These days there was a little war on the Internet in Spain when the leading TV chain in Spain, TVE, ran a show in which they showed how easy it was to vandalize Wikipedia. And what´s worse, after vandalizing some articles, the producers of the show did not even bother to correct the changes. As Microsoft likes to point out that Open Source is not safe to use traditional media´s attack on the Internet generally centers around proving that the Internet is not a trustworthy source of information. In the meantime the value of “reliable” traditional media companies keeps shrinking. Personally I think that the world needs both, professional journalists with great integrity and the user generated content of blogs and Wikipedia. But I can understand why as journalists start feeling that their jobs are being taken by bloggers who compete with their readers attention and do not demand payment other than the occasional Google Ad would react violently and attack the Internet. In the end, this is a foolish strategy. The internet is more reliable than traditional media not because it can´t be wrong (it frequently is) but because it is self correcting. Needless to say the articles that were vandalized have by now been fixed.

Crisis guide 2: Part 1 of our feature looked at why the markets got into a mess. Part 2 looks at how contagion could spread and whether the central banks’ rescue packages will work.

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I normally don´t do this but I got an explanation of the current debt crisis that was so well written that I will publish it in my blog.  As soon as I know who the author is I will give her/him credit.  In the meantime  my general comment is that this crisis reminds me of the Drexel collapse in the 80s when people realize that there was such as poor quality debt.  But what we also know of that collapse is that investors panicked and  sold debt too cheaply. Read More

Today the New York Times publishes an article that estimates that is critical of the use of air power in Afghanistan as it results in a high number of civilian deaths.  I agree with this.  It is very difficult to make the case that car bombs is terrorism but plane bombs aren´t.

You may have heard this.  You ask someone, so where do you live, and they answer, on a plane.  Well as absurd as this sounds I know more and more people who live like that.  I call them the new homeless.  They work for global companies or are entrepreneurs themselves, sometimes intellectual entrepreneurs, regular speakers at conferences for example, lecturers, itinerant professors.  These people have a hard time establishing roots somewhere and many of them tend not to come from anywhere in particular.  Instead they were already  roamers as kids thanks to their parents who may have been diplomats, executives at multinationals, or global hippies.  The problem with the new homeless is that they are mostly unable to develop functional relationships, or friendships and thus the booming field of internet relationships where friendship knows no boundaries.  Unfortunately nobody has invented the internet hug yet and all those emoticons cannot replace a caress or a falling tear.

People say that life becomes really enjoyable when we reach our 40s. According to what I read in Forbes, success is enjoyed from this age and onwards. In a youth obsessed world, I was amazed to discover that the most successful and famous people in USA are much older than I had thought.

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Dell has acquired Zing maker of the Sansa Connect (reviewed by Endgadget). I think this is great news for all of us who while loving Apple products believe that time has come to have some real competition in the music playing arena. To me (and I know that I am still one of the few people out there who believe this) it is much better to walk around with a Sansa Connect than with an iPod. Why doesn´t the iPod have wifi connectivity is something that I can´t understand. And what´s worse, the iPhone has great WiFi connectivity but it cannot be used to stream or add new music. This is exactly where the Sansa Connect fits in. It is a tiny, elegant device that allows you to discover, share and play music wherever there is WiFi and it even stores new songs for you so when you are outside WiFi coverage you can still have fun. And the Yahoo Music version of the Sansa Connect is a start. I can see the Sansas being able to play videos from any platforms, work with Last.fm (my favorite online music community), Pandora, and any other online, video music service. As far as Dell is concerned I think acquiring Zing is smart because now that Michael Dell is back at the helm what Dell needs are novel products with great user interfaces. Zing is not just the Sansa. Zing is a team led by Tim Bucher, formerly at Next and Apple who is to great gadgets what Janus Friis (designer of Kazaa, Skype and Joost) is to great user interfaces. I would recommend that Tim´s talent is used not only to improve the Sansa but to help out accross the board in Dell´s design strategy.

There´s a new phenomenon in Spain. It´s called the Botellon. It´s huge. There´s a Botellón in most Spanish cities every night and probably there are no Spaniards under 25 who have never been to one.   Most go to a botellon over once a week.  What is a “Botellón”. A Botellon is a user generated bar. A bar that is improvised in a predefined place, say a park to which tons of people, many times over 1000 people, take drinks with them and give them to friends, friends of friends and sometimes to strangers. I am now in Palma de Mallorca and there is one very near the marina where my sailboat is at. It is a truly remarkable gathering, something that would probably not be allowed to take place in most countries other than highly permissive Spain (where we have Gay Marriage, legal P2P, gambling, prostitution, overall a highly tolerant society paradise to some, hell to others). For some in Spain Botellones are a horrible fad. Personally I am intrigued by them. In my Spanish blog there´s an article about them  and why they take place and readers wrote many explanations. The most common reason as to why people would prepare all sorts of alcoholic and non alcoholic drinks, cut lemon and lime, bring glasses, and be so kind to others is because for the price of a gin tonic at a disco they can get a whole bottle at the Botellon. Still that does not explain why drink donors would give them away as there never any money charged for drinks.  In my view the economic element is only part of the story. I think people are fascinated by the anarchic, social nature of botellones, they like to move around without the constraints and rules of a bar or disco. They like to meet their friends and run into old friends or even people they don´t know.  Botellones are like the social sites on the internet…live.   Bar and disco impresarios are extremely upset about the Botellones and try to lobby to make them illegal.  The three big negatives are noise from the street to people who live nearby, the abuse of alcohol and the fact that the very 2.0 attitude of creating a user generated bar ends when it gets time to clean up.  All these issues need to be addressed so Botellones can coexist well with the rest of Spanish society not involved in them.

I have four children, 3 were born in the States the youngest in Spain. We live in Spain but we are presently vacationing at our farm in Southampton, Long Island. My older kids are now 17, 14 and 13 the youngest is a baby. Today the older ones ended their vacations in the Hamptons. Unfortunately they could not wait to go back to Europe. There are many things they like about NYC and the Hamptons but overall they prefer Europe for one reason. They feel freer there. Freer to party which is what they like to do. Especially my 17 year old girl. She made me realize that in the States people her age are treated like potential criminals. In Spain, when school is over, my eldest daughter parties a lot with her friends, they go clubbing until 5am in the morning, they are all great students and in my view, once they excel at school they earned their freedom to party. In theory Spanish clubs should check that they are 18 but at 17 they do not. And yes there are many teenagers who drink hard in Spain. But with alcohol freely available in supermarkets they learn over time to drink in moderation. I have yet to meet a single adult in Spain with a serious alcohol problem (they clearly exist but I have not met them instead 3 of my American friends are recovering alcoholics). In Spain kids start drinking at 15 and driving at 18. By then most have learned something about getting drunk and the effects of alcohol and have less accidents on the average than in the States. In the States the opposite is true, they can legally drive at 16 and drink at 21.

This leaves kids with a lack of a drinking education, an education that is only acquired after they drive at a huge cost (in America teens make 7% of the drivers but 20% of the fatalities, USA is now one of the most dangerous of the OECD countries in which to drive). Why is that? My theory is that something akin to “alcohol immunization” takes place in Europe. When alcohol is freely available to teenagers they experiment, they drink, they get drunk a few times, they get immunized. But in the States, with alcohol, so hard to get to the point that a person may be considered fit to die in Iraq but not to drink a beer, people don´t get properly exposed to alcohol at the right time. In Spain instead my kids go out, experiment drinking before they drive. And in the meantime they have a lot of fun, and don´t feel excluded from the adult world and come home…in a bus.