The New York Times writes:

Several research reports, both recently published and not yet published, provide evidence of the limits of multitasking. The findings, according to neuroscientists, psychologists and management professors, suggest that many people would be wise to curb their multitasking behavior when working in an office, studying or driving a car.

These experts have some basic advice. Check e-mail messages once an hour, at most. Listening to soothing background music while studying may improve concentration. But other distractions — most songs with lyrics, instant messaging, television shows — hamper performance. Driving while talking on a cellphone, even with a hands-free headset, is a bad idea.

In short, the answer appears to lie in managing the technology, instead of merely yielding to its incessant tug.

Doc Searls writes:

[The Live Web is] the one with verbs such as write, read, update, post, author, subscribe, syndicate, feed and link. This is the part of the Web that's growing on top of the old Static Web of nouns such as site, address, location, traffic, architecure and construction. Nothing wrong with any of those static nouns (or their verb forms). They're the foundation, the bedrock. They are necessary but insufficient for what's needed on the Live Web, which is where your paper needs to live and grow and become more valuable to its communities (as well as Wall Street).
Lemme unpack that a bit. The Static Web is what holds still long enough for Google and Yahoo to send out spiders to the entire universe and index what they find. The Live Web is is what's happening right now. It's dynamic. (Thank you, Virginia.) It includes all the stuff that's syndicated through RSS and searched by Google Blogsearch, IceRocket and Technorati. What I post here, and what others post about this post, will be found and indexed by Live Web search engines in a matter of minutes. For those who subscribe to feeds of this blog, and of other blogs, the notification is truly live. Your daily paper has pages, not sites. The difference is not "just semantic". It's fundamental. It's how you reclaim, and assert, your souls in the connected world. It's also how you shed dead conceptual weight, get light and nimble, and show Wall Street how you're not just ahead of the curve, but laying pavement beyond everybody else's horizon. It's how your leverage the advantages of history, of incumbency, and of already being in a going business.

Henry Blodget does not think so:

* First, we must define terms, because if "King of Media" means richest, most powerful company in the media sector, Google's already there. (Sorry, Sumner.) If "King of ALL Media," however, means the company that creates, produces, and monetizes all media, forget it.

* Traditional media content--journalism, linear storytelling (in TV and movies), music, talk shows, comedy--is not going away. Google currently does not produce traditional media content, and won't unless it radically changes its business. What Google does do--extremely well--is organize, distribute and aggregate media. As a result, it is a major threat to traditional media distributors, but not (in most cases) to media creators. (For the purposes of this debate, I'm going to assume that to be "King of All Media" one can't just be a distributor).

C. Enrique Ortiz points to "The dotMobi Mobile Web Developers Guide", written by Brian Fling of Blue Flavor.

WAP Review does a deep-dive into the service. "Currently oneSearch is only officially available in the US, although I think that if you use the full url of us.m.yahoo.com/p/search it may be reachable worldwide - although local search results will only be returned for US locations. I applaud Yahoo trying an innovative and generally successful approach to mobile search. Google needs to look out, if Yahoo can address their local search failings promptly mobile search will have a new leader."

The future of India and Indian policy is important because we are living in India. A few years ago, I had remarked in one of my Tech Talks that one could sense a visible change of attitude around – people were optimistic that tomorrow will be better than today. While at least some of that optimism remains, it is being tempered with the harsh reality that the politics and economics of what needs to be happening in India are just not right. The solution does not lie in replacing one party in government with another. Give people power and its shocking what they are capable of doing with it. Armed with a little knowledge, a large percentage of Indian politicians can be quite dangerous for the future of India. I do not have a solution on hand, but the problem is important enough that we all need to think hard about it. After all, we all intend to be around in tomorrow's India.

One starting point is by reading and thinking over what people like Atanu Dey (my colleague) have to say. I will reproduce two of Atanu's recent blog posts. The first one lays out the challenge ahead of policy makers:

We live in cities, engage in non-agricultural work, and earn far more than what the average Indian earns. The vast majority of Indians live in villages, and eek out a meager existence from agricultural related labor. We tend to forget the fact that our economic prosperity and our lives in urban India are correlated. Therefore if the goal is India’s economic prosperity, somehow the 700 million living in some 600,000 villages of India have to have the same option of living and working in urban India on jobs in non-agricultural sectors.

Do we want the reality of today’s India to persist into the future, a generation or two hence? Or do we want a future where the majority of Indians are urbanized and are engaged in highly productive non-agricultural sectors? We can choose, and having chosen, we can actually make that future happen.

I think it is fair to assume a broad consensus on that development is a good thing. Of course, development and economic growth are not the same thing. You can have one without the other. For a very materially rich society, development does not require economic growth. It is possible to appropriately channel resources towards development, an exercise in greater allocative efficiency if the resources are available in plenty. But in a materially poor society, merely changing the allocation of resources is not likely to be sufficient. There you have to have increased production, in addition to the problem of efficient allocation of what is produced. The US, for instance, has a per capita annual income of around $28,000. Extreme variance in incomes and wealth can be reduced with appropriate redistributive mechanisms. Contrast that with India. Yes, there are a lot of very poor people in India. Even perfectly distributing the national income leaves everyone pretty poor. The conclusion is hard to avoid: India needs economic growth for development.

Economic growth is both a cause and consequence of urbanization. The reason is simple. Cities are the engines of growth. The high population and population densities of cities reduce “transaction costs.” Services are cheaper (as compared to the same in rural areas) because infrastructure is less costly because of scale economies. That is, infrastructure have high fixed costs and investment in infrastructure is lumpy. The high aggregate demand and supply of infrastructure in urban areas makes lower prices possible.

So the logic so far: economic development of India requires economic growth. Cities are engines of growth because there is a bi-directional link between urbanization and growth. Therefore the rural people have to be urbanized for India’s development and growth. Every economy has followed that path which begins with agriculture being the main source of income for the majority of the population and ends with agricultural employment being a very small fraction of the total labor force.

In my considered opinion, the problem with India’s rural development has been that the focus has been on the development of rural areas, not rural people. The policy makers have been focusing on the wrong goal, that of village development. It is silly to attempt to develop 600,000 villages because it cannot be done. The future is deserted villages because people vote with their feet when they get the chance to move to a city. Only in very rich economies do people have the resources to live comfortably in villages. India cannot afford to live in villages; it is not that rich.