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I don’t love the internet like I love my family & friends, or even how I love chocolate.

I love the internet because it’s probably the most signifiant wealth enabler in the history of mankind. At least since the invention of stone and then metal tools.

When I sit in front of my screens and bang out line after line of code, I’m doing more than just building web properties. I’m creating wealth!

Not only that, when I make a web property or service that people want, I deliver to all customers at once. Unlike a blacksmith who creates wealth one horseshoe at a time, I make one horseshoe and as many people who want it get it at the exact same time; with zero incremental cost of delivery. This kind of wealth multiplier has never existed before. It has a dark side of course; every mistake is multiplied as well, but the positives far outweigh the negatives. You can respond extremely quickly and cheaply to people’s changing wants.

This is not news, but I’m working hard with my team on building our digitalOttawa.ca startup. we’re moving into our new offices downtown this week, and I’ve been reading and watching all kinds of business wisdom & inspiration to get me pumped up about pushing forward.

Here we go!

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I’m starting to track prices for my main computer replacement later this year. Here’s the comparison of two options, I’ve bolded the better value:

So the Dell turns out to not only offer some better components, but offers them in a package almost $1000 cheaper than the iMac.

So I’m watching and waiting for Apple to update the iMac, maybe they can leapfrog Dell’s offer with an i7 processor and maybe a LED backlit LCD?

I’m also watching both Windows 7 and OS X Snowleopard developments closely. Mac’s OS still offers a significant draw for me, even with the higher hardware cost.

But the fact that for the price of the iMac, I can get a great desktop and still have enough money for TWO netbooks is very compelling.

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ReadWriteWeb recently posted an article talking about Yahoo’s Y!OS initiative. Here’s a quote:

Dubbed the ‘rewiring of Yahoo,’ Y!OS 1.0 launched this week with the introduction of the social suite. Its strategy focuses on opening up almost everything to developers, including content, traffic, and Yahoo’s user base.

I’ve been thinking the walled garden approach to social media is not very good in the long-term. It comes with the risk that if a compelling enough substitute were to come along, you lose members.

Alternatively, if a service were to use an open way of managing user profiles, it could possibly avoid the risk of be usurped. Giving up user profiles might seem risky in itself, but the service could adapt more quickly to the changing capability of a user’s profile “agents”. Today my profile might be the aggregation of my activity on Twitter+Facebook+Blog+Flickr+Google+LinkedIn+… but tomorrow it will be different, with different kinds of data. Today I manage most of all that activity manually. But just as notification of this new blog post will auto-post to Twitter and Facebook, I see a time coming soon where all of this can be done through a “dashboard” of sorts.

This dashboard would have to be stored online somewhere, in a safe place. But this profile dashboard is not like Gmail ot WordPress. It should be a kind of API instead, where a whole slew of software products can be developed to interact with your profile and in turn your profile with all the services synced to it. I could then use an iPhone client, or a web application, or a robot; I could have a robot ‘tweeting’ photos and info about my vegetable garden, and over time I could play, mashup, and mix the dataset in all kinds of ways to learn how to get more veggies.

I don’t know if Y!OS is the answer, but it seems there are a growing number of solutions that are getting us closer to when you let your profile do most of the information filtering of the blinding information that will be the web in 10 or 15 years, maybe sooner.