During these weeks of horrible events in Gaza, many voices raised to boycott Israeli products and services. As much as I’m shocked by the atrocities of this attack, I don’t think that to boycott product and services from Israel is a good idea.

Doing this, we would damage only specific companies and specific persons of that nation, probably many of them already not agreeing on how things are managed by their government. Boycotts and embargos are very unfocused weapons, rarely work. This case wouldn’t be an exception.

As often, instead of being against someone, it’s much more effective to support the ones who are doing something to make things better. In the case of Gaza war, we may for example donate money to ONGs helping the civilian population in Gaza, as the Red Cross, or to organizations asking for an immediate halt to this war, as Amnesty International.

First day of the year … and first post of the year

Until now, my relationship with this blog was absolutely poor. I posted few things, once in a while and without a clear objective. Moreover, I am always troubled with which language to use for writing the posts. I’m more keen to write in Italian, Portuguese or Spanish, instead of English, but English is universal …

This year, I start with 3 clear points:

1) Objective of this blog is to structure and store my thoughts on everything, except my personal life. I want to write more on my job at www.weblogssl.com, on my ideas on politics and economics, on my interests on music, society, languages

2) I want to maintain a decent frequency, let’s say two posts per month

3) I will write most of the times in English.It’s not a language I feel completely at ease with, but it offers 2 advantages: it’s the global language, it’s very synthetic, something that’s I value a lot

So let’s start!

Como comentario a un interesante articulo de Enrique Dans, acabé de escribir eso:

“Enrique, interesante análisis. Tengo dos observaciones que me ponen en parcial desacuerdo contigo:

1) Expectativa que Hulu mantendrá un modelo de negocio estático

Verdad, Hulu tiene hoy un modelo de negocio viejo. Pero eso no quiere decir que no será capaz de adaptarse. No llegará a ser innovador, por cierto, pero para hacer dinero y ser rentable no es siempre necesario. Claro, tendrá que superar fuertes resistencias internas.

2) Expectativa que YouTube encontrará un modelo de negocio rentable.

Yo todavía no lo veo claro. Como tu escribes: “YouTube supone algo completamente distinto: millones de horas de vídeo de todo tipo”. Exactamente esta es, en mi opinión, la cuestión-clave: ¿como monetizar videos de todo tipo, incluidos muchisimo videos basura que forman la larga cola? Y, mas difícil todavía, ¿como monetizar la larga cola sin tener parte de la cabeza? (YouTube no es dueño de contenido “branded” y este contenido esta siendo en parte retirado de YouTube). Al final, pocos negocios fueron capaces de ganar dinero con la larga cola.

Yo creo que hay dos salidas posibles para YouTube:
a) Monetizar el search, como fue hecho con Google
b) Hacer acuerdos de distribucion con los productores, o sea un modelo de negocio B2B donde YouTube actua como plataforma.

Veo menos, o solamente como negocio complementar, lo de mostrar advertising al consumidor en cuanto accede al vídeo. Hulu lo alcanza porque tienes sinergias con la television, o sea apalanca otra plataforma y otra audience mas acostumbrada a modelos de advertising agresivos.”

Enquanto no Brasil a discussão sobre a Lei Azeredo esta tomando fogo (já 125mil assinaturas contra o projeto, aqui), na Itália uma proposta de lei que parecia ter desaparecido, a Levi-Prodi, volta a angustiar os internautas italianos (aqui).

O projeto de lei Levi-Prodi nasceu da clara vontade dos legisladores de limitar a liberdade de expressão, ameaçando os blogs do reato de difamação.  Como? Impondo a quem desenvolve atividades editoriais na Internet a inscrição ao “Registro degli operatori di comunicazione”. Sendo que a grande maioria dos blogs de uma certa notoriedade usa Google Adsense, todos estes blogs ficariam com essa obrigação, com implicações abrumadoras a nível burocrático e legal, que impediriam de fato a existência desses mesmos blogs.

A Lei Azeredo ataca de um lado diferente. Foca na limitação dos cyber-reatos. Mas acabaria indo longe demais, limitando a livre troca de informação entre usuários e imporia aos provedores de acesso um papel policial. Aqui mais detalhes, explicados pela amiga Caru.

Apesar das claras diferenças entre os dois projeto, tem um interessante paralelos entre as duas situações. Nos dois casos, uma classe politica construída no mundo do mass media (TV sobre todo)  percebe a ameaça da Internet e tenta limitar a explosiva forca democrática que esta somente agora começando a incidir na vida politica nacional. E’ o mesmo pano de fundo.

Nos dois países se estão lutando batalhas fundamentais para o futuro da Internet. Todos aqueles que lutam pela liberdade de expressão e pela democracia sabem por que lado torcer.

Atualização dia 22 de novembro

A proposta de lei “Levi” fui retirada, porem apareceu um outro projeto de lei “Cassinelli“, esta vez proposta por um deputado do partido de Berlusconi. Analise do impacto desta proposta aqui. Os tempos dessa proposta são muito suspeitos.

As almost everyone during these months of economical crisis, I’m being brain-washed by some common-thinking statements as: a stagnating GDP is bad, a strong program to stimulate consumption is needed, economy is more important than environment and so on.

But at the end, why should I be worried if during the next years less cars are sold, less cigarettes are smoked, less money is spent in unnecessary goods? Why should I be worried if the humanity starts using energy, food, resources more efficiently?

I believe that the 50K-US$-per-head-GDP that most of the developed countries show hides a big bubble of unnecessary consumption, stupid inefficiencies and dumb destruction of our environment. It would be nice to start converting this GDP in something more intelligent, more decent, more human. How? Promoting knowledge & learning instead of consumption of frivolous goods, subsidizing green energy and green technologies, charging with even more taxes unhealthy businesses as weapons production, tobacco, alcohol, luxury goods / services, polluting technologies (including inefficient cars) etc.

Is this so visionary? I hope not.

Dave Pollard is really an original writer. I don’t like his catastrophic views, but i do like many things he writes, particularly re: himself and his inner life. Dave builds up structures, and exactly this makes his posts so interesting. For instance, he has developed a list of actions he considers key for a balanced and happy life:

It’s difficult to do all these things well and continuously, isn’t it?

To me it’s natural to question, understand, offer, collaborate, but it’s more difficult to imagine and to self-control, and completely unnatural to sense. It’s something is costs me a lot. I will try harder!

Faz algumas semanas estou lendo o blog de Caetano Veloso. Singular este blog, escrito em letra pequena e com textos que nunca acabam. Parece escrito para nao sere lido, mas e’ muito interesante. E’ como uma corrente de pensamentos, thoughts-stream (fala serio!). Aqui o link.

http://www.obraemprogresso.com.br/

Este Caetano …

Just found, through this post of BJ Epstein, an old post on NYT, about how many languages will die in this century. Many, but not as much as I imagined.

“SOME 6,500 languages spoken in the world today. And, according to the 2000 census, you can hear at least 92 of them on the streets of New York. You can probably hear more; the census lumps some of them together simply as “other.”

Here the link

Just met online Mark Griffith and found this very interesting web-site where the future of languages is the central issue of the author. Here the key point raised by Mark:

“Linguistic minorities are communities of ordinary people whose native tongue is not their country’s main official language. Swedish speakers in Finland, French speakers in Canada, Hungarian speakers in Slovakia – and hundreds more – are linguistic minorities. Thousands of unique language communities are becoming extinct. Out of the world’s five to six thousand languages, we hardly know what we’re losing, what literatures, philosophies, ways of thinking, are disappearing right now. So?

We may soon regret the extinction of thousands of entire linguistic cultures even more than we regret the needless extinction of many animals and plants. The planet is increasingly dominated by a handful of major-language monocultures like Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, Arabic, Indonesian, Urdu, Spanish, Portuguese, English, Swahili, Russian, Cantonese Chinese, Japanese, Bengali – all beautiful and fascinating languages. But so are the 5,000 others!”

And here the link: http://www.otherlanguages.org/

In this post, Martin Varsavsky, himself a Jewish, points out an evidence that’s rarely debated: why Jews are over-represented among successful people in almost all societies where they were allowed to live and prosper.

I´m not a Jew, but very attracted by Jewish culture and very curious to understand which are the reasons of Jewish unquestionable success in modern society.

To me, there is no one single reason, it´s a combination. If I should mention three factors, I would say: education, globalization and identity preservation.

About education, this was already pointed out many times.

About globalization, this is a direct consequence of diaspora. In a globalized world, the pain of being persecuted transformed itself in a clear advantage. Jewish families started becoming global hundreds of years before Italian or German families did it. And being global is a key advantage to trade, to make money and then to educate at best the next generation.

About identity preservation, this is something that is unique to Jews. Italians migrated to the Americas and in one or two generations became 100% Brazilians, Argentinians and US citizens. They “melt” into the new country. Not the same for Jews. Today a successfull Italian in Italy can´t connect with successfull sons and daugthers of Italian immigrants in the Americas (and there are many), cause they lost a common language and a common culture.

Jews are the only people who were globally spread apart but then continued to maintain a strong cross-country single identity. Together with the emphasis on education, that is proper of the Jews culture, this makes the equation.