Technorati is about to launch a fantastic new feature. I saw it but swore to David that I would not disclose it. So in this video David speaks about Technorati in general but if you want to know what this feature is wait a few days and don´t bother viewing it.

It´s here, pls go to Sunday, 17:40.

Normally I go to conferences as a speaker. But thanks to my interests as a blogger, I have been asking for different roles so not only I can tell others about Fon but I learn about what others are doing. At SIME things work out well and I was both moderator of a very interesting pannel with Hjalmar Windbladh, Marko Ahtissari, Carlos Bhola and others and then I was also suprisingly given the role of rapper!, at DLD I managed to do slightly better. I am moderating an interesting panel with Nicholas Negroponte among others.

The problems YouTube recently had in India and Brazil illustrate the limits to automation when dealing with video content. What people who accuse Youtube do not understand is that Youtube, as well as eBay and other giants on the internet, rely on the fact that most people are actually honest and that if they are not other people will point that out. But this self policed system, already hard to understand to many in USA, in developing countries, who are used to video as delivered by regulated broadcasting companies, it is just too hard to comprehend.

How can Youtube –now owned by Google, a company that is worth many times more than the GDP of some LDCs– say it cannot afford enough people to police their site? To me the answer is not that it cannot afford them but that doing so destroys the Youtube business model.

Personally I suffered this problem this week. Youtube published a video that showed how Imams train radical Muslims in the UK. By the time I linked to this video it had been watched by half a million people but a day after I linked to it the video disappeared due to copyright violations. While I was annoyed and hate to see blog posts erased, I understood the situation and in the future I will link to Youtube again knowing that many Youtube videos come and go. I will do this because I believe in the Youtube model and want to support it. Indeed I think that self policing is one of the great things about democracy. But I do hope that others feel the same way and that the Youtube that we now know survives intact.

You may not know this, but there´s actually a Starbucks inside the Forbidden City. Personally, when I visit this amazing historical monument, I was shocked to see that this was the case. It seems that the Forbidden City is Forbidden to all….but Starbucks, as there are no other commercial establishments inside this architectural wonder.

Personally, other than the fact that Starbucks offers expensive WiFi and its coffee that pales in comparison to Lavazza, my favorite brand, I have nothing against Starbucks. But the Forbidden City is not the place to open one up and when I was there I wondered what kind of corrupt official allowed that to happened.

So I fully support my friend and Chinese blogger Rui Chenggang who started the Starbucks revolt in Beijing and may actually succeed in removing Starbucks from the most sacred place in secular China.

I was reading about Marin Soljacic and his research at the MIT Physics department on Wireless Energy. I found it fascinating. The key idea is that energy is transferred through magnetism in the same way electric engines are powered but that this magnetism is created say around a room in a way that only objects designed to “tune in” to this magnetism, say a cell phone, receive it and get charged while everything else in the room is impervious to this energy “floating around”. Or at least this is what I think the idea is…..

In this video I show examples of sustainable farms and explain how with only $40,000 dollars or 30,000 euros an American, European or citizen from probably any country in the world could immigrate to Uruguay, a country of the size of Spain with Northern California climate and only 3.1 million inhabitants, buy a 10 hectare farm and lead a sustainable life.