This post covers presentations at MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media at MIT’s communications forum. Josh Levinger leads off the final session at CFCM’s show and tell, titled “Crossing Borders”. His project, Virtual Gaza, aggregates the stories of civilians who were present in Gaza as bombs fell earlier this year... [view entry]

This post covers presentations at MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media at MIT’s communications forum. Rick Borovoy’s project Lost in Boston focuses on what might well be my pet peeve with Boston – lack of signage. (Seriously. It’s a big problem. I suspect we do it to avoid letting Yankees... [view entry]

This post covers presentations at MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media at MIT’s communications forum. Cristina Xu leads off a segment focused on the future of news. She introduces her project, the News Positioning System, by digging into American history to talk about “transient newspapers”. When the US postal system... [view entry]

This post covers presentations at MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media at MIT’s communications forum. Ryan Toole is designing a platform called Red Ink, a tool designed to enable secure, collective financial action. He points out that there are existing tools – wesabe, mint.com, yodlee – which unify your online... [view entry]

It’s very easy to experience whiplash if you hang out at the academic institutions of Cambridge, MA. I spent the day in the basement of Harvard’s wood-panelled faculty club, in a discussion about the future(s) of the Berkman Center, then took the T two stops to MIT for the Communications... [view entry]

What do you know about Fiji? Before getting involved with Global Voices, I knew that it was an island paradise somewhere in the South Pacific much beloved by vacationers and honeymooners and that, despite being an island nation surrounded by seawater, they export a lot of high-priced bottled water. As... [view entry]

My friend and colleage Sami Ben Gharbia just launched a fascinating and useful new site: Threatened Voices. It’s an interactive map of bloggers under arrest and under threat around the world, with an accompanying timeline that makes it possible to track the phenomenon of arresting bloggers over the past several... [view entry]

Hossein Derakhshan (”Hoder”) has now been in prison in Iran for more than a year. My friend Cyrus Farivar has followed his case closely, and has been in touch with Hoder’s family, who confirm that he’s beeing held in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison. Reports from the activist group Human Rights... [view entry]

World Affairs Journal – The Cosmopolitan Tongue: The Universality of English John McWhorter makes the case – which he knows is provocative and controversial – that the death of small lanuages may be more an aesthetic tragedy than a cultural one, and may, in the end, be completely unavoidable: "At... [view entry]

U.S. Wants Microsoft, Google to End Message Bans in Iran, Cuba – Yahoo! News Treasury asks Microsoft to continue to provide messaging services to Cuba… violating its own sanctions. Ah, USG at its best – not only do the departments not to talk to each other, they don't talk to... [view entry]