A journalist recently asked me what had surprised me most about the success of Global Voices. There have been a lot of surprises with this project - the passion with which our volunteer community has embraced the effort, the emergence of translation as central to our mission - but I think Rising Voi...

I had an adrenaline-rich opportunity to make my pitch for cloud computing, with a strict time limit of eight minutes, before a sizable audience and with subsequent (live and unrehearsed) interrogation from a panel of CIOs at this week's Cloud Connect event in Mountain View. I freely admit that any o...

Belize is a fascinating country, and the role that mobile connectivity will play in its economic development has unique challenges.   After spending 2 weeks criss-crossing the jungles, remote villages, and tropical beaches of the country, I thought it'd be interesting to profile the ...

During the conflict between Russia and Georgia this past summer, my friend Evgeny Morozov decided to study the dynamics of “cyberwar” by becoming a partisan. He lurked on Russian-language bulletin boards and followed instructions to download software that would allow him to participate i...

It’s hard to look forward to something as difficult and sad as Medicine Sans Frontieres top ten list of global humanitarian crises. I noted last year that this appears to be the season for top ten lists, and that these lists range from the positive to the extremely disconcerting. MSF’s l...

Version control systems are fundamental collaboration tools for teams of developers. And the benefits of being able to save incremental changes to development projects cannot be over-stated for individual developers. Thankfully Eclipse, and by extension the Force.com IDE, support all the most popula...

Erik Hersman and I look a bit alike. We’re both beefy, balding white dudes who spend a lot of our time thinking and talking about Africa. We hang out at many of the same development and technology conferences. He’s someone I always enjoy reading, and someone I’m proud to call a fri...

When news from the developing world dominates the global news agenda, we get a lot of traffic on Global Voices. As the horrific events unfolded in Mumbai this past week, our authors, editors and tech staff began compiling accounts from blogs, Flickr, YouTube and Twitter feeds. You can get a good ove...

I’ve been in Dubai for the past three days at a World Economic Forum event. WEF is starting a new project called “Global Agenda Councils”, and they’ve invited people to participate in conversations on 68 topics, ranging from the very broad (”Faith”), the very scar...

IT World has put out a list of the "seven dirtiest jobs in IT": it's dated in March, but just surfaced this week on my Google News radar. The good news, they hasten to say, is that mastering the associated skill sets for any of these tasks will pretty much assure you of employment; the bad news is t...