The top navigation is now featuring a new section called countries: An interactive map showing a visualization of how often our posts have mentioned each country in the world, darker tones used for those with higher number.
The relevance of this feature goes beyond facilitating the navigation around the site. It helps emphasize the importance of including as many sources as possible within our posts in order to achieve a truly global discussion. I hope that visitors from those countries that have not been mentioned will react to this visualization by submitting a collaboration.
Over the next little while I expect to improve this feature by adding other ways of visualizing the rich set of data that has been discussed throughout the posts.
Thanks to John at backspace.com for the map technology and the useful documentation on how to customize it.
Yesterday I got a call from To√±o, one of many Mexicans that have come to Canada looking for better opportunities. He is young but his voice conveys a very calm attitude, almost zen-like. He has completed engineering studies back home, but the lack of local acreditations have him working as cheap labour. He is in survival mode and as such is likely willing to try almost anything. I worry that if I can’t help, someone will take advantage of his situation.
He is likely going to be one of the first candidates to participate in a blogging workshop that will allow him to explore new ventures by teaching him basic skills. While I know it is unlikely that anybody will make enough money through blogging, specially at an amateur level, the essential lesson is that people coming from remote corners of the world to the big cities should not dismiss their cultural baggage, and instead should take advantage of the wealth of knowledge. Blogging is just the mechanism to make them realize their potential.
A few months ago, I posted think culturati, an early attempt to describe what this blog [...]
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