The World Economic Forum (WEF), forum for global capitalists, politicians and the well-connected has held it's annual gabfest at Davos, Switzerland for the past 30 years. This year, due to security concerns, it is being held, paradoxically, in New York.

Of course that decision was made post-demonstrasi time in Davos last year and pre-September 11th in New York.

Davos traditionalists, who no doubt are going to miss the chance to turn off their cell phones and go skiing this year, are understandably not too happy with the change of venue.

Among them, Lance Knobel who runs the Davos Newbies Weblog - a fine example of an insider's weblog in a genre dominated by frustrated outsiders shouting their opinions to all and sundry from the anonymity of their own virtual Warholian ten minutes of web fame .

Lance, on the other hand has excellent credentials. He has Lance has attended every WEF in Davos since 1992, edited the WEF magazine "World Link" until Nov 2000, and was responsible for the Davos WEF program at the Milennium Summit in 2000. Whether he is one of the disappointed ski-ers is unknown, but he's not happy with Elton John's gig at La Cirque.

Still, Davos.. err.. New York is only a few days away, and it's always worthwhile to tune in daily, as past experience has demonstrated. Let's say you read things in here, that you will never read in the newspapers... You can be assured of all the insider yarns and yabba-yabba from his site, and you can also keep up with his World Economic Forum headlines from our news feeds section.

Just a taste of his material from
Davos Newbies:

It will be particularly interesting in the coming days to see how Enron plays at Davos in NY. Ken Lay was a Davos stalwart: regular plenary speaker, sought-after moderator, member of the Foundation Board. He's not coming (obviously), but I wonder how many people in the Davos crowd will have the courage to confront the many spectres at the feast...