This week I’m in Perugia, a central Italian, pre-Roman village that sits on a high bluff overlooking a sea of impossibly green pasture that is tucked in each evening by a thin blanket of sunset-tinted fog. The surrounding National Geographic-like views are a reminder of the importance of keeping your enemies in clear sight. Perugia, [...]

Today is the first day since leaving Los Angeles that I’ve been able to breathe. All the other mornings I was awoken by the sound of the alarm clock or the discomfort of jet lag. But not today: I woke slowly, ate breakfast slowly, read the paper leisurely, walked along the green banks of the [...]

What follows is a hyperlinked version of my talk at this year’s re:publica conference in Berlin. For a 30-minute talk it was probably a little dense, a bit abstract, and maybe too close to home for a Berlin audience, but here it is nonetheless. This morning Evgeny Morozov showed us how how governments are using [...]

I spent most of the past week reading around 200 pages of academic papers about transparency, accountability, and governance in a cabin in Mexico’s Sierra del Tigre mountain range. No tweeps tweeting; only birds chirping and the wind rustling through the pine trees. Today is my first day back and I find myself immobile under [...]

Over at Idea Lab I just published my latest about everyone’s new favorite job title: curator. All my peeps these days are opening accounts on Tumblr and Posterous. It’s where they curate the web. Then there are links on Twitter, Delicious, and presumably Facebook (I wouldn’t know). The internet, a big beautiful mess. And messier [...]

Written by Enzo Abbagliati, the former National Coordinator of Chile’s National Library Network and currently at the Foundation for Democracy and Development, which was started by former president Ricardo Lagos. I had the pleasure of meeting Enzo in 2008 at the fifth annual national meeting of BiblioRedes and look forward to seeing him again soon [...]