From the latest Rising Voices newsletter. Did you know that the Canadian coal mining company Teck Resources is planning on increasing its production from 1.5 million to 8 million tons every year at he Ovoot Tolgoi mine, an open-pit coal mine in southern Mongolia? The huge increase in production is sure to have a large [...]

This year’s peregrinations are rapidly coming to an end. I’m in Turkey this week, Lebanon next, and then will soon be “going back to Cali, Cali, Cali.” Yet already – the curse of an addict – it’s difficult to not think about possible future destinations and the experiences that may lie in wait. Yemen – [...]

What do ministers of culture do? This was the question asked by Slate political reporter Chris Beam back in 2007 when, in the same week, commandos raided the Iraqi culture minister’s house to arrest him for a 2005 assassination attempt on a fellow politician. Beam’s general conclusion: “They oversee grants for the arts, fund public [...]

I loved this book and its ideas formed the basis of my thinking about digital craftsmanship, the perils of virtuosity, and an upcoming post about social expertise versus antisocial expertise. Craftsmanship may suggest a way of life that waned with the advent of industrial society – but this is misleading. Craftsmanship names an enduring, basic [...]

I keep thinking back to this idea that rather than readers paying for publications, writers will eventually have to pay readers for their attention. Many – maybe most – of my friends consider themselves writers of some type. They hang onto different labels – novelist, short story writer, journalist, columnist, researcher, poet – but, in [...]

I guess I never really explained the backstory of why I’ve been so obsessed about “digital craftsmanship” over the past few months. I had reached a point in my career where I wasn’t sure if I could keep doing this ‘computer thing’. Increasingly my work felt less like passion and fun, and more like … [...]

I wrote this a few weeks ago while riding the subway from Madrid’s airport to Paseo de Prado. Apparently someone was listening and developed the helpful Web 2.0 Suicide Machine. “Meet your Real Neighbors again!” is a great tagline, destined to become a neo-romantacist mantra. It’s the question: what is important, what is not important, [...]

It all started because I needed a way to get from Kiev to Skopje. I had heard from Onnik about the World Blogging Forum; that they were paying the travel and accommodation costs for all attendees. I was turned off by the language on the website: that they were only inviting “A-list bloggers” (how I [...]

Here’s my latest Global Voices celebrity profile – this time Elena Ignatova who covers Macedonia on Global Voices, is in charge of Global Voices in Macedonian, and works for the Metamorphosis Foundation, which seeks to seeks to enhance the use of information in Macedonian government and society. Among the posts we mention in the interview [...]