When I first lived in Ghana in 1993, my social circle included about a dozen fellow Fulbright scholars, working on a variety of research topics. Most were ones you’d have guessed at - tribal and family structures in Ewe society, the music of brass bands (an unusual legacy of Britain’s... [view entry]

I’ve spent much of the last 24 hours with the lovely Solana Larsen, Global Voices’ managing editor. It’s a bit strange to realize that this is only the second time we’ve met face to face - like many of the most important people involved with Global Voices, our relationship is... [view entry]

TOYOTA OPEN ROAD BLOG: Living Up to Our Committment I have never regretted buying a Toyota truck. Now Toyota is offering to compensate me for rust damage or repurchase my 9-year old truck. I am a very, very happy customer. (tags: marketing blog customerservice toyota) Lionel Beehner: Absolute Samantha Power... [view entry]

I’d forgotten just how much fun ETech is. Not only are the talks some of the most creative and innovative you can hear in the tech community, the room full of people is one of the most congenial, smart and funny you’re likely to encounter anywhere. Tim O’Reilly won’t come... [view entry]

BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | Thailand holds ‘top arms dealer’ Viktor Bout arrested in a Thailand hotel, likely to be extradited to the US to face arms dealing charges in conjunction with arming the FARC (tags: bout arms russia thailand columbia failedstate) Capitalizing on wind - Berkshire Eagle Online Jiminy... [view entry]

African Bloggers Fight Against Bad Governance // Current Excellent video on Francophone bloggers focused on DRC and Chad (tags: africa media blogs journalism citizenmedia chad DRC) [view entry]

I’d expected Violet Blue’s talk at ETech to be packed. After all, she’s a sex blogger, a professional sex educator, a columnist for the SF Chronicle, and her talk was on the topic of “Sexual Identity Online”. Perhaps it says something about the ETech crowd that competing talks on database... [view entry]

Noah Schactman spoke at ETech just before me - I regret that I’m only posting notes from his talk now, but there’s been thousands of miles of travel and a couple of very long meetings between then and now. Besides which, if you’re really bored, you can go back and... [view entry]

Dr. Paul M. Torrens from the Arizona State University School of Geosciences likes making people panic. Virtual people and virtual panic, that is. He studies crowd behavior, which involves putting virtual people into virtual disaster situations and seeing just what they do. Crowds, he tells us, are pretty important to... [view entry]

Eric Rodenbeck from Stamen Design shows some of the gorgeous work he and Mike Migurski do in visualizing large sets of data. We take a brief look at pollution maps, commuting time maps in London and then look closely at the Crime Map of Oakland. You can understand very quickly... [view entry]