This was written mostly on the plane back from Mexico City, during which I was reading The World is Flat and using it as a lens to reflect on all I had just experienced, but I wanted to wait until I got at least some of my Flickr pix up before posting.

On the one hand, this city has neighborhoods like Condesa, which is as close to Paris as I’ve experienced in norteamerica, with an urban fabric and economic texture that keeps neighborhoods teeming with the kinds of activities that would have made Jane Jacobs proud – cafes of all national flavors, streetcorner taco stands, shoeshine men, political grafitti, hole-in-the-wall farmacias¸ cab drivers who remember where your house is . . . and more recent additions like tapas bars, hipster hotels, and slick yoga joints. While wandering around, it was hard not to joke that it was the Silverlake of the DF – and even to make specific correlations between establishments in both bohemian outposts. But after consideration I think it compares pretty favorably. Beyond that particular colonia (district), Mexico City is enriched with grand colonial cathedrals and civic architecture, great public parks, dozens of museums featuring international class art, architecture, and archeology, a rich, poly-colonial history, fantastic street life, Aztec architecture, and phenomenal food.

On the other hand, the same shoeshine men have chairs sponsored by Fortune 1000 multinational companies, people buy their sushi at the Superama, and the whole neighborhood is ringed by more nakedly commercial streets with big-box retailers where actual middle-class residents of the city presumably buy their unmentionables. While we didn’t look closely at home prices and rents, it is clear they are going up (a subsequent peek at Craigslist Mexico City confirms this), and the inevitable gentrification is not just making life pleasant for the flaneur, but also showing the back of its hand to longtime residents and via omnipresent rehab sites, swarming laborers, and new construction signs featuring words like “LOFT” – just as it has in Silverlake, Park Slope, Williamsburg, Capital Hill DC, and so many other neighborhoods around the U.S.

It’s the “swarming laborer” part that is one of the most intriguing – and concerning – aspects of the city. Everywhere we went there were domestic workers, and based on the hourly wages implied by the cost of street services from taxis and tacos, there is clearly no shortage of available employees for any given would-be jefe. This makes life great for the tourist – even those who pay the substantial markups these services go for when procured by the international hotels (something we mostly managed to avoid). As when I went to Africa, there seems to be significant human capital here, in a well-enough organized economy, with plenty of opportunity to add to local services or bring new ideas into play. The entrepreneur in me thinks this would be a great place to start a business. . . . many businesses.

But I can’t help thinking Mexico City is an also unwittingly soft target for modern business practices and international ideas. Primitive mural advertising will inevitably give way to conglomerate controlled outdoor media, and the local authorities will fall into line to police this. At some point, it will become intolerable to find prescription medications in suspicious packaging for half off at the corner store. As international entrepreneurs arrive, the shoeshine men will soon follow this Giuliani effect. The big boxes will be the only place “real” people can afford to shop. Eventually, only the rich will be able to afford the good neighborhoods, and – just as in Paris – the middle-class will follow the working-class and the shiftless to the perimeters. Also as for Paris, this will work wonders to attract tourism, given a sub-four-hour flight from LA and a Euro that’s crushing the dollar. (The reason for my trip was a wedding between a New York-based part hindu, part west Indian, Spanish-speaking investment banker and his native wife, and was attended by a veritable united nations of international guests.)

If the bureaucrats typical of state tourism industries realize their dreams, this will become a self-perpetuating cycle. Bringing the cost of real estate up to the point that only the Starbucks’ and McDonalds’ of the world (who are already arriving) can buy their way in.

OK, so this prognostication is undoubtedly an oversimplification. This is, after all, a city whose municipal plumbing leaks 37% of the water that passes through it even as it depletes the aquifer that supports it. It’s hard to imagine any single, monolithic effects from progress (other than the city exceeding its own ability to supply its citizens with essential resources and process its pollution and trash, much as its ancient forbears did). A venture outside the elite neighborhoods brings the unavoidable sight of windowless cinder-block shanties topped by standard-issue PVC water tanks and unfinished rebar sprawling toward the horizons.

(I have to interrupt this parenthetically to note that, as I wrote this, the post-roll from the in-flight screening of Shrek II is currently alternating between images of the ruins & pyramids of Techuatenoc, India’s Taj Mahal, and a man so jowly and well-groomed, I could only assume he was a minister of tourism – a thought seconds later confirmed by a graphic.)

My point, to wrap it up, is that the human capital in Mexico City, fertile though it may be, is no match for China or India, who are turning out hundreds of thousands of engineers a year and steadily building on their various technology platforms, as well as the legal and bureaucratic infrastructure to support them. Forget about orchestrated modern education; this beautiful city can barely keep its lights on. And in this, it strikes me as similar to many countries around the world that will either have to learn to compete with modern economies, become tourism meccas, continue to mine their natural resources until they are depleted, or find some other means to thrive (art?). I suspect Mexico will fall back mainly to tourism — ironically enough banking on the U.S.’s failure to preserve its own wildlands and urban fabric.

I have high hopes for Mexico City and hope that many great chefs and service entrepreneurs will cut their teeth here and make things great for residents, visitors, and expats alike. I know Amy and I enjoyed ourselves thoroughly, if unexpectedly, and certainly plan to return. It is hard to imagine, though, in the long run, that these things will outweigh the forces of globalization enough to last very long.

I haven’t yet posted about the new Wesabe API, but I’m very excited about it.

Aside from enabling 3rd-party developers to build apps that can help users manage their financial data and get on top of their financial lives (think of a SaaS version of Quicken mashed with all manner of GTD apps), there’s a major shift going on here. Banks and credit agencies are no longer the (only) owners of all the data about us - now we own it too, and have the right to pool it with other users’ data to do interesting things with aggregated data from the community.

MyBlogLog flipped a similar switch by giving users benefits from analytics that have historically been publisher only - now you can’t see my history, and I can’t see yours, but when we’re in the same place, we can see each other’s tracks if we both expose them; I can see what other people are doing at my favorite websites, etc.

Wesabe’s API enables similar opportunities for patrons of the same merchant to connect, and for patterns to be extracted in a way that creates value for all sides. I look forward to seeing what comes of it.

I’ve been brewing on a couple of threads over the past few days that I think come together in a complicated but interesting point. We’ll see.

First, I flew over the entire Baja peninsula on the way here. It is almost entirely devoid of anything other than desert life exept at a few very small points. On farms and construction sites, they drive water around in tank trucks, with the water splashing out of the valves. As I sit in a vertiable water-works of a resort without any clue how they get water down here, I am thinking this is not environmentally sustainable.

Second, I see a lot of Volkswagen Beetles on the road, still. As the owner of a ‘71 Ghia built on the Beetle platform (aka VW Type I), I came to the realization that VW Beetles are one of history’s finest examples of an open-source platform. Viz:

• a large number of cars in many varieties built on a common, simple platform
• wide availability of parts (original, refurbished, reproduction) without any that are “proprietary” to VW - you could literally build one from scratch using after-market parts and VW wouldn’t come after you
• a large number of mechanics who know how to work on VW’s
• a robust after-market modifications and add-ons trade (think Baja dune buggies, etc.)
• truly anyone can hack on one without specialized training - if you can build Ikea furniture, you can probably adjust the valves and carb on a VW

Third, I’m here with a bunch of fraternity brothers, a significant number of whom are investment bankers, analysts, or techies. It’s led to some interesting discussion points - among many others, that poverty in China is appalling beyond description; that “small hedge funds aren’t interesting anymore - the consolidation has already begun”; that autism rates are climbing dramatically, and well-educated and affluent people in the U.S. are afraid to trust the food they eat; that “it’s surprising and a little sad that none of us are doing much of anything creative.” (I like to think I’m doing something creative, but the point is well taken given the breadth and artistic creativity of the people we were in college.)

Fourth, I started reading Paul Graham’s (so-far excellent) Hackers & Painters, thinking about value creation and software.

What I’m building up to is a point that the problems of the world are becoming more and more severe, more inter-related across local geographies, increasingly cumulative, and more and more addressable only at an institutional level. The size that institutions need to be to be players is growing - and I personally believe that government is broken.

Small players and startups can take whacks at global-scale problems, and can certainly create value in doing so. But there is so much more leverage if they can slingshot their distribution off a platform. And certain kinds of problems are going to really benefit from the kinds of contributions only an open-source movement can make.

Specifically, I would love to see another generation of open-source vehicles, this time around with an environmentally friendly bent. There would be plenty of motive for this to come from a single source - after all, the VW Beetle was the longest and most produced single-design vehicle in history. But it seems to me the Who Killed the Electric Car? problem largely goes away in an open-source context. People who hack Priuses are on the right track, but we need something more accessible to laypeople, and more modular.

I would also love to see open-source variations on Kiva and KickStart - perhaps with a Cambrian House approach to development and distribution. If you can invent a better human-powered irrigation pump that can increase productivity in developing world rural farming, distribution should not be a barrier.

Finally, we all need to be thinking about the power of the institutions we work for, and how they can be better harnessed - or at leasted “opened” - to potentially powerful, world-changing uses. Because as a society, we’re not going to be able to fly to remote desert destinations and splash around in abundant water forever.

My friend Brad has launched a site, called Action for Everyone, dedicated to sharing small ways you can help causes incrementally. From the “About Us” page:

Whether it’s writing letters, clicking on banners, signing petitions or whatever, it all makes a difference. We believe in the power of individuals making a difference and furthermore, we believe that it doesn’t have to take a lot of effort.

There are also some features like Ripple and green hosting. As Ghandi said, “Almost everything you do will seem insignificant, but it is important that you do it.” So go do it!

Like a number of my friends and colleagues here, I re-initiated my Twitter account at SXSW (here’s my profile). Having dry-tested it a few months ago without getting the aha, I figured I’d take advantage of the momentum it seems to be picking up here to see if I could make it useful.

Despite the fact that I can’t seem to get it to actually send SMS updates to my phone (probably a blessing given the volume of posts going around among the harder-core users), I am finding it useful as a way to update multiple people I’m trying to coordinate with simultaneously. (Not to mention fun.)

At a party last night, talk turned to the question of whether mobile was finally happening, given that here were a bunch of mid-to-late-30’s-plus year olds using their cell phones like a bunch of high-school students. My answer, from the 3rd beer party of the night I’d converged on with multiple different but overlapping friend groups, where 80’s hits were playing and people were running around in fur hats and underwear? Only because we’re behaving like them in the physical world.

This is pretty fantastic - Amazon has put Mechanical Turk to work in the hope of finding lost computer scientist Jim Gray. Reviewing a few of the images looking for a 2×6 pixel boat among the swirling waves and clouds makes you realize what a daunting task is at hand - and is a very real reminder of the power of distributed social production when harnessed for good.

I urge you to lend a hand.

More details at the ‘Crunch.

I’m very excited about this morning’s announcement that Yahoo! has acquired MyBlogLog.

As a beta user of the reader roll and an instant fan of the analytics, I’ve been hooked on MyBlogLog since I started using it and immediately became an internal proponent of this deal, which has been a treat to watch move forward. I’ve also had the pleasure of getting to know the team really well - in fact, Eric Marcoullier and I first got in touch via the “welcome” email he sent, to my personal address, when I signed up. Congratulations Scott, Eric, Todd, John, Steve, and the rest of the MBL team - I’m delighted for you and look forward to working together at Yahoo!

The deal also afforded me a chance to watch some of Yahoo’s thought leaders in action - Chad, Bradley, and Jeremy were the key ones who made this happen, though I was delighted to see how many folks at Yahoo! got it so quickly and made the wheels turn so smoothly. There were other suitors for investment (and a veritable swarm of interest at the Web2.0 conference); even though this is an early-stage company, it’s great that Yahoo! collectively recognized how good a fit this is for our community and publisher services offerings and figured out a plan to preserve this burgeoning community while bringing it into the Yahoo! fold.

I’ve also had a front row seat watching the pros in our corporate development department do their thing. Fascinating - and a very interesting perspective on the value of startups and VC in corporate innovation.

There are a lot of reasons why I think this is cool for users and great for Yahoo! Among other things, it’s a nice little tool for distributed aggregation on the community front. (My more official post on the subject will appear over here shortly.) The MyBlogLog team seems pretty excited about it too; here’s their announcement.

UPDATE: Lots of additional coverage:

• Forbes CES blog
• GigaOM
• TechCrunch
• Yahoo! Developer Network Blog
• And plenty more. . .

This is fantastic - a local paper in Scotland is using a MySpace page to connect with its readers and aggregate hyper-local news.  I don’t think MySpace is ultimately the right content medium for this - it’s personal and connected in the right ways, but its culture is distinctly different from the kinds of real-news environments that hybrid models like the one I helped kick off at New West are developing.  Nonetheless, a nice little tidbit of validation that the social web is reinventing not just news and classifieds, but that unique space, local news.

I’ve been thinking a lot about organizational culture lately, given the reorg that Yahoo! has been going through. And I’ve been thinking how important underlying cultures and leaders-by-example are to building successful organizations.

But this line of thought took me on a tangent, as I caught a piece of the news this morning about Senator Tim Johnson (to whom I send my best wishes) — and the flurry of politics his misfortune has already and inevitably set off. And I realized that our politicians, as much as they like to blame the media and game industries for exposing our children to violence, are the true role models and culture stewards from whom we take our cues about public life. They are the leaders of our organizations (in that school boards report to them, etc.) and hold — collectively, anyway — the resources and authority to do great good or harm to our world.

And they’re doing a terrible job of creating a culture that encourages thoughtful debate, sincere collaboration, accountability, and success, instead rewarding insider politics and self-serving choices. (Okay, so I’ve been watching The Wire, too!)

How can good results ever emerge from that, and how can a system that rewards cynicism and punishes idealism ever be “built to last”?

Zillow announced a couple of very interesting new features this week that have drawn a lot of attention: the ability to “claim” your home and add user-generated content to it, and a feature called “make me move” that allows homeowners to put an “offer I can’t refuse” price on their home without actually putting it on the market. (One could reasonably argue that the action of publicly pricing one’s home, even irrationally, constitutes putting it on the market, but I daresay the oligopolistic realtors of the world would disagree. . . .)

Josh Kopelman has a post questioning whether Zillow, having raised $50+ million for a consumer play without a visible revenue stream other than advertising, is going to go “that big”, or is simply a rehash of an operatic tragedy we’ve seen before.

As I’ve written elsewhere (see comments), I can’t wait for the real estate market to tip, as though there is significant inertia in the current market structure, there is also significant inefficiency and frustration on the part of consumers. If marketplaces are simply places where buyers and sellers meet by arbitrary convention, I would argue that we are but one such convention away from eliminating realtors completely (much as craigslist has nearly wiped out local classifieds) — or at least from taking away a significant amount of their commission pricing power.

As Josh knows, arbitrary conventions can be created with new levels of efficiency by the internet — and the founder of Zillow has done this before. While I don’t see these new tools as a direct play to dis-intermediate realtors — yet — I do see it as a reasonable attempt to become the defacto spot for consumer-oriented real estate content and to build a lot of proprietary data and user lock-in. Kind of like a craiglist with better authentication tools and structured, incentivized UGC — and completely unlike previous attempts to create a virtual real estate market.

And if this is successful in garnering a critical mass of consumer participation, then it’s an easy step to turn it into the virtual trading post of choice, and even the “real real estate OS”, if you will, potentially enabling all kinds of things ranging from obvious mashups to a real-world Second Life universe.

This is a very big bet — with a very big prize if it pays off. Good luck guys - I look forward to a day when I can I don’t need to pay over $30,000 for someone to type my address into an MLS system, give me self-interested negotiating advice, and fill in the blanks of preformatted contracts for me.