One of the most watched and celebrated corporate tech wars of the past decade, still unfinished, is between Google and Microsoft for domination of consumer and business computing. This begins and ends with the software code used to run computers – the operating system. And as an every day matter it extends to the software that nearly everyone uses on their computers, regardless of the operating system: web browser, word documents and spreadsheets, calendars and email.

Google’s answer to Microsoft’s Windows operating system is the ChromeOS. Google Docs aims to take the place of Microsoft Word and Excel; Google’s Gmail handles email while Calendar takes care of schedules.

So here we are, mid-2011, well on our way to a mobile, social, network culture built around wireless networks and web apps powered by unseen servers in the metaphorical “cloud.” We’re shrouded in news, ideas, opinions and data that find us, in ever greater volume, through our assorted digital links with friends, family and friends-of-friends. The cloud feels more like fog.

We’re mobile. Google, with its Android operating system for phones and tablets, competes against Apple’s iOS for domination of smartphones and mobile advertising, apps, books and services.

Yet it turns one of the battles for our computing hearts and minds isn’t over mobile or networked anything. It’s over something so prosaic, so ordinary, so retro, it feels like a faded clipping from a family scrapbook: the offline world.

Offline – remember that? It means disconnected from the web. It’s what happens when a computer is not plugged into wifi, broadband, 3G, 4G or anything. It’s when a computer and its operator is isolated from the rest of the networked world. It’s what used to be the norm for computers and software designed to run in isolation, when they could neither ingest nor output anything on or through the Internet.

At its developer conference this week, Google announced plans to release versions of its productivity apps that will work well when a host computer is offline.

The next question, of course, is a challenge to the great tech war itself. What if there is no host computer – if we disconnect completely? Walk away. Use a pen. Scribble a note. Have a meeting. What if the next frontier of digital culture isn’t digital, isn’t technology at all. What if it’s us?

As traditional computers give way to iPads, iPhones and other mobile devices, Google’s attention on the offline world is a refreshing reminder that we don’t live in the cloud but on earth. If we’re lucky, we’ve got a roof over our heads, a toilet and access to clean water. We may know, connect and share data with people everywhere – but sometimes we don’t. Sometimes we are alone.

Photo credit: sk12

NEW YORK – Projects that support community activists and renters were the big winners in the 2011 We Media Pitch It! Challenge, which concluded at the We Media NYC conference on April 6.

Pando Projects and Stable Renters each earned seed investments of $25,000. The prizes represent the first funding for each project.

The We Media PitchIt! Challenge, ranked one of the world’s top startup competitions, begins each year with a simple goal: to find brilliant ideas and help turn them into something real with advice from funders, investors, corporations, fellow entrepreneurs, attendees and media. The contest is open to commercial and non-profit ideas.

Stable Renters

Pando Project

Within the shrinking U.S. newspaper industry, tongues wag any time a publisher tries to charge for access to a web site, or a new mobile app; and then they wag again when the effort fizzles.

Techies and newsies greeted last week’s big reveal of the new subscription paywall at The New York Times with explainers on how the paywall works, analysis of what it could mean for profits at the Times, instructions on how to get around the paywall and speculation about privacy-busting evils the Times could unleash to stop cheats.

Canadians got the first taste of the Times paywall last week; the rest of the world will see it March 28.

“Which gives me the chance to say: one great newspaper site will remain free,” Washington Post chairman Don Graham posted on his Facebook wall.

So there’s the line in the sand, to pay here or not pay there, which, for now, only the most loyal and obsessive New York Times readers will be asked to cross. How’s that for a loyalty program?

If, like 85 percent of its web readers, you view fewer than 20 links on the Times site each month, you’ll continue to get in for free. Or if you arrive through a search engine. Or Twitter. Or Facebook.

At TechCrunch, MG Siegler wrote that “The barrier is always met with huge backlash.”

But really, he couldn’t have been more wrong.

When Digg’s users abandoned the link-sharing service in 2010, to protest a new design, that was a backlash.

But when the Times of London limited web access to paying subscribers, and its web traffic fell by 62 percent, that wasn’t a backlash. It was predictable, passive, routine economics. It was a shrug. We’re all used to digital dead ends. It’s no big deal to turn around and find another link to follow instead.

A backlash? The New York Times should be so lucky. Will we see street protests outside of the Times HQ in New York, or a Facebook campaign to persuade Times chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. to change his mind – like we see, routinely, when fans try to revive a canceled television show?

Where’s the passion? Where’s the love?

You could argue that a paywall is the perfect measure of love. Those who love it, pay. Those who don’t, don’t.

The quieter, sadder reality is that most of us don’t and won’t. Pay? For what? Our news is already a strange fog of links from here and there – atomized bits that find us as much as we find them.

The New York Times may be the best newspaper in the U.S. Or it may be the most over-rated. It may be among the handful of English-language, upper-income agenda-setters that still command at least some attention from business, political and cultural leaders. Or it may be an elitist relic of a crumbling empire. It may reach and influence more people online than it ever reached in print. Or it may be neck-and-neck with The Huffington Post, Gawker and dozens of other digital upstarts who each day render the old order ever more obsolete.

It may be all of that. But it ain’t all that. It’s still a click here, a click there.

I haven’t seen anybody speculate on how many new journalists the Times might hire, or how many investigations it might publish, or how much tougher its reporting will be, or how much more daring its writing, photos, videos and story-telling might become, if the paywall “succeeds.” But here’s one number we can crunch: At $15/month – $180/year – it will take 51,000 annual web subscriptions to cover the $9.2 million the company paid its top two business executives last year.

Who wants to subscribe to that?

Until it becomes something else – something worthy of a genuine, heartfelt, passionate backlash – The New York Times, like all the faded newspaper companies that still dream of thriving in its nation-leading shadow, will remain a story that no paywall can re-write, no matter how porous or protective it may be.

Tahrir Square, Cairo, Feb. 4, 2011

But there’s much more going on than business, consumption or greed. We’re in the midst of something extraordinary. Dictatorships are crumbling, microblogs are taking off in China, hackers are fiddling with credit cards, banks and stock markets, communities of all flavors are scheduling Meetups everywhere, and Groupon, Living Social and other social deals distributors have shown local merchants how to move goods and bring in customers without buying ads.

Is all this simply the rebound from economic collapse coupled with internet and mobile phone proliferation? Or the impact and triumph of Facebook, Twitter or mobile networks? Or the consequence of shifting trust? Somehow, the digital universe expanded to embrace and shroud the earth. Or we embraced the universe.

Of course all this has been unfolding slowly. But it feels like in a matter of weeks we’ve experienced a supernova, or cosmic inflation – like the networked culture that had been slowly maturing for nearly two decades metamorphosed into another form. A new lifestage? Toddler? Juvenile? Adolescent? Subadult? A new generation? Whatever we call it, digital life has eclipsed theory, metaphor, aspiration and the realm of digerati. In 2011, it became massively, incomprehensibly real. It became now. We’re all digerati now. For reasons that historians may one day ferret out, in 2011 the cosmic laws and atomic particles of the connected society took shape and diffused to define the world as it would forever after be known.

So We Media, this grand idea that Dale Peskin and I have been exploring for nearly a decade, is now simply the way things are. “We” are driving the culture. We’re networked. We’re a system. Developer-scholar-blogging godfather Dave Winer says news is an environment. I’ve called it a fog – the cloud that surrounds us. We produce, share and acquire information, ideas and insights through a diffuse mist of connections linked through digital and personal networks. We are media, whether we tweet, blog, make or share videos, check in somewhere, like something on Facebook, follow someone, email a link to Posterous, report for a local or global news service, design an app for Rupert Murdoch or for one of his arch enemies, or passively surf, consume, read or answer a Craigsist ad. Or join a crowd to protest the government. Working alone or in collaboration with others, we create, curate and connect to knowledge that spans the globe, moves markets and changes governments.

All of this fills me with a mix of wonder, dread and certainty that we’ve entered an age of astonishing creativity, invention and chaos. I’m feeling woozier than usual. At the end of 2010, Wikileaks embarrassed the U.S. government and put every nation, every business and every citizen on alert that secrets matter, whether your intent is to keep them or to reveal them. Consider what’s already unfolded in the first weeks of 2011:

• The world watched as thousands of people organized online and on streets to overthrow dictatorships in Tunisia and Egypt. U.S. President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, both of whom have expressed contempt for Wikileaks, cited the role of Facebook, Twitter, mobile and social media as a force for change and critical conduits for free expression. In the New Yorker, author Malcom Gladwell dismissed the significance of social media in social movements – and all sorts of A-list pundits and thinkers dismissed Gladwell.
• Goldman Sachs orchestrated a $1 billion investment in Facebook – and kept U.S. investors out of the deal for fear of running afoul of U.S. securities laws.
• Demand Media, a company we identified last year as a game-changer for its algorithm-driven approach to creating and optimizing the value of web content, and which others detest as a “content mill,” raised $85 million and was valued at $1.7 billion in an initial public stock offering.
• Path, a one-year-old mobile/photo sharing service with no discernible competitive advantage over any other photo/mobile/social service, except that its CEO was an early member of the Facebook team, reportedly turned down a $100 million acquisition offer from Google.
• Reddit, a link sharing service that exploded after users abandoned the similar and formerly bigger Digg, recorded more than 1 billion pageviews in January .
• NewsCorp., with help from Apple, launched an iPad-only, once-a-day, crash-prone subscription national news brand for the U.S., called The Daily.
• Al Jazeera revealed more secrets: the Palestine Papers included details of the long and fruitless Israeli-Palestinanian peace negotiations. Soon after, Al Jazeera shared with the world live video from the anti-Mubarek protests in Egypt.
• AOL purchased Huffington Post for $315 million. Since its launch in 2005, HuffPo had grown to nearly 24 million monthly readers – within spitting distance of the 30 million who visit The New York Times web sites each month.
• Blogher founder Lisa Stone was featured in a spoof Superbowl ad with Oscar winning actress Cloris Leachman.

Any one of these items might be noted with admiration for the individuals involved, dismissed as isolated, insignificant developments, or both.

But considered together, along with everything we know about how technology has liberated information, empowered individuals, reshaped trust networks and disrupted systems of power and control, these We Media flash points and data blips hint at something truly awesome unfolding rapidly before our eyes.

For the first time since the web itself was created by Tim Berners-Lee at a Swiss research lab in 1993, business, markets, governments and society as a whole are aligning around the networked culture.

Alignment does not mean agreement. But it means widespread adoption of the technical, cultural and social relationships that define our digital experiences and link them to our human experiences.

As early adopters make room for everyone else, what follows will be even more chaotic than what came before. Old empires – news, entertainment, business, government – will continue to crumble, fade, collapse, expire. But even in the afterglow of a global economic collapse, new empires are on the rise and new methods of informing, connecting, sharing and influencing each other are taking root. For brands, marketers, causes and political campaigns the business of influence has been quantified and refined into repeatable processes and detailed metrics.

What happens next in China? Myanmar? North Korea? Iraq? Iran? Afghanistan? Israel, Gaza and The West Bank? How about our schools and neighborhoods?

The entire planet is up for grabs.

Photo credit: monasosh

At last week’s We Media Miami conference we introduced an agenda for smart capitalism in the New Now. Our economic stimulus package: reboot capitalism with a fresh look at people, outcomes, connections and creativity. We also presented a better balance sheet for companies and organizations to express their stories and report results.

20th Century capitalism was dumb: unfairly distributed, mortgaged and borrowed, destructive to communities, toxic, shallow, filled with air, and ultimately unsustainable. It came crashing down in the lost, first decade of the 21st Century.

21th Century capitalism must be smarter. We must grow and create a new economy by making capitalism attainable, equitable, resilient and sustainable. To achieve this we must make all citizens smarter, healthier, happier, and wealthier. Capitalism must be accessible to all. We believe that media, technology and a connected society – the Power of Us — are the mechanisms for change. Our agenda:

Income to Outcomes: Economics that merely measure financial numbers represent a weak story. We’ve learned the hard way that it’s the wrong story: a misleading mythology, except to the quants among us. The new story: tangible human outcomes and an authentic value proposition. The right outcomes drive the new income. The old question: Are we richer today than we were yesterday? The new question: What makes us rich?

Transactions to Connections: Creating a marketplace for transactions is so 20th Century. Control access, distribution and flow of goods, services and information. Thrive by dominating or controlling the channels. What happens when almost everyone has their own channel, their own marketplace, or free and immediate access to one? The flow becomes the currency. The quality of connections becomes the differentiation. 21st Century capitalism is powered by the quality of connections. The goal is not merely to trade, but to amplify connections and community, co-create and collaborate.

Products to people: Dumb capitalism is powered by capital seeking the lowest cost of production. It disappoints with products and services that meet the lowest expectations – or unrealistic ones — or occupy the shortest shelf life. Smart capitalism empowers people to seek the capital to create, invent and innovate. It rewards skill, dedication, execution, craftsmanship and service – people investing in people.

Productivity to creativity: Creativity is hard to measure, manage and model, so the quants focus on productivity instead. The result is dumb: we’re producing more and more of the same stuff and its worth less and less. Smart capitalism focuses on economic creativity, because creativity establishes new value, instead of just shifting the old value around. So smart growth is creative, not merely productive.

Many We Media participants embraced the agenda, which has brewing for some time. Leaders attending the World Economic Forum in Davos addressed these and other ideas with considerable disagreement. Several participants at We Media, as well as members of the We Media Community, have suggested that the original agenda was extreme.

We’ve modified some of the original language at We Media for clarity of intention. For example, “outcomes, not income” has become “income to outcomes” as a way of expressing the transition from dumb capitalism to smart capitalism, rather than implying — either incorrectly or inadvertently – that income no longer matters. Of course it does; as capitalists, we’re all for income. The point is that in 21st Century capitalism, income will derive from tangible, human outcomes. The same thinking applies to the transitions in transactions/connections, products/people, and productivity/creativity.

We’re looking to the creativity and connections of people for more advanced outcomes around the agenda. Send us your thoughts and ideas. Smarter is a better choice than the dumb legacy we’ve been given.

Download this thinking paper (PDF)

Most Americans believe small business, science and tech leaders will lead the U.S. to a better future – not the news media, government or large corporations. That’s the key finding from a new We Media/Zogby survey released today in conjunction with the 2009 We Media Miami conference. You can find and discuss the findings here.

Like all surveys, this one is a snapshot in time – and given the times, not that surprising. The world is in a world of mess made worse by failing big businesses and inept governments. Big media is tumbling too.

But it correlates with what Dale and I have been forecasting for nearly a decade: a historic, global shift in human behavior and organization. A new era.

The New Now

While the marketers and lords of commerce were playing with our futures, the future itself was emerging in ways that broke dramatically from the past. Technology, economics and human creativity converged to shape the post-collapse era, the connected and empowered culture we call the New Now.

In the connected culture we can no longer claim ignorance, innocence
or powerlessness. Great forces of authority, perception and commerce
compete for our attention and submission. What’s changed is that we
can compete back. And we are.

Something big is emerging – a culture broadly redefined and organized around individuals, creativity, empowerment and responsibility – and enriched, as we’ve long anticipated, by the continuous flow of information through ubiquitous digital networks. In his book The Way We’ll Be, John Zogby writes optimistically of what he sees in today’s 20-somethings – global, digital natives, diverse and accepting of differences, and hungry for solutions. We see that too in our work at iFOCOS: an emerging culture of passion and purpose – in business, in life, in everything.

The public’s sense of who will lead us to a better future reflects the failures of the 20th Century’s biggest and most influential institutions.  Dissatisfaction with the news media, corporations and government runs deep. So in The New Now Americans look elsewhere. They reflect a business imperative for leadership and social responsibility, and an opportunity for all of us to inform, define and provide that leadership. If big business, government or the media won’t lead, we’ll lead ourselves. We’ll create our own businesses and our own media to build a better future.

No matter where you sit or what you do, that’s a call to action to participate, to inspire hope and bring prosperity to more people. It’s an agenda for everyone: Lead us to a better future.

Here’s a longer thinking paper on the End of Apathy. This is a new and expansive agenda for us, our new album – and it’s a work in progress. We’d love your feedback and input as we aim to fill in the details in the next few months. We’re also eager to bring The New Now and The End of Apathy into companies and organizations that want to learn more about the agenda and how to apply it. If you’d like to follow up, contact me via the We Media Community.

Members of the We Media Community inform, influence and inspire business and social innovation in the connected society – and engage with each other to turn ideas into actions.

Join the online community for free – or become a paid member of iFOCOS.

As a member you’ll connect with a diverse network of leaders from the intersecting fields of media, technology, telecommunications, investment, policy and social activism. You’ll have access to a private online members network through which members collaborate, share ideas, schedule meetings – or simply find each other to pursue new ventures.

Membership fees support research, regional meetings, publications, collaboration tools, the We Media Game Changers Awards and the annual We Media conference.

We encourage and seek a diverse network of individuals, companies, startups, nonprofits, NGOs, policymakers, educators and educational institutions.

Review the membership benefits and tiers for individuals and companies here.