While talk of AIDS has become nothing but white noise for many, Zinhle Thabethe, a counselor working on the frontlines of the South African HIV epidemic, is taking action. Through home visits, working with AIDS orphans, educating nurses and doctors, and singing in the internationally acclaimed HIV-positive Sinikithemba Choir, Zinny’s goal is to fight stigma by raising awareness, and to ensure that people with HIV get plugged into treatment and stay on treatment – all in one of the most resource-constrained environments in the world.

Now, National Geographic is recognizing Zinny’s extraordinary contributions by naming her one of the 2008 class of Emerging Explorers – individuals who represent the next generation of world-changing talent from many different fields.

We continue to work with Zinny and her colleague, Dr. Krista Dong of iTeach, on Project Masiluleke, a Pop!Tech Accelerator project focused on using mobile devices to improve HIV care in South Africa and beyond. And we join in congratulating Zinny on her National Geographic nomination.

There is so much content out there on the internet now, however, less than 1/3 of the material is available in any given language. So we partnered with an amazing company called dotSUB, to translate the Pop!Tech Pop!Casts in eight highly-relevant languages in the hopes of removing language as a barrier to globalization. The eight target languages (Russian, Chinese, Portuguese, Swahili, Farsi, Arabic, French and Spanish) were picked because they represent vital areas of the developing world.

We’ve released a preliminary batch of subtitled Pop!Casts including:

Thomas Friedman, New York Times columnist and best-selling author; Bunker Roy, one of India’s most successful social entrepreneurs; Jesse Sullivan and Dr. Todd Kuiken, the world’s first bionic man and the doctor who helped him become so; Carolyn Porco, who leads the imaging team on the Cassini missions to Saturn; Zinhle Thabete, a front-line warrior in the battle against HIV in South Africa; and Richard Alley, the renowned paleoclimatologist and climate change expert.

Don’t worry — more is on the way!

dotSUB was founded by Michael Smolens, who has a lifetime of experience doing business in high risk emerging economies. Recognizing the potential of global communication powered by the Internet, the founders went to work creating a web-based tool that enables video to be accessed in an open, collaborative, ‘wiki’ type environment. This tool gives both professional and amateur viewers the ability to translate video content into multiple languages via subtitles rendered over the video file. The same tool facilitates captioning video for the hearing-impaired. You should definitely check out dotsub.com to see the amazing array of videos that they have subtitled into more than 48 languages.

BusinessWeek has also written up an article about the Pop!Tech/dotSub Inititative which can be seen online.

To see the Pop!Casts, please visit www.poptech.org.

For this July 4th release, we have selected three amazing Pop!Casts that are celebrations of the human spirit, and feats of exploration, independence and civil rights.

First up, Ben Saunders will amaze you with tales and images of his expedition in the Arctic. He was the first person in the world to cross, solo and unsupported, the Arctic Ocean - that’s a 1,240 mile journey across one of the most challenging climates on the earth. After crossing areas of unprecedented thinning ice and open water - experiencing the effects of global climate change first hand - Ben has begun to raise international awareness on the changes. How does he do it? His answer is an inspiring one: “don’t underestimate what ‘man’ is capable of when we have a strong belief system about our goals and destiny.”

Next, political activist Ivan Marovic was one of the founders of the Serb student-resistance group Otpor, which helped remove former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic from power. Ivan continues to champion political and human rights with a video game he helped to create that teaches users the tactics of nonviolent resistance. Players control characters, groups and movements - building them into coalitions, sending them to carry out tactics, and dealing with government responses. Ivan walks us through a graffiti campaign, street rallies and a benefit rock concert that finally brings down the game government.

We finish this week’s Pop!Casts with a stirring presentation by orator Eloma Simpson Barnes. Eloma delivers a speech by Martin Luther King Jr. in what seems like a direct channeling of the great civil rights leader. Her transcendent performance will move you.

This weekend, Pop!Tech Balladeer Jonathan Coulton was featured in the New York Times Magazine article “Sex, Drugs and Updating Your Blog” . The article describes how the internet and social networking sites (MySpace, Facebook, Friendster) have changed the relationship between musician and fan. Rock stars need MySpace pages, blog entries, and they need to respond to fan-emails because–they need the fans. Today fans are expecting all these things. No wonder Jonathan has become a poster-boy for this New Music Paradigm. Besides being an extremely approachable human being, he is also a decidedly accessible rock star as well. In fact, his accessibility has become something of a vocation for him.

He says: “People always think that when you’re a musician you’re sitting around strumming your guitar, and that’s your job,” he said. “But this” - he clicked his keyboard theatrically - “this is my job.”

Jonathan’s a kind of Internet Superstar. While standard means of sales and distribution such as retail CD sales, top 20 radio play or MTV appearances still prevail, the Internet has spurned a whole new channel for reaching audiences and has also created a new metric for determining popularity. Jonathan currently has 5,359 MySpace Friends alone - writing notes to him, emailing with him and, more often than not, getting a response back from him. Not too shabby!

Right now, “Sex, Drugs and Updating Your Blog” is the #2 most-emailed article on the newspaper’s site, which translates to a spike in traffic to
Coulton’s blog at www.jonathancoulton.com

The article is also chock full o’ links to videos of Coulton’s songs and a great NY Times exclusive “Decoding Code Monkey“.

Check out Jonathan’s Pop!Tech Pop!Cast of his perfomance at the conference last year.

On the heels of Brian Eno’s Pop!Cast, we are releasing his session-mate Will Wright’s presentation. He discusses how we can understand the complexities of the world around us by understanding its underlying simplicity.

Also released today, Bob Freling, Executive Director of the Solar Electric Light Fund (SELF) explains how bringing solar energy to remote villages can be a key to promoting health, education and economic growth in developing worlds.

Will Wright

Bob Freling

You can watch more Pop!Tech Pop!Casts at www.poptech.org/popcasts.

We also encourage you to share these Creative Commons-licensed videos on
your website, blog or other video website. If you do, please let us know
at info@poptech.org.

Thanks to Fast Company writer, Linda Tischler, who did a great little write up about the Pop!Tech Pop!Casts on their blog.

You can see it here.

Linda calls attention to the fact that it is becoming increasingly harder to score tickets to the conference and, rest assured, Pop!Tech will continue to make the content as widely available as possible to keep the conversation open to everyone. Our favorite quote from the Fast Company blog post:

“Can PopTech! scalpers be far behind?”

Imagining seedy scalpers prowling the charming streets of Camden whispering “you need two tickets?…I got two tickets…” — it tickles me.

It’s been about over a week since we have made our very first batch of Pop!Tech Pop!Casts available online and we’ve had some great movement since then.

We are featured on the homepage of iTunes, we’ve been linked around the web (Thanks to everyone who have been moved to write about the release of the Pop!Casts). All in all - not a bad start. And that was only with our first 22 podcasts.

We have two more to share with you today:

Brian Eno - Musician, producer and artist Brian Eno shows how simple things can give rise to complex things—in art and life. See how he uses Darwin’s ecological model of the world as a roadmap for human culture now and in the future.

(I still admire him for his lovely purple velvet jacket)

Rodrigo y Gabriela - The Mexican acoustic guitar duo sensation Rodrigo y Gabriela put fast fingers to strings for a performance that will put you on your feet and keep you moving. There’s no better way to say it: they rock!

(They inspired me to pick up my guitar again, but I quickly realized that my playing compared to theirs is like those of a monkey with socks on its hands)

There are also some new features on the Pop!Casts page to make it easier to share these amazing talks and performances with your friends. Now you can send an email, share a permalink or embed the Yahoo! Video player on your website or blog.

Enjoy! And there is PLENTY more to come.

Everyone here at Pop!Tech is excited to let you know that today we released our first twenty-two Pop!Casts, freely available online video and audio presentations available in both streaming and downloadable formats, on our newly refreshed website.

Available at www.poptech.org/popcasts, the Pop!Casts feature some of the very best presentations from the 2006, 2005 (and eventually 2004) conferences, and we’ll be releasing new ones ever two weeks throughout the rest of the year.

The first set includes fabulous recent presentations by:

Thomas Friedman — Pulitzer Prize winning author and New York Times Columnist.
Serena Koenig — Global health leader and Director of Haiti Programs for Partners in Health
Richard Dawkins — World renowned biologist and evolutionary theorist
Zinhle Thabethe — Renowned AIDS activist from South Africa
Sinikithemba Choir Performance — South African Choir of Zulu men and women who provide support to persons with HIV/AIDS
Bunker Roy — Founder of the Barefoot College in Tilonia, India
Carolyn Porco — Chief Imaging Scientist on the Cassini Mission to Saturn
Erin McKean —Editor-in-chief of U.S. Dictionaries for Oxford University Press and self-proclaimed “word geek”
Juan Enriquez — Leading futurist and bestselling writer on the future of nations
Neil Gershenfeld — Director of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms
Jonathan Coulton — Singer/Songwriter and the official Pop!Tech Balladeer
Thomas Barnett — Strategist and expert on national security and best-selling author
Jesse Sullivan and Todd Kuiken —Jesse Sullivan and his doctor, Todd Kuiken, work together to make Jesse the world’s first bionic man
Martin Marty — One of the most prominent interpreters of religion and culture
Chris Anderson — Editor in Chief of Wired magazine and author of “The Long Tail”
Theo Jansen — Dutch “kinetic sculptor” who creates wind-powered robotic “animals”
Marcia McNutt — Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute director
Reggie Watts - Human Beat-Box Polymath Musician and Comedian
Marianne Weems — Artistic director of the new media theater ensemble The Builders Association
Homaro Cantu —Inventor, entrepreneur and molecular gastronomist
Lester Brown — Preeminent environmentalist and head of the Earth Policy Institute
Kent Nichols — Co-Creator of the wildly popular website and podcast AskaNinja.com

The Pop!Casts are being made available to the public with the help of our friends at Lexus with production support from Yahoo! To encourage their distribution, we’re releasing all of these as open-source, non-commercial Creative Commons licensed content.

You can also subscribe to Pop!Casts within iTunes. With one click you can get them delivered to your iPod automatically!

VERY SPECIAL THANKS to Jakob Trollback for designing the Pop!Cast opening titles, Betsy Henning and AHA! for their beautiful written descriptions, Hamilton Hughes Design for their as-always elegant design work and visual refresh of our website.

Tell your friends, neighbors, colleagues — these are truly worth sharing with anyone who appreciates the innovative ideas and people that change the world.