Social Networking Blog

It's one of the most impressive conferences I have ever been to. I am talking about Craig Newmark's talk about Craigslist during Kinnernet. Newmark is a real geek, a guy who loves what he does, even if he could get rich very fast. He does not code any more, but he keeps talking to his users. "The way we deal with our users is what makes us special", he explained.

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I just arrived from Israel, where I could live my second Kinnernet experience. Just Amazing! I learnt quite some things over there, which I want to share here. First of all, I think that new developments on the Internet are stopping down. Why? Probably, the threatening crisis and the need to monetize everything, which is the new priority.

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Talking about Yahoo's 'Toblerone Operation', Martin Varsavsky, Fon's founder, says that Jerry Yang is an "insensitive person". "Once I met him and I was surprised to see him talking so badly about his employees, especially the ones from Yahoo Music. I kept this confidential, but after reading this on the Financial Times, I can not stop saying it", Varsavsky explains.
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Capital risk company Clave Mayor has invested 2 million euros in Spanish startup Red Karaoke, which plans to build a world social network for karaoke lovers. Red Karaoke was created one year ago by brothers (and friends of mine) Miguel and Ricardo Díez.

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One of the main dishes of the DLD conference was to see Anne Wojcicki, wife of Google cofounder Sergey Brin, presenting her new startup: 23 and me. Summarizing, this project is about giving you accesss to your DNA information in order to prevent you from any sicknesses which you have a higher probability of suffering. Besides, they are capable of telling you how similar you are to your grandparents or to your children.

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This was the main question of the VC panel. I specially liked Martin Varsavsky's and Morten Lund's remarks. Both think that big projects which are backed by debt will be in trouble, while small ones financed with equity will not suffer. The only but is that valuations will be affected, so it could not be the best moment to sell your startup.

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Blogging from DLD in Munich. The social networks panel was great, with all people (from Bebo, Facebook, Linkedin and Xing) basically saying the same thing: "We are building a platform, not a network". That is, they want to create the infrastructure (or the utility, according to Xing) so that software and content developers can add the local and personal flavour that is missing to them.

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As you know, we are using Digg as another ingredient of the algorithm of our world top blogs. We think it is one of the main tools to measure the influence of a blog, as it gives anybody the opportunity of voting particular articles. It is also very much related to current events. In fact, many of the most voted blogs in Digg during the last 30 days are political and current events blogs.

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Time to analyze what happened last week in Paris, where 2,000 people attended the largest European conference on Web 2.0, LeWeb3. We could all hear the word "social" everywhere, specially associated with network. Social networks are the new buzz words. Everything has to be social. At the same time, Google almost disappeared from the conference, though it was one of the main sponsors.

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I attended Stream 2007 last week in Athens. This is an unconference organized by WPP since this year. I organized one of the discussions (on measuring the blogosphere) in which we had a very interesting conversation about Technorati and other tools. I also went to other discussions on social networking. These are the most interesting remarks I could hear and my thoughts about Web 2.0 after attending this event:

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