I met Daisuke "Dice-K" Enomoto in Star City, Russia, in August 2006. Enomoto, 37, is slight with tired eyes and a shock of bleach-blond dyed hair. His idea of space travel comes from comic books and Star Wars. He grew up as a self-described otaku, coding his own computer games and dreaming of space—or, at least, space as it was portrayed in Star Wars and manga. His favorite anime show, Gundam, chronicles a future full of giant robots in which humans are abandoning this planet for the stars. "People who live on Earth, their souls is tied up by gravity, you understand?" Enomoto says. "I sympathize with this idea. Maybe in the future people should live in the space."

Enomoto applied his programming skills to building Internet companies, making millions. He bought a swanky wraparound penthouse loft overlooking Tokyo's famous electronics district, Akihabara. He tooled around in Porsches and Segways, and threw raves. He redecorated the moon-age pad himself, tricking it out with sinuous white walls modeled after the International Space Station. But life was bearing down on him. He married and divorced, had a couple of kids. One of his former companies, Livedoor, was embroiled in criminal lawsuits over stock and accounting issues. He needed to get away from the money, the demands, the scandal. And what better place to go than space? "I just want to go up there," he says, "and chill."

This giddy club kid paid $20 million (the price of a trip to the International Space Station at the time) to Space Adventures. He left behind his sci-fi penthouse and moved into a tiny two-room apartment in Star City to train for his 10-day space trip. He bunked with a Russian translator named Sergei, who stayed up every night shoving wads of newspaper into the window cracks to keep out the freezing winds.

The months of intensive cosmonaut training was hard on the keyboard jockey, especially the fitness regimen. When he arrived, he could do only two chin-ups. Swimming 800 meters took him 26 minutes. He was also unprepared for the antinausea conditioning in the whirling vestibular chair. Enomoto had his own technique for trying to deal with the looping around. "I imagined that I was driving in the PlayStation game Ridge Racer," he says. It didn't work. Within minutes, he was spewing borscht all over his blue spacesuit.

The longer Enomoto stayed at Star City, however, the more he came to enjoy the simple life there. Gone were the pressures of life in Japan. "I realize life is more than just money," he says. The broadband access in his cramped Star City apartment and several seasons of 24 on DVD didn't hurt.

Enomoto had big plans for his ride into space—and not just the ultimate iPod playlist he put together for the trip, a meticulously arranged mix of techno and trance. He also intended to take cosplay to a whole new level. He would dress like his favorite anime character—the mighty Char Aznable from Gundam. He had his assistant make a custom space suit, an orange and black number complete with a homemade Dice-K patch stitched on the front.

Every Space Adventures client can do experiments during his or her trip to space—most have chosen to conduct scientific research. Enomoto decided to see if he could assemble Gundam toys in weightlessness. Enomoto explains, "I make robots in these bags!" as he reaches his hands inside what looks like an elaborate Ziploc filled with robot parts, "just because it's fun!"

Enomoto's space dreams came crashing down one August morning shortly after my arrival in Star City. The discovery of a kidney stone means he can't fly. Enomoto's backup, Anousheh Ansari, a 41-year-old Iranian woman living in the US, will be taking his seat in the next Soyuz launch. After a visit to the hospital, he's sitting in his apartment with a steaming cup of tea. Enomoto's phone rings off the hook from friends just getting the news. But Enomoto is all smiles.

"My flight isn't canceled," he tells his friend on the phone, "it's just postponed." With his training complete and his condition treatable by a blast of ultrasound, Enomoto is in even better shape. He'll be up in space in no time. Best of all, he says, now he can work out some final details like getting the space station manuals translated into Japanese. And, he says, maybe he'll use the extra time to negotiate a spacewalk outside the ISS.

In the meantime, he's happy Anousheh is getting her crack at the flight.

Any chance he'll let her assemble one of his robot toys in space when she goes? "I don't think so!" he says, with a nerdy laugh and a snort. He spent $20 million, and the robots are coming with him.

As of August 2008, Enomoto hadn't returned calls, and Space Adventures wouldn't comment on his future flight status.

In the woods an hour outside Moscow, a sign on the road reads zvyozdny or "star." You are now approaching Star City, home of the Russian space program where cosmonauts have trained since the time of Yuri Gagarin. Clients of Space Adventures who shell out tens of millions of dollars for a trip to the International Space Station can expect to spend up to eight months training here before blastoff.

Star City cosmonauts and workers, and their families, reside in these apartment buildings. Some 8,000 people live in Star City year round.

Buses wait outside the entrance to Star City. There is a security booth, and nearby is a kiosk selling cigarettes, snacks, and souvenirs.

The Cosmonaut House is the main community center in Star City. It has a theater for events, a indoor flea market, and a museum that includes Yuri Gagarin's office and artifacts.

A sculpture outside the Cosmonaut House represents Gagarin flying effortlessly through a ring that symbolizes earthly limitations.

This photo collage at the entrance to the Cosmonaut House is just one of many memorials to Yuri Gagarin around Star City.

This is a replica of the MIR mock-up/trainer inside the Star City space museum.

Inside the Star City museum is a simulation of the Soyuz vehicle. The two holes lined with bright aluminum are parachute containers that pop open at lower altitudes for a soft landing.

A MiG monument stands at the air base entrance of Star City.

Artwork celebrating flight shows the MIR at the center, surrounded by images of planes.

Richard Garriott, dressed in his flight suit, stands in the stairwell near his one-bedroom apartment in Star City.

Rostislav Bogdashevsky, the renown Star City psychologist who has been training cosmonauts for more than 45 years, instructs Richard Garriott and Nik Halik with the aid of a translator.

Rostislav Bogdashevsky conducts psychological training of the cosmonauts inside this room. Note the picture overhead of a smiling Gagarin, one of his former pupils.

The bare-bones gymnasium in Star City houses exercise equipment, a pool, and a locker room. Space Adventures clients may spend several hours a day in here.

Gagarin's locker, preserved behind glass in the Star City gym, holds his tennis racket, shoes, and towels.

The Soyuz TDK 7 showing the habitation chamber atop, and descent module below.

A peek inside the Soyuz TDK 7.

Richard Garriott, bottom, and Nik Halik, top, train in the Soyuz TDK 3. Richard Garriott points out: "Note the very close quarters that in real life are even tighter. If you see the green at the bottom of the screen, that is where a door has been cut into the side for easy access. In reality, that is where the parachute compartment sticks into the passenger area. Nik and I are going line by line in the Flight Data Files as the sim progresses. Each line has a time and action to perform and the result we expect. Note that I have a stick in my right hand. When strapped in, especially when in a space suit, it is hard to reach some buttons, so that device is for reaching and pressing buttons that might be hard to reach. Near the right of the screen, you can see the small periscope viewport. At this moment in the sim, our attitude is aligned with Earth. This is likely just after insertion, or just before reentry."

This building houses the TsF-18 centrifuge.

The TsF-18 centrifuge is one of the largest and most advanced in the world. It can simulate the gravitational forces that cosmonauts experience during liftoff and landing—up to nine times as much as Earth's gravity. Space Adventure clients don't endure the full level of the machine's torture—30 gs for unmanned runs—but they are warned to keep their mouths shut at all times, as the extra gs can break their jaws.

The Hydrolab is an underwater training facility used to simulate a spacewalk outside the International Space Station. The mockup section of the ISS shown here can be lowered by the crane into the tank. Cosmonauts wear Orlan spacesuits as they perform spacewalk maneuvers.

The Soyuz Café is a private gathering place for cosmonauts and others celebrating special events in Star City. The blue chamber to the side of the lodge is modeled after the Soyuz, except it contains a wine cellar and comfy sofas.

Richard Garriott holds the old Star City planetarium, a handheld device. A sheet of black paper with holes would be slipped into the viewer and held up to the light.

There's a full-scale Soyuz replica in a Star City facility known as Building 1. Garriott and Halik squeeze into the fake spacecraft and slip on their headsets. It's time to run through another descent exercise, an instructor tells them over an intercom. And this time, no one is nearby to help them.

The capsule is so cramped that Garriott and Halik can't lean forward in their seats to reach certain buttons; they have to jab at them with 18-inch metal wands. The exercise today involves separating the Soyuz from the ISS and returning to Earth. They go through the motions of releasing the latch from the space station.

Garriott begins the countdown in preparation for firing the thrusters. "Ten, nine, eight, seven, six ...," he says. His finger is poised over the Manual Fire button in case the thrusters don't kick in at the right instant, which could cause the Soyuz to skip off the edge of the atmosphere like a stone on a pond.

But the thrusters work fine. One minute later, Garriott begins a second countdown, this time to signal the end of the thruster burn. "Ten, nine, eight, seven, six ..." The thrusters click off. Just before entering the atmosphere, the Soyuz separates from the habitation and instrumentation chambers, and, as Garriott puts it, "we wait to fall out of the sky."

This simulated landing is a success. No ballistic reentry. Touchdown complete.

Aside from surviving the trip, Garriott has one more wish—to earn the title of astronaut. As a gamer, he cares deeply about the difference between character classes—whether a ninja, merchant, or citizen spaceman. But the moniker he has dreamed of all his life is not coming easily. NASA has strict rules about how it titles its explorers, and Garriott cannot qualify, no matter what he does, because he's a private citizen. Instead of an astronaut, they'll call him a space flight participant.

Garriott thinks that's ridiculous. "Every dictionary says that astronaut and cosmonaut are synonyms," he says. "It means anyone who trains for or participates in space flight, period. And once you start training at Star City, they call you cosmonaut."

But they sometimes call him something else, too. As Garriott steps out of the Soyuz, a Russian guard in green fatigues is there to meet him. Garriott has never seen him before, but the dude—clearly a diehard Ultima fan—knows him. "Hail Lord British!" he says, in his thick Russian accent. Velcome home.

Contributing editor David Kushner (david@davidkushner.com) wrote about AI researchers in issue 16.02.

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To drill or not to drill? That has been the question this summer as Congress, the president and both candidates debate where and whether we should be exploring for domestic oil. The implication is that this is an important step in reducing our dependence on imported oil.

It is not. Oil—wherever it is produced—is priced, sold and consumed in a global marketplace. Whatever the outcome of this existential debate, any incremental oil will be sold to the highest bidder, in the U.S.—or in other countries— most of which have an insatiable appetite for oil.

Such flaws of strategic logic seem to show up in most discussions on what to do. We must discipline ourselves to follow a more rigorous approach, which can be hard to do given the enormous importance energy has in our lives. The plans announced recently by T. Boone Pickens and former Vice President Al Gore provide a good opportunity to think through our strategic options, by means of a comparative look. (See the Portfolio.com Green Machine graphic to find out where investors are putting their cash in the clean-tech game.)

I include as a third option a plan to allow cars and trucks on U.S. roads to run primarily on electricity drawn from the regular electric grid.

Pickens proposes to build massive wind farms in the nation's center to generate a large part of America's electricity, which would then liberate the natural gas that is currently used to generate electricity. If the cars on the road were to be retrofitted to run on natural gas, Pickens argues, the need to import the corresponding amount of petroleum would disappear. Setting aside the task of retrofitting over 200 million vehicles, this plan raises a fundamental question. Natural gas, like oil, is a global commodity that can be shipped anywhere. Even if it is produced in the United States, what makes it stay here? It does so if, and only if, the United States pays the prevailing market price for it, just as we are paying market price for the petroleum fueling our cars today. So very little would change.

Vice President Gore's focus is on carbon reduction. He proposes that by 2018, 100 percent of America's electricity be generated from sources such as wind, solar and geothermal. Doing so would free a lot of oil, imported and domestic alike, as well as coal and natural gas. The oil, coal and natural gas that the U.S. does not use would become available for others through the world market. Correspondingly, carbon emissions would be shifted to other countries, but the world's total would not be reduced. And, in spite of this effort, cars on the road would still be fueled by petroleum.

I have been arguing that the first task—Job 1—is the electrification of the transportation sector. The fuel needs of transportation account for a very large part of the nation's petroleum consumption. Even more important is that today only petroleum and agri-fuels can be used as sources of energy for the overwhelming majority of the nation's vehicles, even though the residential, industrial, and commercial needs for fuel can be satisfied using the full range of energy sources.

Put another way, the various sources of energy are fungible for residential, industrial, and commercial uses, but not for transportation.

If we are to undertake the equivalent of open-heart surgery on our economy, we must insist that after the trauma, the fuel for all segments of the economy should be capable of coming from multiple sources of energy. This will allow us to cope with the unexpected, and will prepare us for future transition to renewable sources of energy like wind and solar. This is why fungibility in transportation is important.

This approach has its problems too. As with Pickens' plan, cars and trucks, old and new, must be converted. They need to be able to run on electric power, even if only partially. As we make progress, we will become increasingly dependent on battery technology and manufacturing, most of which currently takes place outside the U.S. If investments in battery manufacturing abroad outstrip domestic investments, this situation is reinforced. In addition, improved battery technologies may end up using exotic metals. As we scour the periodic table of elements, our hunt may lead us to yet another set of dependencies.

The key features of the three approaches, in a comparative fashion, are shown in this table.

Complicated picture? Yes, it is.

Let's face it, we are dealing with the adaptation of the world's largest industry, under the pull and push of different problems. To have even a small chance to improve matters and end our dependence on imported oil, we need to ask basic questions: What problems do we intend to solve? And in what order? Environmental? Economic? National security? They are all important, but our answers lead to different approaches and to different outcomes.

Personally, my bias is that national security has to be our first priority. We can't lead the world if we're on our knees begging often-hostile nations for oil. Wars have been fought over natural resources, and this could happen again. But whatever the answer, objectivity and clarity are essential for us to make progress on the issue that informs the life of our generation.

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Apple is worth more than Google. Huh? This doesn't make sense to me.

Let's start with the obvious: Google makes more money than Apple does. It had earnings of $10 billion over the past 12 months, compared to $8 billion for Apple. And while both companies' earnings are growing fast, Google's are growing faster.

But here's the clincher: Google's earnings were on less than $20 billion of revenue -- that's what I call a profit margin. Apple, by contrast, needed more than $30 billion of revenue to get its $8 billion of gross profit.

Of course, when it comes to stock valuations, the present doesn't matter nearly as much as the future. So what does the future hold for these two franchises?

They're both strong technology giants with very large "moats." But Google is stronger, and its moat is bigger. It owns search, certainly in Europe and the Americas, and it's making strong inroads into display advertising as well. Sam Gustin might be kvetching about "the toll being inflicted on Web advertising by the slowing economy," but the growth rates are still pretty torrid for what is now a reasonably mature industry: Karsten Weide, an analyst at IDC, told Bloomberg that online ad spending grew 18.9 percent in the second quarter, a growth rate 7 percentage points lower than a year ago. Were it not for the slumping economy, web ad spending would have grown by more than 20 percent, she said.

19% market growth? I think Apple would be very happy with that. And remember that Google is increasing, not decreasing, its share of total online ad spending. Over at Apple, by contrast, the iPod/iTunes duopoly can't help but see its market share eroded going forwards, as DRM-free online music stores start competing on price, the record labels try to cut Apple down to size, and the marginal utility from buying your fourth or fifth iPod starts to decline.

Apple's phone business looks great right now, but the industry is notoriously cutthroat, Apple doesn't have the degree of control it's used to elsewhere, and in any case handset margins are never going to be as big as margins on iPods or MacBooks. Yes, the iPhone app store is a very promising business model -- but it's going to be quite some time, if ever, before it makes a significant contribution to Apple's bottom line.

And then there's the computer business. Macs are selling well, at very high margins. But Google's muscling in on the computing business too: over the long term, it makes sense to do all your computing in an ever-improving cloud than it does on specific, individually-owned pieces of hardware which always, eventually, break. The more important the cloud, the less important the computer, and the less important the computer's operating system, too.

Howard Lindzon, by contrast, thinks the stock market is right, and that Apple should be worth more than Google. Two of his arguments are weak: that "social search" will make Google obsolete (I'll believe it when I see it), and that "MacBooks are getting cheaper" (no they're not: Apple's entry-level laptop has been priced between $1,000 and $1,100 for years, and it's going to stay there).

Howards best argument is that a falling Google share price could become self-fulfilling: "if the stock lingers between $500 or worse yet, drifts lower, you will see a brain drain of epic proportions," he says. Google's competitive advantage has long been that it was smarter and richer and one or two steps ahead of the competition. As it matures, it might not have the same ability to attract the very best and the brightest.

But if Google has job risks, Apple has Jobs risk -- which is much bigger and probably just as imminent. No one at Google is even as important to the company as Jonathan Ive is to Apple, let alone Steve Jobs. If I'm holding a stock as a long-term investment (which is the only sensible way to hold a stock) then I don't want to run the risk that the company will founder the minute the CEO exits.

And talking of the long term, the option value of all those crazy Google projects which never make any money is huge. There's a good chance that, eventually, one of them will take off in a big way, and if it's energy-related, it could make Google's present business look positively puny.

Google stock is volatile, just as the founders said it would be in their prospectus. But if I was going to sleep today to wake up in ten years' time, I'd be much happier with Google stock under my mattress than Apple.

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Get on an elevator in any Manhattan office building, and there's a good chance you'll find yourself surrounded by them: the tattersalls, the windowpanes, the mini-checks of Brooks Brothers' fleet of Non-Iron Dress Shirts.

Inoffensive? Yes, as are the often-accompanying oxfords with Nike Air technology in the soles. But as the patterns blend together, they start to form a vaguely disturbing picture.

Gone is the time when the Patrick Batemans of the world could hold pissing contests over the microscopic differences in their business card stocks, dismissing peons for the inferior weaves of their suits. These days, there are fewer distinctions between industries and power levels. Pretty much everyone looks more like they belong in tech support than in a partners' meeting. (View our slideshow to see how the captains of industry dress.)

That's because somewhere between His Girl Friday and casual Friday, between black-tie and BlackBerrys, our workforce morphed from Mad Men into marathon men—and the race is not to the sartorial top, but to the bottom of the laundry pile.

When the dot-com bubble burst, many predicted an end to Teva-wearing C.E.O.'s and even the curtailment of casual Fridays. Clearly the second tsunami of tech money, which brought twentysomethings in hoodies to the head of the conference table, has helped keep that from happening. But tech chic only has so much to do with the dressing down of the workforce. As Bill Clinton might say, "It's the economy, stupid."

Before sitting down to write this, I e-mailed a bunch of friends in various professions and asked them about their work wear. The men overwhelmingly responded with an affinity for the aforementioned stiff shirts from Brooks Brothers, as well as half-brags about their disheveled appearances at the office. "I wind up wearing my lunch more often than not" one wrote [subtext: because I eat at my desk every day]. "I wear pleated-front pants because they're more comfortable," another admitted [subtext: I eat at my desk every day—and every night].

If you look good, you're obviously not working hard enough. Outdoing the next guy in terms of looking put-upon is the new pissing contest.

In a world where profits are down, bankruptcies are rampant, and the most entrenched I-bankers are getting the heave-ho, you can't afford to look as though you spared an extra second thinking about the cut of your Charvet shirt. Did you go shopping for a Breguet instead of billing that extra hour? Are you interviewing? Because seriously, who wears a suit these days? Who has time for that?

With subprime losses piling up, it's not just cubicle-bound young analysts who are being subjected to this sort of scrutiny. After all, Angelo Mozilo always looks like he put a lot of thought into his clothes. Company shareholders are more concerned with what the stewards of their wealth actually do. "Hey, nice suit, asshole. How much did it cost me?"

In fact, it's not uncommon for the messiest guy in the office to also be the most heralded, a phenomenon that has made its way into popular culture. In Dana Vachon's recent novel, Mergers & Acquisitions, the only clear hero is the poor overweight slob to whom all J.S. Spenser's dirty work has been outsourced. The other guys—the ones who can tell the difference between a Turnbull & Asser and a Thomas Pink shirt "blindfolded"—are not so laudable.

Women can take even more criticism if they seem overly concerned with their dress—often at the hands of female superiors. "I'm more 'fashiony,' which is definitely misunderstood and under-appreciated in my line of work," wrote a V.P. at one of New York's better banks. Sport more tailored and modern clothing and you get hit with a double-whammy—not only are you not working hard enough, you're trying to distract everyone else from their business.

If you think that's all hooey, I'd ask you to recall the time Hillary Clinton showed up on the Senate floor revealing a centimeter of cleavage under her rose-colored blazer. No one went so far as to accuse her of trolling for a date, but no one exactly congratulated her on the outfit either. (Or glance at the wardrobes of such titans as Meg Whitman, who just stepped down from her post as eBay's C.E.O., and Irene Rosenfeld, head of Kraft Foods. For them, the way to success was brains, hard work, and separates from Talbots.)

There are, of course, the rare exceptions to the rule. Julie Macklowe, portfolio manager for Sigma Capital Management, was recently recognized as an "It" girl by Vogue. And, speaking of that venerable title, fashion is perhaps the one industry where showing up looking like a slob or like a buttoned-up matron can get you into hot water. Don something less-than and you could face the same question: "Who has time for…that?"

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From wind turbines to water purification systems, from solar panels to CO2 capture, suddenly, if you're an investor with money to burn, environmental technology has become the biggest game in town.

The problem: Venture capital firms and private equity shops are discovering that while dot-com startups are easily fashioned by mavericks and whiz kids, there are few rogue entrepreneurs with the chops to handle the complexities of environmental technology, much less to invent it.

The finance guys' big problem, however, is a potential gold mine for academia.

Take Potentia, a green tech startup conceived by University of Michigan PhD students Tzeno Galchev ad Ruba Borno in conjunction with MBA student Rishiraj Das, and facilitated by Michigan's Zell-Lurie Institute of Entrepreneurial Studies.

The Institute was founded to introduce engineering students to new venture opportunities and help them bring their inventions to market. In addition to offering a business curriculum, it serves as an umbrella organization for grants and competitions for the benefit of new startups -- such as last September's Clean Tech Forum for venture capitalists.

Potentia, which manufactures an environmental energy powered battery, was the runner-up in the center's 2008 Michigan Business Challenge. While still in the R&D phase, Potentia has already been in talks with potential investors.

"I would say that without getting the business background, it would have been fairly impossible to take an invention anywhere," Galchev said.

Michigan's not alone. Top engineering programs such as those at Stanford, MIT, Georgia Tech, and U.C. Berkeley are designing business-oriented programs, institutes, and curricula to turn bookish engineers into savvy entrepreneurs.

According to Bill Aulet, who created and teaches MIT's Energy Ventures class, the nature of alternative energy research poses unique challenges: Green tech innovations require extensive resources, a long time horizon, and a formidable education in engineering, as well as business skills.

"There aren't nearly enough energy entrepreneurs out there," says Aulet, who has seen interest from VCs skyrocket in the last few years. "So what we had to do is start teaching entrepreneurship to engineers."

The shortage of mature green tech startups can be attributed to the suddenness of widespread interest. Investments in companies working on green technology in North America totaled almost $4 billion in 2007, according to the CleanTech Group. And 2008 is on track to yield five times what was invested in 2004.

Of course, universities' eagerness to lend a hand is not free from self-interest. Typically, an invention by a university-employed inventor (e.g. faculty, staff, paid PhD students) with substantial use of university facilities is the property of the university, with the inventor getting exclusive licensing rights to the patent. If a licensed technology forms the basis of a successful venture, that could mean big money for the school.

But Peter Adriaens, a professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Michigan, says that the influx of interest is so new that until recently, the university didn't even have a comprehensive database of its clean tech-related inventions.

"Not so long ago, if an engineer had a small invention he would just hope that there would be someone on business side that would recognize brilliance and see the application," says Tim Falley, a colleague of Adriaens' and the managing director of Michigan's Zell-Lurie Institute. "Most of the time, it would have died right there."

Last year, MIT's Entrepreneurship Center launched a class called Energy Ventures, geared towards graduate students in engineering working on research applicable to the alternative energy market. It also now awards a Clean Energy Entrepreneurship Prize: $200,000 for first place, "to help develop and motivate the next generation of energy entrepreneurs."

Stanford’s Technology Ventures Program also provides resources for linking inventions to investments through the two-year old Precourt Institute for Energy Efficiency. Its Summer Institute for Entrepreneurship serves as a boot camp for graduate students looking to commercialize their inventions.

"What we try to do in terms of the course is to give them the sense that there is a structure in place for how to present your ideas," says Margaret Neale, a professor in Stanford's Graduate School of Business, and SIE instructor. "We give them a framework for how to approach business situations."

An early business education give engineering types the “ability to analyze problems in a different way, by focusing on a need in the market and working backwards to an invention," says Susan Broderick, the program manager of U.C. Berkeley’s Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology.

With the proper training, engineers can avoid embarking down research paths that will be ultimate dead ends, from a commercial standpoint.

"Engineers need to understand that the best technology does not win – the best application wins," says MIT’s Aulet. "They need to think very early on about whether something will create value in the real world."

Years after they first appeared in Wired, these three VIPs remain in the spotlight.

J. J. Abrams Since upgrading TV with that confounding isle, he's taken on 2009's Star Trek prequel.

Why he does it "It's cool to bring something to life, whether it's a song or a video. But to do it and have it embraced by millions ... like Lost, that's insane."

Hilary Rosen Once a foe (she helped shut down Napster), the ex-RIAA chief made a heroic comeback by penning a love letter to Creative Commons in Wired. She now heads lesbian social network OurChart.

Why she does it "I worked hardest to bring the tech and content communities together. It is happening."

Joe Trippi Howard Dean's campaign manager pioneered the Web-centric bottom-up politics that has propelled Obama's run.

Why he does it "I got the chance to put Washington and Silicon Valley together. We are seeing an Apollo project of a new kind of politics being built right now."

* Dead to us: Sonic the Hedgehog, Terry Semel, the Wachowski Siblings, Hans Reiser

Q&A with Hilary Rosen

Wired: With OurChart you used one platform (the television show The L Word) to launch another (a social network). How did you hook up with Ilene Chaiken, and when/how did the "aha" moment happen? Were you convinced from the outset that OurChart would be a success, and why?

Rosen: OurChart was Ilene's idea. We are old friends. She and Kara Swisher (AllthingsD.com) came to me and said that they thought "TheChart" from the show, which was literally a chart on the wall of one of the main character's living room that connected who slept with whom, should go online as a social network — broadening, of course, the purpose beyond sex! The L Word has long served as kind of an analog social networking vehicle for the lesbian community. People watch it at bars and at parties. We created a business plan that would incorporate what people liked about the show, which meant providing original lesbian and fan-centered entertainment content and combined that with traditional SN features. Showtime and CBS were very supportive.

Wired: Only a few other social networks have launched via television shows, but none has replicated the success of OurChart. Why do you think the L Word's audience took so well to a new online community?

Rosen: Lesbians are a hugely underserved market. This is a community with some $300 billion in annual consumer spending. Marketers and advertisers have started paying attention to the gay market over the last few years, but mostly that has been to target gay men. Surveys show that lesbian households have as much disposable income as gay male households. We knew if we built it they would come — both users and advertisers.

Wired: What other projects are on the horizon for you?

Rosen: I am now concentrating on some projects in Washington. I work for a few great companies like XM Radio and Viacom. The brilliant Jay Berman and I have a partnership that helps companies like Facebook navigate the IP world. Politics has always been my hobby, and this year it is also my business. It is as important an election as we have ever had. I am on-air on MSNBC as one more talking head discussing the same things as everyone else, but I hope sometimes with a different angle. And I am excited about a new role I have taken with The HuffingtonPost.com as a political director and an at-large editor. The site's traffic is through the roof, and as the largest site for progressive voices, we are going to have a great impact on this election. Given my experience, I am also helping the team develop the business side as well. It is a great group of people, and Arianna [Huffington] is, as everyone knows, a fantastic force of nature.

Politics has always been my hobby, and this year it is also my business. It is as important an election as we have ever had. I am on-air on MSNBC as one more talking head discussing the same things as everyone else, but I hope sometimes with a different angle. And I am excited about a new role I have taken with The HuffingtonPost.com as a political director and an at-large editor. The site's traffic is through the roof, and as the largest site for progressive voices, we are going to have a great impact on this election. Given my experience, I am also helping the team develop the business side as well. It is a great group of people, and Arianna is, as everyone knows, a fantastic force of nature.

Wired: You've noted the "chilling effect" the RIAA's actions had on legitimate uses/users. Knowing what you know now, would you still file the same suit against Napster?

Rosen: We had no choice but to sue Napster. I tried to avoid it because I thought the service was the greatest thing I'd ever seen. But they weren't knowledgeable enough to be interested in talking at the beginning. It was the first big program, and the precedent needed to be set.

Wired: Do you think the Big Five should have accepted the licensing agreement that was on the table during the Napster 1.0 days? (i.e., $1 billion over five years). Had they accepted the offer, how might the landscape of online music and the industry itself be entirely different from where we are today?

Rosen: I don't know if that particular deal is the one that should have been done, but I do firmly believe that the record companies should have made a deal. At the time, no amount of money that Napster put on the table seemed large enough because it was virtually impossible to compare the then current revenues from sales to the proposed digital revenues. The record companies weren't willing to jump off the cliff and take a chance. That was a mistake which can never be undone. P2P took over, and we had no technology or consumer allies, which we might have had if we had a deal. Having said that, the Napster management was difficult to deal with because the players kept changing.

I understand the interest that people have in wanting to know how this fantastic industry with so much potential for growth has now shrunk so dramatically. The fact is that there are so many reasons. And I can only scratch the surface here. Maybe someday I'll write a book. In the record industry there were problems with the retail distribution, with advertising and marketing strategies, with demographics focusing too much on the young hit maker and not serving the older buyer, with artist relations, with international piracy, and so many other areas. Technology and the piracy it facilitated (and continues to facilitate) was a major reason as well, of course. And this is the issue that got the most play. Senior executives at the record industry were often trapped in the same short-term thinking that a lot of business executives get trapped into — which is making the current quarter revenues as high as possible and hoping that the next quarter works out. It is also fair to say that the most influential record executives were more music men and not businessmen (yes, all men), and therefore there was no problem that a great "hit" wouldn't fix.

But it is so wrong to blame the record companies alone. The music publishers wouldn't license, the retailers threatened the labels with retaliation if they distributed online at a cheaper rate than they sold physical products, and the artists wouldn't reduce advance requests to try and experiment more online. In short, it required the entire music community to see the future in the same way and commit to working together — a very difficult scenario to pull off.

And exacerbating the problems within the music business was a very real arrogance in the technology community that valued technological innovation above all. Their disdain for the music community was palpable and irritating to many of my colleagues. After all, artists worked as hard to create their music as software developers worked to create their technology. ISPs were making more money when piracy was a driver to upgrade to high-speed; hardware makers were incorporating CD-Rs and increasing prices. Once MP3 distribution was rampant, the tech industry didn't think it needed the legitimate music industry because their consumers were being served with the unauthorized music. Most of the best innovators in the field didn't want the music industry to succeed because too many of them believed that it was a zero-sum game.

Well, that needed to change. I wasn't going to be able to undo 30 years of mistrust within the music community since that was in others' control. So I worked hardest to try to bring the technology and content communities together to see their common interests in upgrading the consumer experience with legitimate higher-quality music and artist participation in the extra content that fans wanted. Much of my time in my last few years at RIAA was in that behind-the-scenes shuttle diplomacy, urging the experimentation with business models and facilitating licensing systems. While the language and orientations are still different between content and technology, there is at least some great understanding now. And though there is still a great amount of unauthorized stuff online now, consumers have some great choices and lots of companies are working hand in glove with the music industry to make the offerings even better. It has taken so much longer than any of us would have liked or even predicted, but it is happening.

Wired: Since stepping down from the RIAA, you've consulted for companies like XM Radio. Some would say you've switched teams. Is that a fair assessment?

Rosen: No, I haven't switched teams. I am inherently a proponent of intellectual property protection and its critical role in the creation of art and the commercial support of artists. But I do call them as I see them. And sometimes that means that I disagree with some of my former employers. Not that anyone cares, including me, but I've turned down fortunes to go against them because I just couldn't reconcile the work with either my beliefs or my loyalty.

Wired: You helped found Rock the Vote and work with a number of nonprofits. Do you ever worry people will instead remember you more for the turbulent times you spent at the RIAA?

Rosen: Geez, I haven't turned 50 yet! I hope the epitaph isn't written. Having said that, I do think I have had a great and varied career as a business executive, a television commentator, a lobbyist, and an activist, and all the time working on issues that I really like. Hopefully that will continue. I definitely have another act or two in me.

Wired: Did that period sour you to music, music fans, the music business at all?

Rosen: No, RIAA didn't sour me on music at all. I originally took the job because I was such a music fan, I loved almost every minute of it, and I am still a music fan. But it is nice now to listen to an artist or a new song and not worry about whether they get along with their record company, who's getting paid on what, whether the release was leaked online before its release, and whether it is meeting its sales targets!

Wired: And if you had your way, what would you most want to be remembered for above all else?

Rosen: Who knows?! Who cares?! I guess I just want my kids to be happy and do good in the world.

Q&A with Joe Trippi

Wired: In 2004 you pointed to the fences and declared that the 2008 race would be the "first national contest waged and won primarily online." The first point is irrefutable. Based on what we've seen thus far in 2008, why is the battle being waged online really more vital than, say, 30-second TV spots or door-to-door stumping?

Trippi: The important differences can be seen between the Clinton old "top-down" campaign and the Obama "bottom-up" Internet-savvy campaign. Hillary Clinton was dependent on $2,300 checks — and could not replicate them — having to loan herself millions just to keep up with Obama's online small donors who were able to contribute repeatedly. Obama's volunteers who signed up online organized his caucus victories for free while contributing to pay for the professional, paid Obama organizers they worked with. Clinton did not have enough of these online activists to keep up with Obama in the caucus states — so she lost almost all of them. TV took people out of the process — the Internet and technology are putting people back into the process. Politicians, government officials, CEOs, and others who fail to understand that this changes everything are going to be shocked at what happens to them as their competitors "get it."

Wired: During the ‘04 election, at one point, John Kerry had raised roughly 37 percent of his campaign funds from his Web site. Today, $45 of the $55 million Barack Obama raised in February alone streamed in from the Web. Did you expect the shift toward Web-based fund-raising to accelerate this much in only four years time? Will we see even more impressive numbers before November?

Trippi: In my book, [The Revolution Will Not Be Televised], I said that the $100 revolution was just around the corner — that a candidate in the 2008 cycle would be able to mobilize millions to contribute small contributions of $100 or less. Before this campaign started, I believed and still believe that a candidate (probably Barack Obama) will raise a half-billion dollars just in the general election. The math is simple: 5 million Americans giving $100 each. We are still scratching the surface of what's possible as more Americans get involved in their democracy. Fifty-seven million voted for John Kerry, 60 million or so voted for George Bush — you cannot tell me that 10 percent of the Kerry voters would not have given him $100. The real trigger will be a candidate who limits General Election contributions to a small amount like $250 or less, and millions of Americans realize they can block the special interests and change our politics with a small contribution or helping in some other way. This is going to happen this year. I am sure of it. And BTW, in 2012 or 2016 it will be even bigger. It's the network, stupid. And the network is growing.

Wired: If 2004 is remembered as the year of micro-targeting and online campaigning, what will the legacy of 2008? Also, Obama's campaign has sparked a wave of Web-based creativity — from T-shirts to viral sites like barackobamaisyournewbicycle.com. Had John Edwards stayed in the race, what might your strategy have been to compete, diffuse, or work around all the buzz?

Trippi: I think that the creativity unleashed by sites like YouTube.com will be the hallmark of this cycle. In 2004 we created DeanTV, a 24/7 broadband channel where anyone could upload a video, a mashup of a Dean speech, or anything they wanted — about 200,000 people used it. Turns out we had created our own YouTube before YouTube created YouTube.

The important thing to understand is that TV and Internet campaigning are still intertwined. Elizabeth Edwards called into Hardball on MSNBC to confront Anne Coulter and created an online firestorm. The problem for the Edwards campaign was that no matter what we did, the media focused on Clinton vs. Obama. And the more coverage Obama got, the more his online buzz grew. This wasn't new to me — we benefited from this same kind of media focus in the Dean campaign. Our strategy in the Edwards campaign was to build a strong online presence and then beat both Obama and Clinton in Iowa. We felt if we could do that the media would focus on us and that our Internet presence would combine to dramatically shoot us into contention. We took second — and close never matters in politics.

Wired: I understand you kept a 90-day calendar, color-coded to track traffic to JohnEdwards.com. What was the most common cause for the larger spikes?

Trippi: The larger spikes were almost always caused by something related to Elizabeth Edwards, she gets bottom up politics and the Internet better than anyone – candidate or spouse I have ever worked with. She connects with people and she is authentic and those two things created a lot of the spikes in sign-ups or contributions to our campaign.

Wired: Keeping tabs on what's happening online is beyond a full-time job. What's your best advice for, say, a small-town politician running on a lean budget and staff?

Trippi: This isn't hard or expensive. Start a blog, a Twitter account, and a FriendFeed. Ten minutes a day with just these three tools can make a huge difference. But let's look into the future for a second. Somewhere today there is someone who is oblivious to these tools who is running for city council and is dialing for dollars. There is someone else running for city council who is dialing for dollars but also is collecting emails and growing followers on Twitter. Ten years from now they will both be running against each other for Congress — any guesses at who is going to kick whose?

Wired: Can these tools that are used for campaigning also be used to govern?

Trippi: John F. Kennedy heralded in the age of the television presidency. It changed everything — a president at his inaugural could rally the nation. In January 2009, the next president of the United States will herald in the age of the networked presidency. The inaugural will be live-blogged and mashed up. The new president will outline the agenda for the first 100 days of his administration, and online communities will rally to the cause of passing health care and other agenda items like never before. It will only be the beginning, just as JFK was only the beginning of how television changed governing — but we are about to witness and be part of the most sweeping change in government and people's participation in our government since the revolution of 1776, and it will change more than how we are governed — it will (just as television did) change everything.

Wired: Why does it really matter if your video gets, say, 75,000 more hits on YouTube than the other candidate? And how does popularity online carry over to the voting booth, especially during an extended primary season?

Trippi: The big difference is that if you hear something interesting on the radio, or see something that catches your attention on TV, you cannot interact with it instantly — you cannot respond by joining up or by putting it to music, and you can't send it on to every one of your friends shouting to the rooftops "Eureka! I found it!" Will.I.am's mashup of Barack Obama's "Yes We Can" speech was passed friend to friend by millions of Americans — most of us got it from a friend or someone we cared about. That is much more powerful than getting a message from a paid staffer, even if it comes from a candidate you support.

Wired: After 2004, you vowed not to return to presidential politics. You didn't stay away for very long. What keeps you coming back for more?

Trippi: I always wondered what changed people's lives more? Politics? Or Technology? I have spent the better part of 30 years trying to figure that out, straddling the worlds of Silicon Valley and Washington ever since Senator Ted Kennedy called me in San Jose and asked me to organize for him in 1979. I do it because I want to change things for the better. In 2004 I got the chance to put the two things I knew a lot about together and something amazing happened. I got it wrong, [and] I thought that was the end — but as 2008 neared, I realized it was just the beginning. I was proud to have been part of the Wright brothers of a new kind of politics in the Dean campaign of 2004. But damn — in four years the technology and sites have blown past Boeing, Mercury, and Gemini. We are seeing the Apollo project of a new kind of politics being built right now. But we are all still pioneers — still exploring where all of this will go and how to make it work to bring even more people into the process.

Wired: According to your Twitter feed, you're at work on a Web strategy for Jim Slattery. What can we expect from that collaboration?

Trippi: Jim Slattery believes that we have to get more people involved if we are really going to change things. He was a member of Congress through 1994, so he knows how Washington works. He really understands the importance of the new tools available to people to connect with each other and change the place so it works for us. He is after me every day to help him figure it out in Kansas and take on one of the real status quo players — US Senator Pat Roberts, who fittingly has held office in Washington since before Neil Armstrong landed on the moon. I love Twitter, but I have to be more careful about my Tweets. But keep an eye on the Slattery campaign.

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In past years, Pete Fisch used to cross his fingers, hoping it wouldn't rain during the annual golf tournament he manages in North Carolina. In 2005, it poured, costing the tournament tens of thousands of dollars in reduced ticket and concession sales. In 2006, the rain gods held off—and then last year, Fisch simply sat back and let come what may.

That's because a new online service called WeatherBill enabled him to purchase a contract that paid off in case of heavy rain—hedging away his exposure to the weather.

As it turned out, it did rain heavily last year. Fisch's tournament received a payout of close to $15,000 from WeatherBill. "We still took a loss of around $25,000 to $35,000, but it's better than the $50,000 we would have lost," Fisch says.

As businesses contemplate losing massive amounts of money from events like droughts and hurricanes, WeatherBill hopes to carve out a market in the growing field of weather-related risk-management products, offering what are essentially weather futures contracts to companies with an internet-era twist. The contracts pay off automatically without any kind of claims process based on objective weather measurements like the inches of rain a given area receives.

The company is the brainchild of David Friedberg, who had previously been the business product manager for Google's AdWords and a founding member of the company's corporate-development group, where he led the search giant's acquisitions of companies like Picasa, Urchin Software, and dMarc. Friedberg left Google to launch WeatherBill in 2006.

The potential market for weather coverage is huge, since as much as 70 percent of American businesses are impacted by weather in some way. While the risks for companies like agricultural firms are obvious, businesses from movie theaters—which see ticket sales slump on sunny days—to transportation companies and clothing manufacturers are affected by the weather. It's estimated that $2 trillion to $3 trillion of the United States' nearly $14 trillion G.D.P. is weather-sensitive.

Businesses have long bought insurance against weather-related damages; more recently, they have been able to buy weather futures contracts on exchanges like the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, but the offerings are largely linked to temperature and are unwieldy and expensive for smaller companies.

WeatherBill takes a different approach, borrowing from AdWords' sophisticated, real-time auction engine for pricing keywords. Just as AdWords integrates the latest market changes on a continuous basis, the WeatherBill pricing engine correlates up-to-the-minute weather forecasts with trend data to assess a company's overall risk. Then it spits out a price based on all those factors, with all of this happening in a tenth of a second, and contracts can be purchased right up to the last minute since the latest weather information automatically gets incorporated into the pricing engine.

"For weather coverage to be useful, you have to customize it," Friedberg says. "It's not like car insurance—you're a male between 20 and 40 in San Francisco, here's your price for car insurance."

The end result is that more types of weather contracts are available and more businesses can afford it. When Fisch's golf tournament bought its rain contract in 2007, the cost was just under $1,000, according to Fisch.

Like a typical insurance business model, WeatherBill's strategy is to sell against enough weather eventualities so that the events will essentially balance each other out. Insuring a soybean grower in Iowa against drought might be a money loser, for instance. But if the soybean grower is offset by the state's car washes, which do big business in dry weather, the risk is diversified. Not every customer has a precise counterpart, but a large mix of customers creates a diversified portfolio that, in turn, can bring down prices.

"Our business has all sides of risk—we've got customers wanting rain, drought, heat waves, frost, no frost. We even have people who want hurricanes," says Friedberg.

Since last year's launch, Friedberg says WeatherBill has signed policies with hundreds of customers, hedged hundreds of millions of dollars of risk, and brought in revenue "in the millions." A major deal was struck with Priceline recently, allowing the travel company to insure its users against rain on their vacations for no extra cost. (Priceline will refund the cost of a customer's trip if it rains heavily on more than half the days of their trip.) And the United States Tennis Association has announced it's buying a weather contract to hedge against weather-related losses at this year's U.S. Open, although it hasn't released details.

The Commodities Futures Trading Commission, which regulates weather derivatives, currently limits WeatherBill's customers to accredited investors with a minimum net worth of $1 million as a way of limiting the influence of speculators. But Friedberg hopes to persuade the C.F.T.C. to change that requirement soon and eventually offer policies directly to individuals wishing to protect weddings, travel plans, and other events. As with businesses, premiums would shrink as more customers are integrated into the algorithm and the risk is balanced out.

And Friedberg says that global warming and the volatile weather of the last few years set the right conditions for his business.

"Citrus farmers will call us and say, 'We had four frost events last year. It was nuts. My crop was diminished by 15 to 20 percent,'" Friedberg says. "A lot of ski resorts were shut for much of 2006 and 2007 in the Northeast because it was really warm. They called us the next year. Our customers are definitely aware of climate change and its impact."

Benjamin Waber has a grim piece of news for managers and CEOs: You're out of the loop.

Waber, a PhD student in MIT's Human Dynamics Group, studies the way groups interact socially — based on who's talking to whom. But unlike most social scientists, who simply ask people about their behavior, Waber and his colleagues measure it. They outfit employees with special badges that work with base stations to log all conversations between employees, including location and duration. With this data, Waber's team can plot exactly how information flows inside a firm.

Almost every time he analyzes a group, Waber discovers that the super-connector — the crucial person who routes news among team members — isn't the manager. "The manager is almost always peripheral," Waber says. "It's some random guy." And that person is usually overworked and overstressed. He isn't given enough support to fulfill his role, because nobody in the firm knows he's doing it in the first place. If you study the org chart, the higher-ups are in control. But if you study reality, those same managers barely know what's going on.

This type of research has evolved into a new field called reality mining. By tracking people using location-aware devices like mobile phones or electronic badges, scientists are revolutionizing our understanding of how social networks function.

Of course, we think we know how they work. We've all become addicted to some combination of email and LinkedIn and Facebook and blogs, and at the click of a button we can pinpoint our online friends, right? But once you step away from your computer, Waber and other reality miners have found, the real world often works in ways that are quite different from the virtual one.

On the Web, the best way to solve a problem is to engage an extensive network; the person who provides information, advice, or answers is often someone you know only vaguely — a weak link.

In the face-to-face world, though, Waber says, groups are more productive when the team members know each other well, sharing extremely strong links. That's because face-to-face teamwork requires intimacy, he says, and "when you're among friends you can really capitalize on preexisting protocols" — nods, grunts, in-jokes — for talking and listening.

Reality mining can also spot when a group is in a groove. Sandy Pentland, the MIT professor who heads up the lab where Waber works, has discovered that highly creative teams socialize in a "pulsing star" pattern: They fan out to gather information, then regroup. "People explore during the day," Pentland says, "and then later get very tight and inbred, with everybody talking to everybody."

If you have enough data about commonplace conversations, you can even predict when those conversations are going to take place. Working with Pentland, Nathan Eagle tracked the physical interactions of 100 MIT students over an academic year, using their cell phones. After a few months, Eagle could deduce likely future meetings with impressive accuracy. "So if we know that," he says, "why not design our calendars to sync up?"

But this isn't just about understanding reality. It's about tweaking it. When Waber examines company-wide communications, he can spot inefficiencies — two employees who don't know each other. Introduce them over coffee and — presto! — the office metabolism accelerates. The technical term for this is tightening a network, and Waber is trying it out at several firms around the world.

The scary part of reality mining, as everyone involved readily admits, is that it's a potential privacy nightmare. Do you really want your boss gathering this much data about your daily activities? Or imagine this stuff in the hands of direct-marketing types. Or law enforcement.

Still, the benefits might outweigh the risks, particularly at the public-policy level. Mining companies is cool; mining countries could yield lifesaving info. Eagle is currently analyzing 12 billion anonymized calls placed during one month in the UK. With that much data, he hopes to better understand human mixing patterns, which could help predict the spread of disease outbreaks, social trends, and other hidden phenomena.

We've learned to map our virtual lives. Now it's time to map the real ones, too.

Email clive@clivethompson.net.

In the 20,000 years or so that humans have been getting piss-drunk, no spirit has earned a worse rap than absinthe. Said to turn mild-mannered imbibers into raving maniacs, it was banned in the US and much of Europe in the early 1900s. (Remember Van Gogh's ear incident? Some scholars blame the green fairy.) The chemical culprit was thujone, a toxic compound found in the crushed flowers and leaves of absinthe's key ingredient, wormwood. Or so we thought.

Three years ago, Wired sent me to meet Ted Breaux, a chemist and microbiologist who had reverse engineered the liquor's recipe and discovered that there was barely any thujone present (November 2005). During harvest and distillation, he explained, its concentration was reduced to a minuscule five parts per million.

Breaux's research — finally published this spring in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry (.pdf) — and that Wired story have helped change absinthe's image from drug to drink. The US has been slowly peeling away its ban, and in March, the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau approved the sale of absinthes that were "thujone free" (containing less than 10 parts per million).

To date, there are four brands on US shelves: Lucid (Breaux's formula), Kuebler, Green Moon, and St. George Absinthe Verte. "The US is lucky in that its first absinthes are high-quality products, distilled from whole herbs," Breaux says. "In the European market, 80 to 90 percent is industrial junk."

Under the Jade label, Breaux is making his own absinthes in France and trying to get them green-lighted for sale in the US. "Even at this point, gaining that approval seems to involve more luck than anything," he says. Luck, and a little chemistry.

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When the earth shook in Los Angeles last week, the first reports didn't come from traditional media outlets, but from Twitter, the "micro-blogging" service where users can send short, instant status updates to their friends via e-mail and mobile phone. Ten minutes before the Associated Press reported news of the tremor, a Twitter user named Caroline (Vixy) posted a simple update: "Earthquake."

Blogs and news sites buzzed the next day about how Twitter had ushered in a new era of communication. Such proclamations would have most internet entrepreneurs seeing dollar signs. But not Biz Stone, who insists Twitter's mission is simply to provide a useful, robust service and let the dollars follow later.

"At this point, given that we have plenty of money in the bank, it makes a lot more sense not to distract ourselves with trying to put the finishing touches on a revenue plan," says the 34-year-old Stone, who founded Twitter with Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams in 2006.

Stone's hesitance to "monetize" Twitter echoes that of other major Web 2.0 companies, such as Facebook and YouTube, whose founders have said they'd build their audience first and find revenue streams later. But those giants have shown that converting eyeballs into money hasn't exactly been easy; Facebook has yet to start generating meaningful profit, and Google has said on a number of occasions that it has yet to find the right business model for monetizing YouTube's considerable traffic. Twitter, despite some plans Stone has up his sleeve, may very well find itself in the same position.

Today Twitter makes a negligible amount of revenue from users that send and receive messages as SMS texts, and overall loses an undisclosed amount of money.

But Twitter's user base has undeniably skyrocketed. The service has grown to more than 2 million per month, ten times more than April 2007, according to Compete.com. As of March 2008, 200,000 active Twitter users per week sent 3 million updates per day, according to numbers obtained by TechCrunch.

Indeed, the service's growth has caught the company by surprise, and outages are not uncommon. On the heels of all this growth, Twitter announced a new round of funding in June, raising a reported $20 million in financing from V.C.'s Spark Capital and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos at a $100 million valuation.

But Stone is unconcerned about Twitter's current lack of profits or even revenues, saying too much focus on these things would be "a distraction" for Twitter. For one thing, the company is improving its infrastructure so the service doesn't keep getting overloaded.

"Unless we have a reliable service that works the way we think it should," Stone says, focusing on revenue "is really putting the cart before the horse."

Longer term, Stone, who previously worked on startups Xanga, Blogger.com, and Odeo, sees the company as a new paradigm for how people will find out about and respond to news in the future, with potential revenues to match. But one idea that Stone is considering simply capitalizes on the user behavior his network has helped to establish: real-time news.

"For over the last 200 years, you've seen big companies grow off the concept of real-time updates," he says. "If you look at media companies like Thomson Reuters or Bloomberg, or the stock exchange, people and businesses are dependent on real-time news coming in as it happens. Twitter is similar, except it's much broader than just one kind of news, like stock updates. So when you think of it that broadly as a utility, I think you can begin to imagine how big the potential is for Twitter as a commercial entity."

The most obvious solution to how Twitter can make money would be to serve advertising directly in a user's Twitter feed (or "timeline" as the company calls it), or elsewhere on the site. But Stone and his fellow execs are wary of alienating Twitter's hardcore user base, which has grown accustomed to an ad-free service.

"How would they respond to us putting ads on the site?" Stone says. "Are we going to end up pissing them off?"

Stone says the key to making advertising acceptable to the Twitter community is ensuring that users choose which commercial messages they are exposed to, a lesson Facebook failed to heed last year when it was forced to quickly abandon its disastrous Beacon marketing system. But as with other potential revenue models under consideration, Stone would not elaborate on how he'd use such an opt-in system on Twitter.

One of Twitter's most likely revenue streams is through advertisements in search results where messages could be tied to what users were searching on. Twitter recently purchased Summize, a search engine specifically designed to sift through Twitter messages, for a reported $15 million in cash and stock.

"There is a pretty obvious opportunity there," Stone says. "There is a level of intent that someone is showing when they come to a Twitter search and type in, say, 'iPhone.'"

Another possible revenue stream is corporations paying to use the service to stay in frequent contact with their customers. Several large companies, including Dell, Whole Foods, and JetBlue, have already set up corporate presences on Twitter to let customers know about special offers and even answer customer questions.

In Dell's case, the company says it's made "well over" $500,000 in sales from sending special offers from its Dell Outlet store to its Twitter group, which it began in June 2007. The group has almost 1,500 "followers" who receive its messages on a regular basis.

"This is where are our customers are going," says Bob Pearson, Dell's vice president for communities and conversations. "These folks are influencers, and they want to talk about the hottest or latest stuff going on."

Dell also answers individual user questions via its Twitter group, which is what companies like JetBlue (almost 3,500 followers) and Whole Foods (2,000-plus followers) primarily use Twitter for.

To a company like Dell, $500,000 is a relatively small amount, but it does hint at the potential windfall companies can reap from Twitter. "If you've got 1,000 people following you, something's happening," Pearson says. "The real potential is in the future when you've got 10,000 people following."

While Stone says charging corporate users for a Twitter presence is something he might consider doing, it's not at all clear that companies would be willing to pony up for it. When asked whether Dell would consider paying Twitter for, say, each user that signed up to receive its feed, Pearson says "probably not." Whole Foods and JetBlue both say it's too early to say whether they'd be willing to pay Twitter for its service.

"One of the beauties of Twitter is that anyone can go on, and it doesn't cost anything," says Pearson. "There are other ways that Twitter can monetize its site, through advertising or other means. They don't have to be charging business customers to be part of it. But that's for them to think through."