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Content Tagged with culture + History

You remember those dark days after the first bust?

You know the ones when all the MBAs left, and the people who loved the Web went on building it — building meaningful, crazy, artistic cool stuff, and the ethos of the social web was born, back before when that meant more then widget crazy/Facebook-tulip-bloom-madness. Yeah, that sure sucked.

Just thinking about it in the light of this week’s market silliness is enough to make me want to go back to SxSW again this year (where the torch was kept alight, like Ireland in the Dark Ages). And I’d sworn off it after this last year, but maybe budgets will be contracting again by then. And those projects that got started out in the darkness, say Flickr, and Upcoming and del.icio.us among others, wasn’t it all much better when the market got back involved and they got serious?

At least thats what reading Fred and Jason on “startup depression” reminded me of.

A benefit of open source software is the ability to take the code base of an application and develop it in a new direction. This is, as most of you probably know, called forking, and is very common in the open source community. For example, many Linux distributions can be traced back to either Debian, Fedora or Slackware.

Oliver Wang gives a backgrounder on boogaloo much like he does on soulsides

The dictator and the watch; remembrance of rogues past

A brief history of shredded wheat - the only omission is the Weetabix factor

"When finished, they [i.e., Morehouse College] will have developed, along with Boston University and Stanford University, the MLK Jr. Archival Collaborative, a searchable Web-based database."

Erik Falk's dissertation. A very close reading on Abdulrazak Gurnah's three great novels, insightful also on Vera. Dislocation, exile and entanglements are the themes.

The BBC World Service weighs in on African history as only it can. Not a bad series and some of the footage is priceless. It's almost akin to Unesco's General History of Africa but in bite-sized portions.

Early missionaries to Nigeria condemned most traditional practices as pagan. Roman Catholics and Anglicans later came to terms with most practices, even incorporating some traditional dances into church liturgy. But there was no room for local gods once t

wax printing in Africa began on the Gold Coast, where Indonesian batiks were being imported from the mid-19th century. In 1893, a Scottish traderintroduced the batik-inspired wax prints produced in Holland to the Dutch Indies. spread over West Africa into

profiles Nigerian film industry, which has declared hiatus because of plethora of films; movies, shot on video, are low-budget and marketed to home audience through rental shops and streetside video clubs Note: no mention of "Nollywood", March 2002

The blood feud, whose vengeful precepts trace the ancient code of an eye for an eye the samurai of feudal Japan and the bootleggers of Appalachian America Mafia members in southern Italy reprisal killings vendettas. Albania tries to break free

"This area is the oldest corner of N'Djamena, you cannot just destroy it because of modernity". The Chadian government plans to demolish the much-loved, 115-year-old district of Gardole in N'Djamena which pre-dates the colonial powers a historical treasur

A crucial struggle is taking place over which direction this economically resurgent nation should be taking. the powerful and aspirational segment of the population India poised to make the transformation from an impoverished, backward country into a supe