August :: 2006 :: Thinking Home Business | Practical Tips For People Who Work From Home

Although – or perhaps because – I spent a few years not so long ago in helping promote trade between Australia and Brazil, and thereby got to know a bit about trade with all the Latin American countries, I am conscious that my education in the history, politics, economics and culture of the region is quite deficient.

Take Peru, for instance. Other than colourful pictures of tourist attractions and the occasional story about Machu Picchu on television or in a weekend colour magazine, Peru is off my radar. And as I don’t speak or read Spanish, there is a further limitation on my capacity to learn.

And I’ve never noticed much news on a regular basis about Peru, whether in the Australian, or even the international English language media I subscribe to online – e.g.NY Times, Washington Post. Maybe it’s there, but I’ve not noticed it.

Fortunately I have Global Voices Online in my newsfeed. Global Voices Online “seeks to amplify, curate and aggregate the global

conversation online – with a focus on countries and communities outside the

U.S. and Western Europe”.

And from today’s download from Global Voices Online, I’ve just finished reading bilingual blogger David Sasaki’s report on what occupied the attention of bloggers in Peru this week. David quotes from various sources in Spanish, but his English commentary enabled me to pick up the plot, so to speak.

And then, curiosity about Peruvian bloggers thoroughly aroused, from a bit of Googling I was led back to Global Voices Online and a post about Peruvian bloggers doing their bit to celebrate Blog Day 2006 on August 31st. You can read here about Blog Day Peru 2006 – it will help to be able to read Spanish .

In my history studies years ago I learned the importance of citing sources, preferably the original or ‘primary’ sources, in anything I wrote. That training served me well as a public servant and has also been valuable in several consulting assignments.

But a lot of that citing was on the basis of manuscripts or printed texts, from an analog world. Obviously, our digital world provides a lot more scope for instant manipulation of information – and not always responsibly.

Just how can we have confidence that a blog post, for example, is reliable, or useful?

Robert Scoble’s story of a link path – How the blog trust network works… shows that if you have a degree of trust in the judgement of the person offering the initial link, there is a good chance you will be able to access valuable content.