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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Last week, the Huffington Post published an article of Lester Brown (Director of the Earth Policy Institute at Columbia University and founder of the WorldWatch Institute) about the impact on the food market of biofuel production. While I consider myself an environmentalist and I dislike to take a stance against an environmental policy that is extremely popular in Europe and USA I must side with the new “disident” environmentalists as Lester Brown and take a stand against biofuel.
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Many of us share the perception that the world´s view of the United States was much better in the 90s than now. Now BBC has released a poll entitled “World View of the US goes from Bad to Worse” that shows that respondents in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Chile, China, Egypt, France, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Italy, Kenya, Lebanon, Mexico, Nigeria, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Russia, South Korea, Turkey, United Arab Emirates and the very United States agree on this.
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My view on the Huffington Post.

Arianna founded the Huffington Post, an amazing on line newspaper/blog that has taken America by storm. I met Arianna on Sunday at DLD. Boy is she smart. I don´t know how old she is but she is good looking, self confident and funny (this goes for this stupid rumour started by Vanity Fair that says that women are not funny, if you don´t believe me watch her video). Now Arianna is also quick and after a great conversation she invited me to blog on her site. I had to say yes. Arianna herself is a great writer. Here´s her description of DLD, the Davos of New Media.

Here´s Craig from Craigslist. I loved his presentation at DLD. One thing that surprised me is how Craig used the example of Bush´s reasons for invading Iraq when explaining the tools that Craigslist was implementing to avoid scams.

David de Rotschild is an adventurer and also an ecologist. He is the head of Adventure Ecology, an expedition group raising awareness about climate change. In this video, David speaks about his next adventure, Plastiki. I read Kontiki when I was 14 and fell in love with the book. I think Plastiki is a great idea to bring awareness of the problem of plastics in the ocean in a way that is constructive, fun but yet repetitive enough to make a difference. Unfortunately a lot of what happens in high seas is unregulated as anyone can basically do whatever they want in high seas. But as it happens with pirates when nations got serious about them most piracy ended as pirates need to come ashore and so do ocean polluters.