As if staying at the Rosebank Hotel didn’t already completely spoil us, we began our blogger’s road show of South Africa with a box full of gadget goodness thanks to the kind folks at Vodacom. Included in the bag was a Vodafone E172 Mobile Broadband USB Stick with enough 3G data to keep us publishing [...]

Are you heading to South Africa and worried that you won’t be able to enjoy the very best of metrosexual hospitality. Check out the Rosebank Hotel, probably the only hotel I’ve ever been to which is much more impressive in person than on its website. It is just two blocks away from the Rosebank Mall [...]

Today is the official start of the South Africa Bloggers Roadshow, which means that this is my last post for the next ten days not related to the roadshow. The young bloggers from Kwa Mashu continue to inspire me. I hung out with them all day on Friday. Once again, I expected that they would [...]

Greetings from Cape Town, South Africa. I am here thanks to a blog post by Matthew Buckland, a comment left by Mohamed Nanabhay, and the kind invitation of Simon Barber of the International Marketing Council of South Africa. Starting on November 30 I will be part of a ten-day “bloggers roadshow” in which bloggers from [...]

I have listened to this 13 minute segment of audio three different times now. Each time I hear something different – either a detail that I missed or a tone in her voice revealing the emotion that makes audio such a powerful medium. The excerpt from a recent episode of This American Life is an [...]

In the very first scene of the book, when the protagonist Elvis is awoken by a pounding Nigerian rainstorm, we read this: The book he had fallen asleep reading, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, fell from his side to the floor, the old paperback cracking at the spine, falling neatly into two halves as precisely as [...]

Today is one of those days: typing as furiously as possible to get through what Things tells me to. But, then a ray of sun poked out, shining through the orange-tinged chlorophyll of the maple tree right outside my window. A glistening reflection off of a wee spider’s recent creation. Maybe the same spider that [...]

Remember Taslima from the Nari Jibon project in Dhaka? Isn’t she sweet? Now she has her own domain, Taslima.net. Go on and visit and say hello. Yesterday she led a workshop at Nari Jibon to train the other bloggers there how to publish in their native language, Bangla. It’s not so easy. Jus eeemajin haveeen [...]

When you’ve been blogging for this long – almost five years now – you begin to realize that the personal blog is something of an enclosed pulpit, a sermon to self, a sabbath reminder of your values and goals and needs and room to grow. You repeat yourself. Over and over and over and over [...]

I’ve been meaning to watch this video forever. There are worse things to do with 17 and a half minutes of your time. Now, time for me to go review Graceland at GoodReads.