There have been several things recently that disturbed me about Google. At first I had just thought it was all benign, that they had free tools that were relatively easy to use. But now I'm beginning to question all that. Here's a few reasons:

Spectograms are when you draw a line on the floor and have one end be for people that agree with your statement, the other for those that disagree. People can also stand any where in the middle. It's a great way to get out different opinions in the room and also different perspectives.

Back in January, I got to do a five day training on, well, training. We did a spectogram and had quite a bit of fun with the following statements:

"Experts make the best trainers"
"There's no such thing as a bad training, just bad participants"
"You can't over-prepare for a training"

Been playing around a bit with Tumblr (See http://fabrider.tumblr.com). It seems like twitter, blogging and del.icio.us all rolled up into one. All it really needs to be a del.icio.us killer is to incorporate tagging! Hope to see that feature show up on the site soon.

After nearly two years in the making and tons of hard work, Tactical tech has finally released this booklet.

See http://www.tacticaltech.org/infodesign

We currently have three positions open at TTC. I love working for Tactical Tech. You might too!

Here's the blurb:

Tactical Tech is seeking three dedicated individuals to help build one of the leading organisations bringing information and communications technologies to rights advocacy worldwide. We are currently hiring for the following positions;

- Director of Operations
- Business Development Lead
- Communications Coordinator

Its been a thrilling couple of weeks, watching the protests in Burma continue to gain momentum. I've had a number of queries about good independent Burma news websites and now have two that I'm pretty much recommending to anyone who is interested. See:

- The Irrawaddy at http://www.irrawaddy.org
- Mizzima News at http://www.mizzima.com/

A few weeks back I was visited by Noel Hidalgo here in Brighton. Noel wanted to interview me in Tactical Tech's office and talk about the work I've done with organizing groups and how I came to work for such a great organization.

Noel is traveling around the world and conducting interviews with a wide range of folks working on the intersection between social justice and technology, particularly open source.

I officially moved to the UK in March from NYC. Ever since I starting coming to the UK for work, last september, everyone has been talking about the smoking ban, which went into effect on July 1st. Nearly everyone I talked to about it over the last nine months has said, "I'll quit when the ban goes into effect." So now its nearly two weeks after the ban started and I don't know a soul who has actually quit since it started.

This puppy has taken a really long time to give birth to. I worked on it for almost a year and then the Ampersand Aussie took over and worked on it for nearly another year.

But today, finally, the Base edition of NGO in a box has been released at:

http://base.ngoinabox.org

I'm currently working on a report about ICT use amongst sex worker advocates and I've come accross two more fabulous videos (also see http://www.fabrider.net/node/45).

The first is a redo of U2's One Whore that was put together by Asia Pacific Sex Worker Network for the Star Whore show they did at the Intl. AIDS Conference last year in Toronto. It can be found on Blip TV at http://www.blip.tv/file/199048/