I saw a talk this week by Ethan Zuckerman of globalvoicesonline.org, an organization dedicated to amplifying news feeds from the developing world into the eyes of our mainstream media.

Ethan's talk was motivational and thought provoking throughout, but I think the highlight for me was a quick story about a proxy server and a line of Javascript donated by the blogging community of Pakistan to help bloggers in India circumvent a goverment ban on blogspot.com URLs. From help-pakistan.com:

In light of the recent blogspot ban in India, the blogging community in Pakistan would like to present as a gift to the Indian blogging community a small script that can be inserted into their websites which converts all Blogspot links into a URL utilizing the proxy servers of pkblogs.com

Credit goes out to Adnan Siddiqui for creating this nifty javascript utility which quite simply needs to be installed on your file server and one line of code inserted into the header file of your website. Once installed all your surfers will automatically use pkblogs for all outgoing blogspot links

Download the ZIP file Pkblogs Script.zip

Please consider this as a gift from Pakistan to all Indians in hope of building friends across the border

God bless the hackers.

Another highlight of the talk was the conclusion when Red asked Ethan what we might do to help the world, what issues we might take on, and he responded:

You've got to find something you're passionate about, but passionate in a way that scares you. If it doesn't scare you, you haven't found the right thing.