Great little piece on the Today Programme this morning about a guy who’s going to try to walk to India from Bristol relying entirely on generosity and exchange for food and shelter. He’s not taking any money with him.
Listen here.
Compass is a name that is cropping up more and more in the newspapers and on TV news. It’s a pressure group set up by Neal Lawson to try and influence the Labour party’s policy direction after Tony Blair leaves the helm. I’ve been involved a little bit and was a member of their Good Society working group, which has published its report as a short book today. It’s an interesting read and will certainly get people thinking.
Hetan and Jonathan who co-ordinated the process and wrote the final report have a piece in the Guardian today.
Neal’s blog on the way to a book is also well worth a read.
So it looks like the block on a number of major blog hosts in India was cock-up rather than conspiracy. The story going round is that ISPs misinterpreted requests to block a few individual blogs hosted on generic blogging domains and shut down access to the whole lot.
The coverage (particularly by Boing Boing) made me realise how fragile India’s international progressive brand is. The fact that some people easily believed that the Government would block blogs showed that people don’t see the country as a wholly unrepressive regime. India has sold itself in recent years as being different to China because it doesn’t have to go through the potentially destabilising transition to democracy that China will surely make in the next decade or so. There is, of course, unrest, as the recent bombings in Mumbai have shown, but the Government has always pulled out its democratic card when trying to attract investment or sell Indian services. I think this episode might have tarnished that argument a little.
I’ve noticed quite a few stories about increasing interest in environmental performance by the Chinese Government recently. This one says the Government is to spend $175 billion (yep, that says billion) on an environmental cleanup. This one says that Bill Dunster (who designed my house) might get a big gig in China and New Scientist also ran a piece (sub reqd) about all the interest in Dongtan - a suburb of Shanghai which is going to be built to very high environmental standards.
With almost a quarter of the world’s population we all need to hope the Chinese do something revolutionary about the environment, especially greenhouse gases. But I also wonder whether it’s just the shot in the arm European and North American environmental technology firms need. Maybe this will give them the economies of scale and proof that green can be done big that they need.
I’ve got a review of Yochai Benkler’s book The Wealth of Networks
Here’s an excerpt from the piece:
“There is, of course, something perverse about the fact that perhaps the best work yet about the fast-moving, enthusiast-driven internet has taken an academic 10 years to write and is printed on 528 pages of dead tree. But perhaps the interesting social production happens post-publication. The book is released under a Creative Commons licence so you can download it free from his website (www.benkler.org) and Benkler has given readers all manner of collaborative tools to discuss the book and take the ideas forward. You’ll want a hard copy to thumb through, though. This is an important book.”
The full review is here.
There was a piece on the Today programme this morning about Conservative shadow chancellor George Osborne’s trip to Silicon Valley. He’s meeting a few of the big firms like Google and Yahoo and trying to get a feel for what makes California so much better than the UK at turning little ideas into massive wealth generators. As Osborne pointed out in the interview, even though the UK has world class universities and plenty of money available, there is no British equivalent to MySpace which has become the world’s fifth most popular website in just a few years, let alone a Google or a Yahoo!.
James Naughtie tried to push him on the tax regime, making out that it must be because they have lower taxes. But Osborne quickly pointed out that California has much higher taxes than other parts of the US so it can’t just be that. It also isn’t about intellectual property laws because although, yes, it is more expensive to take out a patent in the UK, actually none of the success stories of the past decade have really been about IP.
I reckon it has a lot to do with a deep understanding of networks. Somebody pointed out in the package before the interview that one difference is the role models that students at Stanford have. Larry Page, Pierre Omidyar, Jerry Yang are all treated as heros. But you have to realise how different these guys are to British business role models like John Browne or Richard Branson. They’ve built business not just through good strategy or PR or relentless personal energy but by incredibly clever hacks that make the most of the underlying network logic of the internet.
If you’re a young entrepreneur trying to emulate the current generation of internet success stories, you’re going to try and think of business ideas that are like Google or eBay, that tap the value of networks of active participants for the simple reason that those are the most likely business to thrive in a network age. At the moment, we just don’t have that culture of understanding network business in the UK.
I reckon if George (or Labour for that matter) wants to know how to build Silicon Valley in the UK, he’ll certainly need to read this.
