The Economist writes in a survey of the world economy: "China, India and other developing countries are set to give the world economy its biggest boost in the whole of history, says Pam Woodall. What will that mean for today's rich countries?"

As developing countries and the former Soviet block have embraced market-friendly economic reforms and opened their borders to trade and investment, more countries are industrialising and participating in the global economy than ever before. This survey will map out the many ways in which these economic newcomers are affecting the developed world. As it happens, their influence helps to explain a whole host of puzzling economic developments, such as the record share of profits in national income, sluggish growth in real wages, high oil prices alongside low inflation, low global interest rates and America's vast current-account deficit.

Emerging countries are looming larger in the world economy by a wide range of measures. Their share of world exports has jumped to 43%, from 20% in 1970. They consume over half of the world's energy and have accounted for four-fifths of the growth in oil demand in the past five years. They also hold 70% of the world's foreign-exchange reserves.

Nicholas Carr writes:

That term is being used, with increasing frequency (and, naturally, decreasing specificity), to describe a new generation of personal productivity applications - the would-be successors to the component applications of the ubiquitous Microsoft Office. Office 2.0 applications are delivered as services over the internet, running in most cases within the user's web browser. Many such "web apps" are already available, ranging from Google's Writely word processor to Dan Bricklin's wikiCalc spreadsheet program to Zoho's Show presentation creator. They are, by design and necessity, much simpler than traditional "desktop apps," and because they run on the internet they are in many ways (though not in all ways) more conducive to collaboration among many users. They are also, in general, easier to integrate with other popular Web 2.0 formats and tools such as tags, wikis and blogs.

Fred Wilson writes:

What's really happening, to steal a phrase from my partner Brad Burnham, is that the Internet is being reconstructed around people instead of pages/content.

In the web 1.0 world, AOL tried to build a walled garden around it's content. Yahoo!, Google, and others went the open web way. We saw who won that war.

I've said several times in this blog that MySpace is the "AOL of blogging". I see blogging as the most open form of social media so that's why I used that term. MySpace made it simple and necessary for people to have a place on the web that represents them, the people they like, the things they like, etc. And MySpace took off for several reasons, but one of them certainly was the flexibility that people had in changing their pages and putting whatever they wanted on them. The people who use MySpace for their social media platform will be able to leave it for a blog or some other form of social media, if not today, then certainly tomorrow.

Fred Wilson writes:

I’ve come to the conclusion that post-rolls ads may turn out to be more valuable than pre-rolls. Here’s why:

Watching videos on YouTube is like surfing the web. You watch one, find another, watch it, and do that until you get bored. The end of every YouTube video is a frame that features two suggested videos. I rarely click on those suggested links right now, but I think they are extremely valuable because over time they will become the natural place to find the next video to watch. I think the ending frame is the killer post-roll advertisement. I don’t think they should run a video post-roll, they should just monetize those links.

John Battelle writes:

Yesterday came news that Google has struck a major deal with Intuit. Today comes news Yahoo has struck a deal with Acer. Both are distribution deals - Yahoo and Google are using their partners as channels to get their software and services into the hands of customers. In short, they are buying new business.
...
perhaps the least reported portion of this deal is the fact that QuickBooks also purchased StepUp, a small SF-based firm that helps local businesses get their inventory into search engines. In short, StepUp is the automation software needed to virtualize all that small business inventory and make it easily consumed, and therefore searchable, in Google Base, Froogle, and the main Google index.

The New Web can be thought of as incremental in Topics. Topics relate to our interests. The New Web is about tracking people or topics. RSS (or a feed) is central to this Web.

Take a look at our own lives and interests. There are so many situations in which one would want a ‘relationship’ to track what’s new. I want to know the new books that Crossword has got in the past week and the deals that are on offer. I want to be able to track flights that I am booked on a few hours from now. I want to know traffic conditions on roads every evening along the routes to home. My wife would like to know the sales around town every weekend. As parents, we want to know the dates for the anti-polio drops.

Life is about the New. For much of human history, the combination of easy publishing and notification has not been available. Now, with blog-like publishing tools and RSS for syndication, it is simple to create and track content. We have already seen this with RSS aggregators which simplify the task of tracking updates to weblogs and topics that are of interest to us.

In this context, mobiles will make things even easier. I can take photos with my mobile – and share it with friends and family by publishing it to a website. Instead of sending SMSes or emails asking them check the latest photos, they can set up subscriptions so that will be notified whenever I publish something new. The ease of sharing will lead to a concomitant increase in the publishing. I will create more content if I know that my friends and family will be able to consume it in real-time and then be able to comment on it, which I can then view just as quickly.

The New Web also lets us pursue our micro-interests. RSS feeds let us change the granularity of what information is updated. On the Reference Web, I will only know that a page has changed – if at all. In the World of Now, the granularity can be for the microcontent – think blog posts. A legacy search engine will index a page, but an incremental web search engine will focus on the feeds. Feeds are the containers and carriers for microcontent.

A recent example will help demonstrate the power and potential of feeds.

Tomorrow: Facebook and Feeds