Skype just came out with an amazing flat rate plan in Europe. Only 2 euros per month and you can call as much as you want to all fixed lines. This is great for us at Fon as now the value of buying a Skype WiFi phone bundled with our Fonera increases as it makes more sense to look for Fonspots to call for free once you are in this plan.

Youtube is a phenomenal video platform. Youtube, however, is also a business. So far censorship at Youtube has been along two lines: removing content that people post but do not own, and removing content that is deemed pornographic.

In the case of copyright, the issue has been clear. Content that is owned by the major studios, production companies has to be removed if they so request. Pornography has been more iffy but Youtube has taken the American approach that considers both nudity and sex to be pornography. In Europe where I live nudity is commonplace and appears in most major newspapers and even views towards pornography are more relaxed. In Europe’s competitor to Youtube, Daily Motion pornography is featured as well.

But what about a new type of censorship that may appear in Youtube, a ban on commercials? Say you make content and you get Adidas to sponsor it. Will Youtube allow you to post your content with your own ads and not share with Youtube? And to be more precise, what is an ad? Is a product endorsement an ad? Is an infommercial an ad?
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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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