Last week I posted about the One Laptop Per Child Project, and it reminded me that I had received a GlobalGiving gift certificate months ago that I hadn't redeemed. I decided to put my money - or at least my gift certificate - where my mouth was and donate towards this project:

Improving Computer Literacy in Afghanistan Afghans continue to struggle for survival within their devastated economy. They lack the skills employers need. Help 200 Afghan students learn computer skills, fill the technical void and get jobs. Theme: Technology | Location: Afghanistan | Need: $9,825

I can't help but feel small when I think of how little a dent my meager offering put into the $9,825 listed need for this project. Then again, it is closer than it was. Education at every level is a key indicator of what the future will hold. If you want to live in a global community that works together instead of one that wastes all of its time and resources on new and more complex ways of destroying one another then the best place to start is by educating the young and creating an environment that is hospitable to the opportunities a peaceful and prosperous world requires.

Technology has a role to play in education. I don't believe that the OLPC effort is a panacea, but I am not inclined to see it as a bedeviling evil foisted upon the poor by greedy capitalists either. I am more inclined to believe that it is a huge step in the right direction that will inevitably hit some bumps along the way. Maybe I'm just overly optimistic, but I think it will be very enabing for those kids who end up with these shiny green machines.

Which brings up their environmental impact. I was asked about this when a friend read my post from last week. Looks like they're doing more to be green than your regular old standard landfill loving laptops.

Hold the champagne and caviar.

I had a strong reaction yesterday when I read One Laptop Per Child & The Cry Babies on GigaOm yesterday. Especially to this:


'Well, as long as kids have something to eat and drink, then what the heck are people getting upset about, right? Forget sending the kids laptops and send them some bootstraps. They'll get along just fine, I tell you.'

There is a palpable throwing of one's hands in the air because the problem and the solution seem so overwhelming as to be insurmountable. "There are kids on the planet without enough to eat, and you want to give them laptops?" If we can't feed the world then of course the idea of educating the world and hooking up kids in remote parts of Cambodia or Brazil much less everywhere in the whole world may seem like a ridiculous proposition.

The problem is that we have enough food to feed the world, we just don't do it. Heck, sometimes we make it illegal to even try. (What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, huh?)

Bob Geldof figured out years ago that a lack food wasn't the problem causing world hunger, it is the distribution system that is broken, or rather never really implemented in the first place.

So is the One Laptop Per Child project a naive endeavor by a bunch of elitists who want to feel good for trying to save the world? Or is it an economical way to help educate millions of children who don't have access to the information that these laptops would allow them?

By all means, feed the world. And while we're at it, let's educate the world too. Libya is buying in to the program to the tune of $250 million. For that amount of money, they get a laptop for all 1.2 million children in the country, satellite internet access, a server in every school and technical support. Every Libyan child with a laptop. Check. I can think of worse ways that money is being wasted by "elitists."

Will getting a laptop into the hands of every child solve all of the worlds ills? No, of course not. Neither will feeding the world, cutting my taxes or finding out if Paris Hilton survives her grueling jail term or not. (Gee, I wonder what will garner more airtime on CNN this year, OLPC stories or Paris in the slammer stories?) Relieving the debt of the poorest nations on the planet is a good place to start. Mosquito nets to protect against malaria is also a step in the right direction. OLPC is another.

The more smart, educated people there are in the world the less likely it is that 50 years from now we'll still have 800,000,000 people on our planet who go hungry every day. Those who hold the keys to the kingdom haven't done such a hot job looking after those who don't.

Maybe it is time to hand the keys out to everybody and see what comes of it.

I was on vacation last week, and took the family to Florida to visit Mickey Mouse. We were bent on achieving theme park overload and had done a pretty good job of it by Friday, our last day to ingest the Disney experience. That's when I got the IM that our web server had crashed. Victor was in DC and had gotten the message from Keely in Africa. It was down, down, down and there was no indication that it was coming back. I was about to head out of the hotel room when my Treo buzzed in my pocket. So I did what any good geek would do when confronted with such a situation; I headed for Disneyworld, Treo in hand.


My mail app on my Treo had suffered from an evidently known bug where it runs fine for just about a year and then decides that it is just too tired to go on and eats all of its accounts, otherwise I would have seen the email from the previous day telling me that we had had a 10X spike in traffic. Or the one from Keely earlier that morning from Africa. Yes, it is fabulous that the folks on iTunes love Global X, and that Inc.com ran a story about our Peace Corps Entrepreneurs series, but our pipe to the outside world was suffering from all the attention.

No worries, I knew that Outlook Web Access was still available, and that would let me exchange emails back and forth with our ISP. So I spent my morning at Disney's Animal Kingdom riding their Kilimanjaro Safari and typing away on my Treo, watching the cell phone access bars shrink to nearly nothing. 'Lions, Tigers and DNS settings, oh my!' I was wishing at one point that I had either a terminal or SSH app on my Treo, which was a very disconcerting wish for me to have. (And yes, they'll both be on my phone the next time I travel.) I thought I had become as much of a geek as I was going to be when I got excited that Mac OS X was going to have a command line. Now I can't wait to find out if there's going to be telnet on the iPhone.

Finally, everything was settled and our site was migrated from a server in Seattle to one in Dallas. Why? Because everything's bigger in Texas. The rest of the day didn't get any easier as I tried to keep up with an 11 year old on roller coasters. Made the morning seem like a vacation by comparison. I learned some valuable lessons on this trip:

1. If you use, ssh, terminal, ftp, webdav, or other web apps to access your site, see if there are apps for your phone to do the same before heading out on vacation.
2. See if you can edit your DNS settings on your registrar's site with your phone's browser. Could be important, trust me.
3. When you're small, having somebody available 24/7 to help with hosting issues is a lot better than having to do it yourself - especially long distance.
4. When in the U.S. at least, stay in cheap motels. They almost always have better WiFi and it's almost always free. Nice hotels seem to always charge extra and have network issues as a result of their billing & security that makes the niceties they offer nearly moot.
5. Never try to keep up with an 11 year old on roller coasters.
   

We're still a little bit stunned here on the Edge. We knew that Global X had a huge following, but bigger than the President of the United States? Well, yes, it appears that he does. The X-Interviews has been at the top of the iTunes Goverment & Organizations charts since shortly after we went to press last Tuesday. George W. Bush trails X in the #2 slot with his weekly radio address.


This doesn't mean that we're planning any inaugural festivities in DC. Global X is an international sort and can't be tied down to a single hemisphere, much less a single country. Maybe if the World Bank comes a calling he'll step in and lead that august body, but for now we're keeping X on the Edge.

What it does mean is that people are interested in the stories that social entrepreneurs have to tell. It means that it is easier than ever before for you to tell your stories to the people who want to hear them.

So what does it take for you to join Global X at the top of the iTunes charts? Does it require hiring a video production staff and buying a lot of highly specialized equipment?  Does it require a plethora of technical expertise to get the podcasts feeds published?

Nope.

Camcorders can be had relatively cheap these days. HD camcorders are shiny, new, expensive toys, of course, but you just need a basic camcorder to get things rolling. The web still isn't built for hi-def, and a regular camcorder can be had for under $250. You can add a tripod for less than $30. For higher quality audio, you might want to add a microphone, but you should be able to get by without.

We use Macintoshes here on the Edge, so we didn't need to get any additional video software. Every Mac these days comes with iMovie, a more than adequate and easy to use video editing program. Windows Vista comes with Windows Movie Maker for editing your movies. Higher end packages are available for both platforms, and there are inexpensive packages available for older versions of the operating systems as well.

To create the XML feed for iTunes, as I mentioned in previous posts, you can create the code by hand, but hey, let's make this easy. Feeder is an elegant solution for Mac, and The Podcast RSS Buddy is available for Windows as well as Mac. Submit the feed to Apple, and wait to see your videos in iTunes. While you're waiting, might as well publish to YouTube as well. It's easier than sending an email to Grandma.

That's all it takes for you to join Global X on iTunes and YouTube. How many social entrepreneurs can land on the charts at once? It would be fun to find out, wouldn't it?

When we started considering relaunching Social Edge last year, we thought about launching a Social Edge Media Empire®! Radio! TV! Movies! We're very humble here on the Edge, but our aspirations know no boundaries. Sure, we're small, but we could take on the CNN's, NPR's & Sony's of the world!

Alas, then we remembered, we're a web community. We want to build conversations, not transmitter towers. The cost involved in setting up a TV station or a radio station? Astronomical. The range? Not so hot. Our audience here on the edge is global, and we want to expand that global reach, not constrain it to any one place.

Still, we knew we wanted to expand our offerings in new ways in order to incorporate audio and video. We added audio in our Peace Corps Entrepreneurs podcast series and video in Global X's series of X-Interviews. Yay! We had made a move towards being more media rich. Not an empire just yet, but hey, have you priced Colosseum sized real estate these days? Even in Second Life, virtual land is starting to gain in value.

Now, SocialEdge.org has global reach. Anybody on the internet can reach us no matter where in the world they are, government censorship not withstanding. (Is there a site out there that will tell you if your site is being blocked by a government? I would love to find one.) Still, Social Edge may be older than YouTube, but we don't get as much traffic as the average otter video does there. 5,546,204 views? 36,472 people marked it as a favorite? 7984 comments? I kid you not, this is what is more important to people than microfinance and social entrepreneurial scalability:


That's what we need here on the Edge: more videos of cute and fluffy animals! The lure of anthropomorphized aquatic mammals is the siren song of the 21st century.

So, we started our own YouTube channel at http://www.youtube.com/socialedge. Okay, I'll be honest, not a lot of people have visited our channels and watched our videos. Maybe we need to get a couple of social entrepreneurs to float in a pool holding hands. Any volunteers? We have a couple of subscribers thus far, but the main thing is that if you want to include an X-Interview in your blog, you can embed the YouTube code into your blog to do so. And it is free to post the videos, so if it never picks up much, we're not losing any money, just a couple of minutes each time we post a video.

For the next part of the expanding Social Edge Media Empire® we turned our attention to iTunes. As I detailed in an earlier post, I used a shareware app for the Mac called Feeder to create the XML feeds with iTunes extensions and then posted them to our site. I submitted them to Apple and we got picked up pretty quick. Peace Corps Entrepreneurs showed up the next morning, while the X-Interviews took about a week to show up. I was very impatient and emailed Apple to find out what was taking the second feed so long to get indexed! Nothing in particular, I just needed to be patient and voila! It showed up.

I had thought that it would link the two podcasts together on a single author's page, but that is something that Apple does manually if you ask them to. Our page is plain, but shows both our podcasts. Apple designs custom artist pages for the most popular podcasters, so maybe it'll be prettier someday. We've been very excited to see them rise on the charts, reaching as high as #3 & #9 on the non-profits sub-category list of top podcasts and #6 & #19 on the Governments & Organizations category. More rewarding still was to see the X-Interviews in the New Releases section of the iTunes Podcast home page.

As it turns out, it wasn't rocket science. If your organization has audio or video that you think a larger audience would benefit from than traditionally pass through your site, take a look at publishing on iTunes. It won't take long and is a small added step to your publishing process that could expose more people to your organization's purpose and mission. Just don't be too popular, okay? We like seeing ourselves listed in the top podcasts and don't need you coming in and kicking us out! Maybe in a year or two there will be enough podcasts from Social Edge members to warrant a new Social Entrepreneurs category in iTunes. Now that would be the start of a real Social Edge Media Empire®!