When Digg, Techcrunch, Gigaom, or others talk about me or Fon, visits to my web site or Fon’s go through the roof. But yesterday the New York Times had me on the cover of the business Sunday Times with a huge pictureand long article and the increased visit effect to our websites was negligible. Same was true when Forbeswrote a great article about myself and Fon. Even though the Sunday New York Times has a circulation of 2.3 million papers and is arguably the best newspaper in the world, the cover article only added 200 additional uniques to this website. Instead when I heard from Michael Dell that he used Ubuntu, I blogged it, my post was picked up by Digg and I got over 50,000 additional unique visitors to my blog!

But while there is a big disconnect between old media and new media and old media does not send visitors to new media, the impact of an old media paper article far exceeds that of an Internet article. Michael Arringtonmay send you a lot of visitors but it is rare that I will go somewhere and people will remember what Techcrunch wrote a year ago. With paper this is not the case. People will cite the Erika Brown’s Forbes article a year later. And yesterday I was getting many emails from long time friends and even a former university professor about the New York Times article and this does not happen to me when blogs who send tons of visitors write about me or Fon.

There really is something about old media that we retain for a long time which is not true of new media and this may explain why people like Tom Friedmanare still not blogging. As a consequence an old media reputation, good or bad, seems to be deeper and longer lasting than the flavor of the month reputation that the Internet builds. When John Markoffwrites paper in hand people listen. They know that Markoff has fact checkers, has done his research and is paid to spend a lot of time on a story. Same was true of Erika Brown whose fact checkers kept calling me for weeks before the Forbes story came out. So while I try to write objectively from my blog and so do other bloggers I don’t think anyone of us has the time or resources yet of a Forbes or a New York Times. Old Media still has more money to pay journalists than new media and it shows. Nor does new media have the undivided attention that readers of magazines or newspapers get. Paper, whether we like it or not, still looks better than screens. So even though I have been an advocate of new media for 12 years and I have never invested in any news that came out in paper, I still think that paper is more credible than pixels.

An old media reputation is still more valuable and lasting than a new media reputation.

I just read the New York Times article on Fon. It´s well researched, worth reading. What´s great about the article is that it shows what it is to try to build a global wireless network on a day to day basis. In this struggle you meet great partners such as Google, who invested with Fon, or skeptics such as Apple, or telcos who ignore you while others embrace you.

Aphrodite my sailboat went from Spain to the Caribbean and now is sailing back from Bermuda to Spain. The crew is a mix of professional and amateur sailors. 3 of them came through my blog.

Revenues at Fon last month were slightly over 100K euros. Gross margins are over 70%. Cash burn which was over a million euros during December was down to 480K euros in April and is going down to 350K euros in June. This puts us on target to be profitable in the last quarter of 2009. Number of registered Foneros is at 830,000. Number of registered hotspots is 332,000 and of active hotspots at anytime has gone up to 212,000 around the world up from 145,000 in December. Last week we added 6000 hotspots and we are on target to have 300K hotspots by year end. Headcount is 61 employees around the world which is remarkable for a company that is managing the largest and fastest growing WiFi network in the world. Our top countries are UK, France, Japan, Germany, USA, Taiwan, Spain and Italy.

Many good things happened at Google Zeitgeist. Some of them I can´t tell as they may become important deals for FON (BTfon was born at Google Zeitgeist). But one of the things that surprised me the most was seeing one of the musicians I have admired the most, Gilberto Gil there. What was shocking about him is that as part of the debate in which he argued for a more moderate system of copyrights, a position that he takes as Minister of Culture of Brasil, he actually sang a song that speaks about my favorite subject: broadband!

Meet the trailblazers is the name of the panel I moderated at Google Zeitgeist. Panelists were Sanjeev Bikhchandani, CEO of InfoEdge, Matt Flannery, CEO of Kiva, my friend and partner Joi Ito, CEO of Creative Commons, Bernard Lukey, CEO of Ozon.ru and Thomas Middelhoff, CEO of Arcandor AG of AOL fame.