Michael Pollan on Food, Energy, Climate, and Health

In his latest column, Nicholas Kristof encourages President-Elect Obama to heed Michael Pollan's call for a radically new food policy. Pollan makes a convincing case that our current food system is a "shadow problem." If we're serious about working on energy independence, climate change, and health care, we have to change how we're feeding ourselves.

During his interview with Pollan At Web 2.0 Summit last month, John Battelle boils it down to "eat sunshine." Pollan challenges the audience to make a difference in the food system. Watch the video and ask yourself--can tech innovators and entrepreneurs create technology to make the food system more transparent and carbon-neutral, and figure out how to make money creating solar food production systems?

Huffington, Newsom, and Trippi talk politics in a Web 2.0 world

"Were it not for the Internet, Barack Obama would not be President," declared Arianna Huffington from the stage at Web 2.0 Summit, the day after the election. In "The Web and Politics" session, moderator John Heileman explores the new world of running for office--and governing once you win--with Huffington, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, and veteran politico Joe Trippi.

Politicians and pundits love to talk, and in this case, they're good at it. A few bon mots and surprising stats to whet your appetite:

* Trippi: People watched 14.5 million hours of the official video created by Obama campaign (not including supporters' videos). Obama would have had to spend $47 million dollars to buy those eyeballs on TV. Plus, YouTube viewers went there on purpose, to watch Obama's videos--they weren't interrupted in the middle of their football game.

* Huffington: "The Internet has killed Karl Rove politics." (You'll have to watch the video to catch her funniest line. Hint: it has an Alaska connection).

* Newsom: "I have to watch myself sing "I Left My Heart in San Francisco" on YouTube, and it can't go away. I am desperate to get it to go away....we're in a reality TV series now, in politics, 24/7."

[NOTE: Web 2.0 summit videos are available on YouTube.]

Radar in Chinese--Crowdsourcing the Translation

At China Foo Camp last November, we got many requests to translate this blog into Chinese. I'm happy to say that Douglas Wan of our Beijing office has ported Radar to a wiki, where staff and a small corps of volunteer readers (from countries including China, France, and the US) are translating entries into simplified Chinese. If you'd like to help with translation, contact Douglas at radarman@mail.oreilly.com.cn.

Social Graph Foo Camp--the Videos

On a stormy weekend back in February, O'Reilly hosted Social Graph Foo Camp (David Recordon and Scott Kveton were the instigators; we were happy to say "Yes" when they asked to hold the party at our Sebastopol campus). Google announced their Social Graph API on Friday morning, adding fuel to the fire as the intense discussions got underway. We managed to drag some of the Campers away from the proceedings, sit them in front of a video camera and capture their thoughts about the state of the social graph. We also included a summary in the latest issue of Release 2.0 (free excerpt). 

There's much more to be done if we're to create sane and useful approaches to the data portability, identity, and privacy issues created by the social networking juggernaut. The conversation continues today at the Data Sharing Workshop in San Franciso, and next week at Web 2.0 Expo, where a slew of SG Foo Campers will be speaking, including Joseph Smarr, Tom Coates, Niall Kennedy, John Musser, Gavin Bell, Artur Bergman, Ankur Shah, Kellan Elliott-McCrea, Marc Davis, Justin Hall, and Dave Morin.

The iPhone wins friends and influences people

At O'Reilly conferences like this week's Money:Tech, where businesspeople outnumber developers, the tool of choice to enable continuous partial attention is a mobile device, not a laptop. To my surprise, roughly 80% of my Money:Tech rowmates had iPhones in hand. I expected New Yorkers to be a Blackberry crowd, but it looks like Tim was on to something when he predicted that the iPhone will beat the Blackberry.

A few more recent random data points about Apple's momentum:

Radarite Nat Torkington reports that developer Layton Duncan of Polar Bear Farm, a trailblazing developer of cool native iPhone applications, was high on his list of "most interesting people I met at Kiwi Foo."

After a few weeks with his new iPhone, Grant McCracken was surprised to realize that he'd probably switch to the Mac when he got his next computer. He wants the iPhone's elegant, user-friendly design on his laptop, too.

Longtime ace coder and Foo Duncan Davidson (who moonlights as the photographer at our conferences) said he'd been getting a noticeable increase in requests to develop for OS X. His corporate clients are investing in the Mac platform.

On their own, none of these anecdotes is wildly surprising. Taken together, especially when they all pop up in the course of 36 hours, they point to continued growth in Mac market share.

Why Non-Obvious Brand Icons Work

While pondering why names like Firefox, Fire Eagle, and firedog work for technology products, anthropologist and culture maven Grant McCracken concludes:

A Firefox and a Fire Eagle are counter intuitive in exactly the right proportions. These names resist comprehension but only just. They are counter intuitive, but not unintelligible. In the first moment of exposure, we don't quite get them...and this prevents them from washing over us and out into that sea of forgettable branding and marketing. Comprehension is held up just long enough for the new name to lock into memory.

Edie Freedman, O'Reilly's original Creative Director, knew this 20 years ago when she designed the first of our now-infamous animal covers:

As I started to look for imagery for the book covers, I came across some wonderful wood engravings from the 19th century. The strange animals I found seemed to be a perfect match for all those strange-sounding UNIX terms, and were esoteric enough to appeal to what I believed the UNIX programmer type to be.

Tim, against the advice of most everyone else in the office, gave the go-ahead to the quirky covers. Edie's intuition proved correct--UNIX geeks, an imaginative bunch who treasure a good story, loved the subtly non-obvious covers. Owning a shelf of "animal books" became a badge of honor for serious hackers.

In hindsight, we realized that the slight hurdle readers had to leap to "get" the animal brand made it stronger. Not only were people more likely to remember our books, but they were in on the secret of the covers, members of a select group of geeks in the know.

If You Want My Trust, Give Me Control of my Data

Spock, the people search engine/social network that launched at Web 2.0 Expo, got many things right, but as Tim noted in a previous post, "This private beta of Spock exposes the tips of many icebergs, some of which have the power to sink one feature or another." Looks like they've run smack into one of those icebergs during the implementation of what they're calling Trust Networks.

I've received a spate of cryptic emails stating that "Person X has added you as a trusted contact on Spock. By accepting trust, you will be able to search each others’ network, share contact information, and get news." Spock's FAQ says, "You should only add people you are comfortable sharing your network connections with," but doesn't reveal how those connections are shared. What's up?

I'm not the only one who's annoyed and/or confused about how and why my contacts may get Spocked. Brad Templeton identifies a key issue with Spock's approach to harvesting users' contacts:

"We have to consider just how much we want to allow applications to 'mail everybody in your address book.' This started with Plaxo and Goodcontacts, which wanted to be address book managers, and now has moved into social networking tools."

When Shelfari got heat for setting defaults to "Share my contacts," Andrew Savikas pointed out that users and producers of Web 2.0 sites are in the process of crafting a new social contract. My social network is a subtle, fragile, and valuable asset. I want to have as much control over this social capital as I do the money in my bank account. So if a site wants my participation (and my friends'), they'll build an architecture and set defaults that let me protect my social assets.

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