VOICES FROM THE INTERNET Respect for Mandela IT doesn't seem that long ago. I remember that Sunday afternoon, watching it happen live on the BBC, straining for the first glimpse of a man who came to help symbolize all the arguments against South Africa's brutal apartheid regime. It hasn't all been good. The moral downfall of his then wife Winnie, the struggles that continue to plague South Africa with regards to HIV/AIDS, poverty, and crime. But significant progress has been made and Mandela deserves the respect and admiration for his invaluable contribution towards peace and prosperity and opportunity for all in a multi-racial South Africa. The downfall of apartheid was also part of a greater change for good in the world. One of the best stories concerning this was former Beirut hostage John McCarthy's account of being allowed to watch the 1990 Oscar's ceremony with Brian Keenan (watching television was okay, but news was forbidden) and their jaws dropping when they heard one celebrity say, “Who would have thought six months ago that the Berlin Wall would come down and Mandela would be released from prison!” The late 80's and 90's saw some long standing brutal governments either topple or face the beginning of the end, whether in South Africa or Eastern Europe and we should never forget what those freedoms mean. – paulburgin.blogspot.com Giving gifts IF I sell you something, we exchange items of value. You give me money, I give you stuff, or a service. The deal is done. We're even. Even steven, in fact. That's fine, but it doesn't explain potlatch or the mystery of art or the power of a gift. If I give you something, or way more than you paid for, an imbalance is created. That imbalance must be resolved. Perhaps we resolve it, as the ancient Native Americans did, by acknowledging the power of the giver. In the Pacific Northwest a powerful chief would engage in potlatch, giving away everything he owned as a sign of his wealth and power. Since he had more to give away, and the power to get more, the gifts carried real power, and others had to accept his power in order to engage. Or we resolve it by acknowledging the creativity and insight of the giver. Artists do this every time they put a painting in a museum or a song on the radio. We don't pay for the idea, but we acknowledge it. And then, if it's particularly powerful, it changes us enough that we become givers, contributing to someone else, passing it along. Sometimes we resolve the imbalance by becoming closer to the brand or the provider. We like getting gifts, we like being close to people who have given us a gift and might do it again. And sometimes, in the case of international aid, we resent the rich giver, the one with so much more power, and thus create a cycle of dependence that does neither side any good. This sort of gift isn't much of a gift at all. When done properly, gifts work like nothing else. A gift gladly accepted changes everything. The imbalance creates motion, motion that pushes us to a new equilibrium, motion that creates connection. The key is that the gift must be freely and gladly accepted. Sending someone a gift over the transom isn't a gift, it's marketing. Gifts have to be truly given, not given in anticipation of a repayment. True gifts are part of being in a community (willingly paying taxes for a school you will never again send your grown kids to) and part of being an artist (because the giving motivates you to do ever better work). Plus, giving a gift feels good. – sethgodin.typepad.com Arabia in Boston I'M very pleased to advise for those of you who are stateside and willing to travel to Boston, the Science Museum in Boston is featuring a special film on Feb 12, titled ‘Arabia', meant to help us appreciate the extraordinary culture and history of Arabia, starting with Ibn Al-Haytham. In addition, Boston is a wonderful US city to explore and discover. It is one of the oldest cities in America with so much of America's history having taken place there. One can go to the port and see where the Boston Tea Party took place. And there is an excellent walking tour of Boston to see many more historical places. Lastly one should not leave Boston without taking an afternoon charter for whale sightings and then afterwards have a meal at the original Cheers restaurant. – americanbedu.com Google Buzz Google Buzz, in case you hadn't noticed, has been getting lots of…well, buzz since being unveiled yesterday. Depending on your perspective, it's either a huge Facebook-Twitter-MySpace-Yelp-Foursquare killer, or it's a giant disappointment and, therefore, an epic fail (our own Liz Gannes thinks it's somewhere in between). Like many of the new things released by companies such as Google and Apple, it seems to function like a Rorschach test for the geek crowd, a blank sheet upon which everyone's highest hopes and/or deepest fears can be projected. Google Buzz is brilliant or Google Buzz is stupid; Google Buzz changes everything or Google Buzz changes nothing. And so on. Google's new service looks and feels a lot like many other social media tools and networks. The primary input is a box for status updates, just like Twitter and Facebook. You can use @ replies, just like Twitter, and you can share photos and other media content easily (there's even a photo gallery function like Facebook's). If you're mobile, you can give Google Buzz your current location and get comments about that location, just like Foursquare and Gowalla and Yelp. But the single biggest difference between Google Buzz and all of these other services is that Buzz is tied to email.
