There’s nothing like travel to take your head out of everyday life and get you thinking about things. Amy and I headed east last weekend for some much-needed R&R in Vermont, and through some coincidence of the normal seasons and global warming, we were treated to a perfect combination of fall leaves and late-summer weather.

More ridiculously idyllic pix will eventually get posted to Flickr, but a few highlights include:

• walking and driving the back roads around Brattleboro and towns around it like Newfane, Grafton, and Jamaica, watching leaves drift off the trees and flutter
• visiting a graveyard with a stone turnstyle
• stopping at an apple farm that grows ~70 varieties of heirloom apples on the premises — some of the best damned apples you’ve ever tasted
• local cheddar cheese and beer — ditto, and ditto

Best of all, we spent much of the time hanging out with friends Tom and Cathy and their two children, who live on 18 acres with a beaver pond, can’t hear traffic from their yard, and have a box of African percussion instruments and a tree-house with a pirate flag instead of a TV.

Tom (a journalist) and I were also trading book recommendations, and I walked away with his copy of Deep Economy, by Bill McKibben — which I devoured on the plane ride home and can’t recommend highly enough. It’s about the notion that our dependence on energy subsidizes a more hidden dependency on cheap shipping and mass production, and what that does to our food chain and our communities. Because it’s cheaper to produce lettuce AND ship it a thousand miles than it is to produce it on a local farm (at least until the price of oil doubles), the price at the cash register tips the balance in favor of WalMart and WalMart-like superindustries in our food chain. And much is lost in the process — including, in many places, any semblance of an ability to be self-sustaining.

Seriously, if you care about community, local economies, or what you eat, read this book. I’m not saying I agree with everything in it (and particularly I don’t think he’s found the right proscriptive angles yet), but it certainly makes a provocative book-end next to, say, Thomas Friedman.

As I was processing all this, replaying the tape of seeing Dr. Yunus’s talk last week, and after I came home to read about having passed “peak water” in the west, I came to a decision that some things must change for me. Among other things, I’m going to be thinking a lot more about how to get serious about harnessing the web (and Yahoo!) for social purposes.

Yesterday, Dr. Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Peace Prize recipient and founder of Grameen Bank, spoke at Yahoo!. I was lucky enough to stake out a good seat, and was very glad I did.

There’s nothing quite like hearing from a guy who has taken hundreds of thousands of beggars out of poverty and millions of humans out of abusive, village-scale loan-sharking situations to remind you what “scalable social solutions” could really accomplish if we put some effort into it. Starting with a $27 loan to 42 women in one village, his bank has to date issued over $6.3B in loans to over 7.4 million borrowers — a veritable tidal wave of tiny payments that has changed government policies and built new infrastructure (e.g., the largest mobile phone company in the country).

In web2.0, we talk about agile development, iteration, delighting users, getting things done, and what functionality to take away to make an API more elegant. In Bangladesh, a family is considered to be moved out of poverty only if it meets 10 criteria along the lines of “all family members sleep on a bed”, and “family uses sanitary latrine”.

Anyone else wanna get stuff done and delight some users? Via Kiva.org, I just lent $25 to Margaret Namyalo, a restaurant owner in Uganda who takes care of 3 orphaned children on top of her own 3. (As of this posting, she still needs some more funds.) I also just added a payroll deduction to the Yahoo! Employee Foundation, which will be matched by our founders and distributed via employee-initiated grants to worthy organizations.

But that’s just doing my bit as an individual contributor in other people’s systems. What I’m really thinking about is how to build more systems that change The System. And how we might be able to leverage and/or hack Yahoo!’s global platform to do that.
I also feel very good about my choice to skip the latest overpriced confab. There are more important things to do. Like rethinking what innovation, incubation, and platforms – three words I rarely fail to use in a day — can really mean.

Thanks to Volkswagen of America, the VW sitting in front of my house — my fourth — is sure to be my last. Not only that, I’m blogging and posting on Satisfaction about my negative experience. (You can read the full details there if you want, but the nutshell is my transmission blew up just barely out of warranty, VWoA accepted my request for help with the matter, and promptly declined it without explanation.)

The point isn’t that my transmission blew up; transmissions blow up. The point is not even that they have a proprietary part that seems to be known by mechanics to be extremely sensitive, want more than half the trade-in value of the car to replace it, and abjectly refuse to stand behind their product.

A little history: the first car I can remember my family owning when I was a child was a rust orange ‘71 squareback that my dad used to commute 80 miles in daily. I’ve owned two Jettas, and currently own two vw’s — the dead Jetta in question and a ‘71 karmann ghia convertible that I love driving (when it’s not raining or too hot or too cold) and proudly tune and troubleshoot myself. I have aftermarket vw parts and replicas catalogs coming to my house, occasionally go to vw-centric swap meets and online classifieds, have been invited to join VW clubs and rallies, and once even entered an air-cooled vw car show (2nd row, middle).

As I’ve said before, the Bug was a true platform. And trust me, I’m far from a true enthusiast compared to many of these folks - these things have just sort of happened as a by-product of owning a vintage car.

So what happens when I call VWoA with this problem? After I make a point of sharing my history and noting that a transmission failure inside of 75,000 miles is unacceptable to the point that I wouldn’t buy another VW if they didn’t help me, they decline to help me.

What amazes me most, though, is that they do so without offering me anything - not even a favorable trade-in or modest incentive on an upsell to a new car (which I would have been very likely to go for under the circumstances).

When I tell my mechanic about my experience with VWoA, he just laughs. Then he shows me the cease-and-desist letter VWoA sent him, because he had the letters “VW” in the name of his business (as in, “____’s VW Repair”). He tells me how he had to buy all new letterhead, new signage, etc., under threat of lawsuit, and that they even tried to collect a settlement from him for the business he had done in alleged violation of their trademark. He tells me everybody knows how poorly they treat their community of fans and customers, and how all the independent mechanics he knows consider them the enemy.

Thinking back on my experiences and visits to the swap meets, I notice I can’t recall any official VW presence there. A quick search shows plenty of examples of C&D’s chilling the community. Unbelievably, they sent one to a rec.autos.makers.vw.aircooled moderator. There’s even an official statement about it, noting that they’ve successfully pursued actions purusant to, among other things, domain names with the letters “vw” in them, such as “anyvwpart.com”.

I do understand trademark protection (setting aside the dubiousness of some of these claims). I also appreciate that random extensions of warranties cost real operating dollars. But what VW just doesn’t seem to get is the opportunity they’re missing to embrace, rather than alienate, their enthusiast community. There’s so much more they could be doing to put their fans to work for them.

Where are the community moderators? Where are the mechanic’s reps? Insiders blogs and message boards, official leaks to influencers, loyalty discounts? How long will it take for vw to discover and claim their brand on Satisfaction? By contrast, another german car manufacturer seems to know how to nurture its life-long fans - and actually use the internet.

In the meantime, I’ll be shopping for a car from another manufacturer. If anyone can recommend a modern car that behaves just a bit more like a supported platform and ecosystem, I’m all ears.