ReadWriteWeb

It's being called the "Mexican SOPA," especially by press sources wanting to place highly with Google News. Last week, Mexican Senator Federico Döring announced an anti-piracy bill, which that country's justice ministry describes as establishing a notification service for suspected content pirates, one which would enable the authorities to obtain those suspects' identities.

That triggered a series of denial-of-service attacks against Mexican government Web sites, probably because Sen. Döring and President Felipe Calderón belong to the same political party (the center-right-wing National Action Party, or PAN). But taking responsibility for these attacks is "Anonymous," the same group that just a few months earlier announced they were suspending online activities in Mexico after one of its members was kidnapped, allegedly by the Los Zetas drug cartel. That cartel later claimed responsibility for hanging two people from a bridge, identifying them as bloggers reporting on cartel activities from social media Web sites.

The impression most people in the West have of the Arabic world, and the wider Muslim world, is sometimes crazy, sometimes reasonable, but always provisional. It's unavoidable that people only have time, and mental space, to understand so much about a culture not their own. But in this case, there is an aspect of Arab history that even many Arabs don't know. They invented agriculture.

To be more accurate, they moved farming from a folkway to a science; and they did it in Europe, or at least codified it there, in Al-Anadalus, Muslim Spain. Now, with the Filāḥa Texts Project, a group is using online collaboration to make these Andalucian writings on our common agricultural heritage accessible to everyone.

We at ReadWriteWeb believe that innovation is a global business (as we noted in an earlier post on the Global Innovation Graph). The "death of distance" - the notion that the Internet makes location irrelevant - may be an exaggeration. Face to face always matters, and that will happen where hubs of expertise and capital emerge. Silicon Valley will likely remain the uber-hub for a long time. But the Internet does dramatically make it possible for an entrepreneur to start from anywhere and assemble a dream team of experts, partners, and customers from anywhere else. Innovation is not just a Valley story or a US story: it is a global story. And we want to write more about this exciting story. In this post, we'll tell you a bit about how we are starting to do that.

Umair Haque is a smart guy. He studied neuroscience at McGill, did an MBA and econ/strategy research with Gary Hamel at London Business School, and began working towards a PhD in strategy and innovation at Oxford in 2004. He also founded Bubblegeneration, a consultancy that studies the economics of consumer-facing industries. Haque is now the Director of the Havas Media Lab, which advises entrepreneurs, investors, and firms with "craft, and drive radical management, business model, and strategic innovation." He also thinks Web 2.0 is full of crap.