Because it is interesting news in itself, and because I know that my friends Chris and Hanako are interested in blog posts about Japan in the non-Western world, here is my translation of a brief blog post by Mariano Amartino about the increasing profits by record labels in Japan.
The latest study by the Record Industry [...]

I’m in Houston International Airport, one of my least favorites, waiting for my delayed flight to Las Vegas, probably my least favorite city in the entire world. I left Buenos Aires filled with sweet sadness. There is so much that I’ll miss. Here in Houston, having arrived far too early in the morning and getting [...]

Originally published on Idea Lab.

An avalanche of analysis, impassioned commentary, and angry rants descended upon the tech mediapshere over the two past weeks ever since One Laptop Per Child Chairman Nicholas Negroponte urged developers for the XO laptop (formerly the ‘$100 laptop’) to recreate the student computer’s user interface for Windows XP rather than Linux. [...]

Sometimes I feel like there are more websites dedicated to documenting citizen journalism than actual citizen journalism initiatives. Among them: J-Lab, Idea Lab, Media Shift, Press Think, MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media, Contentious, Online Journalism Review, Social Media, NewAssignment.Net, and a slew of personal blogs (like this one) that are often focused on that [...]

With my lifestyle and the dispersed locations of my friends, it is very rare when we can all do what most groups of friends do at least once a month: relax by watching the same movie together. In fact, this year I will only have two opportunities to do exactly that. On June 28 in [...]

My faithful fellow anglophones, as you may have noticed, the last two entries around here were written in Spanish. Sorry about that. But then, change is the spice of life, is it not? I’m contemplating the idea of publishing all future blog posts in both English and Spanish. That would be a lot of work. [...]

Last week I read two contradictory texts that each struck me as equally true. The first, in the form of a six-word “tweet” came from Romina Oliverio, an Argentine-Canadian who I believe is currently in Peru. She said:
My roots are people, not places.
Of course that’s the kind of pithy declaration that would strike me as [...]

Many thanks to Nicholas Laughlin from Trinidad and Tobago and Joan Razafimaharo from Montreal, Canada for leaving comments on the last batch of featured Rising Voices posts. I hope that more of you will leave comments of encouragement in this week’s collection of four posts. If, for some reason, you need to be convinced that [...]

Avenida 9 de Julio, supposedly the widest avenue in the world.

The most difficult challenge I’ve encountered so far with Rising Voices hasn’t been training new communities with little online experience how to effectively use new media tools like blogs, podcasts and video- and photo-sharing sites. Nope … that has turned out to be surprisingly easy. In fact, many of the Rising Voices participants like Taslima [...]