Ethan, friend and inspiration
www.oreilly.com -- interview with Ethan Zuckerman
O'Reilly, favourite publisher of geeks everywhere has an interview with my friend, some-time mentor, and often inspiration Ethan. He founded GeekCorps, and has incredibly managed to transport a geek ethic and fascination to a sector which is hardly known for innovation and quick feet.
In 1993, Ethan Zuckerman was a Fulbright scholar working in the West African nation of Ghana. He was amazed that virtually no one in the country had Internet access: "There was, in the whole country, I think, one person who was regularly online, and he was getting online by dialing AOL in the U.K., and checking email once a week," Ethan says. After the Fulbright, Ethan returned to the U.S. and became tech employee No. 1 at Tripod, which was later bought by Lycos. In 1999, at the height of the dot-com bubble, he looked around to find himself far wealthier than he ever imagined he would be and found himself thinking about Africa again.
