Ya era hora / it was about time...

The article count in the spanish wikipedia recently surprassed the "svenska" (swedish/sueco) version. That shouldn't come as a surprise... there's an estimated population of 9.8M swedish-speaking people on the planet (compared to roughly 0.5 billion in a very conservative estimate for spanish).

At some point spanish should take a more respectful place in the top 10 list. This move barely took it to language #9, and with the obvious expectation that chinese should enter that top 10 languages list, heading brutally fast into #1, things should remain almost unchanged for spanish... I'd count with spanish surpassing easily (in the near future) the article count of the wikipedias in portuguese, italian , polish, dutch.. and time will tell if it really has a shot vs japanese, french and german.

If anything it was surprising how far 10M people went (or the thirdy thousand contributors to the wikipedia or that language)... against the 385k contributors of the spanish version.

And there's an encouraging aspect there, if we are to approach it with a "half empty" view.. the spanish wikipedia has a lot of headroom to grow, if latins were to improve on education, and web particulation... passing the "hurdle" of the submissive behavior entrenched culturally and becoming more active, more opinionated.

Yet another healthy exponential

Many companies seem to be around trying to capitalize on the Second Life phenomena. Some of them with healthy investments.. some of them with opportunistic PR attempts.

May be they are counting with this curve keeping an exponential behavior going forward. Have a look (source: wikipedia's entry on second life).

Growing at a healthy 1M new accounts/month (or 25%/month), any type of sustainable business proposition in such a growing pond should have guaranteed growth.. nice!

Blowing up expectations...

Two good examples this morning on how great companies (and great brands) delight their customers/stakeholders blowing out expectations:

1. I just got an email from amazon introducing endless.com, a new way to shop from Amazon.. if not only offers overnight shipping included with the order, but it has a NEGATIVE $5 price for that shipping (limited time promotion, of course). Amazon shines on a great customer experience, but this one was beyond what I expected

2. On a more financial front, Apple numbers went out yesterday. They got their investors used to take their financial guidance as conservative, but this time when analyst expectations were on the mid 50s (cents per share) of earnings, they delivered an amazing 87 cents per share, up 88% YoY, but way above expectations. The flipside is that nobody will believe their guidance going on... it is too conservative.

The "brecha" is 18k and decreasing... but why is there a gap in the first place?

I've been struggling to explain to myself why there are less articles in the spanish wikipedia than the portuguese wikipedia (225.7k vs 253k on today's numbers).

I do respect quite a lot the communicative style that brazilians have.. and i've witnessed them adopt quite rapidly technologies that get people together like cell phones, and having even faster adoption of community-oriented technologies (like Orkut, blogging, and even flickering to some extent).

But the sheer mass of the spanish-speaking population seems to justify a larger article count in spanish. The role that portugal plays on the portuguese-speaking wikipedia seems quite big, but Spain should have an equivalent role in the spanish-speaking wikipedia.

And there's more: the geographic fragmentation of the spanish-speaking Americas should if anything drive more articles, so how come portuguese is still on top?

I will probably keep wondering that. But judging from the trends over the last couple of months, where the difference in article count seems to be decreasing by ~300 articles a day, probably some time in late june/early july we'll see a crossover.

I gotta confess though that I keep service both as much as I can, with small edits and new article aditions.. but a single individual is a drop in the ocean on these "constructions of cathedrals" as the open-source nerds put it.

How can they be that fast?

there are a couple of areas where Flickr's speed (seems to me) is just amazing, and wanted to share those:

Last night I wanted to upgrade to a Pro account, but ended up relying of friend to pay for the upgrade via PayPal... and I was talking with him over Skype at the same time. I felt just shocked to see the "Pro" logo on my account withing seconds (and I mean it, low single digit number of seconds)... that was amazingly fast payment processing. So fast that even a cash payment seems soooo slow.

And then today I finally bother to go start correcting typos or basic spanish or portuguese localizations.. and those are also amazingly easy and fast to get done. I don't know if it's AJAX.. but that makes pretty much every other web service I used seem as efficient as a bureaucratic government office on a banana republic.

Dinosaurs in São Paulo...

There a popular equation in marketing. It says that "customer satisfaction EQUALS experience MINUS expectation".

After receiving one comment* on my previous post (Buenos Aires Zoo promotional billboards) about how good the SP zoo is, and replying to that comment with a "hmpff... i've been there, I liked it, but I gotta give it to Buenos Aires, theirs is better, at least for me", I wanted to give another chance to places of public interest in São Paulo... so we went to the São Paulo Aquarium on saturday afternoon.

Getting there from the south zone isn't that easy, but can be done in slightly less than one hour. The Aquarium+Planetarium is located on the Ipiranga neighborhood, more specificly on the 407 of the Rua Huet Bacelar.

The external aspect and surroundings didn't do much for raising my expectations.. and a planet-earth shaped revolving door welcoming visitors didn't help much... But boy, I was surprised. The highlights to me where the real bones of a whale maxilar, the stones with fossil fish from several species, and the dinosaur bones. They did a VERY NICE job in that dinosaur section.

The fish portion is nice, or just OK, and the 3D movie is quite basic... but that dinosaur section saved the day. If you happen to have a chance, go visit the Aquarium


*- the comment came offline. it is still appreciated as feedback-is-a-gift, on any form.. but it still puzzles me how people end up taking the harder road of writing an e-mail when posting a comment is much easier

brazil at crossroads? halfwaybetween fecundity and frustration.... halfway between progress and inertia...

I typically end up changing once a decade my favorite magazine. When I was in my low 20s it was Wired Magazine, and in my early 30s it is The Economist. On their edition this week they have an article I loved about Brazil called "Land of Promise".

I moved to live in Brazil on mid '02 and a couple of fine books on Brazil landed on my hands, the first one was called "Brazil, the once and future country", and the other was "Brazil's second chance". Those formed key opinions about the tremendous opportunities and big challenges that the country faces. The first book starts brilliantly quoting an anonymous brazilian saying that goes like this: "Brazil is the country of the future", and will always be. The other painted an almost-there state (didn't forecast the big mess created by the '02 election process).

Several years living in Brazil exposed me further to those contradictions between shiny potential and frustrating lack of progress, but I have to give to The Economist.. they "get it" this time in their article. Hopefully the way to its great future state ends up being less patchy than the rollercoaster history of the country.

A nice invite to coming to the zoo... with your kids

I still remember a marketing consultant stating that it should be a crime to put kids and animals in the same TV Ad (among other things, because it is so brutally effective in the way it shakes our hearts and moving us to action).. that's something the consultant said about Parmalat's use of kids wearing animal customs and drinking milk.

That memory came back to me recently in Buenos Aires when looking at this billboard inviting kids to come to the zoo. I think it hits many key points:

- it capitalizes on the children's pester power to get what should be a family experience. I can hear "pa!.. sshheevame al zoologico!!" many times over
- it dismantles the potential fear of large animals.. inserting the angle of "every the fearless bear gets born as a harmless little baby bear"
- it capitalizes on every kids anxiety for becoming and adult, feeding it with the admiration of the big powerful animals and their little baby versions that human babies can identify with

and of top of that, the afternoon I spent once with my family at the Buenos Aires Zoo itself is one of nices afternoons I had.. it is certainly an experience that I would recommend.

a subtle way of exploiting the competitive nature of men?

Many stories have been told about how competitive men are, and that probably drivers some nutty behavior in sports, racing, etc. and I found recently how somebody was taking advantage of that behavior for good.

have a look, I took this picture recently in a urinal in Buenos Aires.

Didn't spent any time checking.. but I picture even drunk guys trying to hit the bulleye ;-)

I knew italians were talkative.. but c'mon...

David Sifry has made an art out of publishing every trimester his now famous "State of the Blogosphere", and he just published yesterday the latest one (somewhat more ambitious it is called now the "State of the Live Web".

That is to me one of the top 2 nice places to just swim in graphic analysis of data (together with Google's Zeitgest, of course), but this time I got somewhat shocked by one of those statistics. have a look.

Now people are posting more in italian language that in spanish. how can that be?

I know people of italian origin in general are quite talkative, to the point of being to do it without their mouth [hint: look at their hands]... but how can ~60 somewhat million italian speaking people express themselves blogging more than ~300M+ million spanish-speaking people... even taking into account per-capita-GDP differences, i just don't get it. any ideas?