People have suddenly realized that there are so many things that they desire that they were not even aware of before. And the truth is that most of these television channels are commercially driven, and so the Bhutanese people are driven to consumerism. That’s inevitable. And that is, to some extent, unfortunate. But inevitable.
Lyonpo Jigmi [...]

“Global Voices is …” – A description of Global Voices, from the voices of the community itself. Filmed at the 2010 Global Voices Citizen Media Summit in Santiago, Chile.
I have already said so many goodbyes that it is starting to feel like I’m dragging this on. But I realized that I have yet to mention [...]

Weekends like this. Locked up in my room, or in various cafes, with a constant intake of caffeine to keep my fingers tapping on the keyboard to the rhythm from my tinny laptop speakers. Right now: J-Live.
Yesterday I worked about 12 hours on a single post, a general introduction to the aid transparency movement over [...]

Often times I work myself harder than my body is able to support, but this past month has been especially rough. And now I’m paying the price. I arrived to Bogotá yesterday morning with deep purple bags under my eyes, a sore throat, and about enough energy to stumble into the taxi that took me [...]

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, [...]

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 the [...]

This year’s 2010 Global Voices Summit will take place on May 6 and 7 in Santiago, Chile. If you would like to attend you can register here. Solana, Georgia, Ivan and I have been so busy working on the fundraising, agenda, and logistics that we haven’t done a very good job promoting the conference itself [...]

When speaking about how our society and culture are changing because of networked technologies, one of the many cheesy metaphors I often depend on goes something like this: In the 20th century we sat silently in the opera house; in the 21st century we find ourselves surrounded by the chaos and the pressure to participate [...]

This is probably the funniest six and a half minutes that I’ve spent on the internet in a long, long time. It also goes to show why guy friends (sorry ladies) are so much more fun than female friends: male bonding is more creative destruction than cautious compassion about feelings and emotions.
And that’s just so [...]

I’ve been back in the United States for four days now, but I still feel like I’m stuck in first gear, always ready to take a nap but never able to fall asleep. The end of December is, in many ways, both exciting and challenging. I need to wrap up all the projects of [...]