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.