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ROD AMIS is a freelance journalist whose work appears in various SourceForge, Inc. publications, principle among them Slashdot, NewsForge and IT Manager's Journal; at EnterpriseLeadership.org; and at HufftingtonPost.com. He has reported on technology, business, the Internet and politics for more than two decades and was described by About.com's MIS contributor in 1999 as one of the top ten technology journalists on the Web.
He is Senior Contributing Writer at LeverageSocialMedia.com and a frequent contributor to the Public Relations Society of America dead-tree publication PR TACTICS.
He was Lecturer on Editing for Internet Publications at the Novi Sad School of Journalism in the former Yugoslavia in 2002. He is a Founding Member, Host and former Project Coordinator for the journalism social network, NewsTrust.net.
Prior to becoming a "WELLpern" in the early 1990s, Rod was an ink-stained wretch working for various dead-tree publications, including the Austin American-Statesman, Rocky Mountain News and San Francisco Bay Guardian. While working for Silicon.com as a Business correspondent during the dot-com boom, his reporting reached 2.5 million readers throughout Europe. He was also part of the original writing teams at Andover News Network and Access Internet Magazine. He was an introductory contributor to PBS.org's "Reality Check" Web experiment.
A graduate of Wesleyan University (Middletown, Conn.), he was the Thomas J. Watson Fellow in Writing in Cairo, Egypt, too many decades ago. He has traveled extensively on the North American, European and African continents without acquiring facility in a single Romance language. His academic language studies were in German and he acquired enough Arabic to get by while living abroad.
During his journalistic career, Rod has been privileged to interview such Internet and social networking visionaries as Esther Dyson (ICANN and EDVentures), Howard Rheingold (Smart Mobs, the Brainstorm Community), Jon "Maddog" Hall (Linux International), Tom Parish (4WebResults, TalkingPortraits), Robin "roblimo" Miller (OSTG, Point and Click Linux, Internet Video Promotion, Inc.), George Olsen (the Web Standards Project), and Mark Hurst (Creative Good).
Rod is an active member of the social networking communities MySpace, Bebo, Orkut and NewsTrust.net. He can be reached via Instant Messaging, Last.fm, Skype, ICQ, mobile text messages and, of course, e-mail.
Rod is also working currently as a Marketing & Development Consultant for the California start-up Virtual Parallel Systems. He resides in Austin, Texas, USA, chases women the way a fly chases a spider and turns down various invitations to appear in public as a guest journalist because he is basically a hermit by nature.
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