Santiago Bilinkis l Risk and Reward - Trying to live a life out of the comfort zone

For me, one of the most entertaining things about having a blog is looking at the ridiculous “keywords” that people enter into the search engine to arrive to the site. We won’t look at all of them (this blog for example has more than 13,000 different ones) but we will check out some of the most entertaining with the following.

For all of you that have blogs, I invite you to share the funniest “keywords” that you can remember….

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I am sure you didn’t realize but this has been the most prolonged interruption in the history of this blog. Six days without posting! And now a trip to Spain is coming up to be in La Red Innova and the Menorca Techtalk, because of that I am going to continue on a slower pace, it seems…

A little because of excessive work and travel, and a little because of the flu (the old and dear “seasonal flu”!), a little for blogging wear out. The matter is that I have been kind of unmotivated to write. The first Saturday of this month was a long one for me and when I thought about what I was going to start writing about again, music came to my rescue.

When the mood hits us, when “shit happens“, music is ideal to put things in perspective for us. Years ago, there was a song “Don’t worry: be happy” that was synonymous for not worrying too much about things. I never liked that. It seemed dumb to me. But here I will share with you a song I listen to when I need to get out of a bad mood.

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After Yesterday’s Top 20 Songs (with links to listen to the best ones), in this second part of the year end Bilinkis chart, my top 10 bands for the year. I still cannot believe an Argentine band can be on top. If you asked me at the beginning of the year the chance of that happening I would have said: “Zilch!”. And here we are…

The same as Yesterday, I invite the readers to share what was THE band of 2008 for each of you…

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I say good bye to 2008 with a special edition of the Bilinkis Top 20 for the full year. Tomorrow my top 10 bands… But today, here they are, the Top 20 songs I listened to the most in ‘08.

I invite the readers to share what THE song of 2008 was for each of you…

At the top of the chart, the same band that was number 1 in 2006 with “Truth”, although at that time I did not have a blog so no one know what that it. Great song!

The rest of the Top 5 with a lot of slow music to my own surprise (my ranking is based on what I listen and sometimes I am myself surprised with what I listen!)… It seems my soft side emerged this year. I included links so you can listen to the best songs. Enjoy!

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In this new 2.0 World there are countless sources of information on almost everything. If, for example, you want to decide which movie to see this weekend, Google offers thousands of different sites where you can gather info to make up your mind: newspapers, specialized sites, social networks on cinema, blogs, etc. Which ones are you going to read? Whose opinion will you trust to make your decision?

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The use of the Web 2.0 opens new doors as it gives us the chance to meet a lot of unknown people. For a phobic like me, this is enough to crisp my hair.

Getting acquainted with strangers is not an easy task for me. For instance, I would never chat with someone I don’t know. But, you know what? In my 2.0 life I was twice surprised by this subject.

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How private is your privacy today?

The fact that there is no danger in adopting 2.0 tools does not mean they are free from generating some serious challenges for our privacy. But, let me tell all those who wouldn’t show their photos or share their stuff, the following: our World today is such that it doesn’t matter whether we want to have our stuff online or not, it will be there anyway! More so, unless you live in a nutshell, mostly sure they are already in it. If you didn’t put your data there, a friend of yours did. Or, even worse, an enemy!

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Recently, I gave two conferences at Wordcamp and Buenos Aires 2.0 offering some of my ideas concerning social networks and the Web 2.0. In this post and in a few more to come I will try to share with you the main points I made there. First, a question: Is the use of social networks dangerous?

We frequently hear from those who are reluctant to the use of web 2.0 tools that they do not do so because they find them dangerous. Don’t upload your pictures to Flickr!, they say. Don’t publicize your activities on Facebook, Twitter or Friendfeed! -they add- as someone might use that information to harm you or even kidnap you!

In my opinion, this argument is senseless. At least in Argentina, where the probability of dying in a car crash is MUCH HIGHER than the chance to be kidnapped, let alone die as a result of a kidnapping. We all know that, yet nobody gives up using cars.

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While I hear little classical music in my post monthly on music this month I want to tell two stories beautiful and interesting in this regard.

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A few weeks ago I was at a meeting of the Advisory Council of Prosperar, the National Investment Agency of Argentina. There, Alec Oxenford mentioned something that truly concerns me: He said that in a speech a few days ago he asked the audience who was their most admired businessperson. And everyone in the audience looked at him as if he was crazy. And that, after thinking for while, the only answer they could think of was Marcelo Tinelli.

You may like better Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. Larry Ellison or Jack Welch. Sergey Brin and Larry Page or Jerry Yang and David Filo. But what there is no doubt about is that in cultures such as the U.S., among the most admired people there are many entrepreneurs. In Argentina being a businessman is a stigma.

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