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Saturday, February 26, 2005 |
 I just got off of the phone with Scoble. He's like a pig in shit. A great job and a fantastic book deal all due to business blogging. I am very happy for him.
3:07:00 PM 
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I have an idea for a toolbar. One that replaces the advertising (banners and Google adlinks) on pages that you view. Instead of ads, the links that show up are content you collect from RSS/podcasting instead of ads -- that way, I wouldn't even need an RSS reader (in the conventional sense), rather RSS feeds would be part of nearly every page I viewed. You could even have important keywords that show up in recent RSS feeds appear as links to words in the pages you view in the browser. So, if you click this type of auto-link, it would take you to a page of RSS items that contain that keyword.
Want to throw a wrench in the works of the big guys? This is the way to do it. Imagine using Google with the links down the right side being RSS items instead of ads... I guess I am thinking like a benign global guerrilla. ;->
12:04:19 PM
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For the sake of the transparency they proclaim, what did Shel and Robert get for their book deal with Wiley??
11:14:50 AM
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Lind's analysis (below) does point out a historical trend that may repeat again (I am thinking like a Greek here -- in cycles). Old global orders typically don't depart gracefully. Also, when they unwind they often prompt violent counter-reactions. For example, the combo of the French/American revolutions led to Napoleon. The First World War (the collapse of the central and eastern European monarchies) led to the Second. In each case, an unwinding of the old order in the first conflict created the conditions for the second conflict. Our situation has proceeded differently so far. The old order of megastates, client states, resource conflict, etc. has been unwinding relatively peacefully. A look at an old map of the Soviet Union will confirm this. Will our luck continue?
10:40:01 AM
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Lind. Fin de siecle.
To an historian, a crisis over the Senkakus would fit in a larger and not comforting pattern: the world before 1914. Then, an unstable European order blundered from crisis to crisis, just avoiding a general war in each, until some shots fired in Sarajevo brought down the whole house of cards and with it Western civilization. Today, we have the war in Iraq, the Israeli-Palestinian mess (the Balkans of our time?), the Balkans themselves, a threatened American attack on Iran, a resurgent FARC in Columbia, and a North Korea that just declared itself a nuclear state. The fin de siecle feeling grows ever stronger; what small incident will it be this time that causes the house of cards to collapse, the house of cards that is a world of “unipolar” American dominance? The tragedy here is that states continue to play the game of rivalry between states, paying no attention to the prime fact of a Fourth Generation world: when states fight each other, the likely winners will be non-state elements. Again, the analogy with 1914 is hard to avoid. Then, the ancient Houses of Hapsburg, Romanov and Hohenzollern remained focused on each other, thinking only in terms of which would triumph over its rivals. In fact, the events they allowed to be set in motion destroyed them all. The real victors were a guy named Ulyanov sitting in a café in Zurich and a transatlantic republic, the United States.
10:05:45 AM
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© Copyright 2005 John Robb.
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