On an average day this week around 6000 people visited my Spanish blog and 1200 people visited my English blog. But on those same days I sent around 11,000 RSS feeds in Spanish and 5300 in English. If you are a blogger like me who is only out there to disseminate ideas, you don´t advertise, then you don´t really care about how people read your content, and RSS is a plus. But if like Om Malik or Michael Arrington you have to make a living out of blogging RSS can be pretty bad for you. Yes there are feeds with advertising but they are probably even less efficient than advertising itself. I once debated Michael Porter at Davos on the overall value creation of the internet. I argued that the internet created valued and he argued that the internet destroyed value. Examples like RSS vs blogging show that the issue is still not solved. So far the internet is clearly taking value away from old media industries such as newspapers, the recording industry, the movie industry, and it is not clear that similar value is being created. I wonder if there is a recent study of the overall value creation/destruction of the internet in the last 5 years that could settle this issue.

I never understood why it is acceptable for American media to call political appointees “czars” as if it was a great example to others to be a czar.

Here´s a mention to Podesta being a possible energy czar.

Another observer said John Podesta, Clinton’s White House chief of staff and now co-chair of Obama’s transition team, may also be in consideration for energy secretary or climate “czar,” a White House position being created by Obama to spearhead climate change policy.

Or a drug czar

On paper, Jim Ramstad — who is rumored to be Obama’s choice for drug czar — looks like the ideal man for the job.

A czar, or tsar, is basically a Russian emperor who hardly ruled in a manner that would be compatible with anything that we would call democratic in the States today. One of the most famous czars is Ivan the Terrible. Here´s an excerpt of his biography:

Other events of this period include the introduction of the first laws restricting the mobility of the peasants, which would eventually lead to serfdom, and change in Ivan’s personality, traditionally linked to his near-fatal illness in 1553 and the death of his first wife, Anastasia Romanovna in 1560. Ivan suspected boyars of poisoning his wife and of plotting to replace him on the throne with his cousin, Vladimir of Staritsa. In addition, during that illness Ivan had asked the boyars to swear an oath of allegiance to his eldest son, an infant at the time. Many boyars refused, deeming the tsar’s health too hopeless to survive. This angered Ivan and added to his distrust of the boyars. There followed brutal reprisals and assassinations, including those of Metropolitan Philip and Prince Alexander Gorbatyi-Shuisky.

So if czar is in fashion how about some other possibilities. The Energy Fuhrer. The Drug Tyrant. The Tech Despot. The Intelligence Dictator. Or maybe, these last days as we witness the collapse of the car industry we could name an Auto Autocrat to lead the way to recovery.

I have been criticized many times in this blog for having had done well in life. Especially in my Spanish blog. Many readers know however that I grew up in a middle class family environment –the son of professors– and that I made my money by founding different companies. They also know that I started my companies by writing a business plan, searching for investors, recruiting a good management team, and executing out a strategy. So there are not many secrets about how I made my money in technology. Criticizing me for being rich in my blog. If it is done with humor, I leave it. If it is a direct insult, I don’t publish it. But the attitude of some readers towards my makes me wonder if people who hate successful people realize that what a society needs successful businesses in order not to eliminate poverty.

What do we want, a society without rich people or a society without poor people? To me the answer is clear. What we want is a society without poor people or, like my Argentinean friend Maximiliano Fernandez says, what a country has to aspire to is to have the “richest poor” people in the world. Why? Because if the poor people of, let’s say, Switzerland are the richest in the world –which they may very well be– then the rest of the Swiss will be even better off and all is well. And Switzerland is a good example because it has the richest poor people in the world, but it also has some of the richest people in the world. The same goes for Sweden, another country where the poor live well, but where there are also people, like the founder of IKEA, with huge fortunes almost unrivaled in the world.

Still unconvinced readers will ask me, “What’s going on in countries like Nigeria, in which almost everyone lives in misery, but some are billionaires?”. My answer is that my argument in defense of the rich is not valid in countries that live off of the exploitation of natural resources. In those cases, where it is common for a few to take control of everything, then the argument of some of my readers, that many are poor because a few are rich, is valid. So in those societies what is needed is strict policies of wealth distribution. But in information societies like the EU, USA and Japan of today, which live mainly off of the accumulation of knowledge, the formula that says that in order for there to be fewer poor people there have to be many business leaders competing for human resources and raising wages, is applicable. And those business leaders and entrepreneurs are generally rich.

Take the United States for example, the country with by far the most billionaires in the world. Interestingly enough, its Gini index (which measures a country’s inequality of wealth distribution) is not so much better than Nigeria’s. And yet the USA’s Human Development Index (HDI) is the 12th highest in the world, while Nigeria ranks near the bottom of the barrel at 158th. Perhaps Nigeria’s Gini coefficient is not much worse than the USA’s because so many people are poor, and its rich citizens are actually few and far in between. In contrast, the USA has hundreds of billionaires and thousands of millionaires in addition to a very large middle class. Hence, there is still inequality, but poor – better yet, non-rich – Americans are much better off than non-rich Nigerians.

What’s more, I don’t know of a single successful society, meaning a country whose poor are among the richest on the planet, that doesn’t also have very rich people. As for rich Americans, well let’s look at Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the co-founders of Google. Their combined net worth is over $22 billion, but think about how many jobs Google has created, and how much wealth it has brought, not only to its thousands upon thousands of employees, but to the computer industry in general, both in the USA and around the world. In contrast, Aliko Dangote, Nigeria’s richest citizen with a net worth of $3.3 billion, amassed his fortune by gaining a near monopoly on Nigeria’s commodities trade. Again: by taking control of natural resources. Dangote Group is not exactly a boon to Nigeria’s economy.

My conclusion is that when a country really mistreats its entrepreneurs it becomes impoverished. This doesn’t mean that we don’t have to implement progressive taxes –which I think are very good– or create an environment in which people that fall into adverse situations receive the help that they deserve to come out on top, and in which inequalities are reduced. But the solution is not to have fewer rich people, but to have fewer poor people.

Over the last 4 years my biggest investments have been in the development of wind farms, solar farms and in FON. One could argue that it is quite a diversified strategy. What correlation could there be among a global WiFi network, and wind farms and solar farms around Spain? Well there is one. On a day like today, when it is cloudy, but not windy, throughout Spain and cold everywhere in the Northern hemisphere, revenues are at their lowest in all companies. Solar Farms get no sun, Wind Farms get no wind, and people stay indoors and connect less to WiFi at FON. And on top of that, I can´t even go cycling ’cause it´s too cold! The weather sucks big-time today!