years later thousands of derivations of those original
programs exist. There are vertical takeoff and landing aircraft with
heads-up displays--think of those simulations on fighter-jet
screens--and rocket launchers. You can buy a glider or fly a dragon
with wings. Although the physics simulation currently in Second Life
isn't accurate enough to help design real airplanes, it's easy to
imagine how this might be possible in the near future.

Information about how to modify and create ever more sophisticated
machines spreads quickly in Second Life. For every clever new idea,
at least one designer is willing to serve up his code for the fun of
being remembered as the guy who seeded the design community. For
example, within weeks of our introducing heads-up display technology
a designer screen-named Yadni Monde started giving away an editable
"emote" heads-up display that lets your avatar change facial
expressions. Such altruism can pay off: You might parlay a giveaway
into a great programming job.

Second Life competes in many ways with the real world, offering
better ways to collaborate, meet people and build things. In the
past few months 4,000 IBMers have flooded into Second Life to
brainstorm, hold meetings for workers dispersed around the globe and
prototype new shopping experiences for customers. Starwood Hotels
tried out its upcoming Aloft hotels by building one in Second Life
and hosting virtual parties where "guests" wandered through the
hotel and gave design feedback. Most inspiring, thousands of people
from all over the world are making a secondary income, creating
businesses and selling things in Second Life with no more required
of them than their own ingenuity and a PC. With the introduction of
new technologies like 3-D voice, which will let SL residents speak
to each other, and Web integration, the virtual lab, with its low
costs and cross-fertilizing possibilities, becomes an ever more
attractive alternative to old-fashioned reality.

Philip Rosedale is the founder and chief executive of Linden Lab,
which produces Second Life.


Howard Dean
Wikipartia
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2007/0507/094_print.html

  How the Web is restoring democracy to politics.

The Internet is the most significant tool for building democracy
since the invention of the printing press. People are now easily
able to create, discover and connect with networks within hours,
anywhere around the globe.

This connectedness is creating a huge shift in power as ordinary
citizens decide what's important and most relevant to them. They can
network with like-minded individuals to create a technology-enabled
global grassroots movement. New local and global communities are
being formed that demand two-way communication with and authenticity
from their leaders. Technology has dramatically lowered the barriers
to entry for ordinary people who are now able to connect and create
networks that are not constrained by geographic boundaries. These
communities include college students, union workers, ethnic groups
and grandparents mobilizing for shared causes or interests.

The implications for political parties are tremendous. Political
power resides with the public; it has only been loaned to us
politicians. It does not work its way from the top down. It grows
from the grass roots up. Fundraising, for example, is critical to a
campaign, but in the race to build support and momentum for a
campaign, those who do so only by reaching out to the largest donors
are missing something. Campaigns must show they can garner support
from a substantial number of small donors.

This is much larger than a mere organizing strategy. We're talking
about reconfiguring communities locally, nationally and globally--a
phenomenon demonstrated dramatically during my presidential campaign
as we tracked the spectacular growth of declared supporters online.
Those who supported us on the Internet weren't isolated individuals
writing in to our blog or sending in $10. Supporters didn't just
raise money; they formed service corps and volunteer projects to
make donations to food banks and clothing drives, to deliver toys to
needy kids at Christmas. They met one another online and, in finding
they were no longer alone, felt empowered.

Political parties have to evolve with the times: If we don't, we
lose. Power is shifting away from centralized messaging and toward
voters who demand that politicians listen to them before speaking to
them. Traditionally, campaigns have relied too much on advertising
and not enough on listening to people. Ads and other forms of
communicating with voters remain important, but if that's all you
do, you can't win. Candidates shouldn't treat online communities
like an ATM or expect them to "fall in line." These are networks of
real people united by issues they care about. These communities will
question leadership constantly, and now they have the power to
change the course of campaigns and their outcomes.

The 2006 election saw the emergence of 22 Democratic candidates in
"red districts" who won largely because of the grassroots
organizations their campaigns built, thus providing a majority for
House Democrats. The victory of Jim Webb in Virginia, which gave
Senate Democrats their majority, was largely possible because of two
networks. The first was organized by antiwar activists who propelled
Webb to victory in the primary. The second network was built in less
than a week by voters who used YouTube to publicize an offensive
ethnic comment by Senator Allen. Both networks were built by
Democrats outside the formal structure of the party. While the party
and committees contributed expertise and money to Webb's campaign,
Webb could not possibly have won without the extraordinary actions
of mainly anonymous people who organized themselves to create
change, often reacting to developments in the campaign in a matter
of hours.

Campaigns will, of course, use the Internet to manage things like
grassroots events, phone banks and printable lists for door-to-door
campaigning. Presidential candidates have staffs dedicated to
organizing and listening to people online and making campaigns more
transparent and accessible. Online fundraising is a vital part of
any serious campaign.

But candidates and campaign staffs cannot control this movement.
Volunteers will form online communities around certain candidates if
they are motivated to do so--volunteers like the grandmother of a
DNC staffer, who ventured online and ended up helping Sherrod Brown,
now the Democratic senator from Ohio, defeat Mike DeWine. Networks
set up solely for the sake of collecting data, steering the debate
or raising money are likely to insult potential supporters instead
of engaging them. This applies to campaign Web sites and blogs,
listservs set up by political operatives and artificial grassroots
movements (a.k.a. "astroturf"). Fundamental trust in your users is
the only way to have a successful relationship with them.

That is a revolutionary idea, one that politicians are not
particularly comfortable with. But it's now the reality. The power
in campaigns now belongs as much to these shifting networks of
committed citizens as it does to the political establishment.

From the beginning of my tenure as chairman of the DNC I've said
that Democrats have to show up everywhere and campaign everywhere to
ask for people's votes. This includes the way we interact with
communities online. Networks of ordinary people and Net activists
are part of a movement, not just a political party. In the
Democratic Party we are focused on connection, empowerment and
community organizing.

PartyBuilder, available on our site, is a facilitator. It helps
people connect national issues to things that matter in their
communities. We developed social networking software, much like
MySpace or Facebook, and tailored it to political activism. We also
gave everyone the power to set personal fundraising goals, complete
with the thermometer-like graphic that tracked fundraising during my
presidential campaign. When you organize an event or write a blog
post through PartyBuilder, you can assign it to any or all of the
groups you've joined. Right alongside all this new technology we
provide traditional ways to get involved--the same Letter to the
Editor and petition functions that we've always had also live within
PartyBuilder. And very soon we'll be rolling out a reward system to
recognize individual members and groups for the time and effort they
put into building the party through this technology.

In the long run these community-built networks may have an even more
dramatic impact in bringing democracy to other parts of the world,
like China and Iran. Nations run by authoritarian forces cannot stop
this dynamic of technology-enabled citizens networking together. The
hundreds of thousands of networking citizens will find ways to
circumvent and evade government interference in the free exchange of
ideas.

Repressive governments at the helm of nations that would become
world or regional powers face a Hobson's choice. They can allow
democracy to flourish on the Internet, or they can destroy the
technology that enables their brightest and most determined citizens
to network--and fall backward into Third World status.

America can still win the battle for a democratic world. The most
important weapon is a free, open, commercially and politically
unfettered Internet that empowers ordinary people from across the
globe to speak and act in the interests of their own communities.

Howard Dean is chairman of the Democratic National Committee.


Seth Godin
Your Product, Your Customer
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2007/0507/090_print.html

  Delivering your message in a networked world.

Entrepreneurs, big company chief executives and
marketers--especially marketers--are control freaks. We do what we
do because we want to be in charge, and we insist on being
responsible. Media work is custom-made for control freaks. You write
the ad, you film the ad, you pick the medium, you pay your
money--and take your chances.

Great brands and great companies have been built on the back of mass
media. You fill your funnel with attention and slowly turn that
attention into cash. Traditionally that's how marketers convert
strangers into customers. Whoever has the biggest funnel wins. TV is
a great funnel filler, and so is direct mail. For a while it even
seemed that Internet banners would keep the attention coming,
cheaper and cheaper, in large volume. Best of all, you could control
just about every element of the process.

Bad news for control freaks everywhere: Your funnel is broken and
you're not in charge anymore. AMR, Verizon, Microsoft--you've all
got problems, and you're not the only ones. American Airlines might
spend $1 million or more on a TV ad campaign and purchase only 100
new first-class customers as a result.

What's a marketer to do? You can try to fill the funnel by running
innovative ads. You can patch the leaks in your funnel by hiring a
cooler agency.

Or you can try something new. First, flip the funnel; turn it into a
megaphone. But not as a device to yell at people who don't want to
hear from you. Instead, hand the megaphone to your best customers,
who can help turn their friends and colleagues into your new best
customers.

When JetBlue entered the cutthroat airline business, it didn't do it
with clever ads. It installed tvs on the back of every seat and
hired the nicest people it could find. The result? The network was
activated. Passengers who were attracted by the low price turned
into evangelists, eagerly telling everyone not about the fares but
about the experience. JetBlue can't control what people
say--especially when it gets caught unprepared in the middle of a
snowstorm. But it sure influences their conversations by doing
things that are remarkable. When David Neeleman, JetBlue's chief
executive, responded with a mea culpa, the audience responded. Not
everyone stuck to the script, but his actions had a huge influence
on what people said and how they felt.

The network was always there, but the Internet makes it powerful. It
amplifies the happy user and spreads the word. But beware: It also
boosts the volume of unhappy users.

Before George Vaccaro, an IT consultant, traveled to Canada with his
PDA, he checked with Verizon about charges for downloading on his
trip. The phone company quoted him 0.002 cents per kilobyte. When he
got back, he discovered that he'd been charged a hundred times that.

Rather than shrugging off the $71 bill, he created a blog about the
charge and his quest to have it fixed (verizonmath.blogspot.com). To
date he's received hundreds of thousands of visitors and attention
from around the world. That's what happens when you ignore the
megaphone.

Thanks to the network, it's easier than ever to find your best
customers and to broadcast their views. Amazon is filled with page
after page of positive reviews by delighted (and uncompensated)
customers. Bowiechick has done more for the Logitech QuickCam Orbit
camera--her video on YouTube has been seen 1.9 million times--than a
$1 million ad on network TV.

The biggest mistake marketers make when they see the power of the
consumer network is that they try to control it, own it or
manipulate it. This always fails because the network doesn't care
about you and can't be bought. The smartest marketers aim to
inspire, not to control.

When Microsoft tried to promote its new Vista operating system, it
sent laptops to influential bloggers. They were trying to control
the conversation by seeding their version of the story with powerful
voices online. It didn't work. Instead, it provoked a firestorm,
with some claiming that Microsoft was trying to bribe bloggers.

So, if you can't buy or bully your way into the network, what should
you do? Make something worth discussing, something people actually
want to talk about. It's worked for airlines and books. It also
works for big-ticket items like cars. Why else is Toyota now number
two in the world?

The network hates to be controlled. The harder you fight to dominate
it, the harder it will fight back. Yet we'll see companies hiring
people to write favorable articles on sites like Wikipedia. We'll
see marketers rewriting their Web sites to show up higher in the
Google rankings. And we're going to see ever more spam aimed at
co-opting customers' attention.

We don't really blame you. You probably can't help it. The world is
changing, and it's natural to revert to what you know. But that
doesn't mean it's going to work.

Great companies don't push, they lead. The next time a p.r. firm's
experts offer to take your money in exchange for their help in
dominating the network, show them the door. Hand the cash to your
R&D, training and service people instead.

Seth Godin is a writer, blogger and marketing expert, and the
author, most recently, of The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You
When to Quit (and When to Stick). (Portfolio Hardcover, 2007.)


Chris Ayres
The Dating Game
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2007/0507/142_print.html

  I didn't lose a sofa, I gained a wife.

All I wanted to do was sell my sofa. but there I was, down one of
the steamier back alleys of Craigslist.com, browsing a section
entitled "Los Angeles Casual Encounters."

Honestly, I can't remember how exactly I arrived there from the
Furniture For Sale section. Perhaps I clicked on something by
accident. Perhaps it was some kind of malfunction. Regardless, I can
report that most of the postings I found there were indecipherable
to the layman, composed as they were of curiously obscene
combinations of letters and numbers (w4m, m4m, m4w, t4m, etc.). Not
everything appeared in code, however. Some of the postings stuck to
a more straightforward formula: a time, a place, and a suggestive
profanity. You had to admire the simplicity.

I've long been a fan of Craigslist and the man behind it--the
awkward, bespectacled, Inspector Rebus-obsessed Craig Newmark. I met
him once for a drink in L.A. and congratulated him for introducing a
new kind of liquidity into our lives. A sofa used to be a difficult
item to get rid of: big, expensive, impossible to carry alone and
too easily ruled out on grounds of questionable taste. But these
days, with unlimited free advertising on Craigslist and a
marketplace as big as the universe (Newmark has beamed some of
Craigslist's postings into space through the Deep Space
Communications Network), it's now just a question of typing in a few
lines and clicking on "publish."

What I hadn't realized, however, was that Craigslist--and other
social networking Web sites--had introduced that same kind of
liquidity to our sex lives. Online, people are trading each other
like baseball cards. After my visit to Los Angeles Casual
Encounters, I expanded my research to other sites, designed
specifically to facilitate extramarital affairs, or afternoon motel
sessions with men and women best described as professionals. I soon
came across Fling.com, HornyMatch.com and AdultFriendFinder.com
("The World's Largest Sex and Swinger Personals Community"). The
latter boasts 1,562,811 listings in California. If this number is
correct, 5% of the Golden State's population is currently searching
online for meaningless sex. Which, when you think of it, is
surprisingly low.

In a strange way it's reassuring to know that men are making an
effort to turn online dating into something cheap and furtive,
especially when the respectable matchmaking sites--I'm thinking of
MillionaireMatch--are promoting a return to the kind of asset-based
courtship not seen since the days when Elizabeth Bennet and
Fitzwilliam Darcy circled each other in the Meryton village dance
hall. Then again, I hope we don't push it too far. With Casual
Encounters and Adult Friend Finder--not to mention the billions of
pages of passive adult entertainment online--men are beginning to
enjoy the kind of sexual liquidity once available only to
billionaire sultans, English kings, and the pharaohs of ancient
Egypt. With nothing more than a personal computer and an Internet
connection the modern male can now indulge every whim, every kink,
every twist, every preference--every vague curiosity--at any hour of
the day or night.

But back to my sofa. I felt terrible about selling it. It had, after
all, been a gift from my grandmother on the occasion of my move to
America, where I had been sent by the Times of London to write about
Wall Street. I remember the day she withdrew £1,000 from her village
bank account in the Scottish borders and handed me the money with
instructions to spend it on something lasting, something like a
piece a furniture: a "settee," perhaps.

I should probably explain that my grandmother's attitude toward
furniture--toward everything, really--is that it should be held on
to for as long as possible, then passed down to the next generation.
Even death doesn't cut it as an excuse to sell something as
valuable, as permanent, as a settee. When my grandmother bought her
own settee, she kept the cushions wrapped in plastic for years, out
of fear that some catastrophic tea or fruitcake incident would ruin
her investment. In her mind it was worth destroying the very purpose
of the settee (that is, to provide comfortable, attractive seating)
to ensure its longevity.

Anyway, I blew my grandmother's money on a sofa from Jennifer
Convertibles and immediately regretted it. The model I had chosen
was covered in a beige perma-crease fabric and felt as though it had
been stuffed with nails. It was dangerously uncomfortable, a fact I
had somehow failed to notice in the showroom. It was also
extraordinarily heavy, making it impossible to reposition without
the help of three Irish doormen and a pulley system. Out of
guilt--and fear, I suppose--I put up with the giant carbuncle for
two years, until I was relocated to Los Angeles. Then, seeing an
opportunity, I listed it for sale on Craigslist.com, at one-third of
its original price.

Naturally, I didn't tell my grandmother about any of this: I feared
she'd disown me. But I rehearsed my speech, just in case. The world
has changed, Grandma. Liquidity, Grandma. Everything is disposable,
exchangeable, tradable. The Internet has brought us all together in
one big, teeming global market. But I could also imagine my
grandmother's furious reply: This liquidity nonsense, my boy, is
just an excuse for waste! Waste and recklessness! Nevertheless, I
became addicted to Craigslist. Along with the sofa I put up for sale
half of the contents of my apartment, including a floor lamp, an
outdoor grill and a folding chair. I was astonished by how quickly
they sold. I was also astonished by the kind of people who turned up
to buy them: girls, mainly. Attractive girls. Girls who had just
moved to L.A. and didn't want to pay retail for what could end up
being temporary furniture. I began to wonder if I should ask one of
these Craigslist girls out on a date. I was newly single, after all.
What could I possibly have to lose? If you could trade furniture and
lewd acts on Craigslist--why not dates?

In many ways, I concluded, Craigslist is just a hyper-evolved form
of the same networks--the church and the family--that my grandmother
believed in so strongly. And following a brief hiatus in the 1980s
and 1990s--when the phenomenon of the alienated, narcissistic urban
yuppie inspired both Robert Putman's gloomy essay Bowling Alone and
Bret Easton Ellis' graphic bloodfest American Psycho--social
networks are finally back: stronger than ever and retooled for a
better-connected, better-traveled, more open and democratic age. So,
in spite of the inevitable tawdriness, why not embrace these human
stock markets, these providers of instant sex and furniture? That,
at least, was what I kept telling myself when I went out on a date
with a girl from Craigslist (from the Misc Romance section, I might
add), which turned out to be a disaster. I recall an excruciating
half hour in a Starbucks--like a job interview but with sexual
tension--followed by a sober dinner, which neither of us wanted but
both felt oddly compelled to order.

I returned from the date to an e-mail responding to my sofa advert.
The potential buyer was a girl called Lucie. Like me, she had just
relocated to Los Angeles from New York. I sighed at the thought of
betraying my grandmother but knew what I had to do. I wanted a
newer, sleeker, more fashionable model of sofa. Secretly I suspected
it might even help me with the girls.

The next day Lucie came over. We talked for a while. Later, via
e-mail, she told me she wanted to put down a deposit while she
organized delivery. The next evening, she came over again and we
ended up talking some more. She stayed for an hour. After her third
visit--to finally pick up the sofa--I asked her out for a
celebratory drink (what was I thinking?) and she accepted.
Inevitably, I'd fallen for Lucie the moment I set eyes on her and
could hardly believe my luck. To my friends she became known as
"sofagirl." After the celebratory drink came a party in Hollywood
("Oh, you're so much nicer than 'lampgirl,'" one of my friends told
her) and then, at last, the First Kiss. Nine months later we were
engaged, and ten months after that we were married in the Scottish
borders, a few miles from where I was brought up. My grandmother sat
in the front row, and I finally broke the news to her about the
sofa, Craigslist and how I had met my bride.

All things considered, she took it pretty well. Perhaps I convinced
her that the liquidity of our networked world isn't such a bad thing
after all. Sometimes it can even produce something lasting, like a
spouse--not to mention a sofa that I'm now obliged to keep for the
rest of my life. Just like my grandmother wanted all along.

Chris Ayres (www.chrisayres.net), author of War Reporting for
Cowards and the forthcoming Death by Leisure: A Cautionary Tale, is
a columnist for the Times of London.


John Doerr and Bill Joy
The Blue Sky Project
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2007/0507/082_print.html

  Can green technology save the planet?

Seven years ago our venture capital partnership, Kleiner Perkins
Caufield & Byers, began investing venture capital in green
technology startup companies. Notable early investments were in
Bloom Energy, a manufacturer of solid oxide fuel cell power systems,
and Miasolé, a second-generation (that is, thin-film) solar cell
company.

Two years ago the growing evidence of climate crisis caused us to
recognize the urgent need for massive innovation and investment in
clean and sustainable uses of energy. The transformation required to
address this global problem will be huge--replacing the inefficient
capital equipment that powers the world will likely be the single
largest economic opportunity of the 21st century. Such a change will
not be easy, but we know it is possible. The Internet represents a
similar disruptive burst of energy and creativity, where we helped
visionary entrepreneurs create companies like America Online,
Netscape, Amazon and Google.

To quickly scale up our green investing we built a network of
experts to help identify and prosecute the most pressing problems
and opportunities. We call it the Greentech Innovation Network
(GIN).

For 35 years we have been assembling such networks of seasoned
entrepreneurs and business and technical experts to help us quickly
understand new industries and anticipate opportunities. These
networks also help provide new ventures with the assistance they
need to grow and become durable enterprises. We have developed such
networks for areas as diverse as semiconductors, personal computing,
the Internet and the life sciences. These innovation networks are a
key ingredient in what we call "relationship capital." There's more
to venture capital than a checkbook.

To launch GIN, we called several "spiders"--leaders highly connected
in the green technology and policy worlds. We asked them to identify
the best and brightest, people who could work together to hasten the
pace of green innovation. GIN was thus built from a database of
policymakers, scientists, inventors, entrepreneurs and executives
and, most important, other spiders with additional rich webs of
relationships.

We held our first GIN meeting in May 2006, bringing together the
first 60 members of the network. We organized around five themes:
electricity generation, electric use efficiency, transportation
fuels, transportation efficiency and public policy.

Some key takeaways from this first meeting: Less than 5% of energy
comes from clean renewables; more than half of all energy is wasted
as unused heat or transmission losses; reducing greenhouse gases
requires a focus not only on renewables and conservation but also on
efficient transportation and, especially, on cleaning up emissions
from coal. Critically important, also, is that breakthroughs are
most likely to emerge at the intersection of disciplines--for
example, the overlaps among physics, chemistry, biology and
engineering. And there's enormous potential for new discoveries at
very small (nanometer-length) scales.

One of the big surprises at the meeting was to hear just how much
policy matters. Many of the technical experts wandered out of their
sessions to join the policy group to discuss how to accelerate
innovation of green technologies. We designed GIN not as a
conference where you sit and listen, but rather as a forum for open
exchange leading to action. At the end of our first meeting one
member, Bob Epstein, a Berkeley engineer who started the database
company Sybase, said, "the single most important thing we must do is
to encourage California policymakers to develop a market-based
system of incentives and mandatory caps on greenhouse gases." So in
August of last year eight GIN members went to Sacramento and lobbied
eight undecided legislators to vote in favor of the Global Warming
Solutions Act. Seven of these eight voted in favor. California
thereby became the first state to mandate a 25% reduction of CO[2]
by 2020.

To understand where innovation could improve energy efficiency, we
created a technology-innovation map highlighting several dozen
opportunities. In electricity generation, for example, we focused on
renewables such as wind power (on both large and small scales) and
solar power (both photovoltaic and thermal), as well as ways to
sequester the CO[2] generated by coal-fired power plants (for
example, by pumping it deep underground). For each of these areas we
then developed a network of technical and policy experts, GIN thus
becoming a network of networks. All this was greatly aided by the
fact that our partnership was already seeing hundreds of interesting
green-tech business plans each year, giving us the opportunity to
dig deep and use our networks to evaluate real venture plans.

GIN has helped us identify key technical trends: the use of
nano-materials for the inorganic catalysis of chemical reactions;
the harnessing of previously known but unexploited nanometer-scale
physical effects (such as quantum confinement in nanowires); ways
(using both software and hardware) to make buildings more energy
efficient; reduction of power in computers, both personal and server
farms; and the use of genetic engineering to turn microbes into
chemical factories.

Look at the positive effects that networks and overlapping
disciplines are having on Amyris Biotechnologies, a three-year-old
company in Emeryville, Calif., which we funded in 2006. In creating
Amyris, UC, Berkeley chemical and biological engineering professor
Jay Keasling brought together three other founders, with backgrounds
in bacteriology, biophysics and chemical engineering. Its
breakthrough process to make artemisinin, an important antimalarial
drug, more affordable has led to a radical new way to make better
biofuels out of sugar feedstocks. The investors and founders then
recruited the chief executive from BP North America, the vice
president of business development from Pixar and the patent lawyer
from a biotech company. At last count the company was recruiting
talent from ten different industries, all by leveraging the networks
of the founders, investors and employees.

We've also invested in Mascoma, which aims to make renewable fuels
from sugars as well as from cheaper and more abundant cellulosic
materials like corn stover and wood chips. Complementing the new
renewable fuels will be exciting innovations in transportation
efficiency, such as serial hybrids (electric vehicles with a small
engine to help generate onboard electricity) and novel ways to strip
weight out of automobiles without reducing their safety.

So far we have allocated $200 million to our Greentech initiative
and have made 14 investments in green technology companies. We've
made a difference in Sacramento and are moving on to lobby in
Washington for sound national policy to regulate greenhouse gases.
We're continually updating our innovation maps to show what we know
and don't know.

The Greentech Innovation Network is meeting again in July. There's a
lot more to be done. We firmly believe that by using the power of
networks and innovation we can help move our economy much more
quickly to a renewable and efficient future.

John Doerr (johnd at kpcb.com) and Bill Joy (billj at kpcb.com) are
partners at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.


Vinton G. Cerf
The Disruptive Power of Networks
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2007/0507/058_print.html

  The Internet has helped shake up our world. Here's what we can look
  forward to next

A third of a century ago Bob Kahn and I were connecting different
packet-switching networks--the first stirrings of the Internet. Who
knew that placing powerful, programmable assets into an
interconnected communication network would be so unexpectedly
disruptive, for good and ill? Consider:

   Onetime receivers of information have now become the producers of
it. Think of e-mail, blogs, Web pages, instant messaging, YouTube,
Current TV, Facebook, MySpace.

   Virtually any digital content can be transported through the
Internet at playback speed (Google Video, Skype, Vonage) and as file
transfers (BitTorrent, Napster). The flat-rate pricing of Internet
connections challenges the à la carte and content-based pricing
traditional in telephone service, cable and satellite radio.

   The Internet has unleashed a flood of group interaction. E-mail
lists, multiplayer games, collaborative working tools, group chat
rooms are all examples of many-to-many forms of interaction largely
unavailable before the Internet.

   The global Internet permits the harvesting of the "long tail" of
user interest in goods and services without mass appeal. This was
not possible in a world without Ebay and Amazon.

   Never in the history of mankind has there been such widespread and
nearly instantaneous access to such a large quantity and variety of
information--or such clear evidence of the collaborative interest in
the Internet user community (I think of them as Internauts) to share
information. Wikipedia and the Human Genome Database are but two
potent examples.

   Social networking allows thinly distributed groups to discover one
another and to make common cause. Politicians have discovered that
the Internet is a two-way street to relay messages to
constituents--and get them back! Fundraising and political
coordination have been raised to new levels of precision through the
Internet and are playing a visible role in election campaigns (see
story). Blogging and video-sharing demonstrate the power of
individual voices to expose corruption and abuse.

There are dark sides we never anticipated:

   With more and more information about people available online, the
Internet exposes us to invasions of privacy and identity theft.
Anonymous postings may damage reputations, and name confusion can
lead to a great deal of misinformation. Young people have been
misled by interactions with predators; the Internet makes it easy to
stalk people.

   Hand in hand with the privacy intrusions are security holes.
Within a few minutes of being placed on the Internet a new computer
may be probed by automated hackers seeking to identify new computer
victims who unwittingly become the host for all sorts of pernicious
activities--sending spam and launching denial-of-service attacks
among them.

Overall, though, the disruptive aspects will, I believe, have
positive effects, giving ample impetus to the creative energy of our
global community. I have said that only 1% of all the applications
of the Internet have yet been invented. What might a few of the
other 99% look like?

The number of devices attached to the Internet will proliferate.
Many of them will be household appliances or office gadgets. Some
may be installed in automobiles or carried on our person, and many
may be part of widely dispersed sensor networks. Web-based
interfaces might be used to allow users to interact with and control
their increasingly capable and complex entertainment or office
systems.

We will see neural interfaces to computer-based systems that are the
natural extension of today's cochlear implants. Some will be
sensorineural (relating to nerves--for example, ocular implants) and
some will be sensorimotor (spinal implants, for instance). Whether
we will get a cognitive attachment (a memory implant) is still
extremely speculative. How about a brain backup every few weeks--or
brain augmentation surgery? While the focus in the recent past on
neural electronics has been on remediating impairments, there is no
reason why these systems could not be used to enhance human
capabilities, just as backhoes and calculators enhance human
capabilities.

More predictable: self-aware buildings and cars. They will know when
they are occupied. They will have the ability to keep an inventory
of contents. (Have any of my wine bottles wandered off? Check the
radio frequency IDs.) Many cars are already able to navigate, and
some models are aware of their surroundings, through detection of
nearby obstacles or other cars. Self-guiding vehicles are a reality,
thanks to the recent contest for the Darpa autonomous vehicle prize.
It isn't hard to project this into a future of self-driven vehicles
and self-flying aircraft.

The virtual and real worlds will merge so that Second Life (see
story) will become part of First Life. Virtual interactions will
have real-world consequences. Control of the electrical grid and
power generation systems could be made to appear to be part of a
virtual environment in which actions in the virtual space affect
actions in real space. If your air conditioner is attached to the
Internet, your utility might turn it off to prevent a brownout.
Educational environments that mix real and virtual instruments and
places will enrich the learning experience of schoolchildren.

Personal health monitoring can be aggregated into tracking entire
populations to permit early detection of epidemiological threats or
important health trends. Such methods might also increase the
effectiveness of emergency treatment through controlled access to
personal health records. Planetary monitoring and sensor networks
will go a long way toward understanding and responding to the threat
of global warming.

Mobile-knowledge robots will mine the data of the Internet, looking
for correlations and unexpected patterns, alerting humans to items
of interest. Google Alerts, which are e-mail updates of relevant
news items and blog posts, are a prototype of such tools. Group
alerts could become the basis for some forms of emergency
management.

Customization of everyday products seems a likely avenue for
development. Capturing specifications and turning these into
production orders is the basic model for Dell computers and could
easily be applied to many other products. Clothing, cars, appliances
of all kinds seem likely candidates.

Communication protocols, programming languages and operating systems
have created platforms for innovation unlike anything in human
history. As computing power, memory and transmission speeds continue
to increase, opportunities to develop new products and services will
multiply. Applications not possible in the past for lack of such
resources will become feasible. The Web will continue to yield
unexpected and stunningly useful services. Thankfully, the software
frontier is endless.

Vinton G. Cerf is vice president and Chief Internet Evangelist at
Google.


David Gelernter
The Inside-Out Web
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2007/0507/156_print.html

  What will replace the Internet? Something safer, more personal, more
  manageable.

My new computer is snazzier, more powerful and a lot cheaper than my
old one. So why did I and my two sons (who are both late-model,
computer-literate teenagers) wait three weeks to unpack it? Because
we knew that, once we opened the box, there would be hell to pay
before we had the thing set up properly. Setting up the new machine
is easy: Unpack, plug in, turn on, connect to the Internet. But
years' worth of vital electronic documents are trapped on the old
machine. In 2007 making old stuff available on a new computer ought
to be a ten-second job. But modern software specializes in making
simple jobs hard--and the transfer took one whole barking, screaming
headache of an afternoon.

The transfer task is a small symptom of a big problem. The solution
lies not in the computer but in the Internet and the Web. Right now
the Web is built from the bottom up. Its structure of linked sites
reflects the underlying machinery: lots of servers in a dense rabbit
warren of connections. Links connecting computers are less numerous
than those connecting Web sites because software connections are
cheaper than physical ones. Yet both structures find inspiration in
the same glorious strategic vision: total chaos. Today's Web is
indeed weblike, but it's no beautiful design of the sort talented
spiders weave; it is a tangled cobweb of the type you find in
broken-down shacks and haunted houses.

The next Web--the Worldbeam, we call it--will resemble today's Web
imploded or, if you prefer, turned inside out. It will be a single
global "information beam." Every Web page ever posted is in this
beam. Whenever someone updates a page or designs a new one, it is
added to the end. The Worldbeam is a stream of many separate
documents--or a beam with many documents dissolved in it, held in
suspension. Both metaphors are useful.

The Worldbeam is a constantly growing journal or time line of
electronic documents. Its storage is dispersed over many machines
for reliability and safety, but to users the Beam looks like one
structure. Like so much contemporary software, it is created by two
programs working together, one on a server (or many servers) and
another on your own machine; these programs allow your machine to be
an "empty" computer most of the time. Information is downloaded
automatically and fast when you need it, and erased when you don't.

The Worldbeam and another design construct, the Empty Computer, go
hand in hand. You will never again need to move information from
computer A to computer B because your electronic documents are
stored on the Worldbeam, which is available on every
Internet-connected computer (or Palm or Razr) automatically. Merely
identify yourself to any computer anywhere and your information is
already there, welling up as naturally as seawater in a scooped-out
hole on the beach.

The Worldbeam is a work in progress based on a research partnership
between me and Ajay Royan, whose day job is at a West Coast hedge
fund. Enough software exists to convince us that lots of hard work,
but no basic unsolved problems, lie in the way of a finished
prototype perhaps 18 months from now. Our project is intended to
yield a basic Beam and a suite of protocols, so that new apps can
extend the system into such critical areas as health care, education
and financial services.

What will it look like? When you tune in a beam, you will see each
new element as it arrives; the beam moves continuously, backing
slowly into the past at the speed of time, toward the rear of the
simulated volume right behind your computer screen. You see a
"parade" of documents, each represented by a single
vertical-standing page--as if you were watching a file of soldiers
from directly in front and slightly above. Each soldier is backing
slowly, continuously away, and new ones materialize continuously in
front. At any moment you see perhaps 30 or 40 documents onscreen.
You can rewind, fast-forward or search.

Many sorts of information are blended together in the Worldbeam,
just as many colors are combined into a beam of white light.

You and you alone can filter out and examine your own private
beam--a documentary history of your life. Your beam consists of
every electronic document you have ever created or received, in
chronological order. Every e-mail and voice mail and MP3 and project
report, snapshot, video, shopping list--all there, encoded, for your
eyes only. Your private documents are encrypted automatically; to
get access to the Beam you'll need to pass a biometric test, provide
a password and, probably, a key card. It sounds cumbersome but will
become as natural as starting your car. (A related experiment called
MyLifeBits is being conducted by Gordon Bell, a software theorist at
Microsoft. Our work is based on an earlier project with Eric Freeman
called "Lifestreams," begun in 1994.)

Each family member has his own sub-beam; the family itself has one,
too, consisting of all private documents of general interest.
Snapshots, e-mail from relatives, videos and MP3s are on the family
beam. So are announcements ("I'll be back at 10," "Take out the
garbage"), shopping lists, scanned-in children's drawings--mementos
of the sort parents ordinarily store lovingly and never see again.
Or you can mix an everyone-on-this-block beam, an
everyone-with-kids-in-this-school beam.

Are you afraid that you'd have to spend two hours a day assigning
access privileges to every part of your Beam? Don't be. Whenever you
create a new document, it's born with the same permissions as
previous documents of the same type. (Your personal beam contains
load of information about your habits and preferences.)

Every organization will tell its ongoing life story via electronic
documents. A newspaper will generate a beam of stories and photos.
(Fresh stories are posted at the end of the beam as soon as they are
filed.) If you get your news from three newspapers, one cable
channel and 12 blogs, you can blend their streams and keep an eye on
them all simultaneously. When you tune in your custom-blend news
stream, you see a time-ordered list of postings--the world according
to all 16 of your sources interleaved, shuffled together.

A car company generates a stream of product descriptions plus p.r.
announcements. An HMO's beam will be restricted: Every patient's
medical history is a separate sub-beam available in whole or part to
medical staff members who need to know.

Organizations will be able to link separate documents as if they
were Web pages, and users can look at one page at a time. You can
still have a conventional Web site if you want. But many users will
prefer for the whole story to be laid out before them as an array of
separate journal pages and will browse or search without following
links. Our first versions use an ordinary keyword search, but we've
developed intelligent search procedures that find relevant
stream-elements even if they make no explicit mention of the search
terms you typed. We can use on-beam documents themselves to help
generate clusters of words with similar meanings.

The Worldbeam's significance lies in several areas. Separate beams
can be isolated and then blended ad hoc, like custom cappuccinos.
Each user has individual access rights to each sub-beam. To make
everyone's life easier, the Beam will make it possible for today's
conventional desktop computers and electronic gadgets to be replaced
by empty computers. The Beam is a natural platform for a new
universe of software apps and for global open markets and will help
keep your electronic assets secure and private. You'll subscribe to
a local Beam service that offers security and global access, and be
able to buy, lease or help yourself to fancier apps if you need
them. The desktop is dead; all my information must be stored on the
Beam in the cybersphere, and be available to me on any machine
anywhere.

Apps of all kinds ride the Beam--apps that make markets, spot and
help visualize trends, allow like-minded groups to exercise
political power, make electronic elections possible--ad infinitum.

New technology should encourage markets without boundaries, where
buyers find perfect sellers and vice versa no matter where they are
or what sorts of goods or services they are trading. Everyone can
post forms to the Worldbeam--to buy a million shares of Plotzco or
sell a puppy. Merchants can be as exclusive as they like, can make
their forms visible to billionaire traders only or to the whole
world. And they can hire any matchmaker software app they choose to
scan the Beam and connect buyer to seller.

Every computer user turns to the Beam first. All my personal
documents are stored there. Any doctor, say, who sees me stores my
health data with my permission on my personal beam. As time passes,
the medical story of my life accumulates on the Beam; it's all right
there if anyone needs it. Hospital staff add data to the same beam.
When someone writes a prescription, sophisticated apps scan my
medical life story to make sure the Rx makes sense; then it becomes
part of the beam itself. The Worldbeam has moral and social
dimensions as well as commercial implications.

In today's computing environment, it's easy for spies, bureaucrats
and thieves to "share" private information that isn't theirs and
(paradoxically) hard for public agencies to share information in the
public interest. When thieves or spies break into computers, they
ought to find gibberish, but software discourages the use of
encryption--which makes as much sense as a bank manager's
discouraging customers from locking their safe-deposit boxes. What
could be simpler or more sensible than writing "burn this letter" at
the bottom of a personal, confidential, amorous or libelous
communication? Yet the e-mails you write are virtually tattooed to
your hide forever, impossible to expunge.

Modern technology makes it too easy for unauthorized characters to
gain control over parts of your life and too hard for the government
to wield the powers we want it to--for example, marshaling
information to fight terrorism. The Internet's bottom-up design
makes information-sharing hard. It encourages proliferating
information baronies instead of one national security pool. The
underlying moral threat is passivity; too many of us view computers
and the Internet as we do spy satellites that photograph us from Up
There. We can't control them, so why think about them? When
technology encourages passivity, it is attacking liberty and
democracy at their roots.

The Internet's opacity yields incomprehension and passivity. The
Beam is transparent. You control access to every piece of
information on your own sub-beam. If an electronic document is not
on the Beam, it's nowhere. Simple rules yield clarity and put users
in control.

Today virtually all technology projects have moral implications.
Technology like the Worldbeam should strengthen the world's
responsible governments against terrorists and criminals, and the
individual against busybodies (government-hired or free agents) who
find it all too easy to violate private stores of information. The
Internet tells government agencies: You each have a separate
information stash and your own network; sharing information requires
extra effort. The Beam tells them: At base you all share one
information stash; withholding information requires extra effort.
Private sub-beams are subsets of the all-inclusive Worldbeam, and no
one can plead "technical reasons" for not sharing.

The Web was a brilliant invention. The Beam is a natural next step.
Children live in the present. We don't discover "the past" until we
are old enough to have one, at least a bit of one; and we discover
the future by analogy with the past. One of them stretches out
behind us, the other in front. The Web tells us what is going on all
over the place, right now. It expanded our view of the
present--maybe our very definition of "the present." The Beam shows
us the same sprawling, enormous "now" that we see on the Web but
shows us the past and future, too. Wisdom requires grasping the
past: its tidal rhythms, its implications for us today. Only by
grasping the past can we understand the present and make good
guesses about the future. The Beam specializes in helping us grasp
time and the past, and where we are--and where we are headed.

David Gelernter is a national fellow at the American Enterprise
Institute and a professor of computer science at Yale University.


P.J. O'Rourke
Adam Smith: Web Junkie
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2007/0507/086_print.html

  He may not have imagined Amazon and Google. But the old boy 
anticipated
  that everything would depend on freedom

I wonder if the know-it-alls at Wikipedia realize that the Internet
was fully described and completely understood more than 200 years
ago by Adam Smith, founder of free market economics. And Smith, I'm
almost certain, knew less about computers than I do (and I can't get
Dora the Explorer from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln
Memorial without tech support from my 6-year-old).

In The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, Adam Smith explained
the three factors that constitute the free market: pursuit of
self-interest, division of labor and freedom of trade. There you
have the Internet without so much as a mouse click. Each log-on is
nothing but the pursuit of something in which some self has an
interest. If the labor that produces the Internet's content weren't
divided, the only Web site you could visit would be your own. And,
as for freedom of trade, that's what put the net in the Internet.
The free market is an enormous network of voluntary association that
allows the unfettered exchange of goods, services and ideas through
routes that are more complex and unpredictable than MapQuest's.

The Internet is not a wonderful new world. The Internet just is a
natural extension of the free market. All the freshly invented
gizmos necessary to operate the Internet make it seem novel and
exciting. Plus the Internet encompasses nearly everything in our
solar system. But so does the orbit of Pluto. Pluto seemed novel and
exciting in 1930 when it was discovered by the astronomer C.W.
Tombaugh, who thereby became, more or less, the Al Gore of that
planetoid.

The Internet would be as remote and lifeless as Pluto if it had
turned out to be the satellite of academia and government
bureaucracy that Gore thought it was. But the Internet immediately
entered the much larger and more powerful gravitational field of the
marketplace.

What's exciting about the Internet is not some false dawn of a
digital age. Peering over the shoulders of my wife and children as
they Google their wits away, this looks about as interesting as Bill
Gates' fashion sense. What's exciting is the Internet's contribution
to the free market's freedom.

The free market is more than a place to shop; it is an enormous
network of voluntary association. The free market fosters civil,
political and personal liberties as well as the Ebay kind. Markets
are the vital organs of freedom. They are the viscera of voluntary
association. Without markets, freedom is just a puddle of offal and
blood. And the Internet quickly and cheaply expands this network of
voluntary association, adding--with its own invisible hand--miles of
blood vessels, nerves and vital parts. The Internet gives the free
market more guts.

The importance of voluntary association to freedom cannot be
overstated. Liberty is a social condition. Humans need other humans
to exist. Reproduction itself requires, at the very least, the lab
technicians at the cloning clinic. Liberty is social, yet--and this
is a big, ugly yet, a Yeti of a yet--society is not libertarian.

Families, religions and businesses are famously bossy. Even the most
democratically elected governments spew edicts and injunctions. The
social structure pushes us around at home, school and office and
stops us in our cars to sniff our breath for cocktails and inspect
our ears for cell phones. The only escape from society's Draconian
rule is in our network of voluntary association, our World Wide Web,
if you will. The old-fashioned name for this is friends.

The problem is to make enough friends to gain and keep our freedom.
Think back to the almost pathologically friendly Bill Clinton. Even
he found that friendship has its limits or, rather, his friends
found that they had theirs and a lot of legal bills as well. In The
Wealth of Nations Adam Smith said that an individual "stands at all
times in need of the co-operation and assistance of great
multitudes, while his whole life is scarce sufficient to gain the
friendship of a few persons."

Smith saw that the free market answered liberty's need for a larger
network of voluntary association. The pursuit of self-interest means
that the free market has built-in incentives for network maintenance
and expansion. You can't mortgage a friend. Buying friends is
problematic. Selling a friend is illegal in most places. The
Internet thus adapts to market principles. Hello, pop-up ads;
farewell, open-source programming. The Internet idealists are
doubtless benevolent creatures. So, perhaps, was the apatosaurus.
Said Adam Smith, "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the
brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their
regard to their own interest."

The most ideally conceived and perfectly executed political systems
(such as those devised by the Internet's wise, deep and knowing
political bloggers) cannot give us the freedoms that we get from the
free-market network. Networks are self-organizing and are therefore
resistant to pressure from those interfering types--politicians--who
want to organize things. Since networks are self-organizing they
are, like all do-it-yourself projects, a mess. This makes networks
too hard for any one person to understand, let alone dominate. Most
of our lives are spent in channels or chains of command or circuits.
(And usually the circuit has someone in it with a wire loose.)
Networks release us from this. We are presented with numerous
alternative connections. On the Internet these connections are,
without intending a pun, virtually unlimited. We can take our
business elsewhere or be that elsewhere by starting a business of
our own. Networks aren't egalitarian. Michael Dell always will be a
bigger node than we are. But networks aren't hierarchal, either.
There's no top and bottom to them, no magnetic north of authority.
It's all side-to-side and back and forth. Detours, shortcuts and
work-arounds make a network.

And networks are what make the free market moral as well as free.
The only way to get the members of the free market to make the
detours, take the shortcuts or work the work-arounds is by
persuading them. In a voluntary association force is not an option.
Every free market transaction is both an exercise in liberty and an
exhibition of respect for the liberty of others.

Alas for such high-flown sentiments, force does come to market. The
bad guys ride into Freedomoftradeburg and rob banks, shoot
bystanders, sass the schoolmarm, throw citizens through the saloon
windows, rustle cattle and set hay wagons on fire. This, in turn,
causes the good guys to ride into town and institute banking
regulation, gun control, sexual harassment statutes, building-code
provisions for safety glass installation in commercial
establishments, USDA livestock inspections and federally mandated
hay wagon flammability standards. It's hard to tell who does the
most damage to the voluntary association of the free market.

That's the paradox of voluntary association: The personal liberty
and moral persuasiveness of the free market depend on the coercive
force of the law. We need law to protect property rights, to enforce
contract, to thwart collusion and monopoly and to keep the weak safe
from the strong. The political system that enforces this law then
proceeds, all too often, to invade property rights, nullify
contracts, promote collusion, create monopoly and become so strong
that no one's safe.

Maybe the Internet can help. The voluntary association of the
Internet has no town into which the bad guys can ride. Or the good
guys, either. Persuasion, and only persuasion, operates the
Internet. You can't send a punch in the nose down a DSL lin