The Sebastian

Warren Buffett has announced a few days ago his decision donating 10 million Berkshire Hathaway class B shares to the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, 350,000 class B shares to The Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, and yet another 350,000 class B shares to each of his sons foundations. Here are Warren's lovely letters to each of them describing the transaction mechanics and details.

I have always had a deep admiration for Warren. His famous yearly letters to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders have made history teaching generations on economics and investing. Warren had mentioned his plans to donate most of his fortune long time ago, but this makes it concrete today and in a way he could only do it (you should read the mechanics from the letters!). After this new event, Warren is not just someone I profoundly admire, but my guide and hero. He's made the world such a better place! And he has worked so hard all his life to achieve this. This is such a gift to humanity.

Just imagine how many lives this can save. Imagine how this helps eradicating diseases and other inequities in underdeveloped economies. This change is a historic one, and has inspired me so much. And I believe this inspiration will stay there for the rest of my life. I have bought and read four different newspapers publishing articles on it, just to collect them and remind myself on the true meaning of life whenever needed.

Also, all the implementation details about his decision are plain wonderful. The altruism behind it, the mechanics, the fact of donating so much to someone else's foundation, the timing, the impact, its all perfect. BTW, Berkshire Hathaway shareholders should also feel great! This helps me understanding why we are here and how we can make the world a better place. How we can make the world remind us for what we have given.

It seems I'm not the only one inspired by his decision. Jackie Chan has also announced he was inspired by Warren and will be donating half his fortune to charity as well. I truly hope there will be plenty of other wealthy individuals and organizations to follow. Younger fellows like me will also hopefully get inspired and live accordingly. Having a meaningful conversation on this with a very close, good friend of mine, he quoted a philosopher saying something like "if a man does not find a reason he would give his life for, then he probably wont find a good reason to live either" (sorry, the reference and exact quote is missing ... please e-mail me if you have it). He also noted the correlation with a somehow more general species' preservation idea.

For an ending, I really think this will motivate me to work harder and smarter each single day of my life so that I can better help others and make a difference. Of course, I would never dare to compare myself with a genius like Warren, but I will surely make the best I can out of it. If we all do, our world can be such a better place to live. Generosity, uninterested giving is such a pleasure... Wouldn't you agree?

Here goes the second part of this series. On the first part I wrote about Why you should be blogging. Now I would like to write about the What:

Failure to plan is planning for failure. What do you want to achieve? You should:

1. Define your objective and mission. What do you want from your blog? What is your ultimate goal and reason why you want to blog? Think about the values behind it, they will go a long way if you follow them (e.g. "to share my knowledge in ...").

2. Following your objective, write down a few short and long term goals. You want them to be SMART:

a) Specific: "I want to grow my business" is not a good goal statement. Choose instead something like "I want to increase my sales by 20% as a result of new leads coming exclusively from my blog in the first six months".

b) Measurable: Achieve 1000 unique visits a day on my third month blogging. Get 10 new leads in the first six months.

c) Attainable: I said 1000 unique visitors, not 1M. Write at least three articles a week, not thirty.

d) Realistic: Research what is a realistic goal by looking into other similar initiatives. What are they achieving? Contact them and ask them questions. What's the worst that can happen?

e) Tangible: You want to have feedback, grow your network and connect with new people. Get more business, etc. Is the press talking about your articles and ideas?

OK, so now you know why you want to blog and what you want to achieve with your new blog. The next question should be:

3. What am I going to write about? What will my content be? Unless you are already well known, writing a few articles about very diverse topics wont help you much. You want to focus in a few (may be three or four to start with) different but somehow related topics. A few unrelated articles from time to time are OK though. Think about these topics as the different categories you will use to classify your articles in your blog. These categories should keep your blog organized and help your readers easily find the articles they may be interested in. You can also later use these categories to tag your articles. Think about your passions. Writing about them will keep you motivated.

Write down 10 to 15 keywords and their relationship with your topics (e.g. golf is a good keyword for your sports category). These keywords will later help you with your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) activities.

That concludes part two. I hope you will find this post interesting and that you'll share it with your like-minded friends. Part three will deal with the Who (your intended audience).

Microsoft has released this Mon 19th their new Windows Live Messenger after a few weeks of beta testing. This marks an important line with their first Live product being released (BTW, Vista is still in Beta2). Here is the features overview and here is TechCrunch's post about it.

At this point in time, Yahoo Messenger with Voice version 8 is still in beta. It provides an extension mechanism through plug-ins, which can be downloaded from this gallery and developed by third parties using the publicly available Software Development Kit. Here is TechCrunch's post.

The way I read it, it seems Microsoft is going for a somehow business-orientated, closed and tightly controlled environment where users can easily share their data, files, contacts and content between the different "Live" applications, with the kick of having a centralized and up-to-date information repository. It seems though, users will probably need to use a good part of their Live products and services set in order to really benefit from the experience.

Yahoo, on the contrary, seems to be betting on a more entertainment-orientated, open, fun and friendly environment where users can customize the behavior of their applications (and therefore the way they share content and interact with each other) and add more functionality into the messenger application itself (as opposite to having several different applications sharing data from a unique repository).

Oh, and yes, Yahoo is also getting more serious about VoIP promoting their cheap PC to phone calls. This puts them in direct competition with Ebay's Skype, which has also been adding very cool new features as SkypeCasts, video support and more. Google talk seems to be slowly kicking in too, may be differentiating itself for its recognizable simplicity.

All this seems reasonable given the positioning of each of these companies. What's your pick?

Borges is one of my favorite writers. In "Las Ruinas Circulares" (one of the stories from his famous book "El Jardín de Senderos que se bifurcan") he wrote:

"...No ser un hombre, ser la proyección del sueño de otro hombre ...", later "...A todo padre le interesan los hijos que ha proceado..." and wrapped up with "...Con alivio, con humillación, con terror, comprendió que él también era una apariencia, que otro estaba soñándolo."

Altough I am definetively not an expert in analyzing Borges' writing, one of the reasons I like his writing so much is that I just love the way he uses topics such as dreams, labyrinths, paths, men, circular references, symbols and some others to correlate with mathematical artifacts and with a fantasy world that so closely resembles the "real" universe. Some of those mathematical artifacts are the chaos theory, graphs, trees, set theory and the infinite.

Today, someone coming from http://ged.livejournal.com/friends has visited this blog. That page links to my previous post on Austin Ventures buing two online customer feedback startups. Looking closer, it says the user who posted that was technorati2987. From technorati2987's page:

"The following are the titles of recent articles syndicated from Technorati Search for: http://www.perseus.comSearch Technorati...."

So we can see that this last page is automatically collecting the links containing "www.perseus.com" from Technorati. The first one is also automatically collecting posts from technorati2987's feed, and from some other sources as well. That was aparently a tree structure. But not any more. It is now a graph since I've just linked back to them as well.

So I am now talking about the web. Yes, the web can be understood as a gigantic graph. That's not my message. My point is, the underlying structures that rule our world can be (easily) modeled. Once modeled, they can be further studied and more deeply understood. That can then bring some light back on why some things are the way they are in the "real" world. The way to model and explore this structures is not limited to mathematics or natural sciences. Borges created his own theory, his own way.

Borges was also writing about the web. Not the same one, but one that worked on a very similar fashion. Which possibly makes it, at the end, the same one. He was also referring to, at the same time, humanity and social networks. I just wanted to point out that, regardless the technology we use, regardless the concrete problem or ideas we are analyzing, it is often the underlying structure that is interesting to understand and explore so that it will shed light into understanding how things work and why they work the way they do. Again, understanding and describing how the structure works can be done through, for example, arts and science.

Have a look at websites as graph for another creative example (by the way this post is from the author of onethousandpictures.com. Seth Godin has posted about it too). At some point, I will probably talk about viral marketing in this blog. Understanding how a network or graph works is the key to understanding social networks and viral marketing.

In Argentina, we say "el mundo es un pañuelo". Well, I believe the web is one too. Now... this will be a hard to classify post. Is it Marketing, or Technology? ...

The Austin American-Statesman published today on their Tech Monday section a small article mentioning the adquisition of Perseus Development Corp. and WebSurveyor Corp. by Austin Ventures.

Both companies are now listed at the Austin Ventures' Information Services page under Growth Equity portfolio. They will be combined and led by Dean Wiltse, former CEO of Greenfield Online. GreenField Online has MSD Capital as one of their investors.