Google growing up?

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Robert Scoble has paid another visit to the Google campus. And he was impressed…For example,

every interaction I had with Googlers this time was different than the last time I was on campus. They seemed more humble. More comfortable. More inquisitive. And, when I gave them chances to say “you’re an idiot” they didn’t take it (and I gave them many opportunities). This is a different Google than I was used to. And it’s the small things that I noticed.

One other small thing I noticed? A lot more blog listening behavior. Carl Sjogreen, who runs the Google Calendar team, told me that the first thing he does every morning is do this search on Google’s Blogsearch service: “Google Calendar.” He says he answers everyone’s questions, even if you’re a kid in another country with only four readers.

Bing. Small things. They are gonna prove to be dramatically important over time…

Agricultural productivity up in Afghanistan

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At last — a success story from Afghanistan! Or perhaps not. From today’s New York Times…

KABUL, Afghanistan, Sept. 2 — Afghanistan’s opium harvest this year has reached the highest levels ever recorded, showing an increase of almost 50 percent from last year, the executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Antonio Maria Costa, said Saturday in Kabul.

He described the figures as “alarming” and “very bad news” for the Afghan government and international donors who have poured millions of dollars into programs to reduce the poppy crop since 2001. He said the increase in cultivation was significantly fueled by the resurgence of Taliban rebels in the south, the country’s prime opium growing region.

As the insurgents have stepped up attacks, they have also encouraged and profited from the drug trade, promising protection to growers if they expanded their opium operations. “This year’s harvest will be around 6,100 metric tons of opium — a staggering 92 percent of total world supply. It exceeds global consumption by 30 percent,” Mr. Costa said at a news briefing.He said the harvest increased by 49 percent from the year before, and it drastically outpaced the previous record of 4,600 metric tons, set in 1999 while the Taliban governed the country. The area cultivated increased by 59 percent, with more than 400,000 acres planted with poppies in 2006 compared with less than 260,000 in 2005…

New Labour and ‘business’

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Interesting report in yesterday’s Guardian.

The annual bill for Whitehall consultants advising government departments is running at more than £2.2bn, an investigation by the Guardian reveals today…

One reason for this is that New Labour ideology includes a naive assumption that ‘business’ methods are invariably superior to old-style ‘public-service’ methods. The problem is that nobody in the Labour leadership knows anything about business because they’ve never run one. And (poor saps) they think that consultantcy firms do. The Guardian report claims that one section of the Department of Health is now staffed by almost as many consultants as full-time officials – 180 civil servants and 170 consultants.

Just googled out

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This morning’s Observer column…

Why does Google remind one of Lord Denning, Master of the Rolls for 20 years and arguably the most inventive judge of his time, forever generating new precedents and concepts and requiring the weekly updating of legal textbooks? Things got so bad that a law student once famously wrote to the Times requesting that the Master of the Rolls should stop making new law until the Bar exams were over.

Google is like Denning on steroids. Scarcely a week goes by without it unveiling yet another wheeze to put someone else out of business. The converse also applies: if Google says it wants to be your friend – as with eBay recently – your share price goes up. But in the main most of Google’s announcements involve plans to eat somebody’s lunch…

Lunch with the FT

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I read the Financial Times every Saturday, mainly because its magazine still contains some of the best book reviews. One of its more quirky features is “Lunch with the FT”, in which a journalist takes some grandee out to lunch at the paper’s expense and, under cover of that, conducts a half-baked interview. This week, the guest was Professor Paul Kennedy, the Yale historian. The lunch was in Wilton’s, a ludicrously expensive restaurant just off Jermyn Street in London. What interested me about the piece was not so much the content (which was pretty banal) as the bill:

1 x crab and avocado salad
1 x asparagus with Bernaise sauce
2 x poached halibut
2 x summer pudding
1 x expresso
1 x bottle of mineral water
1 x half bottle of Pouilly Fume

Total: £169.88

iPod eBooks Creator

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Wow! iPod eBooks Creator…

This utility/PHP script loads a large text file and splits it into notes for use on iPod. It is easy to read your book in plain text format on your iPod via Notes functionality. All notes will be automatically linked, so you can move from one to another with absolute ease. It’s as simple as turning pages of the book…

The future of ITV1

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James Cridland’s in Berlin and has seen the future.

The television has DS:F on it, which until recently has been showing a motor-sport type show, and is now showing what QuizCall would look like if it was also a porn channel. A leggy blonde in yellow hotpants is asking questions to a caller – they could win 200 euros – and has just peeled off her top to display a fearsome set of headlights. She’s now stroking her hotpants suggestively. This is the German equivalent of ITV1, at 10.50pm, folks. This is what might happen at home. Please write to the Daily Mail now…

Christians First, Americans Second

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Well, well. After all that guff about how muslims are more loyal to their religion than to their country, how about this from the Pew Research Center…

Among non-Muslim nations, the United States is the outlier in terms of religious self-identification. The 2006 Pew Global Attitudes poll finds American adults are closely split between those who see themselves as Christians first (42%) and those who see themselves as Americans first (48%); an additional 7% say they see themselves as both equally. By contrast, only a third of German Christians (33%), and fewer than a quarter of British, French and Spanish Christians self-identify primarily with their religion. In this regard, the views of Americans closely parallel those of French Muslims, 46% of whom think of themselves first in terms of their religion rather than their nationality…