Sometimes it’s critical to step back and take in the amazing things that the Internet makes possible. Today, The Guardian, Britain’s biggest left-wing daily newspaper, formally launched a Web site specifically targeted at Americans (called, cleverly enough, Guardian America).

So what, you ask? Fair enough. But think of this: ten years ago, if you asked anyone how big the market in the United States was for left-wing British journalism, few sane people would have said anything other than “very small.” And those people would have had a point: although a weekly print version of the Guardian has been available in the U.S. for decades, very few people ever read it. According to the company’s own figures, fewer than 30,000 copies of that paper are sold in the U.S. and Canada.

What the Internet has made very plain over the last few years, however, is that Americans are (or, arguably, have become) very hungry indeed for news created outside the United States. Today, audited figures indicate that more than 5.1 million Americans visit the Guardian’s Web site at least once a month - almost as many as the number of Britons who do so. And until today, that was a Web site focused on British politics, British sports, using British spellings, and exhibiting various other traits destined to turn off the average American.

The Guardian has very sensibly decided that they stand a good chance of making that impressive number bigger if they actually build a site that focuses on things like presidential primaries, the California fires and the like. (I should disclose here that they also very sensibly decided to hire one of my dearest friends, Michael Tomasky, to edit the thing.) The site still uses British spellings, alas, for logistical reasons I understand all too well.

Not all of the Guardian’s Web popularity in the U.S. (which also extends to the BBC site and a few other British outlets) is due to technological advances. You can thank the Bush administration, the rise of Fox News, and the cowardly behavior of much of the U.S. media during the Iraq war for forcing Americans to seek abroad the critical analysis they felt was missing at home. And I’m certainly not going to say that the Guardian is a perfect newspaper; I lived in London for a long time and have rolled my eyes many times at the outlandish - and often poorly copy-edited - stuff that gets published there.

But at a minimum, a globalized economy requires all of us to have a broader understanding of how the world looks outside of America, and how the outside world looks at America. On that basis, even people who disagree with Guardian America ought to be reading it regularly.

Competition can lead companies to do some odd things. Clearly, the good people at CNBC have been worrying for months about how to respond to the launch last week of News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox Business Channel. (Kind of a rough market to launch into, and so far I agree with Joe Nocera’s take on Saturday: it’s hard to figure out exactly what Fox thinks it’s doing.)

But you can see some evidence of CNBC’s counter-marketing strategy. Playing off the bad joke that is the Fox News Channel’s “fair and balanced” motto, CNBC has been running ads touting its coverage as “unbiased.” Leaving aside whether you find that claim plausible - or even interesting - the actual full slogan is that CNBC provides “fast, accurate, actionable and unbiased business news”.

Perhaps we are on the crest of a new semantic wave, but does CNBC - a division of General Electric (GE) - really want to refer to its coverage as “actionable”? Every dictionary I have consulted uses as the primary definition for “actionable” some variation of “providing grounds for a lawsuit.” In fact, I can find only one dictionary that even includes a definition akin to the one I assume CNBC intends, i.e., leading to an action, or capable of being acted upon.

I suppose this is nitpicking, but as an editor it is my job to spot and (I hope!) weed out unintended ambiguities. And I’m hardly alone in insisting that, really, the legal meaning is the only meaning of the word actionable, and all other uses are unfortunate corporate malapropisms.

The Browser has put this question to two CNBC publicists. I’ll update this post if they decide to make, um, an action item out of it.

Mary Bridges sounds like a smart person. According to her bio on the Portfolio Web site, she went to Harvard and has written for some classy publications. But her recent snippet on presidential debates in wake of the CNN-YouTube experiments might well be the dumbest thing that Portfolio has published in its brief, well-heeled life.

Bridges’ thesis is that presidential debates just ain’t what they used to be. In 1960, as she recounts, John Kennedy and Richard Nixon gave us the vital question: “[w]as Richard Nixon wearing makeup?” And, according to Bridges, “Nearly half the TV-owning public watched” the exchange, even if Edward R. Murrow later said that the two combatants had nothing on Abe Lincoln and Stephen Douglas (of course, that famed series was for a Senate seat, not the presidency, but trust me: if slipshod analogies didn’t bother Murrow they certainly don’t bother Bridges).

By contrast, Portfolio says, a measly 2.6 million people watched the CNN-YouTube debates among Democrats and, says Bridges, we’ll continue to mourn as the great tradition of American political debates “devolves” with the Republican version of the same thing.

Where to start with such mushy thinking? For one thing, no serious analyst of either politics or television ratings would ever think to draw an apples-to-apples comparison between a Democratic primary debate that takes place sixteen months before an election and a one-on-one, Democrat vs. Republican debate aired a few weeks before the general election. Secondly, if Bridges is trying to argue that the value of a political debate is determined by the number of people who watch it live, then she’s got to abandon Lincoln-Douglas as her touchstone, since the technology of the time - the soapbox - did not allow for a very large audience.

Indeed, what makes this Portfolio piece head-thumpingly inane is that it completely misses the point: that presidential debates change shape as they adapt themselves to the prevailing technology of the age. Makeup wasn’t important for radio, but it was for network television; audience participation wasn’t important for network television, but it is for the Internet. (I don’t think Bridges’ 2.6 million figure included those who watched the debate online, by the way; she’s not responded to a query.) That is not devloution, at least not necessarily.

At any rate, it ought to be obvious to anyone - even Portfolio’s distracted editors - that audience-share discrepancy between 1960 and 2007 is a function of diversification of the television dial, not the quality of political debate. If Kennedy and Nixon had to compete with Friends reruns, wrestling matches, C-SPAN, Heroes, baseball, and American Idol, it’s far from clear that they would draw a larger audience share than Anderson Cooper, a talking snowman, and several people called “Democratic contenders” whose names most Americans will never recall, regardless of technological format. So why is Portfolio trying to argue that the country was better off with the limitations of three networks? Because it forced us to be concerned with Max Factor and Nixon’s facial shadows? I’ve heard more coherent arguments from snowmen.

Since its launch over two years ago and the subsequent hand-wringing about its use by terrorists, (or by the Pentagon to peer into the caves at Tora Bora,) Google Earth has more or less drifted along out of the media glare. Time to check in again: today Google (GOOG) has announced that it is adding a new “layer” to the tool for YouTube videos that have been properly geo-coded.

Translation: now, as users fly over the planet in the still-cool G-Earth interface, little YouTube icons appear everywhere. Clicking on one launches a user-generated video, presumably filmed in situ. (Think bootleg footage of Dave Matthews playing a private concert in the Hamptons, or a nice montage of crashing surf on the Oregon coast.)

As with all enhancements to Google Earth, the first business-minded thought is how the thing will translate into ad revenues, and the Kelsey Group is quick and right to point out that the You Tube mash-up “opens up lots of possibilities for travel videos and also small business video advertising which is gaining steam all over the place.”

Fair enough, but the operative term here is “possibility.” The promise of Google Earth remains both big and unfulfilled. YouTube vids are only the latest of many types of content that have been added to the increasingly slick (and now Mac compatible) service. From the start, it was always possible to bring up “layers” that included road maps, or Yellow Pages-info like restaurants or hotels.

Now, however, the layers have multiplied and are collected in a series of nested folders arrayed on the left hand side of the G-Earth window. Today, when one “flies” around the planet with all the content options clicked on, one sees a forest of little camera icons each of which hides a user-contributed still image; and then there are icons for “featured content” from partners like National Geographic, the American Association of Architecs, and NASA; or icons linked to “Global Awareness” content such as Jane Goodall’s blog and the Fair Trade Certification people.

All of this is extremely cool, but there is an obvious problem: the proliferation of content is cluttering up the place, and there is no easy way to sort or prioritize the user-generated deluge.

It’s not hard to imagine a solution to the clutter problem, and one that would deliver a clearer revenue model to the service. The obvious idea is to make content submission on G-Earth paid, co-opting the AdSense auction model, but replacing keywords with geocodes. By default, only those bidding above a minimum for placement would appear on a users’ screen. Such a move would would effectively turn Google Earth (and most likely its stripped-down cousin Google Maps) into a self-managing, revenue-generating platform. Naturally, free user-generated content could remain, but it would not be the default option.

This is not a step, however, that Google has yet taken, and the inherent technical challenges are impressive. So, while we wait for the business model to catch up with the technology, Google Earth will remain a whiz-bang toy, useful for hobbyists, the Pentagon and perhaps schoolteachers, that business people can safely ignore in their day-to-day lives.

It wasn’t that long ago that ousted Sprint Nextel (S) CEO Gary Forsee was a man in demand. Back in 2003, Forsee left BellSouth, (now part of AT&T (T)) where he was widely believed to be in line for the CEO job, for the top job at Sprint. BellSouth sought court orders to keep him from taking the job - and ultimately extracted some interesting conditions to prevent him from breaking confidentiality clauses in his BellSouth employment contract.

Forsee was supposed to breathe fresh life - and fresh air - into perennial also-ran Sprint. (This same problem plagued Sprint when it primarily was a long-distance operator, always trailing AT&T and MCI despite heavy rotation of those annoying “Dime Lady” television spots featuring Candice Bergen.)

Forsee’s legacy at Sprint was the 2005 acquisition of scrappy wireless operator Nextel, a deal that strengthened Sprint’s position as the No.3 wireless operator, behind AT&T and Verizon (VZ), but had one big problem: The two companies operated on completely different wireless standards, making it a huge challenge to mesh their systems. The company spun off its local phone operations, and marketed itself to Wall Street as a wireless “pure play” - a strategy that worked for Nextel in its heyday, but didn’t do much for Sprint’s stock. (Losses in its base of so-called post-paid subscribers didn’t help, either.)

Now Forsee is out, and the Sprint board is looking for someone to fix the company’s financials and goose its market share. The new CEO will have to combat the bundles of wireless and wireline phone services that Sprint’s main rivals, AT&T and Verizon, are pushing hard.

Sprint does have deals to bundle wireless service with the phone deals offered by cable operators such as Time Warner Cable (TWC) - which is majority owned by CNNMoney’s parent Time Warner (TWX) - and Comcast (CMCSA). But some analysts speculate those cable guys eventually may build their own wireless networks.

Has being a pure play wireless operator gone from being a blessing to a curse? Hard to say, but  given the market conditions and Sprint’s history of always taking home the bronze, it is hard to imagine that any CEO can catapult Sprint out of its No. 3 position any time soon.

Green sells. No doubt about it. Look around your local newsstand: Every dead-tree magazine seems to have a green issue. There are TV reality series, design shows, and countless web sites devoted to the environmentally conscious lifestyle. Silicon Valley VCs are swarming around anything even remotely “clean tech.” Discovery Channel recently bought Treehugger for $10 million. And this is all a good thing. There’s no better way to affect change than to educate the masses and make some money while doing it.

But while being green is hot, it isn’t easy. So companies (and governments) claim to be green, or highlight nominally green activity even while maintaining their status quo. In environmentalist parlance, it’s called greenwashing. The Clear Skies initiative is a classic case, where the net effect is far less (or even directly counter to) what the name advertises. BP’s (BP) corporate rebranding as “Beyond Petroleum” is another example. (Yes, it invested $500 million to launch a biofuel exploration center with UC Berkeley, but that still leaves it with $26 billion in profit derived from selling petroleum).

Then there’s yesterday’s announcement from Nintendo (NTDOY), which is both laudable and disingenuous at the same time. The company has introduced a new game for the Nintendo DS called Chibi-Robo: Park Patrol. The company claims to be “on a mission to make some locations — both virtual and real — a little greener.” Aimed at children, it’s “one of the first games based on the growing environmental movement, and it’s a great way to get kids and their parents on a green path. In the game, players take on the persona of a cute little robot.They clean up a park by planting flowers, building park equipment and defeating toxic enemies called Smoglings.”

It’s a good idea for a game — and unsurprising that it comes from Nintendo, given how the company’s chief creative force, Shigeru Miyamoto, tends to be inspired by nature (He created Pikmin after toiling in his garden). My problem is that the company is promising to distribute 500 seedlings to children as a way to celebrate the green movement. (Nevermind that the children have to register as a way to qualify for the random drawing, which is creepy.) 500 seedlings? Talk about a paper tiger. Nintendo probably felled that many adult trees just to fax the release to news rooms around the country.

It’s such a piddly effort that it only serves to undermine the company’s real environmental stewardship: Nintendo recycles 70 percent of its waste (compared to the US average of 32 percent) and polices use by its vendors of any banned substances like lead and mercury. This half-hearted effort makes the public (me, included) skeptical of any subsequent green-oriented news announcements. Here’s an idea, Nintendo: How about making a real commitment (no registration required) to plant one tree for every copy of Chibi Robo you sell? That’d at least show a modicum of commitment. Or better yet, one for every DS sold this year. That would be worth a press release.

The publicity-savvy folks at Internet telephony upstart Jajah are wasting no time making hay of eBay’s (EBAY) $900 million impairment writedown of its Skype unit. Jajah today announced a version if its new Jahah Buttons service - a “widget” that essentially sets up a phone call between two parties - specifically for eBay sellers.

The announcement is a bit of schoolyard taunting on Jajah’s part: The company launched its Buttons program on Oct. 1, and its description of the service notes that users can attach the widgets to “your website, your blog, your ongoing auction” etc., without calling out eBay. A day later, the aforementioned buttons are “customized for eBay”?

Still, Jajah’s service does seem to address one of the central failings of the EBay/Skype marriage: Weren’t the merger partners supposed to make it easy for buyers and sellers to talk to one another? Jajah’s service seems to do exactly what Skype was meant to do for eBay: Create an easy way for buyers to wrap up business with sellers, at no cost to the buyer.

(In the case of Jajah Buttons, the buyer clicks on the seller’s button, and Jajah’s system - which collects phone numbers from both buyer and seller - connects the two parties using Internet technology.) The Browser is intrigued, but we are interested in seeing whether eBay Powersellers will really adopt the technology. Jajah has promised to keep us apprised of its progress, and we’ll keep you posted.

Shares of Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) climbed today on news reports suggesting the company is accelerating cost cuts - and that board members are putting heavy pressure on CEO Pat Russo.  And now analysts are speculating about whether a Russo resignation is in the cards.

A Lucent spokeswoman issued this official response to the news reports: “The company has been working on integration plans and has been looking at ways to accelerate those plans in light of the September 13 [earnings warning]. As would be expected, management reviews its plans with the Board on a regular basis. The company and its management team take seriously the need to improve the financial performance of the business and are taking the necessary steps. “

Still, there’s little question board members have reason to be dismayed. Since the company was formed late last year by the merger of U.S.-based Lucent and Paris-based Alcatel, Russo has issued three warnings on financial projections.  The most recent warning, on Sept. 13, blamed the situation on reduced spending by North American wireless operators.

But really, this company got off to a very rocky start.  Consider this disheartening commentary from Russo, from the company’s February 9 earnings release:

“In the past few months, [the merger and other acquisitions] created short-term uncertainty for our customers and for our people as we worked to develop the combined company’s product portfolio and new organization structure.  This uncertainty together with the work required to close the merger significantly impacted the business.”

Is Russo, 55, the person to lead the company through these tough times? She’s certainly weathered her fair share of problems, most notably at Lucent, where she was CEO for several years before merging her company with Alcatel.

The real challenge for Russo is the same one that faces her counterparts at companies like Nortel (NT), Siemens (SI) and other big telecom-equipment makers. With increased competition from Chinese-based manufacturers and upstarts alike, the bigger question seems to be whether there’s even a place for these big vendors, or whether they need to fundamentally reinvent themselves - not just get smaller - to compete in the fast-changing, Internet-oriented communications world.

Disney’s (DIS) fledgling mobile operation, Disney Mobile, has become the latest wireless reseller to bite the dust, following in the footsteps of high-profile flameouts such as Amp’d and an earlier version of ESPN Mobile.

The problem that all three of these so-called Mobile Virtual Network Operators, or MVNOs, faced was pretty simple: they were trying to target very specific demographics (kids, sports fans, twentysomething music lovers) with the promise of exclusive content or applications. But, says IBB Consulting partner Shahid Khan, it turns out the applications weren’ t unique. “Amp’d had cool video content,” he says, “but so does VCAST,” Verizon (VZ) Wireless’ video service. Only Verizon’s economic model, in which it owns its own network and has millions of customers utilizing that network, is a lot more compelling than that of a company like Amp’d.

But Verizon and Sprint (S) and their peers probably aren’t cheering the demise of these MVNOs. For one thing, they had lucrative wholesale contracts to provide network operations to the resellers. More importantly, the bust of content-oriented resellers simply reinforces the notion that there isn’t a huge demand for exclusive content on wireless devices - something all the mainstream carriers offer. Instead, consumers increasingly seem interested in getting all the content that’s out on the ‘Net on their mobile devices.

Meanwhile, what becomes of the rest of the MVNO players, companies Helio or Virgin Mobile, which hopes to go public? IBB’s Khan thinks Virgin Mobile benefits from its status as a leading provider of prepaid mobile service, not necessarily because it offers special applications or content. But Virgin’s growth is slowing, and Khan thinks the company needs to leverage its brand to get into new areas such as Wi-Fi phone service or voice-over-Internet Protcol. Helio, on the other hand, seems to be hanging on thanks to deep pockets. While founding investor Earthlink (ELNK) isn’t going to invest more money in the venture, given its own financial challenges, Korean telco SK Telecom stepped up earlier this month with an additional $270 million.

Even as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg reportedly considers a Microsoft (MSFT) investment, upstart entrepreneurs at the MIT Emerging Technology conference ponder what comes next. Digg.com founder Kevin Rose made an obvious point yesterday. “I was talking to Mark,” said Rose, who sat on a panel with StumbledUpon.com’s Garrett Camp and NetVibe’s Tariq Krim.

“He was saying he’ll rely on people like the three of us to launch applications. Well, we’ve all launched applications. But if you look at the most popular ones, it’s, like, Pirates vs. Ninjas.”

Although neither Digg.com, StumbleUpon or NetVibe purports to be a social network, replacing a Facebook, each is a leader in new forms of social Internet use. NetVibes lets users pepper a personal dashboard with widgets. StumbledUpon is social search that lets users unearth sites that might be interesting to them. And with traffic that often rivals the New York Times Website, Digg lets users vote their favorite stories to the top of the site. All three were named among MIT Technology Review’s 35 innovators under the age of 35.

Rose had news about Digg: new features will include a suggestion service (If you dug this, you might digg that…) and an image section. He’s also working on predictive features that could suggest how popular a story might become based on very early patterns of interaction between the most passionate Digg users.

Particularly fascinating was Netvibes, the Paris and London-based site started in September 2005 by Krim. The jovial Parisian entrepreneur works under an assumption: In the not-so-distant future, Web users will enter the Web in new ways. Rather than starting on Google (GOOG) and navigating through their favorite pages online, they’ll have a landing page where they’ve assembled all of their favorite sites in small page-on-a-page boxes, or widgets. It’s the same bet Zuckerberg is making, of course, and he wants Web users to enter the Web on their social networking profiles.

Krim, however, thinks people want less structure. With NetVibes, he has designed an open landing page. You title it. You drag and drop your favorite widgets onto the page. One widget might track the top headlines in the New York Times Business Section, for example. Another might track the changes in your Facebook profile. And a third might alert you when you have new gmail messages.

There are no banner ads. There is no mugshot, no top friends, no wall on which those top friends post comments. By the end of the year, Krim hopes to add some social components – the ability to share your widgets, with friends, for example. But ultimately, Netvibes is a personal widget market place – publishers (often advertisers) list them and you choose whether to pull them on to your page.

It’s an idea that has attracted interest among valley legends. Netscape founder Marc Andreesson was among Krim’s angel investors. The site has less than $15 million in venture funding, led by Accel Partners in London. But Krim is the first to acknowledge these are early days for widgets. Publishers have to create more, better designed widgets. Advertisers need to figure out how best to advertise on them and through them, and how to sell that advertising.

And did I mention there are no plans for banner ads? Krim says Netvibes should be entirely neutral. There will be advertising, he says, but it will happen entirely through widgets, and those widgets will be added by users. The pressure is on advertisers to come up with creative ideas that appeal to users. But the users, according to Krim, are growing – to 10 million last month.

Will Facebook’s users tire of the traditional social networking structure and leap to Netvibes? It’s worth watching.