My Book

Holy crap. The Internet of Elsewhere might actually be real — I just filed my first draft. Grand total word count came to about 83,000 words. I’m pretty stoked but also deathly afraid. I apologize if I haven’t been very communicative over these past few weeks as I’ve been trying to pound this thing out. Becks and I are in Geneva for the weekend for the Fête de l’Escalade and to visit my old Italian teacher, Luca Notari. Thanks to…

Hamid Tehrani of Global Voices conducted an email interview with me about my forthcoming book, tentatively titled The Internet of Elsewhere. Cyrus Farivar is a USA-based blogger, journalist and writer. He is currently working on a book about the impact of the internet on society. Cyrus writes about internet impact on Iran, Senegal, South Korea and Senegal. He was recently in Iran and has taken several photos of Iranian carpets, food, buildings and nature too. Q: You visited Iran recently…

Wow. I just finished a very very very rough draft of the Iran section of my book. Yikes. This writing stuff is hard. It weighs in — with a few thousand words’ worth of holes — at about 22,000 words right now.

Baltic Times: [Estonian President Toomas Hendrik] Ilves also talked up Estonia’s reputation as a centre of hi-tech excellence, saying: “Estonia has some positive experiences, like digitalised public services, that deserve to be explored by the others. We have gone far in reducing paper bureaucracy – it makes my life much easier to work with the computer. Our approach to facilitating computer use deserves to be examined by others.” “In Estonia you can use your computer anywhere and you have free…

“Had nations better understood the potential of the Internet, I suspect they might well have strangled it in its cradle. Emergent technology is, by its very nature, out of control, and leads to unpredictable outcomes.” — William Gibson Directors Guild of America’s Digital Day Los Angeles, May 17, 2003

Well, my trip is basically half over. In two and a half weeks, I’ll be on a plane bound for the US. Next Saturday morning, local time, I’ll be on a plane bound for Paris, with a stopover in Casablanca airport, the beginning of the last leg of this journey. I’ll spend 10 days bouncing between Paris, London, Tallinn, Berlin, Geneva and then back to Paris on Feb. 14. How’s it been going so far? To be honest, pretty rough.…

I’ll be on the road (West Africa, Europe) until February 14. Until then, I’m best reached by email or Skype (cfarivar ; 510.931.5564). I’ll be getting a Senegalese number and an Estonian number as well. Ask me if you need it. See you guys soon!

So due to the magic of EasyJet, I have a $50 flight from London to Tallinn in exactly a month. One problem though, is that the flight is from Stansted Airport, which is basically not near anything — meaning, it’s about 30 miles northeast of London. That’s basically like living in Oakland and flying out of San Jose: doable, but not ideal. Now, normally this wouldn’t be a problem as there’s a convenient train that leaves every 30 minutes from…

“When the things got for real, I got up in the fold / and put into practice all that I was told.” – “The Inkwell”, Blue Scholars Things are getting pretty freakin’ real right about now, that’s for sure. I just got a book deal. Yeah. Really. A book. Like you know, one of those things that’s printed on dead trees and sits in libraries and stuff. Maybe you’ve heard of ’em? I’m going to have an entry in the…