I’m in Providence, Rhode Island today speaking at BIF-5 – the Business Innovation Factory’s fifth annual storytelling conference. I’ll be doing my best to blog when not on stage. Saul Kaplan, chief catalyst of the Business Information Factory, explains his role – to get the reaction started and get out... [view entry]

????????? OOPS,Opensource Opencourseware Prototype System Open courseware translation project via a large team of Taiwanese volunteers. A small set of professional editors, a couple thousand translators, and a founder who made his fortune translating the Lord of the Rings into Chinese. Very, very cool. (tags: web2.0 translation education opensource MIT... [view entry]

Do social networks have a business model? : ::: Think Macro ::: Alternative models for social networks based on providing users with advanced features. Focuses on two Russian-language Facebook alternatives (tags: russia facebook socialnetwork socialmedia economics businessmodels) Dutch ISPs Sign Anti-Botnet Treaty – Hacked Off – Dark Reading Major Dutch... [view entry]

Herkko Hietanen of the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology tells his audience at the Berkman Center that “television is really broken.” The medium isn’t rising to its full potential, isn’t providing consumers with programs when and where they want them. To set the scheduled for what you want to watch,... [view entry]

If you can bomb Africa to enforce good governance, why spare the US Ferocious response to Paul Collier's new book, which suggests that military intervention many be necessary to stabilize some of the world's poorest states. (tags: kenya nation journalism book review collier poverty development intervention) Africa%u2019s SMS crisis –... [view entry]

My friend and former business partner, Bo Peabody, has an op-ed in today’s Washington Post titled “Twitter.org?” He argues that social media is extremely difficult to support via advertising, unlikely to make profits for venture capital investors, and is sufficiently important that we should try to build non-profit models to... [view entry]

Not many Afrophiles shed tears when Lansana Conté, Guinea-Conakry’s long-time strongman, died. But the military coup that followed his demise promised to pile more hardship upon one of the world’s poorest countries. The African Union – rightly – has refused to recognize military governments, which should push those governments to... [view entry]

A fascinating story you might have missed. Noam Cohen of the New York Times looks at The Budget, a newspaper in Sugar Creek, Ohio that serves a large Amish community as well as an “English” (non-Amish) community. The story appears to be inspired by Jessica Best, a Welsh journalist who... [view entry]

So, you’re the leader of a UN member nation. You’re invited to the UN general assembly in New York. And that can be fun – you might get the chance to join the 20-minute long scrum of leaders assembled to shake Obama’s hand after his speech. But you might get... [view entry]

Canada’s International Development Research Center and Harvard’s Berkman Center are convening a conversation today and tomorrow at Harvard on the future of information and communication technology and development (ICT4D). Global Voices will be participating in the event as a media partner, and I and Jen Brea will be twittering and... [view entry]