If only all the parents of all the school age American kids could realize the importance of the Internet Revolution that has been going on, but is taking off at a faster rate right now, in my opinion. They would get out of their comfort zones, and do whatever it takes to learn more about computers, the internet, and search engine usage. Then they could encourage and share in the learning experience with their children.
Yesterday, a five year old Chinese search engine had its IPO, and this article from the San Francisco Business times said "Baidu launched its shares at $27 and saw them rise more than fourfold, closing its first day of Nasdaq trading at $122.54. That 354 percent increase represented the biggest first-day increase of a new stock since the heyday of the dot-com boom more than five years ago." The two founders attended SUNY Buffalo and Texas A&M respectively. This article in Wired News on 7/31/05 says "China's communist government promotes internet use for business and education." Baidu.com is now the sixth most widely used search engine in the world, mainly due to 100 million Chinese users, out of a possible, future 1 billion, are using it.
Now I know the U.S. government promotes internet usage too, but I sometimes wonder how much some of the power brokers in traditional media want to promote it, as they may feel threatened by accelerated, widespread adoption. Of course the growth of broadband is also a factor influencing accelerated search engine usage. I'm happy to say that fiber optic internet cable is being installed underground in my neighborhood as I write this post.
Positive Patriotism is a good thing for any country in this emerging "Globalized Economy". Peter Magnusson did a power point presentation on 2/5/97 entitled "The Internet Revolution history and significance" that had a slide on the web as an "Incredible Research Tool". As long as parents are aware of "The Downside" to the Internet Revolution, today's children should be better informed and prepared in this Information Age than the children who grew up in the Industrial Revolution one hundred years ago.
There is a part of a recent Wired News article entitled Ten Years That Changed the World by John Battelle that tells of "The Birth of Google" and the parents of Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page. One parent was a college computer science professor, and the other founder's parent was a college math professor and NASA scientist. Obviously, we can not all be that privelidged when it comes to the professions of our parents. But this article about Jerry Yang, one of the two founders of Yahoo, says " He was born in Taiwan in 1968, after his parents fled China, and his father died when he was two. His mother moved the family to San Jose when he was 10, and he had to learn the language from scratch. But he worked his way to the top of his high-school class and won a place at Stanford, one of the world's leading universities, and the heart of the Silicon Valley revolution."
We should all draw inspiration and patriotism from all these great entrepreneural stories. If we do, then more baby boomer and younger parents will embrace the internet, as a way of sharing quality time with their kids (no matter what age their kids are).
I put this post under the "Seller Advocacy" catagory, because I believe that more parents, in teaching their kids about the internet, should embrace what I define selling as: The education of people to a valueable opportunity, and then making it easy for them to buy.
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