This was originally written for the (almost) weekly Rising Voices newsletter. You can subscribe here.
I haven’t found a citation to verify this myself, but I’ve been told by quite a few people that when Alexander Bell was trying to promote his latest invention, the telephone, he assured anyone who would listen that this new communication [...]

Another video from our bloggers’ trip to South Africa.
In March 1886, nearly forty years after the California Gold Rush, legend has it that Australian gold miner George Harrison stumbled across a rocky outcrop of gold in what was then the Zuid Afrikaanse Republiek. Says Wikipedia: “Ironically, Harrison is believed to have sold his claim for [...]

I have seen a city besieged by itself; a town commit suicide, and a island under terror. So I don’t have as bright a view.
Worlds end. All the time. Southern California may seem very different from any from these places, but sometimes a scratch, not even that deep, reveals what is roiling underneath the surface. [...]

Rising Voices, the outreach arm of Global Voices, is now accepting project proposals for microgrant funding of up to $5,000 for new media outreach projects. Ideal applicants will present innovative and detailed proposals to teach citizen media techniques to communities that are poorly positioned to discover and take advantage of tools like blogging, video-blogging, and podcasting on their own. Applications are due no later than Sunday, January 18, 2009. The five selected grantees will be announced in early February.

Hard to believe that the year has almost come to an end. Dopplr just sent me an email to let me know that I took 44 trips to 34 cities in 2008. That’s a lot of city. One of the most frustrating parts of living life at such a fast pace is that you can [...]

For two years of my life I woke up, more often than not, at 5:25 a.m. It’s only bad when you’re not used to it. After a week of waking up before sunrise nothing could feel more normal. It’s amazing what we adapt to. Anything. My alarm was always set for 5:30, but I would [...]

Emotions, in my experience, aren’t covered by single words. I don’t believe in “sadness,” “joy,” or “regret.” Maybe the best proof that language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I’d like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, “the happiness that attends disaster.” Or: “the disappointment of sleeping [...]

I’ve been in Taipei this week for Culturemondo, a gathering of individuals working in the field of online cultural portals. Thanks to the kind invitation of Ilya, I presented Global Voices as an example of bottom-up grassroots cultural curation. I used I-fan’s post on Xiepingan (謝平安) and Thanksgiving as an example of how people use [...]

My time in South Africa, sadly, came to an end a couple days ago. It was the most fun I’ve had in a long, long while. And I met some new friends on the We Blog the World tour who I hope will soon enough become old friends.

Depending on how you count, this was my [...]

Hector Pieterson in the arms of Mbuyisa Nkita Makhubu, his sister, Antoinette Musi, running alongside. Photo by Sam Nzima, 1976.
My good friend Sameer at WITNESS is leading an online conversation in commemoration of today’s 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Here’s the question: What image opened your eyes to human rights?
Last week, [...]