Ted

a stimulating experience to learn from the worlds scientists and thinkers at TED, what tomorrow will look like and what is important to perserve. My favourites: Sir Ken Robinson

, Hans Rosling,Dan Gilbert - are we happy- why we are happy,Barry Schwartz - Paradox of choice
Neil Gershenfeld: The beckoning promise of personal fabrication
Marcin Jakubowski: Open-sourced blueprints for civilization

Democracy now

following news on Democracy Now! gives me some very stimulating background information which often do not get the attention of the front pages and the indepth analisis. By using Miro.

Projects

Of course i tend to verify all information and one of the fastest updated pages with indepth information can be found at Wikipedia.

Sources

a helpful tool to find your way to source of your interest will be one of the many social bookmark sites. Sites like del.icio.us help you to target the best site of your interest based on the reviews of so many other users.

In a similar way works Stumbleupon. Also this tool can guide you to a topic of your interest and you can share your evaluation of any website with the community of participating users on the Web.

What I follow upon

This is just a little excerpt of projects i like to follow. I'm every year engaged in following the World Economic Forum in Davos.

My interest are broad in scope. This is why i also maky use of tools like the open source Democracy Player, which allows me to access content from many TV Channels worldwide, out of which i follow Democracy Now, Kulturplatz, rocketboom, Sternstunden, Hans Küng - World Ethos (a great men whom i had the pleasure to meet personally in 2001 right after his speech at the UN Assembly).

Very recently I joined Couchsurfing which allows me to meet with many real people visiting the city of Genoa and hopefully allow me to have friends in every town of the world.

Other times i'm getting carried away also by "real world" experiences, such as the encounter with Prof. Achenbach, the founder of the Philosophical Practice.

Of course i follow also the general impact of the Internet of the Gobal Community by studying the papers of the EFF and software developed by Open Source Communities like Sourceforge.

On the site of Kiva,org I'm currently discovering microlending (thanks to a hint from one of my future guests). A very interesting initiative worth to be followed up very closely. I will follow it also bearing in mind, what I learned from Hans Rosling and the Gapminder about the world and of course also my personal experiences.

There is a wide world of news I love to follow up on. Some of the journalists I like to follow is John Pilger, Robert Fisk, Bill Moyer, Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!, Slavoj Zizek, Paul Krugman, but also economist Joseph Stiglitz or Noam Chomsky, George Soros but will always also look for the most direct sources like Malalai Joya, who's book A Woman Among Warlords had been very revealing or at least confirming what we should all have suspected for a long time. In the spirit of Francis Claud Cockburn "Never believe anything until it has been officially denied." The subjects I'm interested in however do not stop at politics and economy, but may include a verity of many other things like The World Within Us just to give an example. But any philosophy lesson be it on Hannnah Arendt or the wonderful story of the life of Stéphane Hessel will grab my intention and of course I will not only look at the surface, but digg deaper into the issues.

The purpose of all this is not to waste time, but to embrace the world and to be open to all it's aspects and to give some positive contribution for the wellbeing of all in my immediate environment.