You may have noticed that I’ve done some housekeeping on the blog. It was about time – I can’t tell when I last updated my blogroll – best guess is sometime in 2006 – but my homepage was evidently last changed in late 2005. I’ll be adding more links to the blogroll in the next couple of weeks – please don’t be sad if you’re not yet included.

My impetus for this digital housecleaning? I’ve had a couple of kind mentions in the media recently, and thought it might be nice to people searching for me to find out what I’m doing lately… and not what I was doing in 2005. And just in case you missed it, here’s the shameless self-promotion:

CNN runs TED talks every Tuesday, and invites speakers to accompany their talks with an essay. I took the opportunity to write about Facebook’s 500 million member mark. This now means that my TED talk is circulating to another audience who are primed to believe that it’s about Facebook… though I don’t think I actually mention Facebook in the talk.

Before going to Oxford for TED, I dropped in on friends at the Guardian for their Activate Summit. Liz Ford offered an excellent overview of my talk there. I dropped by again on my way to Nigeria to do a brief interview about cyberutopianism, which follows below.

Probably the most enjoyable talk I’ve given lately wasn’t a lecture – it was a two-hour conversation with Ghanaian bloggers and tweeps set up by my friend Mac-Jordan. We were almost thwarted by technology – Google Calendar evidently decided to “help” by rescheduling our meeting at Smoothies Pub in Accra to eastern time, which meant that I showed up for the event at an hour when most Accrafolk are in church… and by the time everyone showed up, I’d given up and gone to find a bowl of omo tuo and groundnut soup. It all worked out, and I’m grateful to Mac-Jordan both for setting up the event and blogging about it. I clearly need to spend more time in Ghana – the local tech and literary scenes are both amazing.

Okay, enough about me – back to your regularly scheduled, sporadic posting.

Sorry about that.

One of my new year’s resolutions was 99% uptime for this blog. Looks like we’re not off to a great start on that front. Boingboing was kind enough to link to my previous post… which turned my server into a smoking pile of bits for much of yesterday evening. In an ironic twist, the company that hosts my server moved the machine from one hosting center to another late last evening – in the hopes of improving uptime – and the server was down for several more hours in the process.

For all those who were unable to access our non-plans for an outdoor hot tub – which we actively encourage you NOT to follow – my apologies for the downtime. For those of you with pointed comments about our failure to understand physics or our chosen bathing costumes… have a nice day. And for my regular readers – Africa-centric posts later today. I promise.

I’m on Whidbey Island in Puget Sound, Washington, at the moment, participating in a board meeting and planning retreat for WorldChanging.com. I’ve been a spotty contributor to WorldChanging over the past year, but have been trying to do my part, sitting on the board of the non-profit company that operates the site.

(Guilted by the thought of showing up at this meeting without having posted anything, I banged out quick articles on zinc supplements in Bangladesh and tropically tolerant software in Ghana. And because the site’s managing editor is trying to participate in the retreat, not write his usual ten thousand words a day, WorldChanging is running some back content, including an interview Alex Steffen did with me months back, now with a new introduction, where he counts coup in convincing me to become a WorldChanging contributor, board member and now board president…)

I’m feeling incredibly lucky at the moment to be involved with two virtual communities that are trying to create online spaces for conversations that rarely take place in the physical world. There’s a huge number of similarities between WorldChanging and Global Voices and at least as many differences, but the gathering is getting me tremendously psyched to bring together some of the Global Voices team at a conference this December in the UK. Lots more on that as we get closer to the date.

Hi folks – I’m disappearing for about ten days and am going to be largely offline during that period, which means no blogging. Enjoy the silence. I’ll be back online on June 27th.

(There are half a dozen people I owe phonecalls to who read this blog regularly. Please accept my apologies, and I’ll be easier to reach once I get back from this trip. June has been a bit crazy thus far.)

In the meantime, please check out Rebecca’s great experiment with Microsoft Spaces in China – it’s an interesting commentary on the sorts of constraints companies are working under when they work in China.

Hi there, and welcome to the new, somewhat improved, and somewhat dysfunctional “…My Heart’s in Accra”. I’m just moving into the new place, and most of the boxes aren’t even unpacked yet. For one thing, very few of the posts from the Harvard-hosted blog have been moved over here yet – I’m going to work on moving those over in the next couple of weeks. By the end of April, I will stop posting on the Harvard site and redirect the RSS feed and homepage over to this site, though I suspect I’ll keep archived posts there for a while.

I would be very grateful for your help in testing the new blog. Does it render well in your browser, or does it break? Are you able to post comments? Are there features I should attempt to add or subtract? Help me out, folks!

I’m home for five blissful days in a row – something that’s becoming increasingly rare in my peripatetic lifestyle – and I’m finding that a familiar bed, good internet access and the comforts of home are encouraging me to blog far more often than I do when I’m on the road. (It’s also possible that it’s just so damned cold and snowy here that I’m not really tempted to do anything else.)

Not all that blogging is taking place here. I find I’m now a semi-regular contributor to three additional blogs, each of which is eminently worth reading. They are:

WorldChanging – Rapidly emerging as the leading online magazine for social an environmental change, WorldChanging seems to have at least one post a day that makes me feel good about the world. I’m an infrequent contributor, a but big fan.

GlobalVoices – Growing out of the daylong workshop Rebecca Mackinnon and I held at Berkman’s Internet and Society conference this December, Global Voices is rapidly becoming my main project at Berkman. Global Voices is dedicated to the idealistic principle that everyone in the world has a voice worth hearing, and the practical challenges of making that vision a reality. Rebecca, I and others around the world are trying to identify great bridge bloggers, unheard stories and the tools and organizations to make this global conversation possible.

Bacontarian – And, because the world is a wonderful and funny place, a collaborative international weblog about bacon. Probably not for vegetarians, observant Jews or Muslims, or anyone who has trouble with the assertion that “bacon is a vegetable”.

I invite all four of my readers (yep, readership continues to grow) to join me in the conversations taking place on these blogs. And, because it’s always more fun to converse in person, here’s my speaking schedule for the next couple of months. If you’re going to be at any of these events – or even in the same city – please drop me a line and let’s get together.

Madrid, March 7th – 10th – The International Summit on Democracy, Terrorism and Security

Austin, TX, March 15th – 17th – South By Southwest

Tokyo and Chiba, Japan, May 7th – 11th – 14th International WWW Conference

Johannesburg, South Africa, May 25-27th – Launch of Creative Commons South Africa. Also planning on spending a couple of days in Cape Town and seeing as many South African bloggers as possible.

Minneapolis, MN, June 12-14th – PUSH 2005

Whew. I’m tired already.