Our trip begain with  five relaxing days in beautiful Rarotonga (aka the Cook Islands) where we chilled in a guesthouse on the South (quiet) side of the island. The residence had two fine dogs, five rooms and a shared kitchen and common room but after the first day we were left with only the dogs for company. The dogs were keen to accompany whenever we walked out to the beach and they would go swimming and fishing. The owner would bring us fresh bread, papayas and mangos each day. We hired push bikes for and rode around to various beaches and up through the hills that form the spine of the island.

An interesting interview from CNN(!)

Cory Doctorow (Boing Boing) and Alex Steffen (WorldChanging) got together a few days ago and came up with the Outquisition -- a positive alternative to the pessimistic, post-apocalyptic, "Road Warrior" scenarios that abound for the near-to-mid future.

Cory describes this as "super-networked post-apocalyptic Peace Corps who respond to the Great Fall by figuring out how to put it all back together."

Google has come out swinging against Canadian ISPs (incl. Telus, Rogers and especially Bell Canada) that are throttling peer to peer traffic of their customers.

I've long been a big fan of Douglas Rushkoff. In this keynote "invocation," (courtesy of BlipTV, 8 mins) which opened the second day of the Personal Democracy Forum on June 24, 2008, he argues that there is no such thing as "personal democracy" and genuine democratic discourse can only be participatory and collective. The power to write and publish, he notes, may finally be in the hands of everyone (after centuries of domination by religious and political elites), but real democracy isn't just blogging and commenting, it's treating the entire world as "open source" and remakable by direct participation.

I caught the closing session of Vidfest on Friday - a call to arms to defend net neutrality, entitled "Can I Have Your Attention Please? An Internet SOS", featuring Matt Thompson and Jason Roks.