I woke up this morning feeling like a jerk. Looking back over the past six months, I’ve spent far too much time arguing over small details with people I respect and largely agree with, and not nearly enough time collaborating with them toward the common objectives we’re all striving for: greater access to information, more [...]

Institutional Power An institution builds up and expands its power by controlling the flow of information and building a reputation around that information. A university, for example, controls which professors it hires, what research it publishes, and which students it admits and graduates. In making those decisions it builds its brand and attracts various sources [...]

When we think about electricity the first name to come to mind is famed American inventor Thomas Edison, who filed the first of his more than 1,000 patents at the age of 21. In 1879, at the age of 32, Edison invented what today we call the light bulb. It was a tremendous achievement; the [...]

Georgia and Ivan were on BBC’s Pods & Blogs show a couple days ago discussing the past, present, and future of Global Voices. I have made a track of just their segment in order to save my esteemed readers from having to listen to a piece on virtual guide dogs in Second Life. Georgia in [...]

This is an especially American perspective of looking at the development of cities, but I think that the same basic evolution is generally true for cities around the world, even if they haven’t yet reached some of the later chapters. Chapter 1: Make-shift Slums Tokyo slum during the US occupation years. As Kevin Kelly rightly [...]

At some point in the future my children will ask me what I did during my 20′s and I will tell them that I traveled around the world going from one conference to the next with my laptop. And my children will ask me why I did that. And I will say, you know, that’s [...]

On September 19, 2005 a tall, dark, and handsome Taiwanese blogger who goes by the strange name of “Portnoy” decided that he would start translating select blog posts from Global Voices into Chinese. His first translation was of a post by Indonesian blogger Enda Nasution which summed up the week’s news from Indonesia through the [...]

In The Omnivore’s Dilema Michael Pollan reminds us that food is an inelastic good, which is to say that, obesity aside, there is a limit to how many calories a person can consume in a single day. Any more and we would explode. Once we all reach that caloric daily limit then the food industry [...]