Britain’s Prime Minister, Tony Blair, has returned from his trip around California. When he wasn’t hobnobbing with the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger, he found time to lunch with a group of Silicon Valley leaders, including Steve Jobs of Apple and Jonathan Schwartz of Sun Microsystems. The latter gives and account of the lunch on his blog.

Naturally Mr. Blair was interested in what makes Silicon Valley so successful. One of the answers he received was “education”. He was also told that wage costs do not matter so much, so long as the talent can turn projects around fast.

Coincidently, The Economist Magazine has a different version of why America’s high tech firms succeed (Venturesome Consumption quoting a paper by Amar Bhide). According to this theory, investing in scientific education can be over-done. The “Venturesome Consumption” theory praises consumers, rather than inventors, of technology.

“The most important part of innovation may be the willingness of consumers, whether individuals or firms, to try new products and services.”

I have to say that on my first visit to Exbiblio, I was very struck how the office had adopted all the technological help it could get its hands on, from a wireless network, to AIM instant messaging, a wiki, and internal blogs. Using tools like these seems like second nature, at least in this American company. The same tools are freely available in the UK, but few companies are quite so quick to adopt them.

So Mr. Blair take heed: it might be better to leave great inventions to others, and to let consumers get on with enjoying their gizmos.

One of England’s oldest and most important public records is now available in digital format. The Doomsday Book dates from a census of 1086 by the Norman invader, William the Conqueror. Its gloomy name probably relates to the fact that it was used as a basis for taxation. It listed just about every village, field and pig in the land, as well as the owners, though the big cities such as London were excluded. Many families can trace their names back to the survey, and the book is an important starting point for genealogists.

The Anglo Saxon Chronicle relates how William commissioned the survey:

Then sent he his men over all England into each shire; commissioning them to find out “How many hundreds of hides were in the shire, what land the king himself had, and what stock upon the land; or, what dues he ought to have by the year from the shire.”

You can now search the Doomsday book online at the site of the UK’s National Archives. Unfortunately, there is a charge to see a facsimile of an individual page. This is a model that could prove problematic for Exbiblio, which aims to interlink paper copies with their online versions. Even so, it would seem likely that researchers will be among the earliest adopters of Exbiblio’s technology.

The Exbiblio system is, of course, about closely integrating print on paper with online texts. One of the obstacles that needs to be overcome is the fact that the majority of written texts do not yet exist in digital form. The Google Books Project aims to change that, but it faces quite a struggle against copyright holders, many of whom hate the idea of their property being propagated over the internet. Personally, I think they are wrong. The existence of digital texts does not discourage me from buying a nice paper copy of classical books such as War and Peace, but that’s by the by.

The LA Times reports that The University of California is in talks with Google to digitize 34 million volumes from its 100 libraries on 10 campuses. It’s said to be the largest academic library in the world:

Daniel Greenstein, UC’s associate vice provost for scholarly information, said that joining the Google Books Library Project — with its ability to search for terms inside texts, not only in catalog listings — would help “create access like we’ve never had before to our cultural heritage and scholarly memory. It’s a whole new paradigm.”

Greenstein mentioned the fear that a natural disaster might destroy this body of knowledge for ever. He was no doubt thinking of the fire at the Library of Alexandria where many of the great texts of the ancient world were lost, possibly during the war between Egypt’s royal family and Julius Caesar in AD 48. Incidentally, Stanford University has just recovered some lost works from the Greek scientist Archimedes who in the 3rd Century BC jumped out of his bath an shouted “Eureka!” – “I have found”.

More about the UC talks with Google can be found on Tim O’Reilly’s blog.

A slightly baffling but intriguing phrase caught my eye in an Exbiblio email recently: “Cruelty-free tantalum.” I wondered what this was about and had a look around the internet to find out more. I discovered that it is an evolving story, not unconnected with an event in the news.

Last Sunday, the people of war-torn Congo queued up at the election booths in a remarkable exercise in democracy. Despite its official name, this was the first election in the Democratic Republic of Congo since 1960. Congo is one of those countries that is, in a way, cursed by wealth. The violence that has raged since 1994 through this central African country is largely a battle to control Congo’s mineral resources which include diamonds, copper, and ores such as tantalite which is known locally as coltan.

Tantalum has has a high melting point and is capable of storing and slowly releasing an electric charge. Understandably, it is used widely in electronics. The rising popularity of mobile phones and gadgetry caused the value of this mineral to climb steeply during the 1990s, and then slump in 2000 along with the tech crash. 80% of the world’s tantalum is in Congo.

Many of Congo’s poorest farmers, including children, were drawn to tantalite ore, either as independent prospectors, or seeking work in the mines. Tantalite became a focus for fighting and banditry. Some of the deposits fell into the hands of rebels who used forced labour.

A tantalum rush ensued, and a legion of small farmers took their picks and shovels into Congo’s Kahuzi-Biega National Park in search of the mineral. The park is one of the last habitats of the extremely shy and retiring mountain gorilla. The incursion of miners has posed a threat to the existence of last 250 gorillas living in the park.

The unfortunate set of circumstances surrounding Congolese tantalum has given rise to campaigning against buying this mineral from Congo. But things aren’t always so simple on the ground. Many local people found tantalum to be an important source of income, and were dismayed when prices fell in 2000. I quote from a BBC report:

“It’s our only way of making a living,” said Blanchard, an intermediary who travels upcountry to buy coltan from the small-scale miners and brings it back to Goma to sell. “There’s nothing else to do here.”

These distant events have a direct bearing on Exbiblio’s policy of ethical sourcing, but I’m not sure that this is a straight-forward moral issue. Tantalum has been a motivation for banditry and the exploitation of miners, and some of it is tainted by “blood” just as much as conflict diamonds. In some cases, its extraction has disturbed families of gorillas, but refugees from the war have also been a big problem for the animal life of the National Park. On the other side of the argument, tantalum has also provided income to extremely poor Congolese. Congo is still a violent place, but its nascent democracy needs all the help it can get. It needs to move on from the civil war in which almost 4 million people have died (mostly through hunger and disease)– a staggering death toll that has gone largely unnoticed by the world. You can buy tantalum from Australia, and be sure that your hands are clean, but can you be certain that you aren’t turning your back on one of the most needy parts of the world? Bear in mind the verdict of The Economist newspaper on the Congolese election:

The best chance for a generation, unless the world walks away.

Mitch Kapor , who gave the world Lotus Notes, has announced on his blog that he is incubating a new startup. His description is suitably vague for an early stage project.

We’re working on innovation at the intersection of search and social production. Think of new services which are a cross between Google and the Wikipedia. So far it’s just been myself and my co-founder, Todd Agulnick. We have built an incredibly nifty proof-of-concept system built around tens of millions of bookmarks.

Search and social (or collaborative) production are of course the hottest areas on the Internet. It goes without saying that Google has shown that Search has enormous utility and the ability to drive contextual advertising. Social production is exemplified by services such as Flickr, Del.icio.us and Writely. The first two were bought by Yahoo, and the last one by Google. From what I’ve seen of Exbiblio, it too will be operating in these key areas.

Update: Kapor’s project is called Foxmarks. It synchronises bookmarks across different computers and there’s a wiki about it here.

Declan Curry of the BBC has been chatting on his blog with Jerry Greenfield of Ben & Jerry’s, the ice cream company.

Ben and Jerry’s, as you probably are aware, has always made a point of being more than just a business, and has aimed to change the world for the better – just as Exbiblio aims to do. It was founded in Montana in the 1970s, and six years ago was sold (some people say “sold out”) to the food giant Unilever. Ben and Jerry continue to run a foundation which bears their name, and to be involved in the social aspects of the company.

As Jerry says, originally their company was considered to follow a “hippy” way of doing business. These days it is mainstream. Certainly here in Europe, “fair trade” coffee and chocolate can be found on the shelves of every supermarket with large markups (and a few extra pennies going to the farmers). Even the great oil giant BP bears a green logo.

BBC viewers sent in some good questions to the blog. One writes that “ethical” companies that sell up to multinationals are just giving their new owners a respectable “green wash”. Jerry responds that when Unilever bought the company, it committed to buying the milk and cream from family farmers, and it continues to fund the Foundation at the same level as before. He admits, however, that although Ben and Jerry’s tries to influence its owners, it’s like a small tail trying to wag a big dog.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, job interviews at Exbiblio can begin with a question about helping the homeless. I notice that from now on, helping the homeless on the streets of Las Vegas will become a criminal offence punishable by a $1000 fine or six months in jail.

Here in the UK, someone who commands a great deal of respect on this subject is John Bird, the founder of the magazine, The Big Issue. The Big issue is sold by homeless people as a way to help them get back on their feet. If Bird was interviewed for a job at Exbiblio, he would have an interesting answer to the question about what you might do when approached on the street for money.

Bird has attacked “hand-outs” as “mollycoddling” the homeless, and has accused charties and soup-kitchens of making the situation worse. (here’s one ex-homeless blogger who disagrees with him). In fact, I heard him telling the BBC today that giving bread to people on the streets is like “feeding pigeons.” He added that it gives them “hope but not opportunity.” In his view the only correct way to approach the problem of homelessness, is to work on ways to get people off the streets and back into mainstream life, rather than continuing their dependence.

This is a question with a number of legitimate approaches. To a large extent it should be about individual conscience and choice, but of course it’s important to take a look at what works and what doesn’t work. However, making it a jailable offence to help the homeless on the streets, as in Las Vegas, strikes me as quite extraordinary.

The first week of this blog has had a slightly bumpy ride, but I suppose that all the most interesting journies have a few bumps on the way. I thought it might be useful to link to the site which explains why a company might want to have a blog in the first place. It’s called the Cluetrain Manefesto, and it propounds the now famous theory that markets are conversations and that those conversations are conducted in a human (not marketing/pr type) voice. You’ve probably come across it before, but it’s always worth a re-read. You have to scroll down the page to get to the Manefesto.

I stumbled across this interview with Apple Inventor, Steve Wozniak. He has a number of interesting things to say about inventions, but I think this thought bodes well for Exbiblio:

Then there’s the iPod. Its success is due to the fact that it’s a satellite to a computer: The computer has become absolutely central to our lives

Wozniak believes that many areas in technology are swamped and that perhaps there should only be a dozen companies making computers. The industry is mature, and it’s hard to come by new inventions. But clearly he believes that an invention that is a satellite to the computer has lots of mileage in it.

From what I’ve seen of Exbiblio’s technology, it is about making the good old-fashioned book orbit around the computer – in fact, if Exbiblio suceeds, the book will be the ultimate computer satellite, perhaps even cooler than the iPod.

“Just remember that your ideas last longer than people or things. Your ideas will go further if you don’t insist on going with them.” From Start Up, A Silicon Valley Adventure, by Jerry Kaplan.

My first thought when reading this sentence is that most historic ideas are associated strongly with names: Plato… Newton… Marks …Darwin.. Freud… Einstein… Keynes, and that this linkage has never stopped those thinkers having followers and disciples who develop the idea further. But of course, the famous thinkers in this list were academic types who worked alone for the most part.

I can see that within a company there can be a desire for an idea to not belong to one person, but to take on a life of its own, and to grow and develop among those that work there, and be transformed, perhaps, into something rather different. I know that Exbiblio is in this latter camp.

Jerry Kaplan’s idea, by the way, was for a hand-held computer with a pen instead of a keyboard. He came up with the idea when he watched Mitchell Kapor, the founder of Lotus, get frustrated while his laptop powered up so he could take notes and organise his thoughts. But Kaplan’s invention was before its time, and his company ended up being liquidated in 1994, chair by chair, at an auction.