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 am at Supernova in San Francisco. I just spoke at a panel on social networks in which AOL and Yahoo were represented. AOL has over 100 million unique users, mostly in America. Yahoo has around 400 million uniques with USA being it´s number one country as well. And other than Flickr my guess was that most people in the audience did not use AOL, nor Yahoo. Also other than Flickr I could not see how any AOL or Yahoo properties benefit from the Web 2.0 effect, namely that your experience gets better on the net because somebody else is surfing the same site as well.

But if anything AOL and Yahoo were eye openers to me in the sense that I wonder how elitist many of the sites that I invest in are. Companies like Technorati, Netvibes, Joost and many others are much smaller than Yahoo and AOL and have little chance to ever catch up with them. So is the Web 1.0 just here to stay? Is the Web 2.0 a minority group that just looks huge to us because we live in it but it is tiny when all is taken into account on the internet? Or will AOL and Yahoo eventually evolved and make most of their experiences comunal? Hard to tell.

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.



The FON US Team has just sent me this video as a suprise…and it’s hysterical. I also liked this one.

The dudes at Facebook not only have done an amazing job in building the best social web site in the world, a site that, other than my 7 month baby, has managed to recruit all the other 5 members of my family, ages 13 to 47. But now, by allowing everyone else to come to Facebook, it has build a platform that within a year will become the most valuable social platform in the world.

What I wonder is, for how long is Facebook going to allow other companies to build businesses inside Facebook? Is Facebook going to begin asking for toll payments at some point in the future or will they be happy with the fact that, in any case, it all takes place there and they will find ways to monetize the new traffic? Seeing what they have done til now, my take is that the Facebook land grab will continue with the limiting factor here, being not acreage, but attention span.

Many of my English readers, especially those from USA and UK, would be surprised to know how anti US, anti UK, anti Israel and pro Arab the continental European press is. Because very few people in the world read press in translation or are both bilingual and interested in knowing what others think, this strong dislike for the policies of the US, the UK and Israel has mostly gone unnoticed in the anglo saxon world.

Living in Madrid and running a foundation like Safe Democracy, I have had a hard time dealing with commentators who have lost perspective as of the causes of the wars in the Muslim world. It is difficult for me to read newspapers like El Pais who frequently attribute all evil in the region to the bad policy choices of the US, the UK and Israel to the point in which the average Spaniard now thinks of Israel as a nation who invaded not just the Palestinian territories (a view which I share) but Israel itself (a view that is simply wrong). While I do believe that these three nations have made tragic policy mistakes in the region, and many times have done more harm than good I am also convinced that the problem of radical Islam has little to do with US, UK and Israel. Radical islamists hate fellow Muslims more than they hate Christians, Jews and anyone else in the planet. Most likely, even without any intervention from USA, UK or Israel the Muslim world would have been a part of the world suffering from horrendous wars similar to those that were found in the Christian world a century before. A proof of this is that during the last 20 years many more Muslims have been killed by Muslims than Muslims by Infidels. This is evident right now in the three Arab Civil Wars: the civil war between Al Fatah and Hamas, between the Lebanese and Palestinians and the conflict between Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq. These conflicts have caught the Continental European progressives by surprise as it is becoming more and more apparent that it is hard to blame USA, UK and Israel for the virulent Muslim vs Muslim character of these three wars.

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Before the digital era there was only way to be poor and that was not to have access to things. But now there´s a new kind of poverty and that is digital poverty. Not only can you be poor because you have no access to the information society as we like to call it in Europe but even inside the Internet you can be poor. Let me give you a concrete example of digital poverty. It relates to Stardoll. Stardoll is a very simple yet incredibly successful site for little girls to dress up their dolls. I first blogged about Stardoll in April of 2006 both in English and Spanish What happened to me after blogging about Stardoll in Spanish is that because of my Google Ranking when you google Stardoll only in Spanish you come to my blog. But what´s unusual about Stardoll is that even though doll´s are virtually dressed in Stardoll their virtual clothes cost real money. And what I frequently get now is e mails from little girls from Spanish speaking countries who ask me if I can please give them stardollars so they can buy dresses for their little dolls. And I feel so sorry about them that I even contemplated that my foundation could finance some of these but came to the conclusion that that would be absurd. Interestingly, yesterday, I had a chance to see Mattias Miksche from Stardoll again and raise this issue. Since there´s little cost involved in producing these clothes. Couldn´t we start an NGO that actually gave them for free or for practically nothing to poor girls in say Ecuador, Peru, Colombia? And in general, now that wealth is both felt (no food) and perceived (Swedish girls can buy clothes, Peruvian girls can´t), don´t we have an opportunity in the virtual world to do virtual philanthropy and make a lot of little girls, boys, and even grown ups happy? Mattias did not give me a concrete answer but I am sure he is thinking about this. Personally I think that there is a chance of bringing digital justice to this world. Pricing digital property in terms of the average purchasing power of each country would be a good start. Cause as opposed to real property digital property has no cost for an extra copy. Let´s take advantage of this and start the digital fair trade movement!

This is my Netvibes Universe.  Basically my Netvibes Universe is a fancy way to say that you can now look at my personal Netvibes page.  Or that my Netvibes page is now “blogged”.  Why is this feature interesting? Because now you can see my sources, you can see the blogs I read, my news sources, the tools I use.  In order to make the Martinvarsavsky Netvibes Universe I did take some things out.  I my Netvibes I get my email for example, and you don´t (not that you would care to read it but I am just saying this).  But to me the Netvibes Universe is a lot of things, among them a social netvibes, my new blogroll, a way to share sources and tips.  Hope you enjoy it.

With Stardoll issuing Stardollars, with Second Life having Linden Dollars and many other sites selling virtual gifts and virtual property, will we soon see an Exchange in which all these virtual currencies and properties are traded?

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.

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