The Economist has a great article in this past issue about how more and more of us in the U.S. are living in “landslide counties” - local regions where political proclivities are pronounced and tend to vote consistently, and strongly, one way or the other. The reason? The article suggests people are choosing to move into neighborhoods where they feel their neighbors share the same values as they do.

Although this is not an entirely new phenomenon - there are conservative parts of the country, and liberal ones, the whole red state-blue state sort of explanation - this brings home the greater granularity with which this sort of division is shaping up to be.

I remember shortly after the 2004 election, Dan Savage wrote that this country is not composed of red states and blue ones, but rather an urban archipelago that is deeply blue, and a red suburban and rural America that is just as richly hued. In other words, urban Texas is more likely to vote Democratic than rural California. The map to the right describes the phenomenon well, and another (which I can’t find right now), shows the same map but distorted to reflect the relative size of voting populations (which demonstrates that red & blue are almost evenly matched).

I can’t argue with the logic, personally. I like living in cities, and have much more in common with people of different sexual orientation and ethnicity in cities, with respect to my values, ideas around leisure, entertainment and culture, than other gay white people living in rural and suburban areas (they do exist, but probably not as great in number). There’s something to be said for the ability to have a decent, respectable conversation with your neighbors about something deeper than the weather. In today’s volatile and sharply-partisan political climate, maybe that’s not possible in “mixed” neighborhoods.

As long as they don’t resort to insults or violence, I am perfectly content to share a block or even a building with people who share different values from my own (and I suspect that I already do, although I haven’t polled people in my apartment building).

The question that might come up, however, is if we are just setting ourselves up for stony silence and pent-up hostility, interrupted with the occasional flareup, between adjoining communities that used to intermingle and share resources. That scenario reminds me of what the Dutch called zuilen, a perverse form of which sprouted up in South Africa.

It’s the end of June, and I find myself mulling my next phone choices with a certain sense of anxious excitement. I currently have a Blackberry Pearl which I like pretty well (it’s certainly a lot lighter and smaller than my previous Treo 650, but I miss the touchscreen sometimes). Besides the rumors of an upcoming touchscreen-enabled Blackberry, there are two choices on the horizon: the Apple iPhone 3G and a Google Android-enabled smartphone.

The iPhone 3G is sure to have the same incredibly intuitive UI and clever tricks I’ve come to love in my MacBook Air. Apple has a way of wrapping sophisticated features in an instinctive user interface to which it owes a great deal of its success. And its new development platform will bring the same sort of cool innovation we’ve come to expect on Facebook, not from the site providing the platform itself, but to the thousands of clever minds that finally have a way to distribute their ideas. The iPhone’s biggest drawbacks - the lack of video recording, Flash support, cut-and-paste, and MMS - could conceivably be supported by third-party apps. Native support would be nice, but this might be a signal from Apple that they’re going to focus on hardware and OS over functions, and it might be an incentive for app developers to migrate away from Android.

The gPhone is really nothing more than an OS and applications platform. We have no idea what forms the gPhone will take, or from what manufacturers first, but we do know these for sure: there will be easy Google Apps integration, there will probably be an apps platform, and, yes, there were most certainly be ads. Lots of them. In Google’s neverending quest to secure more ad inventory, accessing the burgeoning mobile ad market would be a whole lot tougher without a ready default delivery platform. Like Apple, Google will be sure to dangle carrots in front of app developers in order to encourage them to create for the Android platform.

I have about a couple of weeks to make a decision if I want to participate in the first-day euphoric rush at the Apple Store. If I decide to pass, I’ll consign myself to searching the news every day for announcements about the HTC Dream and enviously watching friends play with the iPhone 3G in the meantime.

The New Yorker had a fantastic piece on the Keith Olbermann phenomenon, one that Olbermann himself agrees wouldn’t have existed if it weren’t for its diametrically-opposed counterpart, the O’Reilly phenomenon.

Olbermann’s success, like O’Reilly’s, is evidence of viewer cocooning—the inclination to seek out programming that reinforces one’s own firmly held political views. “People want to identify,” [MSNBC Vice President Phil] Griffin says. “They want the shortcut. ‘Wow, that guy’s smart. I get him.’ In this crazy world of so much information, you look for places where you identify, or you see where you fit into the spectrum, because you get all this information all day long.”

It’s an interesting development, and one that dovetails with the viewership march from the mainstream media to the blogosphere to get news. Is this a reaction to information overload? When confronted with an overwhelming onslaught of news items from an increasing number of global sources, do we turn to someone to follow the news, digest it and parse it for us in a form more easy to assimilate?

I know that Timothy Ferriss, the Four-Hour Workweek guy, says that he doesn’t follow politics at all, and just asks a friend or two that he trusts to tell him whom to vote for each election cycle. He’s an incredibly busy guy, he has his own dreams to follow, and doesn’t feel that following each detail of the lengthy political process gives him any more necessary perspective than his friends’ advice give him when it matters.

The Information Age has given those of us with access to the internet’s resources freedom to go both broad and deep on data as never before. But, at a certain point, each of us has to make some choices as to what to limit our exposure to - we don’t have the time or mental energy to dig through everything and still have time to get work done. Might it be fair for matters of politics to turn to our favorite partisan blogger or “news analyst” to both inform us on what’s important and also shape our opinion?

I’m not so sure. I personally find myself turning daily to the Drudge Report, a right-leaning news page, even though I’m left-of-center myself. Why? My other purviews into the world of politics are decidedly mired in a Democratic/left political ethos, and I wonder what else I’m missing out there. And although Drudge doesn’t provide any of his own commentary besides the shaping of his headlines’ titles, he does exert an editorial bias on which stories he publishes (and how long he keeps them up).

I feel it’s important to keep a pulse on the sentiments of people who you might not necessarily agree with, but whose line of thinking you can at least consider rational enough to respect. But this is just one man’s opinion. In today’s politically-polarized atmosphere, maybe true neutrality is something that’s too much to ask for.

The United States, until now maintaining observer status in the 2-year-old United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC; the successor to the UN Commission on Human Rights), has decided to withdraw except in cases of “deep national interest.” The reason? It claims that the body has become dominated by Middle Eastern and African nations with an interest in bashing Israel over all other human rights concerns.

A look at the current members (with staggered three-year terms) shows a handful of countries that would happily enjoy criticizing Israel at the expense of taking a hard look at their own abuses: Egypt, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia. At the same time, there’s at least one that would probably defend Israel (Canada) and others that would shy away–abstain–from being overly critical of Israel (Japan, South Korea, France, UK, Netherlands, and most European countries).

Turning to the record, the UNHRC does show itself to be a bit of a joke. In its first year, 9 resolutions were leveled against Israel, and none against any other country (like Sudan, Zimbabwe or Myanmar). While there might certainly be human rights abuses in the Palestinian territories, they pale against those committed in Darfur. This disparity is really impossible to overlook.

What say those members who don’t have an axe to grind against Israel? Maxime Verhagen, the Netherlands’ Foreign Minister, has said, “At the United Nations, censuring Israel has become something of a habit, while Hamas’s terror is referred to in coded language or not at all. The Netherlands believes the record should be set straight, both in New York and at the Human Rights Council in Geneva.” It’s not difficult to infer from his words that the Netherlands would rather see its voice be heard on a panel where it might be dominated by differing interests, than capitulate that voice altogether.

Juliette de Rivero, head of Human Rights Watch offered, “Having the US at the table was very important to building a stronger, more effective Human Rights Council. Instead of ceding the field to those who want to shield abusers from scrutiny the US should have redoubled its efforts to make the Council work as it should.”

Reasons for the US withdrawal range from it not wanting its own human rights abuses aired on an international stage, to wanting to sap the power and legitimacy of the Council (much like it did to the League of Nations 90 years ago). Since there hasn’t been any official announcement, we’re left to guessing its motives along with the impact it will have on the body.

This brings up a number of interesting questions:

• Should the US participate in the UN Human Rights Council?
• How do international bodies prevent “the tyranny of the majority” from setting the agenda?
• How do international bodies prevent a “bully” from setting the agenda?
• Who should act as neutral arbiters in cases of human rights abuses?
• Does the UNHRC fulfill a useful purpose?

Debuting a documentary about Malawi, the home of her recently-adopted son, David, at the Tribeca Film Festival a couple of months ago, which she narrated and her former gardener directed, Madonna took issue with America’s aid efforts, saying, “I don’t know what our government does period, instead of getting us in more debt and blowing up countries.” When asked later if the US government should do more, she replied, “It’s our own job to change that and I think it’s a fool’s errand to rely on the government to change things.”

Whatever you think of Madonna’s sense of humor or her knowledge of the US’s activities, she might be somewhat on the mark when it comes to American aid. The fact is that the US government is a miser when it comes to charity, but individual American citizens more than make up for it with their own largesse.

Two interesting, and highly contrastive figures:

• Among the 22 OECD development assistance committee countries, the United States is second-to-last in terms of generosity (only Greece was more miserly). This measures governmental aid. The Scandinavian countries, led by Norway, were the most generous. The US government gave 0.16% of GDP.
• The United States is the most generous of all countries, as a percentage of GDP, when counting total aid (see infographic to the right, courtesy of Fast Company). The US gives 1.7% of its GDP (Britain, Madonna’s new home, gives 0.73%, less than half that)

The difference? Private giving. Americans rely less on the government to do the job, and rather donate to non-governmental agencies, private and public, to do the job. A third go to religious organizations, and three-quarters from individuals (only a paltry 4.3% from corporations), but it’s clear that the American people, as Madonna calls it, will be the ones that people in need will have to rely on when they seek help.

What is missing from these statistics is how much of giving is destined for overseas. This, brings up some interesting questions (all of which would make for terrific dyalogue topics):

• Should individuals help less-fortunate people overseas, or “take care of their own” first?
• Is aid to former colonies (typical among European former colonial powers) as altruistic as aid to countries without a historical connection to your own?
• Is there a reasonable charitable giving target, or is any number arbitrary?
• Do celebrities owe a responsibility to the poor?
• What is the ideal government:private aid ratio?

We’ve broadly scoped dyalogues to mean any sort of back-and-forth exchange between exactly two people.

That’s pretty broad. We know. At least at the beginning, we’re launching with two formats:

• debates
• dual reviews (two people review something together; think Siskel & Ebert, or Ebert & Roeper, I guess)

There are two other formats we’ll launch down the road:

• interviews (one user interviews another)
• multi-step advice (think Dear Abby or Ann Landers, except you can ask follow-up questions)

There are some differences in the UI for each of these formats, but primarily the formats will be grouped together, so if you’re an interview fanatic, you can read interview after interview in the same section on the site. Or if you want to read what everyone has to say about the new Blackberry Pearl, then you should be able to see all of those reviews collated in the same section of the site.

There might be other formats that we’ll test down the road, as well. But these 4 are those that are on our current roadmap.

I just noticed this past week that Google Docs (word processor, spreadsheet and now presentations, or, to use file extensions almost everyone knows now: doc, xls and ppt) now allows you to work on your docs offline - like if you’re on a plane or in the BART tube - and then synch up later when a connection becomes available (unfortunately, it hasn’t been rolled out to any of my accounts yet). Although Google Docs are still a bit clumsy, this is yet another step towards a serious step on Microsoft’s turf.

Price? Either free, or $50 per user per year for more advanced features and more storage. A bargain compared to Microsoft’s Office bundle, which, by the way, added very little except for confusion in their most recent update. (Kevin notes, though, that in the new version of Excel, you have more than 1 million rows at your disposal, instead of less than 66,000).

At the same time, Google Docs still has a way to go on the way to completely supplanting Excel, Word and PowerPoint. Sophisticated graphs with trend lines, pivot tables, advanced sorting - these are missing in Google Spreadsheets, for example (and I use them fairly often, personally). However, what they lack in functionality, they make up for in shareability and easy collaboration. Kevin and I share Google docs with each other all the time; it certainly is easier than emailing updated versions of the same document back and forth. And most of the time, the limited functionality of a Google doc is all we need.

So what’s Microsoft to do? The same thing it did with Netscape - copy the competition, fast. TechCrunch reported over a month ago that Microsoft’s going to be moving many of its applications online, using a Salesforce.com-like subscription model for usage.

Is it too late? Probably not. The fact is that the majority of business and home users are still comfortable and familiar with Microsoft’s UI (although they kind of shot themselves in the foot with the most recent scrambling of their menus). Provided it’s priced right and that it retains most of the useful functionality of the pure-offline product (something that might be possible with Silverlight, which will probably add more power than Flash and Ajax), Microsoft can probably retain its dominant position. There’s a lot to be said for inertia as well; corporate customers are the least likely to try to rock the boat and switch away from a software library that their users know.

But Google moves fast, and Microsoft is ponderously slow. It’s time for the behemoth from Redmond to pick up its game.

I’d like to point out an example of the sort of conversations that are happening across blogs that demonstrate the market, if you will, for dyalogues.

1. On Feb 12, Glenn Kelman, CEO of real estate startup, Redfin, compares Silicon Valley, where he spent 16 years, to Seattle, where he’s based in now.
2. Three days later, Michael Arrington of TechCrunch writes a response on his blog. Readers interested in first reading the blog post he’s responding to must follow a link to Glenn’s blog. Then they come back and read Michael’s response.
3. Glenn finds out about Michael’s post (maybe via an email from Michael, maybe by monitoring his trackback pings, maybe a tip from a friend who follows TechCrunch) and posts a response on his blog. Of course, the only people who understand the conversation absolutely clearly are those who follow both TechCrunch and the Redfin Blog, and have a pretty good memory. Everyone else has several browser windows/tabs open as they weave through the conversation chronologically.
4. Michael finds out about Glenn’s response post (again, we have no idea how) and posts a link to it at the bottom of his original post.

If this sounds complicated, it’s because it is. It’s not, by any means, an impossible conversation to follow - it’s just a bit clumsy because blogging platforms are not designed for deep interaction between bloggers. It can feel a little like an online scavenger hunt to follow the conversation.

This is where Dyalogues shines. Dyalogues is a web platform for two-way interchanges between two bloggers. The dyalogue starts with a premise and an initiator, and then proceeds in a conversation-like pattern. It’s easy to read, and the system handles notifying both parties about when the other person has responded, and when it’s time to write a reply. The conversation can proceed as quickly as the participants want it to.

We hope Michael, Glenn, and other bloggers take the time to engage with each other via a dyalogue or two, and have a permanent, easy-to-read record of it with which to share with their readers, both current and new.

The Economist had a feature recently on how mobile technology is enabling a nomad-like work culture. Blackberries, Wi-Fi availability in Starbucks and other cafes, and lightweight laptops are allowing people to conduct work while being on the move, even to the point of obviating the need for an office. Coburn Ventures completely lacks a formal office; team members typically meet in an coffee shop to touch base before heading out to meet with clients.

I personally consider myself a member of this group - I have long blurred the line between work and home, never really striking that fabled “work and life balance”, but, importantly, I have never really minded. This article was reassuring; there are lots of people like me.

Here are a couple of blogs that chronicle this trend:

• Digital Nomads
• Life Nomadic

Over the past couple of months, I’ve suddenly enjoyed some of the features available on my Blackberry Pearl, including apps for Twitter, Facebook, and Google Chat and Gmail. I’ve taken pictures and posted them immediately to Facebook, and updated my moves around town via Twitter (which updates my Facebook status), and carried on work-related chats as I’ve sat in doctors’ waiting rooms.

One consequences of this hyperconnectivity, though, is its tendency to enhance isolation. With such a huge amount of information available, you have to limit the sphere you’re exposed to, to a small number of friends you already know. You couldn’t possibly follow hundreds of people via Twitter & Facebook and get work done.

Like blogs and recommendations on iTunes and Netflix, the ability to channel your life’s information feed to exactly what you like and preferences, it is very easy to avoid any sort of exposure to something truly novel (even if that’s because you’re completely unlikely to like it).

Think of it in terms of Chrismas presents, too - 20 years ago, we got ugly sweaters we would never wear. Now we get gift cards, which almost never go to waste. But we miss out on those rare gems of gifts that we would have never known about because it wouldn’t have ever nomally crossed our personal attention horizon.

From the Economist article:

Sociologists in particular are trying to figure out how mobile communications are changing interactions between people. Nomadism, most believe, tends to bring people who are already close, such as family members, even closer. But it may do so at the expense of their attentiveness towards strangers encountered physically (rather than virtually) in daily life. That has implications for society at large.

So does technology’s ability to personalize one’s experience and liberate us from the confines of a cubicle and commute also limit the sort of exposure to true novelty that’s necessary for the creative impulse?

Although it’s not exactly news anymore, Obama’s issue with Jeremiah Wright is not behind us, not least because another preacher from the same church bashed Hillary recently. But I think there’s a tremendous amount of significance to the entire matter.

Obama knew that his pastor was prone to making controversial outbursts (although wasn’t apparently present at the sermons that have been getting so much coverage on YouTube and on the news). However, he chose to stay with the church, only recently distancing himself from Rev Wright, arguably for political expediency. Hillary Clinton said very forcefully that she would not have stayed with the church had she heard Wright say the sort of things that he said after 9/11.

Forgive me for getting on the soapbox here, but I suppose that’s what Dyalogues is for, anyway. I side with Obama on this.

First, I don’t think language critical of the U.S. (”God damn America”) is something profoundly evil to say. The United States is an institution that, like any institution can be condemned. If this country weren’t open to severe, biting criticism, it wouldn’t be the country that it is. Countries that forbid self-criticism either through law or officially-fomented nationalism are, well, not exactly the kinds of countries that inspire envy. (I’m thinking of North Korea, Iran, Cuba, etc.) Unsurprisingly, the U.S. has indeed survived Wright’s criticism, and doesn’t seem to have borne any permanent scars.

Second, as an adult, I’m sure Obama can sort out what he can seek spiritual guidance from his reverend on, and what to politely dismiss and ignore. It is not as if he were a child that can’t make those sorts of judgment calls. And it’s clear, from many, many long-time parishioners’ accounts, that, for the most part, Rev Wright was an inspirational, uplifting figure, that spent decades doing good work for his flock and thousands of suffering people in the Chicago area.

The fact that Wright made a number of outbursts seems to have come as no surprise to either Hillary Clinton’s pastor nor John McCain’s; both actually defended Wright. They know that delivering a sermon can be an emotional experience, and occasionally prone to stirring eruptions on the pulpit.

But the most important issue, in my mind, is this: How can we bridge the divides that separate us in this country if we turn our back on people we disagree with? This is something I feel very strongly about, and it is the main reason we started Dyalogues. Engagement with people that you disagree with is the only way you ever have any hope of finding some sort of compromise or understanding that you can live with. Refusing to engage at all with people unless they see things the way you do is a quick way to end things in a hopeless stalemate.

As a gay person who has strong feelings about gay rights, including the right to marry, it can sometimes feel infuriating to argue with someone who doesn’t feel like we’re entitled to the same rights that they enjoy. But, provided they’re simply not an unrepentant bigot, it would be a mistake to write them off and not understand at least where they’re coming from. You can only guess at what a person’s reasons are for holding a different position from yours until you actually talk to them.

So this is where Obama’s argument that he can bridge the divide in Washington, ironically, gets a little substance. And this is where Clinton’s similar claim tends to ring empty.