Dell has recently come up with a commercial  that includes the catch phrase “In the Real World Goliath wins”, a pretty convincing argument to buy their servers.  But some conservatives are pretty unhappy with this ad because it seems to imply that if this is true then the Bible is not the real world.  Personally I find it hard to believe that somebody would think that the Bible is the real world, as real say as running into a friend going down the street.  But it seems that a lot of people seem to believe that the characters of the Bible are as real as you and me and therefore the Bible is the real world.  I hope even those still judge servers by their quality and price and not their Biblical connotations.

Are we all into vanity searching?  I am.  I want to know what people are saying about me.  But googling myself just does not do it.  The problem with googling myself is that I get over half a million results and the top 50 rarely change.  So no matter how absurdly vain I am I just don´t have the time to look at how my personality evolves in Google over time.  And I have not found alerts of the kind as “a certain result has made it into the top 25 in your search”.     I also have a Google alert on Varsavsky (there are of course other extremely accomplished Varsavskys but we are all the same family and when they show up I also like to hear about them)  but one of the annoying things that happens with google alerts is that I tend to get alerts notifications that are either very late or repeat alearts of articles that have been written ages ago.  The Technorati alerts work better but they only alert you on what the blogosphere is saying about you, which is fine but not enough.  And then there´s google news, which tells you when news articles appear on you.  And that works pretty well but it´s only news.  So in the quest for the perfect vanity tool I came up with UnfoldingNews, the vanity search engine….at least for me.   What I did with unfolding news is ask my developers to help me with a search engine that draws from different sources but tells you about all the very recent stories that blogs and news sources have about you.  I launched it a week ago and in my Spanish blog which tends to get many more comments than my English blog we got many sugestions to improve it.  And we did.  Now if you share this desire to follow how the news on you unfold or the news on anyone you like or care about, I recommend you try it out.

Don´t you ever want to follow news as they develop? I do. And my problem is that in order to do this I have to alternate between many different news sites and the blogosphere mostly represented by Technorati. So here´s a web site that the Fon Labs developed so I could track unfolding news (in this case we did it to track how the BT Fon news were disseminating around the world). It is called Unfolding News and it is a simple search engine of unfolding news. You can try it out with any term you are interested in searching that may be newsworthy.  And since this is an experimental product we of course accept any ideas on how to make it better.

In this post John Battelle asks his readers what they would like to know about the wireless debate for his panel at Web 2.0  in San Francisco where I will be this week (I will be in the Bay Area from Tuesday to Saturday).

I read a fascinating article called: A World Without Human Beings. One of the most surprising things was to learn that, from all known things on Earth, what has the best chances of survival in the long run are not the famous insects we were always told will remain when we are gone, but…TV signals that escape into space and travel forever. In theory, these signals will be seen even after the destruction of Earth due to sun expansion.

I guess this will be a morale-booster for people who work in TV and sometimes feel that their work is TV-trash. Now they can feel they are helping to spread our heritage in the universe.

Here´s an article on BW with a great commentary on the part of Michael Dell supporting Fon. Fon has already grown quite a bit in the States but in this large country we are still far behind the UK and other smaller nations in spreading Fon. My view is that Fon is a standard for connecting to WiFi and as GSM has shown USA tends to come late to standards that are not home grown, but they tend to adopt them in the end. I am confident that Fon will eventually make it big in the States as well. Especially as we move into .n foneras, wimax foneras, femto foneras which are necessary in many parts of the States in which people leave farther away from each other.