As I listened to the shows we published on IT Conversations last week, I kept getting the feeling that the week's theme should have been Reality IT.

• I enjoyed listening to Oden Shakar's "East Meets West" presentation from Pop!Tech. Dr. Shankar is the Ford Motor Company Chair in Global Business Management at Ohio State University and author of the book The Chinese Century : The Rising Chinese Economy and Its Impact on the Global Economy, the Balance of Power, and Your Job. His talk about China's likely rise to be the world's largest economy over the next several decades is a sharp dose of economic reality.
• One of the things I think the world needs more of is real-world implementor experience in the area of SOA. Too much of it seems like black magic and there are vendors everywhere promising that their product "delivers" SOA like it were so much bologna. In SOA War Stories and Battleplans, Sprint's Ed Vasquez, Avaya's Jerry Flasz, and Evergreen Investment's Tom Myers dish out some real world experience. I enjoyed it a lot. Note that the original copy I got in my RSS feed was only 15 minutes long and ended in the middle. If that happened to you, download it again--it's about 48 minutes long.
• The last bit of reality was Dr. Cory Goodman's discussion with Moria Gunn on TechNation. He's the CEO of Renovis and he pretty much dumps cold water on the idea of monumental breakthroughs in the area of brain medicine. Maybe I took him to be more pessimistic that he really is, but it I couldn't help thinking that while medicine may make it so my body can live over 100 years, my brain is on it's own.

The other highlight for me this week was the O'Reilly Pick of the Week, Richard Florida's talk on The Rise of the Creative Class. I loved it the first time through and subsequently read the book.