If you believe author/activist Naomi Klein, there's a nefarious conservative conspiracy intent on making the world safe for capitalism by exploiting national crises to force political change. Whatever you think of Klein's "Shock Doctrine" thesis, Google CEO Eric Schmidt seems like an unlikely candidate for the cabal. But at a talk in Washington D.C. on Tuesday, the head-honcho of the Search Engine That Walks Like a Verb did see a green lining in the current financial crisis: an opportunity to "stimulate the economy" by launching an ambitious infrastructure program that aims to fundamentally alter the American energy system.

Schmidt spoke at an event sponsored by the New America Foundation. He argued that the green lining in the economic implosion is that it has created demand for a massive domestic stimulus, opening the door to large-scale public works programs of the sort undertaken by Franklin Roosevelt during the Great Depression. Instead of subsidies for the foundering U.S. auto industry, said Schmidt, we have an opportunity to leverage the bailout to "decarbonize our economy." 

Clean energy sources like solar and wind power face a "grid problem," according to Schmidt: The optimal areas for renewable power generation aren't hooked up to the areas where the people who need power are. The effort to build out that infrastructure, said the Googler-in-Chief, could be sold as a jobs program for local contractors hard hit by the moribund housing market.

Federal pre-emption could be invoked to cut through the bramble of diverse state regulations and enable deployment of smart grids that manage power more efficiently, Schmidt believes. Citing the ARPANET—funded by the Defense Department, but partially built and then massively expanded by for-profit companies—Schmidt argued for a similar public-private collaboration to build a better power grid.

Schmidt drew several more specific suggestions from Google's Clean Energy 2030 Plan, a $4.4 trillion proposal to drastically reduce American dependence on fossil fuels and foreign oil, which the company projects would return $1 trillion in savings over its lifespan. Among these: a Federal Energy Lending Authority, modeled on the Farm Credit Act of 1916, and a cash-for-clunkers program that buys older polluting cars to get them off the roads.

A self-described "big fan of infrastructure," Schmidt argued that the technological innovation needed to improve our power networks will depend on the quality of our information networks. That means—in addition to traditional steps like offering matching grants for green companies and a permanent R&D tax credit—promoting wider network connectivity via both wired broadband and whites paces to "enable a whole new category of platforms."

Pressing a theme popular with Barack Obama's tech surrogates, Schmidt also waxed enthusiastic about the power of network technology to create a more transparent and participatory politics. "Government has not embraced, generically, the tools we all use every day," said Schmidt. "It's time." Pointing to the Patent Office's Peer-to-Patent program for crowdsourcing patent application analysis, Schmidt asked "why is that not true of every branch of government?" The same "police of the Internet" who debunked political rumors during the campaign could be turned on key legislative and regulatory issues. "A lot of people care passionately about them," joked Schmidt, "and they obviously have a lot of free time."

The one deviation from the generally upbeat tone of the proceedings came during the question and answer period, when a representative of the group ConsumerWatchdog.org challenged the CEO to adopt more privacy-protective practices on its websites and in the new Chrome browser. Schmidt was clearly familiar with the changes sought by the group, but suggested that some of them—such as default SSL connections and IP anonymizing in the browser's "incognito mode"—were unlikely. "The default is not to use the most secure form because it slows everything down," Schmidt explained.

So how realistic is the Google agenda?  It certainly sounds as though Schmidt at least has the ear of incoming White House Chief-of-Staff Rahm Emanuel, who this week told business leaders that an economic stimulus packaged focused on promoting "green infrastructure" and clean energy would be "the first order of business" for the Obama administration. Emanuel seems to have read The Shock Doctrine as well: He recently told The New York Times that one must "never allow a crisis to go to waste," because "they are opportunities to do big things.”

There have been a steady stream of worries about the dangers that Internet use could pose to children, and many have dismissed these worries as overblown parental concern. The latest group to weigh in is the MacArthur Foundation, best known for handing out the so-called "genius" awards. The Foundation has funded a sprawling set of studies that looked into how the US youth population is using the Internet, and has just released a document that ties them all together. Overall, the conclusion is that, at worst, the Internet generally enables the same old social interactions in a new medium; at its best, however, it enables them to participate in something close to a meritocracy, where their age isn't a concern.

The new report is based on studies that have been performed over the last several years; the entire list of data sources takes up a large paragraph, but includes over 5,000 observation hours, nearly 700 interviews (both individual and focus groups), diary studies, 10,000 social networking profiles, and more. The authors take what's termed an ethnographic approach, eschewing a controlled look at a single facet of behavior in favor of a global picture of how kids are using the Internet.

What they found is that behavior broke down into two general categories: normal social interactions, primarily pursued with other people in the same location, and interest-focused socializing, which tended to occur across wide geographical areas.

In the first case, the social interactions primarily occur with people the kids are already familiar with. "With these friendship-driven practices, youth are almost always associating with people they already know in their offline lives," the authors wrote. "The majority of youth use new media to hang out and extend existing friendships." Texting, e-mail, chat, and even online gaming have simply been integrated into the normal social routine. In fact, the report cites a number of cases where friends in the same room would use some sort of online service to extend the circle of people they could interact with.

For the most part, children are just as protective of this sort of communication as they are with more traditional forms. Just as they would with a phone call, kids want the parents to stay off the line when they're socializing. Although many seem to view the emoticons and radical abbreviations used in online chat as a sign that these venues don't fully develop social skills, the report says that most online communities have clear social boundaries that kids learn by exploring: "Youth online communication is conducted in a context of public scrutiny and structured by shared norms and a sense of reciprocity."

In fact, online media seem to provide youth the chance to hone their communications skills; many kids described how they were able to take as much time as they needed to craft carefully ambiguous messages (often flirtatious) for posting at places like Facebook.

But parents aren't being completely frozen out. Many kids reported using computers (though not necessarily social tools) for interactions with their parents. A number mentioned having set "family gaming" hours each week, and the more artistically inclined worked on family projects, such as editing videos of major events.

This sort of activity blurred into the second major social aspect, which is involvement in interest groups. "Online groups enable youth to connect to peers who share specialized and niche interests of various kinds, whether that is online gaming, creative writing, video editing, or other artistic endeavors," the report notes. Since this social circle is defined by interest, membership tends to be geographically diffuse.

In this environment, adults appear to have a key role, in part because participation is often based on expertise. "On the interest-driven side," the authors write, "we saw adult leadership in these groups as central to how standards for expertise and literacy are being defined."

But, once those standards are set, these communities tend to judge members by them, rather than age. As such, youth are able to obtain social currency within these groups in a way they were unlikely to manage in the offline realm. As such, these groups have the potential to significantly enhance the maturation process.

If the report sees significant risks in the explosion of online communications, it's that the technology gap may enhance all the other gaps that tend to pop up during the teen years. "A kid who is highly active online, coupled with a parent who is disengaged from these new media, presents the risk of creating an intergenerational wedge," warn the authors. Which, of course, is just an extension of a more general warning: you should not only pay attention to what your kids are doing, you should make sure you know how they're doing it.

Further reading:

The MacArthur report (PDF).

Yesterday, HP launched its multitouch-capable TouchSmart tx2 and dubbed it the first multitouch tablet on the market. Touch screens and multitouch capability are the industry's designated "hot" technologies for 2009; device manufacturers are scrambling to incorporate fingertip features into form factors and price points ranging from the sub-$100 cell phone to the aforementioned ~$1,200 tablet.

If HP's new system catches the eye of the masses, it could breathe fresh life into what has previously been a niche product space. Bill Gates coined the term "Tablet PC" back in 2001, but early systems based on tablet design principles soared into the sparkling new computing frontier with all the grace and agility of a frozen turkey that's been flung out the window of a high-rise. Speaking at Comdex seven years ago, Gates said: "The tablet takes cutting-edge PC technology and makes it available whenever you want it... Within five years I predict it will be the most popular form of PC sold in America."

Yeah, not so much. The problem isn't that tablet-based computing is a bad idea, it's that building an attractive tablet turned out to be much harder than the pundits of 2001 anticipated. Clunky recognition software and overpriced/underperforming systems gave laptops an edge in virtually any comparison, and tablets have languished for the past seven (nearly eight) years. HP, however, obviously thinks it has built a system that has overcome these problems.

Meet the TouchSmart tx2

The Touchsmart tx2 is a flippable design that can be configured as either a tablet or notebook. It ships with a rechargeable digital ink pen to allow for sketching and handwriting directly on the screen, and offers multitouch support through HP's custom MediaSmart software suite. I've personally had occasion to use MediaSmart before, as it came preinstalled on the HP HDX laptop we gave away earlier this year, and I was impressed with it. This probably says something about my level of expectations when it comes to OEM software—I'm happy if the OEM-customized crapware doesn't crash the machine; doing something useful is icing on the cake. There may, however, be a caveat. Since Windows Vista doesn't include integrated touchscreen functionality, the degree and functionality of touchscreen support will vary from application to application. If you've already got a suite of software you want to use, that's no issue, but just buying the laptop doesn't magically enable touch (or multitouch) in all applications.

The tablet's left-side ports

Next question: How's it specced? One reason tablets failed miserably seven years ago is because OEMs were unable to offer attractive price/performance ratios. All too often, systems were either affordable and barely usable, or usable, and unaffordable. Fortunately for HP, things have changed. Below, I've charted the specs on two laptops—the tx2 and a standard multimedia-oriented dv5z system. Both are built around AMD processors, which makes for a nice (revenue-earning) feather in the company's hat.

Note that neither system is minimally specced; I added and updated features to bring them into close alignment while preserving the ~$1,100 minimal configuration on the tx2 tablet. Compared side-by-side to a standard cousin, the TouchSmart tx2 manages to hold its own. There's still an unavoidable "multitouch tablet tax" but reading over the tx2's specs, one doesn't feel a sinking sensation, as though asked to strike a Faustian bargain between an acceptable level of performance and desired functionality. That, in and of itself, is a significant achievement—the tx2's configuration options are more limited than the dv5z's, but there's only one thing a dv5z can do that a tx2 can't: play Blu-ray movies. I call that progress.

There's currently a tremendous amount of interest and hype swirling around multitouch functionality. The iPhone and iPod touch have it, the Android-powered G1 unofficially supports it, and Microsoft has confirmed that windows 7 will include multitouch it. Personally, however, I'm uncertain as to the size of the multitouch steak underneath all this sizzle. The spec sheet on the tx2 is evidence enough that tablets have come a long way in the past seven years, but concerns over how the tech industry will perform in 2009 are climbing rapidly thanks to recent warnings from Intel and TSMC.

Economic turmoil won't kill the spread of multitouch technology, but it may slow the rate at which devices—especially computers—adopt and feature it. Software support, meanwhile, is still far from ubiquitous; Windows 7's support for multitouch is, in many ways, the bare beginning of the adoption process, rather than the end. Long-term, I think we'll see tablet PCs, multitouch trackpads, and multitouch displays widely incorporated/adopted, but the timetable may be considerably longer than some have thought.

In an attempt to offer a more customized search experience—and to stay ahead of competitors—Google will soon be rolling out its SearchWiki feature to everyone using its services while logged into a Google account. The feature, which has been in testing with select users over the last few months, will allow people to shift around, annotate, add, and delete search results to their liking.

"Have you ever wanted to mark up Google search results?" asked a post on The Official Google Blog. "Maybe you're an avid hiker and the trail map site you always go to is in the 4th or 5th position and you want to move it to the top. Or perhaps it's not there at all and you'd like to add it. Or maybe you'd like to add some notes about what you found on that site and why you thought it was useful. Starting today you can do all this and tailor Google search results to best meet your needs." SearchWiki will actually live up to its name and act as a wiki so that users can see notes made by other users, and view what pages others have added or deleted.

As to what the point of the SearchWiki is, well, Google isn't saying just yet. Google is known for its secretive, magical PageRank system that promotes important search results while demoting others, and PageRank already has some degree of human input on the Google end. We're not sure whether Google plans to incorporate user feedback from SearchWiki into its normal search results, or whether the company simply planned to consider the extra data when determining the relevance of its own rankings.

Microsoft, on the other hand, makes no attempt to hide the fact that it plans to use its own user input to improve its offerings. The company launched U Rank last month, a feature that allows users to edit, organize, and annotate search results—very similar to Google SearchWiki. The company described U Rank as a search engine "research prototype, to help us learn more about how people use such technologies so we can continue to innovate."

It's no surprise then that Google is introducing SearchWiki to more people. At the very least, the company will have data from Internet users (and presumably many, many more of them than Microsoft) that it will be able to analyze for preferences and usage patterns. And theoretically, if the sample size is big enough, people will use SearchWiki in the same way they would use U Rank, ensuring that Microsoft doesn't gain even the slightest edge over Google. For those (like me) dying to try out SearchWiki, you'll just have to be patient. Google is introducing the feature slowly to more users, and it's not showing up yet for everyone just yet.