July 8, 2008 – 11:49 am

Global Voices

Rebecca and Joi have each made postings (here and here) about the Global Voices Summit that happened a couple of weeks ago in Budapest, and it sounds like it was an incredible, wonderful event. I’ve been tracking Global Voices for just a little while, so not long enough to know the history, but long enough to know that it’s a wondrous thing that shows so much of the global promise of the web. The idea is simple: it’s a set of bloggers from all around the world, collected in one stream. The impact is profound: you get a sense of some of the real-time feelings & thoughts & perspectives that are happening around the world, not mediated through our traditional media or governmental channels.

The last couple of years I’ve been lucky to do some traveling for Mozilla — in particular to China, Japan, and Europe — and have found my perspective on what the world looks like (and can/should look like) changing greatly. (And I’m currently in the middle of Fareed Zakaria’s excellent new book The Post-American World on this subject.)

I’m just repeatedly blown away (and sometimes overwhelmed) by what Global Voices is doing — it seems to me a necessary point of view in a world where national boundaries seem more & more artificial and sometimes obstructive to the way people are having conversations and getting things done.

This entry was written by John, posted on at 11:49 am, filed under Mozilla, The Internets, politics. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.

6 Comments

  1. 1. 
    Rebecca MacKinnon
    Posted July 9, 2008 at 5:18 pm | Permalink

    Thanks John! :) Was great running into you in China last year. Look forward to connecting again at some conference somewhere.

  2. 2. 
    Rebecca MacKinnon
    Posted July 9, 2008 at 5:18 pm | Permalink

    Thanks John! :) Was great running into you in China last year. Look forward to connecting again at some conference somewhere.

  3. 3. 
    Sami Ben Gharbia
    Posted July 10, 2008 at 5:32 am | Permalink

    Hi John, we have the videos for almost all the public sessions so you can catch up: http://globalvoices.blip.tv/

    I’m uploading the rest

  4. 4. 
    Sami Ben Gharbia
    Posted July 10, 2008 at 5:32 am | Permalink

    Hi John, we have the videos for almost all the public sessions so you can catch up: http://globalvoices.blip.tv/

    I’m uploading the rest

  5. 5. 
    mrz
    Posted August 4, 2008 at 3:02 pm | Permalink

    Came across Fareed’s show on CNN this weekend.

    http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/fareed.zakaria….

    Scroll down towards the bottom right and there’s a link to the podcast.

  6. 6. 
    mrz
    Posted August 4, 2008 at 3:02 pm | Permalink

    Came across Fareed’s show on CNN this weekend.

    http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/fareed.zakaria.gps/

    Scroll down towards the bottom right and there’s a link to the podcast.