Much of the world an open book -

The Internet has shrunk the apparent size of the globe. A wonderful post today by Bobbie Johnson, at the Guardian Unlimited news blog, provided "a list of noteworthy modern blogs and crucial moments from the first decade of blogging." It is an absolutely fascinating read. Some countries do not see the world as an open book, however, according to this blogger. To quote just one of her listed items,

China's anti-blogging purge -
Internet censorship mean blogging is tough in authoritarian countries such as China. Political agitation has led to a number of people being incarcerated for their online comments - low points for blogging, which nonetheless mark out the way blogs can challenge freedom of speech. Among the victims were the blogger and filmmaker Hao Wu, but Reporters Sans Frontières has a full list .

Focus to expand - For a time Saturday posts at S/SW focused on the European Union. Today I have expanded my reach to include "Other Countries," because an exclusively EU focus left out our closest neighbors, Canada and Mexico. It also ignored Africa, and the regions of Southeast Asia and the Far East. And technically, Russia is not part of the EU. These are countries in which the United States has an abiding interest, and that regularly make interesting news. This is a fascinating headline as an example: "UK and US unions in merger talks." It is also from the BBC News. To quote from the story,

Amicus, a major union in the UK, is to discuss a possible merger with another union based in the US and Canada.
If agreed, it would bring another 1.2m members to Amicus, creating one of the biggest unions in the world with more than 3m members.
. . . Previously, Mr Simpson has spoken of creating "a single global trade union movement capable of challenging the might of multinationals".

South by Southwest gets visits from readers around the world.* To those of us who "surf the net" on a regular basis, it as if other countries are next door. Time, space and familiarity have been altered by connections within world wide web. We learned yesterday from this BBC News article, for example, that peoples all over the earth will be affected by global warming. And we are all in the lifeboat together. The headline reads, "Billions face climate change risk." Quoting the scientists' dire prediction, "Billions of people face shortages of food and water and increased risk of flooding, experts at a major climate change conference have warned."
* S/SW visitors by country (of most recent 40): Republic of Korea, Europe, Portugal, United Kingdom, Germany, Taiwan, Spain, Greece, Thailand, Canada, and Cote D'Ivoire.
Technorati tags: technology blogging conmuters and internet internet news web

My “creativity and dreaming” post today at Good Second Mondays is about the promise of Spring .