My interview with Thomas Barnett is live on IT Conversations. In the interview we talked about the concepts in his new book, his use of technology-base analogies to explain his ideas, blogging, and outsourcing. Doing the interview was a lot of fun--I hope it's as interesting to listen to.

Tom has great appeal to the IT Conversations crowd (65,000 downloads of his last interview). Part of the reason is that he uses technology-based analogies to describe world events. But more than that, he also sheds lights on non-technical issues that techies care about. A sampling of two recent entries from his blog show that.

In one, Tom talks about how growing up on video games (in Tom's words: "been there, Doomed that") has produced a generation of soldiers better equipped to handle the multitasking, fast-paced chaos of battle and yet hasn't increased their overall endurance for battle.

In another Tom explores how a small country like Israel has to create companies that go global right from the start. The small size of the home market means you have to target Europe, Asia, or the US as part of starting up. Globalization means more to small economies than to large ones.

Tom's blog is a regular read for me. I like seeing the news through the lens of the ideas in his books. In fact, I've started to see the news that way without Tom's blog. I frequently hear a news story and think: "ah, this is about ... getting connected through ..." or "this is happening because ... is more connected now and it's changing their society."