Picks of the week: Libraries in Africa, Ning and Plain English

Here are the interesting links I harvested this week:

• Room to Read partners with local communities throughout the developing world to provide quality educational opportunities by establishing libraries, creating local language children's literature, constructing schools, providing education to girls and establishing computer labs. They also feature on my post about meaningful Xmas gifts.
  
  
• You might think Facebook is "it", but I like Ning more as a highly customizable social network platform. It features blogs, forums, video and picture libraries, events scheduling all on an easy to use platform. I subscribed to ChangeBlogger network on Ning.
  
  
• You might have come across some of the Commoncraft ".. in Plain English" video tutorials, but have you checked out their library. All in Plain English, from "Electing a US president" to "Twitter" and "Social Media", all in short videos and in Plain English.
  Some of their productions is also worth a look. (Watch the Google Docs video).
  
  
• You would be surprised of the digital trail you leave on the Internet through your signature (your IP address). There are plenty of public domain tools available allowing anyone to trace back the origin of the visitor through that IP address. So.. should your activity can be monitored? Maybe you are a human rights activist, or you blog about controversial issues. TorProject allows you to 'hide' your entity, and 'go onto the web anonymously'
  
  
• And last but least, Technorati published their 2008 overview of the Blogosphere. Who are the bloggers? What is the impact on the Internet? Even just these figures are impressive: 184 million blogs active worldwide, reaching 346 million readers. 77% of active Internet users read blogs.

More Picks of the Week on The Road.