New Fortune.com managing editor (and ‘95 Medill grad) Daniel Roth (@danroth) gave me a chance the other day to write a guest column on transparency and financial recovery and XBRL. It’s now here.

I watched a C-SPAN replay tonight of a Jan. 29 panel at Davos in which five industry leaders pontificate about the future of the world. This was after tonight’s 60 Minutes lead report on the exclusive Davos gathering. The 60 Minutes report was as good as ever, but a failure of vision makes itself apparent in the Davos C-SPAN tape.

As I’m enjoying outstanding Belgian cuisine with the family of a CLOUD, Inc. colleague after a day of meetings about how computer standards can improve the clarity and efficient use of information and provide for more accurate evaluation of the trust that one might place in information, a 500-mile drive south of here the world’s financial leaders are contemplating the future of finance.

Charlie Hoffman just made the most enlightening post I’ve read in a long time. It’s no accident that the best journalism is the most direct: subject, verb, object. Similarly, clarity is essential to good lawyering and to the most successful business.

Back on June 17, I blogged about the Government Information Transparency Act. The goal of government information transparency took a step closer to reality today when the co-sponsors of the bill, Reps. Edolphus Towns and Darrell Issa, added their bill’s provisions to a Senate bill to improve the federal grant system.

Saturday’s Barron’s had a pithy review of Ken Aulettta’s Googled: The End of the World As We Know It.To sum it up, reviewer Mark Veverka says, “Google’s science exposes the inefficiency of traditional advertising and threatens to remove middlemen.”

In addition to improving asset-backed securities disclosure (using XBRL perhaps?), SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro called for substantive ABS regulation in a speech Tuesday to SIFMA, the parent organization of the American Securitization Forum.

Because they are the financial instruments at the center of the economic crisis, it’s great that regulators are thinking anew about the information ecosystem in which ABS are bought and sold.

The day 3 agenda of the XBRL Pacific Rim Technology Workshop and Summit was simple – approaches to tagging and “rendering” XBRL, data consistency, putting tagged data into databases, and something about “impact investing.”

Day 2 of the XBRL Pacific Rim Technology Workshop and Summit included calls for business and government to use open business standards to disclose information about spending, pollution, and important business changes.