I am sure that there´s tons of stuff written on the web about the pros and cons of pinging (notifications a la technorati) vs crawling (programs that scout the web for links a la google) or listening vs spying. Tonight we had dinner with Jimmy Wales the founder of Wikipedia in Madrid and we spoke about some of these. In general pinging beats crawling in everything but thoroughness. Crawling finds all there is to find on the net, pinging finds what wants to be found. Jimmy described to me a problem that I was not aware of and that is that ajax pages are hard to crawl. I commented on a problem that he was not aware of and that is that Google is the biggest or one of the biggest consumers of electricity in the world and that is among other things because crawling is incredibly energy inefficient compared to pinging. In any case what was extremely interesting is the concept of an open source search engine. I really hope that Jimmy and his open sourcers make this one work. One of the worst jobs at Google is probably policing results to make sure they are not hacked as the monetary incentive to hack google results is huge. Wouldn´t it be great to have a community police force rather than some paid employees? This problem is more manageable than the problem of people who tried to hack Wikipedia. If the Wikipedia community dealt successfully with article hacking, search optimization hacking should also be policed more effectively by a community than by a few paid individuals. Wisdom of the crowds at work in search. Intriguing.  In the meantime I mentioned to Jimmy the little search engine that we put together at Fon called Unfolding News.  This engine combines crawled sources with pinged sources that are all fresh.

The dollar is on a free fall. It used to take 85c of a dollar to buy a euro. Now Americans have to cough up 1.45 dollars to buy one euro. For Europeans USA now is a bargain. For Americans coming to Europe is becoming horrendously expensive, especially London, America´s favorite foreign city with the pound at an all time high as well. At this point I think it´s fair to ask how can USA be a global super power when its citizens can´t afford leaving their home? While many in USA think that devaluation is good because it helps exporters my view is that if you can make a decent living with a very strong currency you are in a much better position than if you need a weak one because your companies are more competitive, more automated, more productive, and you can afford buying other companies around the world. To seek protection behind a weak currency is not the strategy of a super power, if anything it is the strategy of a wannabe power like China.

Having said this USA is USA, the number one economy in the world. When George W Bush announced that he was going to invade Iraq I thought that this go alone foreign policy was going to bring tremendous economic hardship to America and sold my dollars, moving my savings into Euros. Now however, as a Clinton victory seems to be on the horizon I think that the collapse of the dollar maybe coming to an end. For the US to have a decent currency again the country needs to go back to the balanced budgets of the Clinton era. Should that happen the dollar should recover to close to parity with the euro again. Military adventurism and absurd overreaction to minor international threats have made of America the world´s largest debtor by far. Spending half of the world´s military expenditures and go around the world begging (or printing papers and hoping that others will take them) is a foolish strategy that has to come to an end. The good news for the depressed dollar is that the Bush era is coming to an end.

My last name maybe Varsavsky but I live in Spain, a country of Fernandez, Perez, Dominguez, Martin (yes my name is much common as my last name here), in short a country in which probably 50% of the population shares 10 last names. And Spain is not alone in this. China and Korea for example are notorious for having very few last names that millions share. Why is this a problem? The obvious answer is the internet. On Facebook alone see what happens if you try to find a certain Carlos Garcia, or a Juan Fernandez, and the same is true in Google searches. Now being this the case isn´t it time that governments make it easy for people to change their last names? Will we see any Juan Fernandezz popping up soon? I don´t know but I am happy to be the only Martin Varsavsky in the world. I would be uncomfortable if there were thousands of people with my name.

In June when I visited Facebook and concluded that Facebook was going to be worth over $10bn many friends told me I was crazy.  The funny thing is that when I told this to Owen, Chris Kelly and other Facebook top managers they also laughed and told me I was out of it.  I guess after the Microsoft $240M investment  I wasn´t so out of it.  And I am not surprised that it was Microsoft who paid that “crazy” amount of money as my friends at Google have seen the social network fashions come and go and would have not paid that valuation.  Having said this Facebook plus $240M = serious damage.

I just came back from San Francisco. The Fon office in San Francisco is near Union Square one of the most commercial parts of San Fran but also an area that is populated by a lot of homeless people. Tonight, at dinner table in Madrid I was telling my 3 older children about this tragedy and how difficult it was for me to understand why USA, the richest country in the world, had such an enormous amount of homeless people. My kids themselves remembered being shocked about this phenomenon in their latest visit to NYC.  During dinner we all tried to figure out why large US cities had such vast homeless populations. We could only come up with two answers, one is that while Spain has an average income that is half of that of USA this income is much more evenly distributed and few people fall through the cracks. But the second one that we felt it was more important was family ties. It is very unlikely that a Spaniard would let a relative be homeless.  Even Spain´s junkies, and there are many of those, mostly live with their families.

Well of course I am going to say that you should like BT because of BT Fon, but now there´s another reason to like BT and that is that BT is investing tons in clean energy.

This article would be especially funny, if it weren´t so likely to be true.

Dell has recently come up with a commercial  that includes the catch phrase “In the Real World Goliath wins”, a pretty convincing argument to buy their servers.  But some conservatives are pretty unhappy with this ad because it seems to imply that if this is true then the Bible is not the real world.  Personally I find it hard to believe that somebody would think that the Bible is the real world, as real say as running into a friend going down the street.  But it seems that a lot of people seem to believe that the characters of the Bible are as real as you and me and therefore the Bible is the real world.  I hope even those still judge servers by their quality and price and not their Biblical connotations.