Last week I had a very good talk with my friend Joichi Ito, who Chairs Creative Commons, at the FON Party. Creative Commons is addressing a great need that many of us have. Before Creative Commons, copyright belonged to a corporation or copy was not protected and then there was no control to what happened to it and no attribution. Creative Commons filled a niche in between.

Here´s an example of CC use that concerns me. Wicho, a top Spanish blogger and photographer, took this picture of me at a conference. Computer World of Denmark was writing an article about FON and they took the picture from Flickr, because it was under CC license. In this way we all benefit. The magazine did not have to send a photographer to Spain, I am in the cover of Computer World, and Whicho got to do a cover and got the credit (thanks Alvy from Microsiervos for the link).

This week I spend time hanging out with Joichi Ito who, among other things, Chairs Creative Commons. Joi, who is a good friend and also the lead fonero of FON Japan, alerted me to the fact that copyright owners keep trying to extend the rights of their licenses into areas that historically were out of bounds.

I comment on the subject in this video shot in Paris at a used book stand .

While I don´t know why Anne Wojciki´s called her new venture 23andMe and not 46andMe (as far as I know I have 46 chromosomes and also happened to be 46), I still think that 23andMe is the coolest tech venture I have heard about in a long time. Probably the best analogy to describe it is “a search engine for human genetic information”.
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Bruce Feiler the best selling author of a series of wonderful non religious books about religion such as Abraham and Walking the Bible has a provocative post in his blog today entitled Muslim Blood in the White House? In this post Bruce, an expert in religious relations describes Obama´s complex family background and wonders if somebody who was partly raised as a Muslim can be elected president in a country that is at war with Muslims. Moreover the subject becomes more complicated by Obama´s own description of his upbringing which was a complicated mix of Islam, Atheism and Christianity.
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I have been teaching at Instituto de Empresa for 10 years. I teach a class on entrepreneurship in the fall. During the last 10 I have seen Instituto de Empresa grow and grow, basically going the way of Spain. Spain was a somewhat successful country that over the last 10 years became the star performer of the large countries of Europe. ´
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Dale Dougherty of O´Reilly did a great job summarizing a session that I moderated at DLD entitled “How to be good?“. Now here´s the paradox. Although DLD is a European conference, I was surprised to see that every “do good” venture on my panel was American. These included Nicholas Negroponte´s OLPC aiming at supplying a laptop to every student in less developed countries, Steve Mariotti´s NEFTE, who is doing a great job teaching entrepreneurship to teenagers, and Gabriele Zedlmeyer , of Hewlett Packard, one of the largest corporations in the world involved in hundreds of projects to improve education.

Confronted with such an overwhelming American presence I felt compelled to ask the question: Why is it so American to want to do good?
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