Here in the west, innovation and individual expression is such an ingrained ideal that it’s sometimes easy to take it for granted. Not so in Asia, where the imitation of (and often, let’s face it, the improvement upon) successful products is the sincerest form of flattery.

This is especially true when it comes to popular culture and technology.  Twitter has been so phenomenally successful that it’s now arguably equal parts both - so it’s worth taking a look at a few of the Asian clones out there.

The first thing one notices is that most of the knockoffs use the same shade of turquoise blue and the same style of font used in the original.  Again, to western eyes, the choice to copy the graphic design so closely might seem somewhat shameless, almost to the point of adding insult to injury - yet it’s just another example of the Asian mindset.

Intellectual property and copyright issues notwithstanding, the lack of ego that makes these near-exact replicas of Twitter possible is somewhat refreshing - and  sites like digu (below) demonstrate that they’re certainly keeping up with us over there - this Chinese Twitter clone features a Google Maps-powered mashup that pops up real-time geo-located balloons of posts as they occur - just like similar western sites such as twittervision.

It’s an increasingly interesting dynamic, this difference between the East and the West.

It’ll be interesting to see what digu does for an interface in the event Google does in fact pull out of the country….

Listen, the day your mobile network dies and you find yourself amazed how much that upsets you, that might be the day you realize - your wireless devices, and the networks they are tied to, by now are of utmost importance in your live.

To that point, earlier this week, part of T-Mobile’s US network suffered interruptions for the later part of a single day. The resulting outcry was significant.

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No! Not Wayne’s World. Nor The World According to Garp. Instead, your and my world. And this time according to either Thomas L. Friedman, Professor Eli Noam, or Facebook - depending on how you choose to see it.

If you ask long-time New York Times op-ed writer Thomas Friedman, the world is flat, implying that digital communications increasingly ensures everyone everywhere has access to the same growing pool of World Wide Web-provided information. This levels the playing field for all of us, he says, to impact the plethora of socio- and economic-political issues — no matter where and who we are on this globe.

This sounds promising, I thought, if it wasn’t for an off-the-cuff conversation I had with Columbia Business School Professor Eli Noam, about a year past Friedman’s book published.

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ICANN might be the most important non-profit organization you’ve never heard of.  Based in nondescript office building just off Lincoln Boulevard in the Marina del Rey section of Los Angeles, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is charged with (among other things) mapping human-readable domain names to internet IP addresses   Although technically a sovereign organization, historically ICANN has been under the control of the Dept. of Commerce of the United States, the country that invented the plumbing for - and tacitly claims ownership of - the internet.

Until now.

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Listen! I know how digitized and rapidly changing our world has become. I live in New York. I am a new media analyst for a major telecommunications company. I co-write a blog.

In other words, I eat and drink the stuff our increasingly digital real-time media reality is made of. But ever so often, I am still amazed if not puzzled about how much the times they are a changin’.

The other day I had to check the Web site of what used to be my local savings bank back when I lived in Germany — a good fifteen years ago, no less.

Turns out, they’re now into Twitter. Yes, Twitter! I was stunned. The old-fashioned local savings bank of my childhood days is now condoning micro-blogging, for that purpose flaunting its very own Twitter account.

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I’m now at week 3 of my 7 week contract project here in Berlin.   I’ve gotten used to my German keyboard layout, I’ve learned not to go for irony when making jokes, and with the help (and patience) of some friends here, I’m even building up my Deutsche vocabulary, however slowly (I’ve decided to ignore the various grammatical cases and noun genders – and the resulting 16 different situations affecting how one says the word ‘the’ - for now).

Anyway, over the past few weeks I’ve had ample opportunity to pick up on some of the differences differences between how Germans and Americans approach technology, both in and outside of the workplace…

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Come to think of it, here’s a couple additional thoughts on my previous screaming media missive.

Both a recent Variety and Utne Reader article got me thinking again about this post-Walter Conkrite, post-Don Hewitt era of 24-hour noise channels.

In a somewhat tongue-in-cheek way, I believe my screaming media concept is indeed a deserving (albeit absolutely made up) label, as “yell TV” continues to spread far beyond its original cable roots.

First off there’s satellite TV of course, plus, increasingly, telecom-powered “broadband” IPTV. Other ways TV programming is being delivered to you and me these days includes an ever-growing number of mobile video services, media receivers, gaming consoles and Internet-connected TVs.

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As we await the naming of our new “Cyber Czar,”  it’s worth noting just what a jungle it is out there on the internet, and how much we need one.

While working in networking , I had the opportunity to see firsthand the level of garden-variety denial of service attacks a typical DNS server exposed to the public internet faces (DNS, in many ways the soft white underbelly of the internet, is discussed a bit here).

While impressive, though, my experience was limited to small business networks - imagine what it’s like when entire governments go at it: in 2008, the Department of Defense reported almost 360 million attempted attacks - that’s close to a million every day (up from ‘only’ about 6 million in 2006).

Here then, a short list of recent cyber-spying activity…
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Last week, I attended the first HD Communication Summit, here, in New York. 

I have to confess, the concept of high definition voice transmission was new to me. 

Yet, by the time I left the auditorium, Jeff Pulver and team certainly made sure I was up to speed. (For the purpose of full disclosure, although I am a “telco guy”, I am primarily focused on market analysis and vendor scouting in the fixed broadband consumer data space. That keeps core voice service topics outside my purview).

So why HD-quality voice transmission, if for decades standard-definition 300 to 3000 Hz service quality has done just fine for most of us?

Among the arguments, once people have gotten a taste of what wideband voice communications is like, they wouldn’t want to turn back - ever!  

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A quick update on my recent ever got pinged by your CEO? post, and some related commentary on online social media in the enterprise world.

Presumably by way of a forward-thinking PR department close to Deutsche Telekom management (indeed my employer), I recently received a LinkedIn invite to connect to DT CEO Rene Obermann.
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