It’s been a long day and I’m exceptionally bad at liveblogging, so I won’t even attempt to cover all the talks and sessions that happened today at iSummit 2008, instead I’ll just give a few thoughts and impressions. (Read more…)

I finally got around to posting an article at iCommons.org that I had meant to publish a long time ago, about an apparent conflict (in my view) between the idea of “open” content (and particularly the “open culture” movement) and the essence of linguistic “difference” which underlies the act of translation. The article is partly intended as an introduction to a session called “Open Content, Open Translation” that I am involved in organizing for the Local Context, Global Commons track at the iSummit conference, which starts in a couple days. (Read more…)

An article of mine about translation in Global Voices and Project Lingua, titled “Translation and Participatory Media: Experiences from Global Voices“, has been published online at Translation Journal. In the article I outline how translation and languages fit into the day-to-day operations of Global Voices, and also try to situate the function of translation in this context in relation to other types of translation. To my knowledge, this is the first academic paper on the crossover area between translation and participatory media, an area that I expect will become more and more important in the future. (Read more…)

I’m reading “Blog Journalism: Media for 3 million people” right now and stumbled on an interesting passage that I thought I would translate. The passage features the book’s three co-authors Yukawa Tsuruaki, Takada Masayuki and Fujishiro Hiroyuki discussing participatory journalism (Chapter 8, p. 129-130). (Read more…)

Ten years after the burst of Japan’s economic bubble, with the erosion of a common sense of values that had been shared for many years through an earlier period of strong economic growth, we face an era of confusion in which it is not even clear what we should believe in.

That’s my rough translation of the first line describing a seminar, held on March 15th by the Institute of Engineering Innovation at the University of Tokyo, entitled “Miete kita mirai” (見えてきた未来/The future that has come into view). (Read more…)

The Japanese language team at Global Voices (myself and my co-editor) were interviewed by Asahi’s new Komimi online news portal, a new site created to “introduce original articles and conversations from across the country”. Both of us are really happy with the way the article turned out in the end, so to “give a little back”, I dug up a couple things about Komimi and also, in the spirit of Global Voices, translated the article back into English. (Read more…)

Here it is a week later, and I can finally sit back for a second and reflect on my first experience attending We Media in Miami. (I’ve also posted a couple live-blogged point form summaries of talks here and here.) (Read more…)

Next session is “Political World - Hype vs. Reality in Campaign ‘08″. Just caught the tail end of this one. (Read more…)

Here I am liveblogging the first sessions at WeMedia. This will be point-form for now, hope to add more later. (Read more…)

I’m off today to We Media 2008 in Miami with many other people from Global Voices (some of whom have already been interviewed), will be liveblogging some of the events there, stay tuned over the next few days.