Untangled

Yes, it seems that "The Internet" has been nominated for a Nobel Prize. Really? Somebody hasn't stumbled across Chatroulette yet. I understand that the telephone was up for the award way back when until some heavy breather on a party line ruined the fun for everyone.

Of course, I'm pulling for "The Internet" if for no other reason than I want to see it show up to accept the award. And see how they make out the check.

Okay, not really. Reading something like that makes me want to get up on a table with a cardboard sign that says "TOOL."

The internet is a tool. Tim Berners-Lee is a fine choice for an award. A tool is not. (And trust me, you don't want to get me started on a rant about the anthropomorphizing of entities that have no business being anthropomorphized. You know, like corporations.) Tim also has the distinct advantage of being able to cash a check. Maybe they could bump it to him via PayPal on iPhone.

As a tool, the internet is a wonderful thing. It is not something that requires referring to in the third person. Internet is a noun, and as such it is a person, place or thing. I'll give you two of the three, as long as person isn't one of them. The internet is not going to come to your meeting so don't bother scheduling the conference room, okay?

Use it, abuse it, just don't confuse it with a sentient being. Once you do that, you'll start blaming it for the ills of the world. Oh wait, too late.

C'est la vie. I bet electricity was blamed by Victorians for a decline in romantic evening walks in the moonlight. Little did they know that in the future Facebook would be responsible for 20% of UK divorces. Amateurs.

I found out this morning, there will not be warp drive. Okay, maybe there will be, but it will kill you. So that's kind of a drawback.

It would be nice to think that it will be nuclear weapon free - but that's just another flight of fantasy, isn't it? I mean, if the US is spending $7B to update their nuclear arsenal that costs $52B a year to maintain, that's a hefty chunk of change for something you want to phase out.

And no, still no jetpacks. Sure, we'll have iPads, but flying cars? Not so much.

So, I guess a little expectation levelling is in order. I understand that astronaut is no longer a growth career opportunity. That's okay, advertising was always the sitcom career I envisioned for myself when I was a kid.

So the future of my childhood isn't panning out as planned. I don't have a lightsaber either. On the plus side, I haven't sliced off any major appendages with my lightsaber. So there's that.

The future is what happens today when people stop talking about creating it and simply go out and make it happen.

My favorite kind of story is one where the protaganist is told over and over that s/he can't do that, failure is inevitable, blah blah blah, only to succeed beyond anyone's wild dreams.

So when I hear people complain that we're not going back to the moon, I wonder instead when we're going to get to Mars. No flying cars? Don't care. I just want one that's electric. And I'm not giving up on a nuke free world just yet. At some point someone has got to own up to the fact that using a nuclear weapon is stupid, so owning and maintaining them is simply an exercise in expanding our horizons beyond conventional stupidity into truly exeptional stupidity.

Expectations are a funny thing. Aim too high and you are bound to fail repeatedly, and hit on a few grand compromises along the way. You may eventually get where you're going, or you may not. But the end result will be better than waiting to see if someone else gets it done in your stead.

Oh, and about that jetpack...

No, I'm not talking about bit torrents or some Napster replacement. I'm talking about MacHeist. If you are a Mac user, chances are you will be tempted by the bundle that is offered. Or will be offered later today.

Eight hours until it goes up for sale, but you can usually count on a few must have utilities and some other interesting software - especially if you work in video - to be bundled up for the price of a single app.

And yes, it's the best way to accidentally squeeze in a game or other fun app that is just thrown in the bundle. The best things are usually the disk utilities. If your hard drive isn't performing up to snuff, chances are there will be an app in the bundle to help you out with that.

For a business that supposedly isn't much of a business, Twitter keeps finding new ways to be interesting. The latest is a deal to make SMS Tweeting free in Haiti. Is it a great business move? Doesn't really matter does it? It is a heck of a lot more interesting to think of Twitter the tool rather than Twitter the business model. Let them worry about how to keep their lights on and servers humming while the rest of us continue to learn how to maximize the tool that they built.

Or if you really want to clear your head, unfollow everybody on your list and only follow the Dalai Lama. Well, okay, the Dalai Lama and Social Edge.

Today I'm working from the bottom of Yosemite valley. I found the spot where you can get 128k wifi access and am finishing up the newsletter and update from the food court nestled in amongst the trees. In a way it is quite decadent, being able to work from this and other gorgeous places. I've carried my laptop to four continents, sent the update from five countries, a boat in the Mediteranean sea, and from the airport in Miami on Christmas Eve. I've done troubleshooting on my phone at Disney World.

Same thing for the rest of the Social Edge clan. We've done more than one update while spread out on multiple continents in multiple time zones. Doing so is easier than I would have imagined ten years ago. Or even five.

But yes, it can sometimes be a burden. I have often regretted not getting a smaller, lighter laptop. Family vacation planning always involves making sure there's readily available wifi on Tuesdays.

So why do I do it? Because I love what I do. More to the point, I love what you do and hope that there are more than a few of there out there that feel the same way about what it is that we do here as John Montilla does. Makes lugging the extra laptop pounds and scrounging for wifi even easier.

The best tech solutions are the ones which allow you to eliminate things. Oh, sure, we always like to focus on the more More MORE! elements of technology, but when it gets right down to it, we need less.

Yes, it was marvelous when the iPod came out. More music everywhere you go! And as the hard drive increased in size, there was even more music available to you. But what made this great wasn't that you could have more music. The iPhone took the iPod and merged it with a smartphone and a camera and a handheld gaming toy so that you only needed one device. Why does this matter? Because you only have so many pockets.

Databases? Boring... until you think about the filing cabinets you don't have a use for anymore. CRM? Same thing. Anybody have a Rolodex anymore?

Laptops are great little slightly underpowered computers. So why are netbooks killing the market? Because less is more when it comes to something you carry. And this is where the iPad steps in and saves my back. If it can do all the things I need my MacBook for when I'm traveling, I can shed 5+ pounds from my carry on. Netbooks and iPads are a threat to the laptop market? Try the chiropractic market.

I saw Barnes & Noble's Nook for the first time today on the train ride in to the office. The Kindle is the first eReader to gain a bit of traction. Why? Less is more, more or less. It isn't that you can take hundreds of books with you, it is the fact that you don't have to take a stack of four with you on vacation. Or on the train. Or plane.

Other technologies do more than getting rid of bulk from our lives. Online ordering eliminated the need to drive to four stores to find the right item. Digital products that take the place of physical products eliminate the need to have your online order shipped to your door.

Of course, we can take the process of eliminating further by eliminating a lot of those office buildings people congregate in. How much time, energy and materials are spent commuting to office buildings where most of people's time is spent alone in an office or wishing they were more alone in a cubicle so they could get work done. There are enough virtual meeting tools out there to get the job done.

The problem that arises, hoever, is what to do with everything we get rid of? A lot of it can be recycled, yes. Office space can be converted into other uses. But the big wins come in not generating more and more stuff as we move forward. Less is more.

And so it was that Steve Jobs revealed the iPad, just as it had been foretold by the prophets on the web. And it was good.

Oh sure, the regular crowd has its regular complaints. In today's media marketplace there are two sides to every story. It goes a little something like this: 'Some people love the x, while others have their doubts about it. Could it be that x is what will bring about the end of everything that is good in our known universe? Could it adversely affect the unknown universe?!?!?!?!?!' It is as if critical thinking skills have become totally passe and undesireable in the modern mass media.

Basically, the iPad is a big iPod Touch. It's an iPhone without the phone. It'll be able to use 3G - and VOIP, so it could be phone-esque.

It doesn't have a camera, which is a little bit of a bummer because you can't video conference with it. And when was the last time you video conferenced? Everybody always thought the future was going to be filled with video phones. Turns out that the future is all about texting, be it email or SMS.

It doesn't have multi-tasking. Yes, Apple figured out how to multi-task with System 7. Is it annoying? Yes. But since we all know it is coming eventually, whoopee.

Apple put out a computer that is truly for 'the rest of us.' It is a simple, straightforward slab that is simple to use, and simple to configure. Geeks won't like that they have to go through Apple and their App Store submission process to sell their wares is what I'm hearing - only since they're making money doing that already... isn't that a moot point?

The more interesting thing is the software aspects of the device. No, not the lack of multitasking. The new stuff. iBooks and iWork.

iWork is really interesting in that it is a suite of full fledged productivity Apps, nothing limited about them. (Okay, Numbers is still not a full-fledged spreadsheet, but it does what most people do with a spreadsheet.) And people are creating real apps for the iPhone and will do even more with the extra screen real estate and CPU power of the iPad. Already we've seen some really innovative apps for the iPhone. Apps that will compete with what's left of the big box software makers out there.

 iBooks is the other really big change. Apple is opening up a digital bookstore, a la iTunes for music and video. It uses the ePub open format so in theory books that you buy can be transported to other devices. We'll have to see how that works in practice. I was a little surprised there wasn't more emphasis on the format of the books. ePub isn't known for how it handles graphics and media within text. After learning that, I understood why magazines weren't a focus just yet, although the New York Times app looks to be a great implementation of a media and text rich content delivery vehicle.

If the open ePub format enables book portability, well, hot diggity! Popularizing an open ebook format will do wonders for making ebooks more readily available. That should in turn make a low cost device like the OLPC2 a more viable platform for getting books into the hands of kids around the world. This may not be the intent of the iPad and iBooks, but it has the potential to effect this change.

Oh, and the accessibility features? Not mentioned. But since the iPhone OS already has those features, there wasn't much left that needed to be covered.

So, in sum, nothing very revolutionary, but more evolutionary. But the evolutionary steps have the potential to really change things in this consumer space.

So, I got my hands on that cool new product out of Silicon Valley this week. It is affordable, small, lightweight, portable and will change the way that millions of people will read.

The iPad? iSlate? iTablet?

No, sorry, but we'll get to that. I'm talking about D.light's Kiran solar powered lantern. It has been designed to replace more expensive and dangerous kerosene lanterns for lighting where electricity is unreliable or unavailable. It is slick and will get plenty of use in my household where electricity is quite reliable.

Apple's new tablet is supposed to debut tomorrow, and it will change the way a lot of us think about, consume and interact with information and media. It will be a game changer, no doubt, as Apple's big products always are. Rumors are that book, newspaper and magazine distribution will be coming to the iPad and this will be a good thing for those industries as well as for those of us who want these materials in digital format. A Wired or National Geographic subscription with videos and photo galleries embedded in the articles? Nifty. The possibilities are infinite.

Hopefully, the new Apple iPad (or whatever it ends up being called) is solar powered. And maybe once the price comes down, it can fill a need that the OLPC project has tried to fill for a while now. (No, that won't happen immediately, but today's cool new gizmo is tomorrow's ubiquitous product. See: cellphone.) Hopefully they will avoid some of the accessibility issues that have hindered Amazon's Kindle recently - which is probable, given their previous experience with the iPhone in this area.

As for a product that will be a truly global gamechanger for 2010? I'd put my money on the d.light Kiran. The kind of impact that it is designed to create is simply on a different scale than that of a new Apple gizmo*.

(*This of course does not negate the technogeek-lust I have for Apple's unnanounced wonder-toy. Rest assured that I will get my hands on one soon! And when the big announcement turns out to be iPhone OS 4.0... I'll get over it.)

Me? I don't text much. It's not that I don't like it, I just don't like paying for it. Email works just fine for me on the go anyway. Plus, I'm a fan of Strunk & White and there isn't an edition of Lmntz o Styl just yet. Plz canz I by a vwl? It is as if e.e. cummings took over our thumbs.

So far, however, more than $22 million has been donated to the Red Cross for Haiti earthquake relief. Thatz sum srz bnjaminz! Global X, as usual, was ahead of the curve. It is stunning to me that so many people have been enabled to donate so immediately and effectively in this manner. Count on good people doing good things - and bet on the fact that most people are good.

Sadly, there are Haiti relief donation scams popping up here and there, reminding us as always that we are our own worst enemy. Stick with the folks you know who are working in the region. Such as:

• Water.org
• Partners in Health
• Free the Children
• Peace Dividend Trust

Okay, so you're not going to lose weight this year. Again. Give in, enjoy the cookies, the cake, the ice cream.

You thought maybe spending more time with your family was a good idea, huh? Until you invited your cousin over to watch some football and he spilled bear on your couch. They're family. You have to love them, but you don't have to subject your furniture to their fluids.

Maybe you're a smoker and have decided to quit? Listen to the siren call of that nicotine. 'Smoooooooooke me. Just one little puff...' You don't have the resolve. Go light it up like a chimney.

But don't renig on your promise to back it up. It's not hard, it just requires doing it. It's not expensive either. I saw a 1.5TB external drive selling for less than $100 the other day. Buy two and rotate. This year, as I do every year, I implore you to follow through on this one new year's resolution. Back it up.

We sent out our newsletter this week, but unfortunately I couldn't find free wifi in Gibraltar. I found plenty of monkeys, but no wifi. So this post is coming to you from aboard a boat. A Social Edge first!

Anyway, here's a monkey picture.

Next week, my post might be coming from a plane. Who knew wifi was easier to find while mobile than while on the ground?

So, looks like Hopenhagen was a bust. Next time, how about holding a climate meeting a) during the summer and b) near the equator. Oh, and c) don't invite countries that really have no incentive to get anything done.

Turns out the biggest roadblock to saving ourselves from ourselves is, well, ourselves.

It's a theme I have heard all year long. People want x and in order to do so they are going to destroy y. So in order to save y, you have to find for z, and it had better be something better than x or they aren't going to want to hear it. 'Maldives are drowning? So what. Let 'em. Not my problem. I've got a GDP to worry about.'

It's not enough to save the world. Somebody's going to have to be able to make a buck at it too. As a matter of fact, it is going to have to be a lot of somebodys'.

Instead of dealing with a bunch of dis-incentivized politicians, how about sending entrepreneurs next time. Let them share ideas back and forth and build products that are more wickedly cool and more environmentally sound than the junk we're paying for now.

The exclamation point in the title is needed. Not because I think global warming is a myth, but because inevitably when I hear the naysayers say it, they are screaming. They are passionate about the fact that humanity is being duped into believing that humans are making the world uninhabitable for humans. Okay, fine, let's assume that argument is true and start the discussion there. Al Gore is a sanctimonious windbag! Global warming is a myth!

So what?

As all those tree huggers gather in Copenhagen to try and save the world from this Myth!, what exactly is it that you object to? You have a problem with them wanting to act on what 99% of the scientific community is telling us is occurring? What horrible things are they trying to do to the poor unsuspecting world?

Let's see... they'd really like it if we could stop polluting the world a bit. Develop energy technologies that aren't finite, and are abundantly available at any longitude or latitude. Drive cars that don't require the burning of fossil fuels.

So your problem is that you prefer oil derricks to wind farms? Refineries over solar panels? You would blow a mountain top off rather than use a hydrogen fuel cell, or - dare I say it? - ethanol? You can't stand the thought of not being able to drive a car that gets 5 MPG?

Do you object to industry finding and developing new technologies to sell in the marketplace that are cleaner than what we are using currently? Are you sitting in traffic, watching the exhaust from the vehicles in front of you and thinking hey, this is the best we can do?

The U.S. space program managed to figure out how to put a man on the moon in about a decade. Tangible benefits of having been to the moon? Well, we did get some pretty cool pictures, right? And some moon rocks. Those are cool. But the process of figuring out how to do that meant creating a lot of things that we take for granted now. Like Velcro. Doppler radar. Ultrasounds. Tang.

A push for greener technologies will allow us to better our quality of life while preserving the planet for the generations to come. Maybe in the process of developing a car battery that will extend the range enough for me to drive across the continent without stopping at some smelly gas station, that same technology could be used in making my iPhone battery last a whole day without requiring a recharge. Or maybe traffic congestion could be dealt with by developing better and cheaper video conferencing to allow for more telecommuting. Oh, the humanity!

But instead, we are left dealing with people who still find it too difficult to push a trash can AND a recycling bin to the curb. And really, if you bring up the whole cow farting thing again, I'm going to stop being polite and ask you to join me in becoming a vegetarian. Help me make the sky blue again or I'm coming after your filet mignon.

When I think about the world I want to leave my kids, it doesn't include congested freeways, peanut butter colored skies or wars over economic resources. As lovely as the smog enhanced sunsets in my hometown in Southern California are, I'd gladly give them up for blue skies the rest of the day.

So really, what's the worst thing that can come of all this huffing and puffing about climate change? A new flavor of Tang?

When the whole Product (RED) campaign started, I was intrigued and thought, what the heck, if people are going to be buying things anyway, why not give them the option to slightly alter their purchase and have a portion of that money go to a worthy cause?

Granted, the Gap clothes weren't *ahem* my style. But maybe that's just because I'm old. There is a (red) iPod shuffle at my house though.

So there are products that, when made (red), can work their way into ones everyday life.

And today I saw another one that makes sense. For me at least. I don't know how the back end of Shazam works, but I do find myself using it from time to time. I used to know every song that I heard on the radio but alas, it appears that father time is catching up with me.

And so (SHAZAM) RED makes sense for me. Now the next time I chaperone a high school dance and one of the other parental unit like people asks 'what's this noise kids these days are listening to?' I'll be able to whip out my iPhone, tag the song with (SHAZAM) RED and tell them "It's Kardinall Offishall, featuring Akon," while feeling doubly smug about it.

I did something this past weekend that is hard for a geek like me to do. I unplugged.

Thursday was Thanksgiving here in the US, and I had a quick little holiday on the coast in California in an area without cell phone reception. (My plan is with AT&T, so this wasn't as hard to do as one might think. Thank you, thank you, I'm here all week. Don't forget to tip the wait staff.)

WiFi was available nearby, but was spotty at best. I was able to check email each day to make sure that things were up and running still on Social Edge, but I didn't respond to any inquiries and didn't check any web sites for news, info, or anything else. My phone became a timepiece and a camera, and I delved into some old-school technologies - books and board games.

At first, it wasn't good. I felt like I should be checking on this. Or that. Or... wait, why was that so important exactly? Turns out, it could all wait. By the second evening I had stopped reflexively fondling my phone, wishing that it would magically pick up signal.

There's something about always being connected that makes us very reluctant to let go of what it is we're focusing on. There are plenty of pluses and minuses to being connected all the time, and one of them is that you can address a problem at anytime from just about anywhere. But it also means that when you are working on a solution to a long term problem, never letting it leave your consciousness can mean never looking at it from a fresh perspective.

Having enjoyed the tranquility and allowing everything to fall away for a few days, when I returned to the office yesterday and started remembering where I had left off the week before I saw new solutions to age old problems present themselves. In retrospect, they were so shamefully apparent I am shocked that I hadn't seen them before, but understand better now that sometimes to change your perspective can require averting your focus for a while.

So unplug. If I can, as tangled up in the interweb as I am, you can too.

Google has announced the addition of automatic captions to YouTube. In the accompanying video, the narrator mentions that sometimes the transcriptions are not completely accurate, but they are 'better than nothing.' Not the greatest endorsement of a service that has such extraordinary potential.

The automatic captioning is being rolled out with a handful of partners for feedback, so I would encourage users to give Google/YouTube your feedback so that they can make improvements and get this feature rolled out site wide. Not only will this allow the hearing impaired access to a much wider range of the video web, it also does translations opening that same content to speakers of different languages than the content originator. Add in the search capabilities that transcripts allow and this is an amazing step in increasing the usability and find-ability of video content.

Another feature that isn't as splashy but is also an immense timesaver is the auto-timing feature mentioned in the same announcement. You can add transcripts to your videos, and YouTube will parse them into captions that match up with your video. As anyone who has added captions to video can tell you this is an incredible time saver.

Sometimes, small is beautiful and you'll never hear me argue that fact. But sometimes it takes the scale of a Google to make changes of such wide scale impact occur.

Stanley Kubrik's 2001: A Space Odyssey is a quaint vision of what the future will be. Back in 2001 I video taped it when it was playing on basic cable. VHS was still a seemingly viable technology back then. I had been meaning to watch it since I was a kid. It seemed important somehow. So I hit play, sat back, watched the movie and fast forwarded through the commercials.

It is possibly the longest movie of all time. Okay, at 141 minutes, it isn't even close, but it sure felt like it. Maybe it was the minimal dialogue. I love that movies from this era played with the expectations of their audience, but in retrospect, some of the filmakers efforts didn't stand the test of time. And once you've seen History of the World Part I, you can never look at what came before in quite the same way again.

I got to the part towards the end at the stargate when it stopped and started rewinding. It would be years before I would watch those last few excruciatingly tedious and confusing moments. As the result of archaic technology, I had been left wondering if the end of the movie would make sense of what came before, but no such luck.

Now we are past 2001, and still, no ubiquitous space tourism, and no homicidal computers. Instead, we are stuck with computers that all too often we would like to kill. Especially at work. At home we are stuck with what we can afford, and we make compromises accordingly. At work, we're at the mercy of our IT specialists.

A large portion of the world, for varying reasons, is still stuck using technology that came out or was around in 2001. You are still more likely to find PC's running Windows XP - released in 2001 - than you are Windows Vista or Windows 7. Exchange Server has been updated a number of times since then - but is your IT department up to date? My guess is that if your organization is still using Exchange, it's probably not Exchange 2010 - or even 2007.

Why is this? Simply put, change is hard. You can make all the arguments for change that you want - at the end of the day, no matter how difficult your archaic technology is behaving, updating it requires work. And let's face it, no matter how well an upgrade to a new machine or system goes, you'll find some way to grumble at the IT staff anyway.

Having been away from the IT world for a few years now, it seems inconceivable to me that so many users are facing the same issues as they were oh so long ago. We've fixed those issues, right? I mean, more often than not, I answer my email from my phone. I went out of town a week ago, and was dissapointed that I haven't quite gotten comfortable with leaving my laptop behind when I travel for pleasure rather than work because I haven't tested access from my iPhone for everything I might need to do. And I haven't updated the web site editor to allow it to work on the iPhone as well. And yet, there are people who are still having to deal with Outlook Web Access when they want to get their work mail remotely? Or can only access their files via VPN?

If your employees sneak off to a coffee shop to utilize the free wifi - and the firewall-free network - you might want to revisit your IT policies. If they hand out personal email accounts to work contacts rather than your company email, you might want to see about replacing your mail server. If everyone has a Mac at home and you're handing out XP desktops, hmmm... might want to think about that.

And let's be honest. Most of what you use your work computer for these days is email. Occasionally you'll do some serious word processing - you know, a letter with paragraph indents - or you plan on torturing an audience with a bullet ridden slide set. Perhaps your big task of the day will require you to misuse a spreadsheet to make a list of some sort. If that's all that you or your users are doing, maybe you should look into Linux based netbooks. They're cheap, relatively user friendly and do all the basics. If not now, maybe next year when Google Chrome OS is out in the wild.

There's no good reason to buy too big or too small these days. You can get systems that are up to date and meet most every need without killing your budget. And you can do it in ways that lift your ongoing costs by moving your data closet out into the cloud. It'll make your users happier - and more productive.

iPhone apps have evolved, as have Apple's rules about how developers can make their wares available. Originally, of course, the only apps were the ones Apple put on there, and web apps were the only way that developers could put there wares into iPhone users' hands. Then came regular apps, be they apps that people paid for free apps. A lot of the free apps were supported via advertising.

I'm guessing that these ad-supported apps were fairly successful. Otherwise, Google buying AdMob for $750M wouldn't have made much sense.

From an end user perspective the prospect of downloading a free app to try out was appealing, even if it meant deleting it later to replace it with a full-featured version - or an ad-free version.

Then Apple opened things up and allowed for in app purchases. You could add the ability for users to buy things inside of your app. But this didn't apply to free apps. Now they've opened it up to free apps as well.

I'm looking forward to seeing this capability used more, so that you can buy a free, ad supported or limited function app and upgrade it without having to download a new app, delete the old, etc. I have an app on my iPhone that I made an in-app purchase for and was briefly worried that after a restore from a backup the in app purchase I had made was gone. But, just like with a full app, when I went to purchase it again it recognized that I had already paid for it and downloaded the add-on for free.

I'm also hoping that we start seeing more non-profits find a way to take advantage of this capability. A free app could be downloaded that gives an overview of the organization, pertinent, related information and then request donations via an in app purchase. It'll be nice too when there are enough apps developed for Apple to consider making non-profits a separate app category.

The latest New York Review of Books has two prison related articles, one by Peter Mathiessen on Leonard Peltier, and another on the state of the U.S. prison system. Depressing stuff.

Peltier is considered by many to be a political prisoner, and there are obvious and extensive problems with his conviction. He was denied parole in July and won't be eligible again for 15 years, when he's 80. How one incident can be viewed so differently by the same court system is a mystery to me. The other two people who were tried in the case were found not guilty on the grounds of self-defense.

Whether or not race played a part in the Peltier case - he is a Native American and an AIM activist - it is increasingly hard to deny that race and incarceration in the U.S. are not related. More than 50% of the U.S. prison population is African American, and another 20% is Latino. Those numbers are obviously not on par with the ethnic make-up of the population.

Add in the fact that the U.S. has by far the highest percentage of its population behind bars of any country in the world and it's easy to see that something is very amiss. A shift in emphasis from rehabilitation to punitiveness has made sentences longer and prospects upon release dimmer. If you ignore race, the other commonalities that appear in the prison population are poverty and a lack of an education. Funny, it seems that wherever you go, if there's poverty there's a less educated populace and more crime.

Rehabilitation should be easier, better and cheaper than ever before. There is this new fangled technology out there that can connect people to information faster and cheaper than ever before. Something called the internet. There are online universities. There's Wikipedia. There are a trillion unique URLs and more than 100 million web sites. Not all of them are as informative and useful as, say, Social Edge, but it's not all dancing hamsters out there either.

The next time you here somebody talking about how net neutrality is an infringment of a corporation's right to free speech, ask yourself why it's so important for corporations to limit their customers' access to information. Ask why more people aren't up in arms because we don't all have equal access to the internet and the educational opportunities that such access affords.

Technology and easy access to information isn't enough, however. Our attitudes and priorities have to change before any real change is possible. Poverty, education and justice are issues that social entrepreneurs tackle every day in order to make the world a better, more equitable place. At some point, however, the haves are going to have to be convinced that there are better ways of eliminating the have nots than incarceration and separation. They have to realize that making everyone's lives better is in their own best interests. Segregation is never a reasonable, sustainable solution, be it as a result of race, religion, class, economics or any other differences that people have. A society that truly values and invests in equal opportunities for all and rehabilitation for those who miss out the first time around is a society that doesn't need to put 1 of every 150 of its citizens behind bars.

Yesterday may not have been the day the music died, but it was the day that GeoCities closed its doors. Or had them shut by Yahoo! who once paid around $3,000,000,000 for the privilege of being caretaker to this dotcom era dead weight.

Once upon a time, when Under Construction banners still seemed as cool as digital watches once were, GeoCities was a bustling little neighborhood. Sure, the sites were god-awful ugly, but they were user generated and they were plentiful. Then MySpace came along and took the really ugly user generated web site business away from them. Why? Because GeoCities never evolved. So when a new site sprang up with new capabilities and features, the community moved on leaving behind a virtual wasteland of blinking graphics and annoying midi tracks. (Go ahead. I dare you to click that last link.)

No, I'm not really lamenting the loss of GeoCities that much, and I won't miss MySpace when and if it follows suit. The backs of my retinas are relieved.

I am sad, however, that GeoCities never adapted, it never grew up. It never changed. Sure, it is daunting to view something that is successful as something that needs to be changed, especially if you're a caretaker and not the original innovator. If you don't figure out how to adapt, then your best hope is to ride out the maintenance time and land somewhere new before the numbers go south. And they will go south. It's the fourth law of the internet: Thy numbers shall go south as soon as you stop aggravating your userbase with seemingly needless changes. Or something like that. Turns out that the people who object the loudest when you make changes are the first ones out the door when something new and shiny comes along.

How long until we here the same news about MySpace? Probably long after it leaves our consciousness. A dead community can hang on for years in the background, finally falling when nobody is around to hear. Facebook? Twitter? All depends on how they change and adapt. Millions of eyeballs today won't mean much if some brilliant new community swoops in with new ways of connecting that are easier and more relevant to users.

It's not just large communities that this happens with. It's your communities as well, the eyeballs that are focused on your organization and how you have proposed to go about changing the world for the better. If you have an audience and they're listening to you right now, great! But don't be afraid to offer them something even better. If you don't, someone else will.