Apologies in advance

An apology in advance to all my regular readers – I’m on the road the next three weeks and my blogging will be highly irregular. The next few days, I’m at one of Open Society Institute’s quarterly meetings of the board of the Information Program. These meetings are a blast, as both the staff and the board of the program are some of my favorite people in the world. But they’re also strictly off blog and they don’t leave much time for blogging, with meetings roughly 14 hours a day. Expect radio silence for the next few days.

That won’t be the problem late next week, when I’ll be attending the TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference in Monterey. I’m there primarily to offer support for my friends from Worldchanging, notably Jamais Cascio who’ll be a featured speaker, and Cameron Sinclair, who won this year’s TED prize, given to a social entrepreneur to help further his work. Last year’s winner, Ed Burtynsky, made a “wish” that Worldchanging would be supported by the TED community, a wish that’s already helped Worldchanging grow radically this past year.

Part of my deal with Chris Anderson, the curator of TED, is that I’ll attempt to blog TED with the sort of intensity I blogged Pop!Tech this past autumn. (I’ve packed my laptop desk, an extra battery and lots of Larabars…) So expect a dozen or so posts a day next week.

In the meantime, some suggested reading from/about my Global Voices friends:

Israel21c has an excellent article on a remarkable blogger encounter: an Iranian blogger in Israel. Hossein Derakshan, a regular GV commentator, met Lisa Goldman, our Israel contributor, at our London summit this past December, and Hossein decided to take Lisa up on her offer for him to visit Israel. Since Iran doesn’t recognize the state of Israel, this may make it very difficult for Hossein to go back to his native Iran. But it’s fantastic to see the possibilities of Israelis and Iranians getting the chance to know each other better through blogs.

My friend Akwe Amosu has a fantastic post on the We Media Global Forum blog. She asks whether the fact that we’ve got all these exciting new tools to share our views makes us more or less powerful:

So why, if the tools allow us to have so much scrutiny, transparency and accountability in these new times, do we see increasing impunity in government?

It feels as though I won the chance to shout about my issues but, as part of the same deal, those with the power don’t have to listen. Not only that, we seem to do a lot of shouting without knowing or caring whether anyone is listening.

Could it be that as a species, we can’t be bothered to be consultative in really noisy systems?

Good stuff – very much worth a read and a long think…