I spent most of today flying to San Francisco and will spend all of tomorrow flying back, so my bloggery will be marginal. I’m sure you’ll manage to deal with it.

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Plaudits to AKMA for his excellent DIDW coverage, which I only managed to catch up with this morning. Vivid, rooted and rooting. You go, Akkie! (You can start reading his coverage here.)

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Submit your own or
enjoy those of others,
The Red Sox still lost.

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While there are a hell of a lot of blogs and blog readers, blogs aren’t even close to being a mainstream phenomenon the way email is. It’ll happen. And here are some guesses (note: guesses) about what they’ll look like when they do:

1. The word “blog” will expand to cover any linkable posting (a place) where a person gets to speak her mind more than once. If it’s more permanent than IM, it’ll be a blog.

2. Group blogs will be at least as common as individual blogs. Most people don’t have time to stoke the blogfires every day, but groups do.

3. The lines between blogs and discussions will blur. Contributing to a blog discussion requires less effort than creating your own and taking the initiative to come up with topics every day or so. The regular participants in a blog discussion will consider themselves to be blogging. (We see this beginning to happen in the comment boards of the Howard Dean blog.)

4. The lines between email and blogs will blur. Already we can post to our blog via email. But at some point, maybe we’ll be able to press a button on an email to post it to the Web, with the link sent automatically to everyone on the message’s cc list, creating an instant blog site that grows as the thread grows. There’s no technical barrier to this, of course, and the functionality already exists already almost and kind of, but it hasn’t been presented to us as a type of blogging. Something like it will be, and the ecological niche between email and blogging will be quickly filled in.

5. Corollary: Closed circulation blogs will become as important as open blogs. Closed circulation lets blogs serve the function of cc lists.

6. Corollary: Many blogs will be event-based and time-limited. I.e., we’ll have Leah’s Graduation Blog that lasts for a month and the Class Trip to Shenandoah Blog that lasts for two weeks.

7. Blogrolls and buddy lists will thoroughly merge somehow.

8. The distinction between the big, high-traffic blogs and the rest of the world of blogging will be increasingly sharply etched. The “tail” will gain more and more value as the number of high-traffic blogs necessarily grows much more slowly. At some point, the “A-List” bloggers won’t even seem like bloggers because what they’re doing is so different from what the rest of us are doing. By analogy, when I receive some massive-circ email newsletter, I don’t think of it as being like email I receive from a friend, even though both are using email transport. (This doesn’t mean the high-traffic blogs will be of less intrinsic value. It does mean they’ll be of less value relative to the increasing cumulative value of the lower-traffic blogs.)

9. Blogs will be of increasing value to democracy.

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Robert Wright explains that non-zero sumness means “a correlation of fortunes for better or worse.” E.g., when you buy something, the merchant is happy with your money and you’re happy with the good.

Why care about non-zero sum games? Stopping the spread of AIDS would be a NZ game. Globalization can be. We’ve been playing NZ games since history began. E.g., hunter-gatherer societies are held together because it’s a NZ game. History advances because technology enables poeople to play NZ games over greater distances.

Thomas Schellling, a leading game theorist, told Robert: “In a non-NZ game it never makes sense to communicate honestly.” So it’s not surprising that information technologies have driven the evolution of social complexity. In this view, history has a moral direction. He references Peter Singer’s The Expanding Circle about how we have expanded the realm of creatures we consider to be moral agents and worthy of dignity.

Terrorism creates zero-sum relationships. NZ relationships such as economic interactions get us to acknowledge our common humanity. An active compassion is going to be more and more in our self-interest. If their economic problems cause your economy problems, you need to take an interest in their economic problems. [Hmm. Not what I would usually call “compassion.” Seems more like self-interest.] With regard to terrorism: if potential terrorists get happier, it’s good for us. That’s the definition of a NZ relationship. Hatred is a threat to your children’s future.

I.e., Freedom is inversely proportional the amount of hatred in the world.

Q: Do economic sanctions work?

A: It’s mixed. Yes in South Africa. But they’ve been an abysmal failure in Cuba. “Cuba would be the 51st state by now if we’d been trading with them.”

[I like all this, and he’s a great presenter, but the game theory part sounds like a jargon-izing of common sense; yes, I know game theory has greater depth than you can present in a 25 minute talk, especially where your point isn’t about game theory but about futures and peace. Or maybe game theory has shaped commonsense already. Anyway, it was a terrific talk.]

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“All that makes me weak and strange will be engineered away.”

So, here’s a young guy writing uniquely funny songs, reminiscient of Tom Lehrer. Yeah,almost that good. (His Mandelbrot Set song got PopTech’s only standing ovation – unfortunately, none of the songs he performed here are on his Web site.) No fucking recording company stands between you and him. Support the hell out of him.

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Scott Hunt says we need to make compassion our guiding light. He wants us to be hopeful. He thinks the media focus on the negative. Since we’ve been at PopTech, 105,000 kids have died of malnutrition. 4.3B live on less than $2/day.

The says the Dali Lama (with whom he has spent a lot of time) suggests we list all the bad news on one side and all the good acts on the other. Be sure to add all the acts of decency and restraint. After Scott traveled the world’s battlefields, he came back and wrote the first line of his book: “Kindness is alive and well and we have good reason to be hopeful about the future.”

Here’s how technology is helping to move towards Israeli-Palestinian peace. A web cam dialogue between a Palestinian and Israelis turned a would-be suicide bomber away from that path. “Hello Peace” puts people on opposite sides into telephone contact.

He’s going to give us a structured plan for peace. The first step is to recognize “something I call human dignity.” We will afford all people pursue happiness no matter how different they are. Everyone wants to be happy. [I’m finding this very well-intentioned but jejeune.]

Second, we need to take action. The weapons in our heart are greed, ignorance and anger. We need an eBay-like market system for humanitarian aid. It has a web site with projects that can be sponsored. You can chat with the people who are constructing it. [Good idea, IMO.]

Third, we need persistence.

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Arnold Kling feels that the PopTechians are a smug bunch o’ angry, liberal white guys. He was particularly bothered by Larry Lessig’s showing a clip of Bush and Blair video-manipulated into singing a love duet. Arnold felt that the political bias was unnecessary; had it made fun of Hillary, we would have reacted differently, he says.

Well, yes, there is a general ethos at PopTech, but maybe not as uniform as Arnold thinks. For one thing, Bob Metcalfe is one of the organizers and he’s not shy about his support of the Bush administration. Nevertheless, if you randomly tell someone that you’re supporting Howard Dean, you are far more likely to get an expression of support than a denunciation. I don’t actually see a problem with conferences having personalities and political tendencies.

Second, showing a clever re-mixed video that lampoons sitting leaders is a good way to emphasize the social good of allowing sampling and mixing. It’s certainly seems plausible to me that if three years ago, Lessig had shown a re-mixed video of Bill Clinton rapping about not having sex with that woman, people would have responded favorably also.

Arnold, it’s good to have you here.

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Sally Stansfield of the Bill & Melinda Gates Fund is talking about how technology can be used to improve health globally.

It’s been 50 years since the development of the polio vaccine but it’s still a threat in much of the world. A child born in the developing world has a 1:6 of dying before age 5. More than 800,000 kids die from measles every year. 25% of the world’s kids are moderately or severely malnourished. Less than half of people at risk of AIDS can’t get condoms.

Health is a public good gone global, which means that governments, with their concern for national goods, can’t deliver it.

The free market is not developing drugs for the developing world. And there’s no economic incentive to develop vaccines that do not require refrigeration.

The World Health Organization has committed to deliver 3M anti-retro-virals (42M people are living with AIDS). But we send them back into their communities where they can infect more people because the community has no access to AIDS prevention techologies. Sally says no one is looking into the effect of this. She sees WHO’s program as something that makes us feel better about ourselves.

The private sector is stepping up to the plate. Merck has made a new commitment to provide the anti-River blindness drug. Glaxxo SmithKline has agreed to produce the anti-elephantiasis drug. They’re putting millions into programs to make these things happen. But private citizens and organizations are required to solve the problems.

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Michael Rosenzweig is depressing us with facts about our destruction of our shared ecology. Preserving tracts of lands as parks and reserves is not enough, he argues. Global warming will destroy the parks; Australia has discovered that 95% of its preserves and parks will be under water with global warming. [How many degrees are we talking about?]

The more area of wilderness, the more species.

But we can learn to reengineer our habitats, conserving species diversity, and we can do it where we live. Michael calls this “reconciliation ecology” because it reconciles our needs with those of the diversity imperative. For example, Turkey Point power plant south of Miami, half nuclear and half fossil fuel, has 80 miles of cooling tubes that turn out to be perfect for crocodiles. That was by accident. In another example, British ecologists reengineered golf courses and even bomb craters to preserve a particular frog. [But it took 50 ecologists 25 years to save one frog. Do we know enough to make reconciliation ecology practical?] Also Eglund Air Force Base: it’s used without impediment by the Air Force but through small changes preserves the diversity of species there. Key point: “It is not a preserve.” The Air Force uses it, the trees are timbered, 2,5000 houses are there.

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