Black coffee, New York Times, and an order of Cindy’s special “Garbage” at Cindy’s Diner in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

The following chart is interesting in light of all this talk about how China has ascending to the second largest economy, knocking Japan out of the number two spot. The US is still number one. I thought it would be interesting to see how we in the US rate city-by-city in terms of earning. If I can find a chart that compares personal net earnings country-by-country, I will post that chart in a follow up.

This chart obviously does not include all US cities, since I am pretty sure that Washington, DC, San Francisco, CA, and other cities are doing better than Delhi and Jakarta.

However, we all know that China isn’t a 1st world country and is still a developing economy. We also know that there are still peasants and subsistence farmers — so China is just powerful based on the size of its economy and not the wealth of its people. I wondered.

What people like to bandy around is the per-capita GDP, which is simply, as far as I can tell, the GDP divided by the population, which does not reflect the wealth of the population, just the efficiency of the country… sort of like taking the gross weight of a sports car and dividing it by the peak horsepower of the car, thereby coming up with a power-to-weight ratio.

That’s a great number for a car, since it allows light cars with smaller engines to be able to compete with huge sedans with enormous engines — it sort of flattens the playing field and allows apples and oranges to compete.

However, for people, is it a good number? While I love this city-by-city comparison — as the US only exists in

In a last-minute opportunity, I am live-blogging the Airship Ventures zeppelin here in the San Francisco Bay area here at Moffett field which is also home of NASA and Singularity University! We’re here in Holy Land and passed Stanford and Facebook on our way. I will try to live blog this journey. You should surely check out Airship Ventures.

A Perfect Sunday Morning, originally uploaded by Chris Abraham.

Starting the morning with a New York Times and a Venti Mild drip coffee is one of four perfect Sunday morning scenarios. What is your perfect Sunday morning? Tell me about it in the comments.

I want to reassure you that there are new people every day just discovering blogs — and even the Internet — for the very first time. You are not the left-behind. I promise.

Don’t listen to the early-adopters, don’t listen to the bleeding-edge. They don’t know what they’re on about. They live in places like New York City and expect the half-life for a popular restaurant to be six to eight months.

In the rest of the country — and the world — most restaurants are passed on from grandparent to parent to child to grandchild. Most of the world is not about the “latest and greatest.” Much of the world isn’t even online yet, to say nothing of the blogosphere!

While early adopters may have moved on somewhat, more and more Americans are adopting the online environment. Just remember how long it took “Middle America” years to stop wearing acid washed jeans an start wearing 7s. Hell, I just have to go into the suburbs and I can’t take a step without tripping over a pair of mom jeans. Come on: mom jeans!

Don’t forget that a majority of people who are using the Internet are still using dial-up. Blogs are not remotely dead — in fact, they are barely-tapped. The wave hasn’t even formed yet.

Just remember, the blogosphere is doubling every five months. Although the Internet is already highly monetized, the next step has to do with penetration.

We have barely scratched the surface even as the bleeding-edge, early-adopting, hipsters are already closing shop, These cool kids announce that Friendster, Orkut, and MySpace is already dead but the truth is that Friendster is alive and well and full of more wonderful, general, non-geeky kids than it ever has.

In other words, the kinds of folks who have money to spend and not such an axe to grind.

That is not to say we should not keep up-to-date with the latest and greatest thing — I mean I am myself a technologist, a strategist, and a futurist myself — but we shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Right?

Sometimes we are so cutting-edge we forget that there is still an amazing market out there and the stuff we currently know really well still serves up beautiful even though it might be eighteen-months-old.

Market intelligence culled from blogs and other forums for online conversation and discussion is still more relevant and powerful than anything else.

You have my word on that. Good as gold. I am super-excited. There is plenty of crystal-clear water in that well yet! There is plenty oil in the ground and gold in them damn hills.

Actually, the truth is is that the futurists, the technologists, and the strategists are always trying to sell you the latest and greatest, “and here’s why.” Its their business to upsell you then sell you on something different.

I will take the analogy further: oil works, we just need to spend more time and energy figuring out better strategies for using oil: efficiency, discovery, recovery, collection, etc…

In much the same way, there is a lot we have yet to know about the blogosphere and the newmediasphere that we haven’t tapped yet. Slow down and spend more time learning, analyzing, and finding patterns in these truly democratic and accessible forums for conversation and collaboration: blogs.