I read today that 80,000 blogs are created every day (Financial Times, Sunday 6 November edition). I wonder how many are written at 34,000 feet over the Pacific Ocean! Yours truly is posting from on high flying an ANA 777 using Boeing's new connexion service. Needless to say the service is flawless. I was able to connect in a few seconds and the speed is at 11 megabites a second.

Getting back to the FT, there was a terrific article by Nasrin Alavi entitled "Iran's Blogosphere Pulses With Anti-Establishment Feeling." Alavi states that Iran produces 75,000 Blogs and Farsi is the fourth most popular language for Blogs. Another fact: In 2003 Iran became the first country to imprison somebody for the content of a Blog.

Here are a few of the protest Blogs mentioned (I hope you can read Farsi?): atash3.blogspot.com and myownsromm.blogspot.com. Alavi points out that efforts by the Iranian government to shut down Blogs is failing --- just another case of how the Internet cannot be stopped.

A 14 hour flight allows for lots of thinking and reading. I just finished about 7 hours of newspaper reading. Google is the one topic that appears over and over again. Googlemania is everywhere. The New York Times had a front page story about how even Wal-Mart is terrified of Google. The Times also had an article by James Fallows that was supposedly about Yahoo, but the gist of the article is that everything that Yahoo does is directed at stopping Google. I must confess that I did read a Golf magazine and found no mention of Google -- quite a relief.

My next post will be from Tokyo and then Sydney. Amazing how one can move around! I will be back in New York City on Friday.