Felix Salmon

I’ve been on a mini-crusade while in Davos: every time I meet someone with a truncated RSS feed or no RSS feed at all, I get all evangelistic on them about the wonders of full RSS. And guess what – it’s worked! Justin Fox now has a full RSS feed. And Andrew Sorkin of DealBook says he might try it. If it gets good results there, maybe they’ll even roll it out to the rest of the NYT’s blogs!

If Bono did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him. The big press conference at Davos today was full of important people making important statements about how very important it is that we meet the Millennium Development Goals; it fell to Bono to be the scold, and to say how disappointed he is in what the world has achieved so far. Politicians, even good ones like Gordon Brown (who gave an excellent, forceful speech) are by their nature much better at optimism than pessimism, which is why it is that Bono always has a place on such panels: he’s the yang to the politicians’ yin.

The great and the good who gave speeches at the press conference are acutely aware that in some sense the MDGs are already a failure. There is zero chance that they will be met on time, by 2015, and the amount of progress that the world has made since they were announced, in 2000, is quite pitiful given the ambition of the goals and the fact that we’re now halfway to deadline.

Then again, as Bill Gates noted, the MDGs are very useful things even if they are not met. They give the world a way of measuring progress in the fight against poverty, and they constitute a global consensus on the most important priorities in that fight.

On the other hand, no one mentioned today that there are big weaknesses to the MDGs as well, not least the fact that there seems to be much more progress than there actually is. If no governments and no NGOs and no corporate citizens and no Swiss talking shops ever did anything at all about the MDGs, the growth of India and China alone would make an enormous dent in them. What’s really important is what Paul Collier calls the "bottom billion": the poor who live in slow-growing countries in sub-Saharan Africa and other places like Haiti. Since the MDGs are global, the world can kid itself that it’s making progress when people come out of poverty in China and India, even if Africa continues to decline.

My Only In Davos moment this morning: sharing a cab from the train station to the conference center with an honest-to-goodness ayatollah, Mahdi Hadavi. He was a panelist at a session I attended yesterday, on faith and modernization, moderated by Tony Blair – that was the panel where I was so impressed by Rick Warren. Given the state of Davos traffic, we had enough time for an interesting conversation, about Tony Blair and Barack Obama.

Hadavi said on the panel that he was impressed by Blair’s moderation now – but that he was very unimpressed at the way in which moderates like Blair seem to transmogrify into extremists when they come into power. He said that all of the presidential candidates in the US were essentially the same, as far as he was concerned: committed to entrenching America’s status as the sole global superpower. Obama, he said, was just as committed to that end as the rest of the candidates, while he ought to be more focused on domestic issues within the US.

That’s one of the good things about Davos: it makes it impossible to think of anybody else as "other" when you chat away with them and realise their views would really not be out of place at a Brooklyn dinner party.

Bill Gates, dishevelled as ever, launched into a hugely-anticipated speech this evening in Davos, the closest thing that this conference has to a keynote. Gates managed to splash the speech all over the front page of today’s WSJ even before he gave it; I’m not sure how much reaction he’ll get now that it’s in the past. If the coverage is commensurate with the number of new ideas he came up with, there’ll be very little.

There was nothing in Gates’s speech which every Davos delegate hasn’t heard a hundred times already. But the speech was webcast and highly flagged, so maybe Davos wasn’t really Gates’s audience. The basic idea of what Gates calls "creative capitalism" is simple: that companies should use their power to innovate for the greater good. "Breakthroughs change lives primarily where people can afford to buy them," he said. "But economic demand is not the same thing as economic need."

Gates seems convinced that "recognition", whatever that might be, will step in and make up for foregone profits: I think he’s mildly delusional on that front. Yes, some companies (Ben & Jerry’s, say) do well by doing good. But more often, companies will not receive much if anything in the way of extra profit if they put the kind of effort that Gates wants into helping out the bottom third of humanity. Gates knows this, which is why he says that the profit motive alone won’t do the trick. And I think he’s right when he says that once a company has signed on to this kind of corporate citizenship, it becomes such a central part of what makes its employees proud to work there that it is quite easy to sustain. But I think he’s going to have to do better than "increased recognition" as a carrot to incentivize CEOs to go there.

Still, the new economy does change the rules, sometimes. The internet can help shine a light on companies which do really good work, and also companies which are very bad in such matters. And more importantly, many of today’s products, such as software and vaccines, have a low marginal cost. That, in turn, allows variable pricing where the poor pay less.

But if Davos was hoping for a paradigm-breaking speech, they didn’t get one: they got a recitation of standard corporate-citizenship bromides instead. Which is all well and good: it happens every day at Davos. It just isn’t very special.

The biggest surprise of Davos so far for me? Rick Warren. Being a cosmopolitan atheist type, I’d heard of him, of course, but thought he was, well, author of a bestselling self-help book and pastor of a megachurch somewhere. What I didn’t realise was that he’s been coming to Davos for years, and that he can work his magic on Masters of the Universe – and cynical hacks – just as much as he can on his congregation at home.

"If you’re a global leader, you have to realise that the future of the world is not secularism," he said at a panel on faith and modernity moderated by Tony Blair. "There is going to be more religion, not less. You may not like it, but that’s the way it is."

Warren had some good one-liners: "The church was global 200 years before Davos started talking about globalization," he said. And he was very compelling on the ability of religious institutions to help solve the enormous public-health problems of sub-Saharan Africa. After all, they’re there, on the ground, in the communities that need reaching – and they have credibility with the poor that no one else has.

In terms of being able to pitch his remarks perfectly at the level of the audience to whom he is talking, I’d say that Warren is up at Bill Clinton levels. Who knew?

The theme of Davos this year is "the power of collaborative innovation". As it happens, I’m talking to one veteran delegate who explains that I’m wearing a piece of collaborative innovation around my neck.

In years past, the World Economic Forum, like all such talking shops, gave its participants ID badges which were worn on one of those ubiquitous ball chains. And as anybody who’s ever been to a conference knows, there are two big problems with those things. Firstly, the IDs invariably flip around so you can’t see the name which is meant to be prominently displayed. And secondly, the ball chains are so long that you find yourself staring obviously in the general direction of your fellow participants’ groins. Davos regularly asks for feedback from its delegates, and this was one of the things they complained about. (Rich people: they’ll always think of something to complain about.)

So now, at Davos, we have much more sophisticated ID badges – and I’m not referring to the fact that they incorporate RFID chips which allow you to log into the meeting network with a simple tap. The much more impressive innovation is the fact that the badges are attached not to a ball chain but rather to a short piece of elastic. It never flips around, and it’s short enough that the amount of eye movement needed to see someone’s name is minimal. It should be adopted everywhere.

Ned Phelps: Nice guy. And prescient, too: he put all his Nobel Prize money into bonds.

Esther Dyson: Speaks fluent Russian.

Mike Arrington: Rocked up in faded bluejeans and dirty white sneakers. Masters of the Universe not visibly impressed.

Rupert Murdoch: Needs no link. Clearly a Davos veteran. Wears incredibly unfashionable yet practical brown Puma sneakers. Is very nice to everyone. Probably runs the world.

Igor Shevchenko, a Ukrainian lawyer, introduces himself to Walter Isaacson of the Aspen Institute; it just so happens (really!) that Shevchenko has a copy of Isaacson’s biography of Henry Kissinger in his bag. Isaacson signs it, of course, and then says to Shevchenko "you should get Henry to sign it too". For Kissinger is, inevitably, standing right in front of them in the Davos conference center.

I just walked into the opening press conference at Davos, where the co-chairmen of the World Economic Forum are talking about what they are looking to talk about and achieve. Tony Blair is beaming admiringly at Henry Kissinger, but the quote of the press conference so far has to go to Jamie Dimon, with his opening sentence: "Number one on my list is world peace." He’s an investment banker, so I’m sure he’s been in his fair share of beauty contests, but still.