Millions of Westerners fear their jobs may be offshored as the Internet and cheap telephony make it easier for countries with abundant supplies of labor, such as India and China, to compete with Western service firms. The world is flattening, you might say, and it makes many people nervous.

So, should we be afraid that our jobs are all going to be sent to India? On the contrary, I see yet another opportunity for trade to give us what we want, whether it's extra leisure time or getting things done more efficiently. Thousands of ordinary Americans, for instance, are embracing the use of affordable "virtual personal assistants" (VPAs) in India via sites like GetFriday.com for such tasks as booking dinner reservations, helping the kids with their homework, or even playing "World of Warcraft."

And they love it. Take Michael Levy, a U.S. lawyer who employs a VPA in India. He relishes his new-found freedom: "You become lazy... It's just wonderful." And Web sites such as IwantaPA.com offer "empowerment" not only for independent professionals, but also for small to medium enterprises and large enterprises, 24/7, and without the burden of office space or paying out benefits. All for a third the price of regular PAs.

That said, having a VPA is not all gumdrops and lollipops. Two years ago, A. J. Jacobs of Esquire wrote a humorous account of his experience outsourcing his life to a number of VPAs in India, including a woman named Honey. Jacobs writes:

I THINK I'M in love with Honey. How can I not be? She makes my mother look unsupportive. Every day I get showered with compliments, many involving capital letters: "awesome Editor" and "Family Man." When I confess I'm a bit tired, she tells me, "You need rest. . . . Do not to overexert yourself." It's constant positive feedback, like phone sex without the moaning.

Sometimes the relentless admiration makes me feel a little awkward, perhaps like a viceroy in the British East India company. Another cucumber sandwich, Honey! And a Pimm's cup while you're at it! But then she calls me "brilliant" and I forget my guilt.

Sounds great, right? But Jacobs's story raises some interesting questions: Is employing a VPA in India to respond to your every whim a neo-imperial, exploitative phenomenon? (Jacobs did experience other pangs of guilt as he found himself making stranger demands simply because he could.) Or is it a genuine win-win transaction, where clients in the West make the most of their purchasing power while entrepreneurs in the East expand their markets?

Not enough Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in your life? The Iranian president has been blogging on and off for about two years—and now he's looking for feedback. In his latest post, Ahmadinejad asks for more readers write to him about Iran's relationship with the rest of the world:

As you know, the purpose of running this blog is to have a direct and mutual ‎contact and communication with the viewers and even though I have received many ‎messages from the viewers to update the blog and write new notes, I preferred to write ‎less and spend more time on reading the viewers' messages – and not let this ‎communication tool become just a one-way medium.

And apparently, people are responding. Here are some of the more colorful comments, both in agreement with and opposition to Mahmoud. All errors of grammar and spelling original:

Pro	Con
I in fact think you are a great leader and I am actually contemplating moving to Iran because of the ignorance of people and the harsh things they say about all middle eastern countries... - Adara in Canada Mr. President Allow me to express my admiration for your policy. You are a great example of how one should stand up to the bullies of the world. Keep up the good fight. You are a spoksmen to all the free people, not just Muslims. - Filip in Macedonia After watching video of your experience at Columbia University I felt tryly ashamed to be an American. The ignorance and intolerance exhibited by Mr. Bollinger in his introduction speech was totally unacceptable and certainly not a befitting welcome for a world leader and scholar such as yourself. - Allison in the United States	Hey! Do all you non-Iranians realize that if you were in Iran, you wouldnt have any rights?! You couldnt serve in the military or police force...youd be discriminated against!!!! Why the hell do you support someone like this?! - Xochitl in the United States You are a terrible, despicable human being. You WILL be attacked by the US or Israel and will be destroyed! - "Your gone" in the United Kingdom How does it feel to be the most hated person on the planet? - Martha in the United States

If you read other languages, you can also check out the comments made on the non-English versions of the site. Translations of "Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Personal Memos" and their respective comments are also available in Arabic, Farsi, and French.

When Google launched its fancy Web site for the 2007 Australian federal elections, the company gave no hint about Easter eggs—fun little surprises put there by mischievous programmers—buried in its mashup map section.

But blogger Ben Balbo poked around and found two animated graphics of Prime Minister John Howard and opposition leader Kevin Rudd having some fun with each other.

Here we see these bitter political rivals tossing the Frisbee at Bondi Beach in Adelaide Sydney:

And here we see them playing a vigorous game of rock, paper, scissors in front of Parliament, presumably deciding the fate of the nation:

And there's more, Ben says: 

I've been reliably informed that there are another 6 "easter eggs" hidden around Seaworld on the Gold Coast, Tanunda in Adelaide, a well known Melbourne sporting venue, near Barrack St Jetty in Perth, near Mandorah in Darwin and near the Botanic Gardens in Hobart.

The elections are slated for Nov. 24, which is this coming Saturday.

(Hat tip: Google Maps Mania)

Throughout the week, we've been posting e-mails from U.S. foreign service officers on their reaction to the State Department's controversial decision to "draft" FSOs for service in Baghdad. Yesterday, the State Department's official blog, Dipnote, got into the act by posting a letter from Anbar-based FSO John Matel. Matel advises his fellow employees to cowboy up and consider how ridiculous they look to those in uniform, who were never asked for their opinions about being sent to Iraq:

I will not repeat what the Marines say when I bring up this subject. I tell them that most FSOs are not wimps and weenies. I will not share this article with them and I hope they do not see it. How could I explain this wailing and gnashing of teeth? I just tried to explain it to one of my PRT members, a reserve LtCol called up to serve in Iraq . She asked me if all FSOs would get the R&R, extra pay etc. and if it was our job to do things like this. When I answered in the affirmative, she just rolled her eyes. 

[...] 

If these guys at the town hall meeting do not want to come to Iraq , that is okay with. I would not want that sort out here with me anyway. We have enough trouble w/o having to baby sit. BUT they are not worldwide available and they might consider the type of job that does not require worldwide availability.

We all know that few FSOs will REALLY be forced to come to Iraq anyway. Our system really does not work like that. This sound and fury at Foggy Bottom truly signifies nothing. Get over it! I do not think many Americans feel sorry for us and it is embarrassing for people with our privileges to paint ourselves as victims. 

A shorter version of this post was written on Matel's personal blog last week. It's strange that Dipnote would choose to publicize departmental infighting this way. My initial assessment of Dipnote as a collection of glorified press releases might have been premature. Karen Hughes has only been gone for a week, and already this supposed tool of public diplomacy is being used to browbeat State's own employees. I doubt that Dipnote will be posting the other side's views any time soon, but they have proven us wrong before.

Passport, on the other hand, is still interested in hearing from FSOs on both sides of the debate. Keep those e-mails coming.

UPDATE: DipNote Bloggers write in:

DipNote was started to provide a forum for dialogue with the public and provide greater transparency into the Department. Given his perspective as a PRT team leader in Al Anbar Province, we thought our readers would benefit from hearing about Mr. Matel's experiences in the field. Mr. Matel has his own blog, so we asked if he'd like to blog for our site as well as his own. Since the issue of directed assignments is in the news, we thought his post on the issue was particularly timely and decided to post it. We would not characterize his post as "browbeating" his colleagues; he's expressing his opinion in a forum for open discussion. That's what blogs are for, right?

As for Dipnote iteself, initial reactions to have been ...shall we say, varied. At first, some commenters indicated that the blog would be nothing more that a "collection of glorified press releases." Ironically, others later indicated that, "It's strange that DipNote would choose to publicize departmental infighting this way." We understand the ratoinale behind both of those sentiments, but are not allowing polarizing comments to sway us from our mission to provide a fair and objective forum.

As we stated in our first post, we hope to cut through the opacity of the Department and provide an open forum. If directed assignments are what people are taking about, we'll blog about it. We're always open to anyone who wishes to contribute a blog entry expressing varying points of view and we'll run it on Dipnote.

Google Earth is a cool tool that's fun to play around with. Now you can also use it for something more serious—monitoring countries' progress toward achieving the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals, eight objectives to be reached by 2015 that form the blueprint of a mighty effort to make poverty history.

Launch Google Earth (download it first if you don't already have it) from the MDG Monitor Web site and you'll be able to click on capital cities all around the world to monitor their corresponding countries' progress toward achieving the MDGs. For example, you can learn that due to improvements in health and education, Madagascar brought its poverty rate down from 85.1 percent in 2003 to 67.5 percent in 2006. (The goal is to reduce the percentage of Madagascarians living on less than $2 a day to 50 percent by 2012.) There are also links to complete country profiles, such as this one for Madagascar.

Not to be outdone, the World Bank has put a bunch of its own data and links to its projects around the world into a Google Maps mashup. It's not quite as flashy, but you don't need to download any special software to view it. Is this the beginning of a map war between the World Bank and the U.N.?

(Hat tip: Mark Leon Goldberg)

This, from a Google news conference Wednesday, is a gem:

[R]esponding to a question from an analyst [about Microsoft's stake in Facebook], co-founder Sergey Brin said: "We don't feel, at a higher level, that we need to own every successful company on the Internet," he said. "We can partner with these companies."

For the past several years, visitors to Google search page have smiled at the scribbles of Dennis Hwang, the graphic designer who comes up with the creative sketches that are incorporated into the Google logo on special occasions. The first doodle Hwang created for Google was on Bastille Day back in 2000, when he incorporated a French flag and some fireworks into the company logo. Other notable Google doodles have been the double helix to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the discovery of DNA, a sketch of Einstein to commemorate the scientist's birthday, and "Google" spelled out in dots in honor of Louis Braille's birthday.

For the most part, Hwang's doodles have been viewed as a public expression of Google whimsy, a way to have a little fun and inject some levity into what would otherwise be a dull, minimalist home page. But last week, this seemingly harmless logo offended some people:

The doodle was intended to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik. But some conservative bloggers are angry that Google honored an achievement of the United States' totalitarian archenemy during the Cold War, the Los Angeles Times reports. They're especially pissed that Google has never posted a doodle to honor American troops' achievements on Veteran's Day or Memorial Day. (Never mind that Google regularly drapes its logo with the American flag every July 4.)

It's actually not the first time that Google has come under fire for its doodles. On past Thanksgivings, Google's incorporation of a turkey into its logo has drawn criticism from Brazil, Australia, and other parts of the southern hemisphere, with claims that Google is too focused on the north. Google has altered its logo for non-Western holidays like Persian New Year and Chinese New Year, but I'm afraid we're getting to the point where Google will be scrutinized for every single doodle it publishes. It's a pity that this politicization of the Google logo will only work to dampen down the tiny bit of creativity we have left in the corporate world.

That was fast: The good folks at Dipnote, the new blog of the U.S. State Department, have heard our complaint and updated their blogroll to include FP Passport. Who says the State Department bureaucracy is cumbersome? Obviously, there are some folks with fine taste over there in Foggy Bottom.

I should note that it's a great sign that State is doing this, and especially that the blog allows comments. One other interesting project that State has embarked upon is having a few of its Arabic speakers go into mainstream Arabic-language online fora such as al-Jazeera, BBC Arabic, and Elaph.com and try to combat misperceptions of U.S. policy. What I like about this effort is that State's commenters are not trying to hide their State department affiliations, but are openly posting in their own names and as State Department employees. That's a good thing, Saudi political analyst Adel al-Toraifi told the New York Times:

Toraifi said the bloggers had generated some debate in the Arab World and had been the subject of a column in an Algerian newspaper lauding the State Department for discussing policy with ordinary people, something the writer said the Algerian government would never do. Indeed, several analysts said having State Department employees on the Web helps to counter one source of radicalization - the sense that Washington is too arrogant to listen to the grievances of ordinary Arabs, so violence is the sole means to attract attention.

At the end of the day, public diplomacy of this sort can only do so much; it's the policies that have to change before Arabs will embrace the United States. (Just as the State Department has a lot of work to do before most pundits will pronounce it a healthy institution.) But there's nothing wrong with open dialogue. In that spirit, I hope that Dipnote embraces its comment section as an asset and, as Mark Leon Goldberg stresses, gets engaged with other bloggers instead of just regurgitating press releases and standard talking points. We all understand the need to stay on message, but nobody wants to read a blog full of the usual boilerplate.

(Thanks to Passport reader JR for the tip.) 

Today, Sept. 18, is the 25th anniversary of the smiley-face emoticon. At 11:44 a.m. on this day in 1982, Scott E. Fahlman, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, first typed the smiley-face emoticon, :-), on an online bulletin board as part of a discussion about how to signal that an online comment is being made in jest.

The historic phrase, located after a "heroic effort" of digging through ancient backup tapes, reads as follows:

I propose the following character sequence for joke markers:

:-)

Read it sideways.

A reproduction of the original bulletin board thread that gave rise to the emoticon is available here. (The discussion reveals that "&" and "#" were also proposed joke markers. The character "&" supposedly looks like a "jolly fat man in convulsions of laughter," and "#" supposedly resembles "two lips with teeth showing between them.")

Fahlman writes on his Web page about :-): "I've never seen any hard evidence that the :-) sequence was in use before my original post, and I've never run into anyone who actually claims to have invented it before I did."

Fahlman seems to have cemented his place in history as the creator of the smiley-face emoticon, which has spawned the creation of other emoticons and given Internet users worldwide the ability to express what in verbal communication is normally conveyed through tone of voice. In doing so, he has probably helped millions of people avoid all sorts of misunderstandings and hurt feelings. And that should make everyone feel :-).

This passage from a recent piece by Joshua Davis in Wired concerning last spring's cyber attack on Estonia's Internet infrastructure reads like a deleted scene from The Matrix:

Across the dinner table from Aarelaid sat Kurtis Lindqvist, the man in charge of running Stockholm-based Netnod, one of the world's 13 root DNS servers, which direct global Internet traffic. That makes Lindqvist a sort of Olympian in the IT crowd. He is a handsome 32-year-old with a dimpled chin and close-cropped hair. By day, he wears a trench coat and shades, but the geek in him is just below the surface. He loves to play badminton and often programs late into the night. And, befitting the trench-coat-and-shades look, he belongs to a clandestine alliance of Internet elite with the power to cut off global Internet flows. He's one of the so-called Vetted: the select few who are trusted by the world's largest ISPs and can ask them to kick rogue computers off the network.

The Vetted constantly crisscross the globe to expand their network of trusted members, and by a stroke of luck, Lindqvist and some others were in Tallinn that week for what was referred to as a BOF — a birds-of-a-feather — meeting with European network operators.

So what is this mysterious geek Illuminati?

As far as I can tell, "the Vetted" refers to the Internet Architecture Board. The IAB traces its origins back to DARPA, the tech-research division of the U.S. Department of Defense that created an early precursor of the Internet in the 1970s. Today, the IAB, no longer under DoD control, is responsible for overseeing "aspects of the architecture for the protocols and procedures used by the Internet." The IAB also oversees the Internet Engineering Task Force, of which Lindqvist is a member. The IETF oversees global TCP/IP protocols and does indeed hold regular "Birds-of-a-Feather" meetings. Far from being a clandestine society, however, the IETF is an open community whose meetings are open to anyone who happens to be interested. 

As for the enigmatic Mr. Lindqvist, he seems bemused by all the attention, writing on his personal blog:

No, I don't like staying up at night. I even told Wired to correct this. I like to sleep at night. Also, I don't think I have done serious programming for years...

I also believe that I have never owned a trench-coat. I do own a half-long beige jacket though...:-)

I'm still not sure I trust a guy who uses emoticons to protect us from Russian cyber terrorists.

UPDATE: In an e-mail exchange with Blake, Passport's editor, Lindqvist writes:

Actually, exactly what [the Vetted] refers to I suggest you ask Wired about, I have never attributed this term to anyone - and I am not exactly sure myself. Second guessing the author of the Wired article, I would assume this does not refer to the IAB as the IAB has no operational role at all. It has an oversight function inside the IETF, that sets the technical standards for the Internet. It's members are appointed by a well defined process inside the IETF.

No word yet from the folks at Wired, however.

Wired's Noah Shachtman has the goods:

For years, the military has been warning that soldiers' blogs could pose a security threat by leaking sensitive wartime information. But a series of online audits, conducted by the Army, suggests that official Defense Department websites post material that's far more potentially harmful than blogs do.

The audits, performed by the Army Web Risk Assessment Cell between January 2006 and January 2007, found at least 1,813 violations of operational security policy on 878 official military websites. In contrast, the 10-man, Manassas, Virginia, unit discovered 28 breaches, at most, on 594 individual blogs during the same period.

The difference may be that soldiers blogging in combat zones are instinctively more careful than the desk jockeys back in Washington. As Army spokesman Gordon Vlan Veet put it:

Often these bloggers are stationed in the combat areas and they more than anyone understand the importance of security and the potential impact any OPSEC violations could have on themselves and their fellow Soldiers, Airmen and Marines."

Daniel Berehulak/Getty

The many Internet scams that fool people never cease to amaze me. Consider the case reported by the Telegraph on Monday:

An Australian sheep farmer who sought love over the internet was instead kidnapped and held hostage for 12 days after his African "bride" turned out to be a group of machete-wielding gangsters.

The man, Des Gregor, flew to Mali to meet and marry his online lover "Natascha" (and accept his dowry of gold bars worth $85,000), only to be kidnapped by a group of men who demanded a £42,000 ransom from his family. Eventually, Australian police working with Malian forces foiled the scam. But it wasn't actually the first time Gregor got caught up in this type of scam. Three years ago, he traveled to Russia to meet a different online lover. Nobody really knows what happened there, except that he didn't return with a bride as intended.

A while ago, NBC's Dateline aired a show called "To Catch an I.D. Thief," in which the show tracked people around the United States as they fell for online "lovers" who easily manipulated them into helping out with various criminal schemes. The trail ultimately led to Benin (which borders Nigeria, land of many an e-mail fraud), though Dateline never really got to the bottom of the conspiracy. But what was particularly striking was the ease with which Internet lovers can convince their targets to do some remarkably stupid things. As Des Gregor now warns, before divulging your bank account details or catching a plane across the world to meet up with your online lover, "Make sure you check everything out 100 percent." Sounds like good advice.

The wife of U.S. presidential candidate John Edwards as quoted by CIO Insight, a business journal aimed at IT executives: 

We can't make John black, we can't make him a woman. Those things get you a lot of press, worth a certain amount of fundraising dollars. Now it's nice to get on the news, but not the be all and end all.

It's ridiculously easy for anyone with an Internet connection to see how the U.S. media is covering Iraq. But it's nearly impossible to find out how the Iraqi media covers the United States. That is, unless you are fluent in Arabic, have a deep understanding of all the factions jostling for power in Iraq, scan the Internet obsessively, and basically dedicate yourself full time to the job.

That's exactly what Daniel Kimmage and Kathleen Ridolfo of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty have done for their report, Iraqi Insurgent Media: The War of Images and Ideas. In their 74-page report (pdf), the two analysts find that Sunni insurgents are spreading their message through a rich array of media—disseminating slick daily press releases, printing weekly and monthly magazines, posting video clips, and producing full-length feature films. But messages from the insurgents are hardly unified. There are platforms for those sympathetic to al Qaeda, websites for the Baathist "resistance" movements, and postings from revolutionary brigades. These diverse groups have one thing in common when communicating with Iraqis: They're flexible, and they're fast.

Even more troubling, if you take the aggregate messages from all the media outlets they investigated—as Kimmage and Ridolfo noted in the Q&A period after their presentation Thursday at Washington's New America Foundation—you hear a lot more from global jihadist movements than you do from nationalistic insurgents. It's not that people on the ground are necessarily more intent on propagating Greater Islam rather than on uprising against the Shiite Maliki government. But rather, it suggests that global jihadists from abroad are better than Iraqis at disseminating the message of jihad. After all, it's probably a lot easier to spread propaganda from a computer in, say, Damascus (or London or Glasgow, for that matter) than it is from Mosul.

Although it may be hard to log in from Iraq, it seems like everyone there's got a cell phone. And what do people like to watch on their phones? As RFE/RL president Jeffrey Gedmin said Thursday, they like to look at "traditional" pornography, and they like to watch "political pornography". Lots of people think that looking at traditional online pornography cools lovers' ardor in the bedroom. Somehow, though, I don't think the virtual jihad works that way.