Martín Varsavsky invests in Menéame

In a recent speaking gig in Spain, i had the pleasure to meet Ricardo Galli, an Argentinian, now living in Mallorca (Spain), who is the founder of Menéame, a website which is often described to me as "the Spanish Digg clone", but is also an open source platform where other communities can create their own little "Digg clones".

Menéame (which roughly translates to "shake me") has been a FeedBurner publisher for some time, and also a member of FeedBurner Ad Network in our Spanish language targeted ad channel. Early on they created a "send to Meneame" FeedFlare that can be found in such publications as Alt1040 and Xataka, and they publish that about 0.1% of their traffic comes from this FeedFlare. That may seem like a small number, but there are certainly secondary effects of this traffic that starts to snoball over time.

But there's a couple other things that interest me about Menéame - the first being the point above about it also being an open source platform.

There's as the time of this writing, 145 installations of this platform, in many different languages - most of which can be found here. There's all sorts of micro-communties forming here around this "Digg-like" software, which I think is pretty neat. At any rate, that type of takeup of a platform is pretty interesting.

The second thing is from their stats page, which shows traffic by country. That's a pretty large percentage of their traffic that is coming from the United States. This begins to show you how the Latin American population in the U.S. absolutely is involved in social media, and becomes a distinct segment in which to market.