The following is a preview to the forthcoming book – The Spanish Net: How to reach and segment the 136 million Spanish-speakers online – from Paramount Books.
How can we develop great content online for the Spanish-language world in the years ahead? Much like the Madrid-based blog networks in my previous post, we can answer this question by looking to one of the leaders of publishing in Spain: Gumersindo Lafuente, who founded SoiTu.es, a truly innovative content portal, previously ran the newspaper site ElMundo.es and as of January, 2010 became a co-director of ElPais.com.
Mr. Lafuente feels that news organizations must do a better job of integrating information and technology to figure out new ways to distribute and consume content. This is why he hired programmers to work in-house to develop SoiTu’s own back-end systems including their content management system, ad server, and UTOI, a Twitter-for-journalists that could scan text, suggest tags and create a better way to organize journalistic information. From the readers’ perspective, SoiTu offered search tools by keyword, theme and date and fully integrated social media style commenting, encouraging users to register on the site.
Here, you can see SoiTu’s weather, lottery, soccer and skiing widgets that they developed for consumers to use in iGoogle, Apple’s dashboard, on blogs or wherever you want to include the code. (However great RSS is, Mr. Lafuente admits that the vast majority of users don’t set up a custom RSS page on Google Reader.)
This past April I visited my friends Antonella, Mauricio and their daughter Isabel in Barcelona. We had a tremendous time together. I filmed the train ride along the seashore as I approached Barcelona from Tarragona, about an hour to the south. Enjoy the sunshine and palm trees….
Lots of insights coming out about blogging this week. Most notably, Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere report came out. More on that in an upcoming post….
My friend David Berkowitz at 360i wrote two excellent articles this week:
1) Blog search stuck in Beta on MediaPost about how to improve blog search engines
2) Blog Startups and Superstars on his blog – MarketersStudio.com – about notable blogging companies that he met at Blog World Expo. I am hoping to try out Lijit and Zemanta soon.
Last weekend, April 25 and 26, I spoke at the University of Oviedo at a new MBA program in communications and new technologies. During the coffee break on Saturday, I learned something very interesting from Elena, Alfonso, and Igancio, three students from the program. The government of Asturias (one of the states on the Northern coast of Spain) gives 500 Euros to every person between the ages of 18 and 35 as a means of providing them with an educational tool. This includes 350 Euros for the computer and 150 Euros for Internet access. You can read about it here in Spanish on one of the local newspaper sites. Compare this with Mexico and you will see something completely different. Mexico essentially has a system of double taxation where it taxes manufactures, like Dell, when computer parts are made in Mexico. Then it taxes consumers when they buy the computer. The resulting prices, of course, are devastating for computer buyers. Compare the prices on Dell’s US and Mexican web sites. Search for a Dell Inspiron 1525 Notebook on Dell.com.mx and the starting price is $6,999 Pesos (or approximately $636 USD). Then, go over to Dell’s US site, Dell.com, and you will find the same model for $499 USD, or $236 fewer dollars. Which country will have a better educated work force in 10 years?
My friend Fernando Bravo at Grupo Editorial Expansion introduced me to the folks at Quo España via email, so I stopped by for a visit. Interesting to hear about what they are doing compared to what Quo Mexico is doing. Our web sites are especially different. Quo Mexico’s site hasn’t been redesigned in a while. Quo España’s site is currently part of France Telecom’s network – Orange – although they indicated that they may take it back and build up a business on their own. Here is a photo of Jacobo Delgado, the design director of Quo España…
