Posts Tagged with ‘africa’

If you somehow managed to keep up with the goings on of the broad international news space throughout 2007, you know there’s one topic in particular that received copious amounts of attention. No, not that Mexican repellant them paranoid repubs and loose-limbed dems signed off on. Nor the tinderscape that was/is southern California. Darfur? Nope. (Too bad, though. It sure would’ve been good to see the American media juggle that ball a tad bit more.) Pakistan? Nah. The year was [...]

The year is almost through. Eggnog’s running low. The once fresh-cut Douglas-firs placed inside millions of homes over the holidays are running dry and approaching their final demise. Bottles of bubbly are being prepped and placed on standby for the global celebration to happen next week for the new calendar’s arrival.
So I think it’s only fitting to follow convention here and offer up a few wise words in anticipation of suspected things to come in the wide world of Web [...]

Ever heard of FON? It?s a WiFi network, built, wonderfully enough, by individual consumers and small businesses in Europe and many other parts of the world.
It works on a tiered system of paid and free access. If people opt in to become a ?Fonero? and set up a FON account and hotspot of their own, they can get free access from any other FON hotspot in the world. If one doesn?t complete all aforementioned introductory steps, one can still [...]

In today’s edition of The New York Times, a front-page article in the Business portion of the paper caught my eye immediately. It’s title is “Africa, Offline: Waiting for the Web.”
I felt compelled to write something on the subject because 1) many of you, being the globally-connected generation that gives a damn about the globe to which you are connected and the people which live upon it, likely do take an interest in how the developing world is faring – [...]

Google has put together a set of new layers for its Earth utility, a group that everyone should familiarize themselves with. The collection is called Crisis in Darfur. The title alone aptly explains what it’s about.
I’ll give you a brief synopsis anyhow. Essentially, Google’s Crisis in Darfur project, created in partnership with BrightEarth, is an assembly of “high-res satellite images of Darfur…[and text of] first-hand accounts of the genocide currently underway in the region.”
The inhumanity of what is being [...]

Today, a headline on BBC News read, “China leader urges net crackdown.” The story’s summary reads something to the effect that Chinese President Hu Jintao is now requiring that the Internet accessible by millions of now regularly connected countrymen and women be purged of “unhealthy” content. Of course, this comes after a myriad of dailies and weeklies in various parts of the world (not the least of which the United States) had spent a good deal of time, [...]

Africa is a continent with areas experiencing incredible turmoil and others undergoing economic expansion never seen before. The second most populous contiguous group of nations in the world, it is a land populated by a thousands languages ? some believe over two thousand are spoken in total. A collection of economic, cultural, social, and ecological conditions, Africa is witnessing the worst of the worst in terms of famine, disease, warfare, and genocide, but record GDPs are a regular sight as well. [...]