I finally got my Sansa Connect and I think that the Sansa, while not a great gadget as of now, it is certainly the start of something great. My short review of it is that the gadget itself is extraordinary, compact, inviting, but as it is available now the Sansa Connect is only great if you love Yahoo´s music platform as it is geared to work and promote that platform. I have been a user of Yahoo Music for a couple of years now and while I have my Martinvars1 radio there, what I like most on the internet is freedom of choice and to me the best Sansa Connect is one that has Yahoo Music and LastFM, and Pandora, and whoever else I like. Now having said this, I do think it is worthwhile to buy the Sansa Connect because the Yahoo Service has access to most music that is available and it is great to have an ipod like device that “contains” most music you would ever want to listen to.

I just had the incredible opportunity of being in a panel at The International Economic Forum of the Americas conference with Luc Montagnier and James Heckman. The panel was on innovation and economic development and the debate centered around patents and whether patents promote economic development or not.

Although the panel went on for around 2 hours the summary of it is that Luc Montaigner, the co discoverer of the AIDS virus, was for patents and James Heckman, the Nobel prize in Economics, against. While Luc Montaigner made a good case as to why patents are needed in the field of medicine, James Heckman made the best case I had ever heard as to why patents mostly hurt development. When it was my turn I sided with Heckman, elaborating on the open source movement and how I oppose all technology related patents outside of medicine.

I know, you are all confused. Martin Varsavsky has been hacked. But I haven´t it´s me with a migration to WordPress and a lot of new functionalities. I really hope you like the new look of this blog. I would like to thank the people at Blogestudio who helped me out here.

This morning I discovered two curious web sites. Both intriguing but for different reasons. One is about censorship, the other about orgasms. I start with the censorship site. It´s called the Great Firewall of China and it is a site that when you put a URL it tells you if it´s being censored in China. The problem with it though is that I put Fon and it did appeared as censored but we have already quite a few foneros in China and have not seen reports of blocked access so maybe the site is not correct.
Read More

The La Fontennas are signal extenders that stick to windows, are the size of a PSP and boost your La Fonera’s WiFi coverage by 10 times more than what it is now. Today we started an e mail campaign directed at our most successful Foneros, those who capture the most roaming linuses and aliens to try these out for free. If you live in a high density area and think you qualify but did not get one please write to me with your name and address. I do not promise to deliver one to everyone but I do promise to spend some time looking up the location in our maps and give out at least 100 to my readers.

Last night I was having dinner with my friend Lars Hinrichs of Xing but the dinner was soured by the fact that somebody had posted antisemitic remarks in Xing and the press was accusing Xing´s management of being antisemitic. Other than the fact that as a buddy of Lars and being Jewish myself I can say that Lars is clearly not an antisemite I think that as Youtube and many others are seeing, “user generated content” also implies “user generated problems”. Will the traditional press ever understand that web 2.0 web sites cannot hire armies of people to police their own user generated content web sites? The only way user generated web sites can be managed is flagging offensive content. It is only then that web sites responsibility begins. And indeed if Xing had failed to remove those remarks it would be at fault. But they reacted immediately. And that is the only way the web 2.0 can truly function.

In this video, while I walk around Cambridge I talk around what I believe is seriously wrong with the British educational system in which high school ends when kids are only 15 and at 16 they are forced to choose only very few subjects to study.

A journalist at the New York Times told me yesterday that as opposed to top blogs, the New York Times does not normally link to sources of their stories in their internet edition. Today Tim O’Reilly points this out in referring to a New York Times story that cites me but does not link to my blog. In this case the source of the story is my story on Anne Wojcicki and 23andme.

This is what the New York Times wrote. Their article is inspired in the original post where I blogged about the company in January and the recent post in which I praise Anne for getting her company funded. But when you read the New York Times article it really sounds like they interviewed…my blog. Is asking the New York Times to link to blogs when they quote from them asking the most important newspaper in the world to adapt to new rules that are not part of their culture?

The New York Times is not alone in this. A similar problem arises with The Economist, arguably the best magazine in the world. Recently I was interviewed by The Economist. When the story came out, not only did they not link to my company, FON, but I saw that The Economist journalists do not sign their own articles. At least in the case of the New York Times, I was able to send an email to Katie Hafner who wrote the article, asking her to link to the source. But in the case of The Economist you are being covered anonymously, something that in the world of blogs is generally reserved to commentators, not authors. So, for example, if The Economist writes what in this case was a well written, balanced story on the state of affairs in Spain, you have nobody to thank. The opposite could also be true. Personally I think that journalists worldwide learn as much from feedback as bloggers do from commentators. Recently I had a chance to meet John Micklethwait, The Economist’s Editor in Chief, and question the policy of anonymity. His reply was that The Economist does not plan to change it, that it has served the magazine well over the years. I guess John has a point. A magazine that has been in continous publication since 1843 and a newspaper that has been in continous print since 1857 probably have earned the right to live by their own rules. Still as these publications migrate from print to the internet, I wish they followed the transparency rules that all of us in the internet are used to and expected to uphold.