We're filling up the world with technology and devices, but we've lost sight of an important question: What is this stuff for? What value does it add to our lives?

Technology is not going to go away, but the time to discuss the ends it will serve is before we deploy it, not after.

"What are they thinking?"

The plan, in the words of Paul Duguid, information specialist at the University of California at Berkeley, will "blast wide" open the walls around the libraries of world-class institutions.

No one is forecasting a brave new world without actual libraries. Rather, they are raising questions.

Far too many students already read excerpts and seldom read the full texts.

The most intriguing, and potentially most important, dimension of the deal for the company is that it is IBM's China card.

The new Lenovo, folding in the IBM personal computer business, will be China's fifth-largest company. IBM is eager to help China with its industrial policy of moving up the economic ladder, by building the high-technology engine rooms to power modern corporations and government institutions with IBM services and software.

IBM is placing 10,000 of its employees, its brand for five years and some of its prestige in Lenovo's hands. There is a lot more at stake than the cash.

Today, there are two ways to create long-term value for information technology customers and shareholders. "Invest heavily in R&D and be the high-value innovation provider for enterprises, or differentiate by leveraging vast economies of scale, high volumes and price."

The Web is obsessed with anything that spreads, whether it's a virus, a blog or a rumor.

And so the Internet loves memes.

Meme and memetics were once terms batted around only by thinkers like Dawkins, Dennett, and Blackmore. Now the word "meme" is part of many would-be-trendy Web addresses like MemeStreams.

One site says it tests "new, old and emergent memes that are sweeping the memesphere, the mediasphere or the buzzsphere." In fact, much of the site is a grab bag of blogs, quotes and theories about politics and culture.

Another web site advertises a meme list that turns out to be just a dispensary of lame topics for bloggers.

n other words, you add some meme gas to your blog to help it spread through the culture. The model here seems to be Sylvester McMonkey McBean, the Dr. Seuss character who invented a machine to put stars on the bellies of non-star-bellied Sneeches.

Since the late 1990s, technology markets have declined dramatically. Responding to the changing business climate, companies use strategies of open innovation: acquiring technologies from outside, marketing their technologies to other companies, and outsourcing manufacturing. But open innovation is not enough; it is mainly a way to run a business to its endgame. By itself, open innovation results in razor-thin profits from products that compete as commodities. Businesses also need a path to renewal. No one ever achieved a breakthrough with open innovation.

A breakthrough creates something new or satisfies a previously undiscovered need. Radical breakthroughs often have uses and effects far beyond what their inventors had in mind. Breakthroughs can launch new industries or transform existing ones. Our capacity for creating breakthroughs depends on a combination of science, imagination, and business; the next great waves of innovation will come from organizations that get this combination right.

During periods of rapid economic growth, companies and investors focus on the short term and forget where breakthroughs come from. Without appropriate engagement and reinvestment, the innovation ecology breaks down. Today, universities, technology companies, government funding agencies, venture capitalists, and corporate research laboratories need to foster the conditions in which breakthroughs arise.

The emergence of nanotechnology as a major science and technology research topic has sparked substantial interest by the intelligence community. In particular the community is interested both in the potential for nanotechnology to assist intelligence operations and threats it could create.

To explore these questions, the Intelligence Technology Innovation Center asked the National Research Council to conduct a number of activities to illustrate the potential for nanotechnology to address key intelligence community needs.

Cellphones are chock-full of features like built-in cameras, personalized ring tones and text messaging. They also gave a real boost to Kenny Hall's effort to cheat on his girlfriend.

Cellphone-based alibi clubs, which have sprung up in the United States, Europe and Asia, allow people to send out mass text messages to thousands of potential collaborators asking for help. When a willing helper responds, the sender and the helper devise a lie, and the helper then calls the victim with the excuse.

... distinguished Americans labored mightily ... breathtakingly bold in some recommendations ... [but] disappointingly shallow ... too skimpy to be persuasive.

In "Musings on the Internet," Vint Cerf offered his ideas about what was happening, at that time, in the Internet world -- its technology, policy, economics, and philosophy.