Evidently, you can't get to YouTube from China:



Some of the videos on YouTube have been deemed unsuitable for viewing by minors. Because after all, what we do to each other isn't obscene, but watching video or looking at pictures of it is. If we teach our children how horrible war is, how will we convince them to die for us in the next one?

In the last month, China has ranked number six in terms of visits to SocialEdge.org, behind the U.S., India, the UK, Canada, and Australia, with the most visits coming from Beijing. So yes, it seems that you can read Social Edge in China, but you can't watch YouTube videos, so I guess no X-Interviews. Somehow, I don't think the X-Interviews are the most important thing they're missing out on.

Last year the U.S. blocked soldiers in Iraq from YouTube and 11 other sites as well, citing bandwidth concerns. Yay freedom, woo-hoo. There's always a perfectly "legitimate" excuse available when you want to quash dissent and stifle speech, be it in Tibet, Baghdad or your living room.

Okay, so the first thing I saw when I was reading about Apple's iPhone SDK announcement was that AIM was going to be available on the iPhone. Second thing was, yes, the $100 million iFund investment arrangement - seed money for iPhone development companies. That's a lot of money for development of a new platform. The third thing was the iTunes distribution channel. As an old IT supply chain guy, this warmed my heart. Finally, a digital distribution model for software that makes sense. I've been waiting patiently for years to see this happen at the computer level. Apple skipped ahead and made it happen at the phone level. This is fun stuff, if you dig supply chains. If not, well, let's just move on.

The iPhone as currently priced and distributed is not going to be widely distributed to the areas where cell phones and microfinance are changing the way such a huge swath of the world is doing business. Unless, of course, a large portion of those unlocked iPhones are being redistributed unlocked across rural regions globally. It's possible. At any rate, in a year or two it will be the reality.

Will we see microfinance utilities/applications spring up for the iPhone? I imagine we will. Other relevant apps across the spectrum of social entrepreneurship? Yes. The two questions I have are 1) what are they going to be; and 2) who's going to build them?

So, last week I was complaining about how monitors don't fold, so nothing on the web is above the fold. This week? Our New Entrepreneurs podcast series has been picked up in iTunes, and is featured in their New Releases section on the Podcasts homepage:


Above the fold? Not that important. More important is that it is at the home page level instead of being on the Government & Organizations section or even farther down in the Non-Profits section. In this medium, we're getting the same visibility as ESPN, Gallup - and clonepod. The net isn't constrained the way paper is, it is three dimensional, hierarchical... Are social entrepreneurs going to usurp the attention of those who want sports news? Video games? Politics? Probably not. Then again, why not?

Apple, thanks for featuring us. It helps us to see that the world isn't solely focused on sports stars, teenage pop-divas and the like. There is a desire for more relevant content, and it is nice to see a venue where that rises to the top.