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Worldchanging.com's Emily Gertz discusses the effectiveness and ineffectiveness of blogs and mobile phones, referring to recent events in Burma and an activist project in Congo, among other things:

"In the world of online activism, expectations have not inflated to the level of a few years ago, when a wave of techno-utopian optimism swept the activist 'net that maybe a "technical intervention," that is blogging, could stop the mass killings in Darfur -- an effort which, on those terms, failed.

Still, could another such "failure," fueled by the dismay and anger about the Myanmar government's violent crackdown, undercut the momentum of mobile-enabled activism? It's a good moment to consider how networked communications don't -- and do -- help achieve human rights."

Link to full post.

My graduate thesis was about The Daily Show and its relationship to media and politics, and so I grew almost embarrassingly excited when someone in the house told me that Evo Morales (who is featured prominently in the Why Democracy? film Looking for the Revolution) had been Jon Stewart's guest last week. It's a decent 8-minute interview, and it's interesting to hear the crowd's positive response to Morales' various acheivements that don't jive so well with official US policy. The interaction between Stewart, Morales, and Morales's translator is pretty hilarious, too.