Reading Thomas L. Friedman’s “The World Is Flat” and Seth Godin’s “Who’s There?” has set me to thinking about how everything is in place to provide global access to the internet. Most of my friends in Mozambique have cell phones and through “moblogging” pretty soon any one of them could start publishing on the Internet. Blogger already has a way for people in the US to publish text, images and even sound recordings from their cell phones. Soon that service will be global. [Correction: It already is global (just not through Blogger)] Just think when anyone speaking any of the 6,912 languages listed in the Ethnologue can join the publishing third wave just by sending a text message from their phone!

Much hand-wringing has been wasted on the high entry cost of getting a computer to get linked up to the Internet and in the meanwhile, more and more people are carrying the 21st century equivalent of Gutenberg’s press in their pocket. If information is the commodity of this century, those living in the third world have in their possession a unique commodity: one of the endangered languages of the world. Perhaps in the not too distant future, graduate students of linguistics will be able to pull down language samples direct from the field and enter into direct contact with speakers of a language they wish to study.