About my blog: how it works

I want you to understand more about what is happening in your world and how those things affect your life. This page explains how I’m doing that with this blog.

1) A global, multilingual perspective

7 billion people in 200 countries speak a lot of languages. 7,358 according to some estimates. There’s no way anyone is ever going to be able to speak all of them, of course, but I love languages and cross-cultural debate so I’m trying something else.

I have a degree in Modern Languages and Linguistics, I speak English, French and Spanish and I’ve spent ten years working as a translator. My Italian isn’t bad and I picked up a bit of Swedish and an even smaller bit of Russian on my travels.

I have discovered that blogging in more than one language is fun, instructive and opens up both my mind and the debate to more diverse points of view and many more people. This is ultimately of great benefit to you as a reader.

Firstly, with each additional language, we get to read a much broader view of world news and global events: what is considered ‘important’ news varies from country to country, as well as from newspaper to newspaper. Secondly, as I add languages, the community of people reading my blog becomes both larger and more varied, in terms of the ideas everyone brings to the debates.

As you can see, I’ve already begun with English and Spanish. The next language I add will be French, in 2012. I will then try and make it work with some others: Chinese, Russian and Arabic first, which will give us all six official UN languages and access, in theory at least, to about 40% of the world’s population.

Now, this will obviously all take some time. While it has certainly been possible to blog in two languages at once, the logistics of writing a blog AND translating it mean that sometime in the future, probably as I add French next year, I will start working with translators to make it all function properly.

But that, loyal reader, is where I want to take you: as much truly global, cross-cultural, multilingual debate and thought about world news and global trends as we can get our hands on. I want my blog to be a global, multilingual platform for debate and ideas about areas of life which affect us all.

2) 7 areas of life which affect us all

After thinking about this for a long time, and after much reading of interesting articles and books, and after talking to a lot of people, I’ve settled on the following seven areas of life as my blog categories becauses they are relevant to every single one of us now in some way, wherever we live and whichever culture we are a part of somewhere in the world:

Environment & climate: you might believe in man-made global warming or not, but it’s hard to dispute the existence of climate change and the existential problems it poses for 7 billion human beings, from the melting of Arctic ice to the huge island of plastic waste floating around the Pacific. How should we deal with it?
Cities & infrastructure: for the first time in history, more than 50% of humanity now lives in a city somewhere on the planet. There are now 26 “megacities”—with more than 10 million inhabitants—in the world, when in 1950 there was just one (New York). We have built ourselves a global infrastructure, and we must live within it;
Agriculture & energy: everyone needs to eat and drink every day. Everybody needs ‘stuff’ and fuel to move around. How do we “feed the 7 billion” properly, much less the the 8 billion we are likely to be within 10 or 15 years? If life around the world is so dependent on so much energy, what happens if it starts to run out?
Healthcare & education: disease has been one of mankind’s biggest historical enemies, and advances in healthcare and medicine have allowed us to make impressive progress. It is difficult to argue with the premise that education is the single most important investment any individual or society can make;
Economics & money: almost everyone seems to want “a little bit more money”. From its origins as an efficient medium of exchange to the current modern financial mess we’re in, money and economics have always been important drivers of human relations and world affairs. How will our relationship with it evolve?
Politics & society: how should we organise our societies? What is the correct model for a nation? What, in fact, is a nation? Which new global problems are countries around the world trying to deal with? How must they think about more fundamental concepts like the rule of law and the role of the state in order to prosper today?
International relations: you reach a point where it becomes hard to avoid the conclusion that international relations has almost nothing to do with genuine cooperation and almost everything to do with a giant global fight for resources, power and glory. How, then, do we deal with so many truly international, cross-border problems?

3) The global flood of news and information

We live in a world in which we are bombarded with a constant, instant flood of information, data and opinion which we must somehow attempt to understand. 10 years ago, you could still feel well-informed by picking up your daily paper and reading it with your coffee in the morning.

Not any more.

In 2011, we live in a time of absolutely unprecedented access to information, stories, data, articles, status updates and debates about our world, global events and the march of history.

According to Google’s CEO last year, from the beginning of recorded time—from time the Sumerians invented human writing about 3000 years before Christ—until the time Zuckerberg started inventing Facebook in 2003, humans produced a total of 5 exabytes of data.

That’s the number 5 with 18 zeros after it—5,000,000,000,000,000,000—which is enough to fit into about a million desktop computers.

In 2011—just eight years later—thanks to smart phones, blogs and social media, we are now collectively producing those same 5 exabytes of data every two days!

Every. Two. Days.

How are we supposed to decide what is important in a world like that? How are we supposed to decide what is relevant when we are drowning in a flood of facts and opinion that normally a) overwhelms us and b) makes us think it’s probably better to drink a beer on the beach instead of trying to understand it all?

4) Important world news: global relevance

What, though, is ‘important’ news, in such a connected world with so many people in it?

From the thousands and thousands of events going on every day, all around the world, in every country, how do we make a decision about which ones to spend more time thinking about? Which ones do we perceive to be more relevant for some reason?

How do we decide every day which ones to concentrate on more, given our limited amounts of time and energy?

We need some reference points to tell us which stories are ‘important’:

How certain is the news? Is it just some random opinion, do several pieces of data point towards the same conclusion or are we looking at scientific, statistical proof?
Which parts of the system—or systems—does it affect? Does the event affect one tiny, irrelevant component or a key hub? Does it affect more than one system?
How does it appear to be changing? Is the event or force getting stronger or weaker? Is it just starting to form or reaching a critical or catastrophic tipping point?
How likely is it to have a real impact on the world? Is it already having an impact on life somewhere? Is it about to? Or is it just a theory, something that might happen?
Where will it have an impact? Will the impact be local on just a few towns or will the event have a truly global, international impact in several countries and continents?
How many people around the world will it affect? Is this going to affect just a few people or are tens of millions of people about to have their lives changed?
How long will its effects last? Is this something which will last for a couple of hours or are the effects of this going to be felt for generations?

These questions give us a framework with which we can talk about the news and with which we can start to be a bit more objective about what is or isn’t ‘important’.

5) Global news pages: stay focused

The main page for each category—the ones you see if you click on the links at the top of the blog—are entry pages into that topic. They do several things:

My latest in-depth articles & interviews: On the top left, you can see my latest articles and interviews relating to that topic;
Latest news & opinion: At the top in the middle, you can see the latest ten news stories and opinion articles that I’ve found around the internet and think you should read. Updated daily;
Latest video comment: On the top right, you get to watch my latest video commentary on that topic;
Hot search topics: just below the video comment, you can see some search links which take you to the latest news about each phrase. Each phrase is some hot topic in that area of life that week;
Topical search phrases: words and phrases allow us to follow the news about different aspects of each topic. You can find lots of them in the middle section of each page to help you explore the news better;
Debates and ideas: a summary of the debates which matter within each topic.
Recommended books: a selection of recent and not so recent books which I have read or have on my reading list and which I think will improve your understanding of a topic if you want to read further.

My homepage reflects all of the latest news and articles from each area and updates automatically during the course of each day as I add new things I find.

6) Top world news stories: around the world

The Top 10 world news stories is a little section devoted to trying to answer the question: “what are today’s most important world news stories?”

Each article gets a link and what I consider to be the most important quote from it.

The idea is to do two things with this section.

Firstly, I want to save you time: you get all the stories on the same page, with what I think is the most relevant quote from each of the articles. That way, if you only have time to read one page on the internet that day, you can still keep up with the most important world news.

Secondly, I want to offer you a very human view of the news. No algorithms, no automatic posting of anything. The stories get selected based on a broad reading of the day’s news across the world, in several languages, and according to my best knowledge and understanding of the various debates within each of the seven important areas of life and the direction events appear to be moving in.

There are a whole host of ways in which I think about the news and whether or not it’s ‘important’ (You can read about how I do it here), but trust me when I say I think about it a lot.

You will, of course, find no stories at all about Britney Spears, Justin Bieber or Big Brother.

If you sign up to my e-mail list, I’ll send you a reminder each day when the Top 10 stories have been published, so you don’t even have to remember to come back and find them.

7) Multilingual ideas & analysis

Looking for invisible ripples of truth. Once we have started to:

…understand the debates, ideas and problems in each area of life;
…identify and read new articles which tell us how that area of life is developing;
…checked across several languages and countries and newspapers;

…something very interesting starts to happen.

We start to see global trends. Invisible ripples of truth spreading around the globe which, for some reason, suddenly start to become apparent. Some kind of greater truth about how our world is changing.

We start to understand the bigger picture.

Will anyone ever have scientific, statistical proof that this is all happening beyond a shadow of a doubt?

No, never. No one will ever understand it all.

But it’s an interesting way of thinking about the world.

That’s what the in-depth daily comments are all about.

And if we start to have that kind of understanding of how the world is changing around us, and the likely reasons why, then our vision of life and world news starts to become very, very interesting indeed.

This is also the point where I ask you to start paying a small subscription fee—you can choose any price you like—to support what I do a little and to continue reading.

8) Interviews (…coming back soon…)

So,

…we’re reading the news;
…from as many sources as we can find;
…in as many languages as we can understand;
…in some important areas of life;
…and starting to discover some very interesting “invisible truths”;
…which help us think better about how our world is changing.

What’s next?

Talking to people who know more than we do is what’s next. And that means interviews.

I enjoy this type of conversation immensely and Skype and the Internet make it incredibly easy to record interviews with experts from around the world, which you can listen to:

on your computer
during your commute on your smartphone
in your car on the way to work

9) World news guides: understanding debates (…coming soon…)

As well as finding and interpreting more news, and talking to some interesting people about what that might mean, we can also compare what we find with what is already known about a particaulr subject and the theories which exist about how that area of life works.

This is also very useful if you’re new to all this and wondering where to start or how to being getting your head around what’s going on in the world and why all of this stuff might be important.

So I have written a series of seven short introductory guides to help you think about bigger ideas in each of the seven areas of life.

They contain:

a short (10 pages or so) written introduction to each topic;
summaries of theories, debates;
introductions to relevant authors and thinkers;
a chronology of important events;
lists of blogs you can read;
and documentaries you can watch to learn more.

This also functions as my “free pdf report”: an essential component of blogger–reader relationships.

Having a “free pdf report” is supposed to encourage you to want to sign up for my e-mail updates more than if I didn’t offer one.

That way we start an interesting relationship around a subject which interests us both. You will reach a point where you want to subscribe to read more and in return get to learn much more about what you’ve expressed an interest in: world news, global trends and how life is changing.

You get the first one about ‘Environment & Climate’ when you sign up for the e-mail updates. You can read the rest when you subscribe to continues reading (and remember, you choose how much you pay…!)

10) Book thoughts: world news & big ideas

I read (quite a lot of) books about all of these world news topics.

Given that I want to write about them for you, I think that’s very important so that we understand the debates better.

It helps us to observe the news better and we can form better images of what really might be going on in the world.

I usually have five or six books on the go at once at different stages of ‘finished’.

When I’m reading, as well as taking interesting notes on the author’s ideas and the facts and theories he talks about, I frequently come across paragraphs or even whole passages which veritably jump off the page and scream to be shared with you on the blog

They frequently seem extremely relevant to what’s going on in the world right now.

So that’s what this section is for.

‘Book thoughts‘ is a section full of quotes from interesting books about the world, mixed with some brief thoughts about how and why I think that’s relevant to the way we see the world changing.

11) History + news + theory + debate + morality

So there you have it, loyal reader, that is what I’m doing with my blog, my work, my project: mixing together history, news, theories, debate and questions about right and wrong to help us think better about this world we live in.

History is important because, in most human affairs, its almost all been done before, by someone, somewhere, so the more we know about that, the more we can compare our current situation to it and improve our lot, the better.

News is obviously vitally important because it lets us know what’s going on right now, what everyone is doing, where the world is going and how situations and history are changing. Then we can start to think about what we might want to do about that and about what our options are.

Theories are important because they allow us to ask questions about the operation of different parts of life: how does life work? If we are capable of designing parts of that experience, how do we want it to work?

Debate is important in order to open our minds and to see what others are thinking. This introduces more rigour into our thoughts, allows us to consider a broader range of possibilities and helps us to confirm whether or not we are thinking along the right lines.

And morality is important because, once we have understood where we have been, where we come from, what the current situation is and where we could go or what we might do about it, we must ask the more important questions of whether or not we should go there or do that, or even whether or not we must go.

Once we get to this point, of course, we just go straight back to point number one and keep reading. We keep thinking and we think better than before.

12) About my project: the back story

The ‘about my project‘ section is where I tell you what it is I’m trying to do on my blog and how all that is going, what my current readers think, how media and blogging are changing, what the best to do something might be, and anything else I think is relevant for us but which clearly doesn’t fit into the normal categories.

I publish about one post a week for you in this section.

13) Subscribe: you choose how much you pay

If I’m going to do this properly, I need a way to do it sustainably. I can’t pay the rent or buy food in the supermarket with goodwill.

What is the right way to make money with a blog? Where is the value in a blog?

Designing and covering my blog with annoying ads would distract your attention from what you’re really interested in and waste your time. I don’t want to do that.

Trying to attract and hold your attention in order to sell you somebody else’s affiliate products via an e-mail list is a waste of your time and energy, and a waste of mine.

Trying to force you into a subscription to my own blog at a fixed price is, well, not the right way to go about a long-term virtual relationship. You have a different personal economic situation to the personal economic situation of every other reader of my blog, and your personal financial circumstances are likely to change several times over your lifetime.

So you choose how much you want to pay when you subscribe. And feel free to change your subscription rate—up or down, more or less—whenever you like, depending on i) your personal economic circumstances and ii) how much value you think you get from my blog.

Oh, and I’ll pay 50% of my net income to charity. Why? Because that encourages everybody to give a little bit more. You give a bit more, I give a bit more, the people who really need it get a bit more. We read and think about how to make our world a better place, and we channel some of our money towards that same end.

You can read more about this idea and subscribe right now, on this page here.

14) Stay in touch: e-mail updates

Now you know what my project is all about, what I want for you and why I want you to become a ‘loyal reader’ and not just a one-time visitor, if you sign up for my e-mail updates, you won’t have to remember to come back to stay up-to-date.

Same deal as with the blog: no ads, no affiliate sales, no spam, just quick e-mail updates when I publish something new: the Top 10 world news stories, a new multilingual analysis article, a book thought, an interview or a new post about my project.

Click through if you’re interested in whatever the topic is, ignore it if you don’t. Remember: you choose.

save lots of time;
get updates when I publish a new post;
get your free copy of my “Environment & Climate” world news guide (…coming soon…);
start thinking about your world better.

And remember, the e-mail updates are free.. They won’t cost you a penny. €0.00.

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