I first met Kuol Dut eight years ago - before joining CNN - during my 15 years as a newspaper reporter and editor.

It was my job then to write about immigrants and refugees, and I covered the U.S. government’s resettlement of 3,800 “lost boys” of Sudan in the United States. I did that mainly by following Kuol and three others for their first few months in metro Atlanta, Georgia. They had grown up without mothers or fathers in the midst of an awful war and came to the United States with very little knowledge of the modern world.
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The mother of Neda, the Iranian woman whose death touched millions, is a grieving woman. My colleague, Octavia Nasr, and I spoke with her a few days ago from her home in Tehran.

I was most struck by Hajar Rostami’s sincerity. I don't speak Farsi, but you could hear the pain in her voice, the pain of a broken-hearted mother trying to live a normal life without her daughter.
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I get asked a lot who's my favorite iReporter, and my response is always the same - “I don’t keep favorites.”

It’s a diplomatic answer, and it might seem disingenuous, but the truth is there are many iReporters - far too many to list - whom I hold near and dear to my heart.

Today, I’d like to introduce to you to one.
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The mere mention of Amanda Knox elicits strong opinions. People across the world have been fascinated by her case - it's taken the world and media by storm since her roommate, Meredith Kercher, was first found murdered in November 2007.

I remember the exact moment Meredith Kercher was found dead when I was working at CourtTVNews.com. Instantly, I was intrigued. As time passed and the case slowly worked its way through the Italian justice system, Knox’s case slipped to the back of my mind.
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I took a recent trip "into the cloud" of the Internet for CNN.com. The goal was to find some or all of the photos, blog posts, status updates and documents I save to the Internet instead of on my laptop or work computer.

Part of the way through my adventure, after visiting an IBM cloud computing center (shown above), I learned the IT industry has a name for people like me who want to find the real locations of their digital data.
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When we clicked a mouse on the morning of October 24 and the new CNN.com came to life, a new section of the site was also born.

Nestled between the Travel and iReport tabs on the home page, you’ll find Opinion - the home for a robust lineup of writers who will challenge, reshape or confirm your views on all kinds of topics.
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The best part of having been around for a while is all the people you run across. Most are chasing a dream, and some actually catch it. Consider Michael Connelly, the cops reporter they said couldn't write.

In 1993, Connelly was on his way out and I was on my way in at the Los Angeles Times. I was replacing him on the cops beat in the San Fernando Valley. Like Florida, the Valley is fertile territory for what used to be known in the newspaper business as "dirtball stories" - love triangle murders, contract killings, mad capers and stupid criminal tricks.
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Let me tell you about my favorite corner of the web: CNN iReport. (Full disclosure: I’m totally biased, since I lead the amazing team that built iReport, but stick with me here. This is big.)

Just like CNN, iReport is a place where you’ll find news stories from almost every corner of the globe and fresh perspectives on the day’s big headlines. What’s different is the people. People on iReport aren’t professional journalists. They’re regular folks who have a camera and something to say, and together they’ve built a lively community of news hounds and citizen reporters who take us inside the stories that are close to them. Their work is incredible, and it’s made an enormous impact on CNN.
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While working on the Medill Innocence Project in college, I learned for the first time how lonely it can be for an inmate. I still remember meeting Chris Abernathy, a soft-spoken, lanky prisoner in Statesville Prison in Illinois  who is serving a life sentence for a murder.

His friends and acquaintances had lost touch with him soon after his incarceration at the age of 18. Twenty-five years later, his mother remains the only person who regularly visits and writes him.
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It’s difficult to write a profile of someone who you’ve never met in person - much less someone who lives on the other side of the world, on a continent you've never visited. With the help of technology, though, it’s getting easier.

In today's CNN.com profile of Jens and Lars Rasmussen, the brothers behind a new Web product called Google Wave, I used some tech tools to get a sense of the brothers’ personalities, their relationship and their creative process without traveling to their office in Sydney, Australia, for a face-to-face interview.
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