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.

My work for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution grew into a book that is called, cleverly enough, "The Lost Boys of Sudan." It follows the four young men from southern Sudan from the moment their airplane landed in Atlanta for their first few years in the United States.

They tolerated a reporter’s presence and my nagging questions as they felt the heat of an electric stove for the first time, learned to drive and went on job interviews. They also gave me a front-row seat to their quest for what they wanted more than anything – an education. And they gave me a glimpse of how tough it is for vulnerable newcomers to achieve the American Dream.

I learned quite a bit while writing the book. I learned about the complexities of the war in Sudan, which one historian refers to insightfully as a series of multiple and recurring wars. I came to know quite a bit about the history of Sudan, from its pre-colonial days through the rise of militant Islam. And I learned that the U.S. typically has administered its refugee-resettlement program with foreign-policy priorities in mind.

Yet the most lingering lessons, for me, involve the power of the human spirit to trudge on, to keep going despite poverty and despair and disease and death. Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter may have put it best in a blurb for my book, when he wrote that the story “speaks to the strength of the human spirit to survive and grow under even the most abject circumstances.”

Writing the news stories and book also reminded me of how generous complete strangers can be – and how that generosity can pay dividends for them. Some of the most inspiring people I met during my time writing about the “lost boys” were the many ordinary Americans who were moved to give their time to help welcome the strangers. They were women mostly, who volunteered with refugee-resettlement agencies to help the “lost boys” navigate a confusing new world. Many also had helped refugees from Kosovo, Vietnam and other parts of the world. These volunteers helped the young men get to work, understand auto insurance and make doctor’s appointments. They donated clothes and furniture, gave rides here and there, and helped the young men pursue their education in the United States.

Their example prompted me to follow suit, albeit in a much more modest way. The Atlanta office of the International Rescue Committee, a nonprofit refugee-resettlement agency, worked with me to set up a fund that received a share of my meager book royalties. It also accepted contributions from the public. We gave small grants to help Sudanese refugees pay costs associated with school and work. In addition, I donated part of the book proceeds to Jubilee Partners, a Christian community in the woods of northeastern Georgia that has helped welcome thousands of refugees of all faiths and nationalities.

These were small steps, really, but I found that taking them gave me a sense of satisfaction. It might not have made a huge difference in the long run, and it paled in comparison to the difference that so many American volunteers made, but at least I was able to do what little I could, in addition to helping call attention to the bleak circumstances in far-off Sudan, and that made me feel as if I had made the right choice.

Now a few years have passed since I met Kuol Dut – say it “Quall Dut” – and several other “lost boys of Sudan.” The book has come and gone for me. The days of speaking about it and thinking about it have faded into memory. I left the newspaper to join the CNN Wire, a wire service that conveys CNN reporting on the top and most compelling national and international news stories. As for the young men about whom I wrote, their lives have gone on, as well, of course, with the same share of triumphs and disappointment that we all experience. We talk every so often. Next month, I plan to go to graduation ceremonies at Georgia State University to see one of them receive a bachelor’s degree in economics.

And Kuol and I had just spent some time together the other day when a CNN colleague called to ask whether I’d write something about young people who endure war, but for the most part we live separate lives. It was a pleasure to write about Kuol again (he’s looking for a job, by the way, if you happen to know of something….). It reminded me of all that so many of us who have never battled starvation and death take for granted. It gave me hope, even if only a glimmer of hope, for so many people who find themselves today in abject circumstances.

And it reminded me of one of the powerful lessons of all. Getting to know these young men from southern Sudan reminded me that all people, despite differences of race, ethnicity, religion, language and so on, tend to have more in common than that divides us. We all can experience universal emotions and impulses, including the pull of family, the yearning to survive and the desire to transcend hardship to improve, to at least try to grasp and claw our way toward the promise of a better life, no matter the odds.

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.

She fainted when she first learned Neda was dead. It was interesting to hear her talk about going back to the scene of Neda's death. She counted the steps between Neda's car and where she lay on the ground. There were 26 steps in all. Neda was 26 years old.

On a metaphorical level, those 26 steps represent each year of her life. "Neda has made me enormously proud," the mother said.

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.

A name like Percy Von Lipinksy is not easy to forget, but it’s Percy’s personality on camera that stands out. He’s a globe-trotting one-man story-telling machine who shares his colorful adventures traveling the world on CNN iReport. His exploits include a crocodile cruise in Costa Rica, an active volcano in Guatemala, exploring sea caves in the Philippines and peering over the edge of Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe.

There’s a lot to like about Percy’s DIY approach. Armed with a camera, a tripod and his trusty wireless mic, Percy takes the viewer along for the adventure. And wherever he goes, he loves to mix it up with the people he meets along the way.

“Good audio is the key,” Percy says. “If I’ve got that, I’ve got a story.”

When he’s not traveling the globe, Percy grabs his camera and documents the local flavor near his Vancouver, British Columbia, home, from a local Critical Mass bike ride, to an Alice in Wonderland party and most-recently, the Vancouver Apple Festival.

A couple weeks ago I was chatting with Percy and I asked why he shares his iReports with CNN. He told me simply, "I just like to get out there with a camera and tell stories, make a difference if I can, and open some eyes."

Today I invite you to open your eyes and check out some of the stories fascinating iReporters like Percy are sharing every day right here on CNN.

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.

Earlier this summer I began to wonder what was happening to Knox? What became of all of the evidence the prosecution touted early on?

There had been so much tabloid fodder about Amanda ­it seemed to overshadow the case. As a crime and court junkie, I wanted to take it back to the facts. The task of trying to cover an Italian case from Atlanta, Georgia, was difficult. With the help of Amy Sahba, in our New York bureau, we were able to speak to sources close to the prosecution in Italian to get their side of the story.

Eventually we were also able to get a copy of the crime scene video. We hoped that showing each piece of evidence side by side with what the prosecution and defense said, would help the readers feel like they were going through a detective's files.

Closing arguments for Knox and her former boyfriend, Rafaelle Sollecito, begin on November 20.

Many of the players in this story have big dates coming up too. Rudy Guede, who was convicted in a separate trial of Kercher's murder, will have his appeal two days before Knox's and Sollecito' s lawyers begin their closing arguments. And the prosecutor in this case is facing his own verdict in a case about prosecutorial misconduct.

The jury in Italy will ultimately have to choose a side, and choose to believe either the prosecution or Knox and Sollecito. Who do you believe?

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.

They call us "server huggers."

When Rich Miller, a blogger at Data Center Knowledge, told me about the term, which has a negative, Luddite connotation to it, I thought, "ACK! I don't want to be one of those."

But I do think there's value in knowing your cloud data has a real-world home in energy-sucking data centers all over the world, likely in secret locations.

I thought I'd share an ultimate example in server-huggery, which Miller pointed me to.

The Planet, a data storage company with centers in Dallas and Houston, Texas, and in London,  England, recently held a promotion where they sent photos of their servers out to customers. And these weren't just any servers. They were the servers these clients stored Web sites and business data on.

The Planet even put little name cards in front of the hulking computers.

Kevin Hazard, who has blogged about the promotion for the company, told me The Planet likes to invite its customers and the public into its data centers. He says such transparency - which is highly uncommon in the data industry - is important because it keeps data providers honest.

Sometimes when clients come to the centers they literally hug the machines, he said.

To some, that may sound bizarre.

Hazard says it's just "a techie pride kind of thing.”

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.

Since launch, we've heard from Wynton Marsalis on the blues and race, from Lance Armstrong on surviving and fighting cancer, John McCain on the Afghanistan war, Jonathan Safran Foer on factory-farmed food, Joy Behar on President Obama and his critics, Helen Thomas on what she’s learned from covering nine presidents and Deepak Chopra on giving to charity.

We’ve welcomed new features – columns by neo-conservative David Frum and Mashable Founder Pete Cashmore and the first TED Talk Tuesday, a video by an original and provocative thinker filmed at a TED conference - along with commentaries by the speakers and others written especially for CNN.com. For more about TED, see TED curator Chris Anderson’s introduction.

Videos in the section will include the weekly “Knock-a-round,” a fast tour through the week’s top issues by Roland Martin and Ruben Navarrette Jr. And Opinion will be the home for commentary by all of CNN’s outstanding contributors.

We hope you’ll sound off with your comments on what you read and see - and share your reaction by sending iReports.

It’s still early, but we think Opinion will give you new perspectives and help inform your views. At times, it may infuriate you - or give you a reason to smile. But we promise to keep putting thought-provoking insights on the table.

Thanks for being part of the conversation.

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.

Connelly was getting his first taste of success as a novelist. Even President Clinton was reading him. So he was packing in his press pass to pursue the book-writing thing. He took me on a tour of the Valley's cop shops (there were five) and the place where Rodney King was beaten by the LAPD. Connelly - everyone called him that – was shy and soft-spoken, with just a trace of Philly in his voice.

After the King beating, Connelly had gotten a chance to try out downtown for the paper's Metro edition. Every reporter in the 'burbs longed to go downtown back then. It meant you'd made it to the big leagues. At the time, Metro was filled with poets and stylists, writers who could make pretty words dance on the page, but were short on reporting.

Connelly was different. His prose was spare but he reported the hell out of a story. But because he wasn't a poet in one editor's eyes, Connelly didn't make it to Metro. He became known as the guy who couldn't write.

It was a bum rap, but Connelly didn't complain. He saved his best writing for himself, staying up late at night to create Harry Bosch and Jack McElvoy and Mickey Haller, the characters who drive his best-sellers. He also sprinkles his fiction with the real people and places of Los Angeles. Some of the background players - a Lt. Hilliard or a Sgt. Rector -  take on the names of old editors and colleagues. It's fun to unearth those nuggets.

I was a bit concerned when I read "The Scarecrow" and saw that cops reporter Jack McElvoy's replacement wound up murdered after getting the nickel tour of the LAPD's Parker Center. She was an ambitious, back-stabbing Twinkie whose passing was unlamented.

I couldn't help but ask Connelly: Was that me?

"If it's not your mojo, you have nothing to worry about," he advised.

Over the years, Connelly grew a beard and the cars he drove got better, but he's pretty much the same,­ a guy who never outgrows his friends. He submitted a piece for us because we asked. Trust me, the guy can write.

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.

Since iReport launched in 2006, people around the world have posted 442,414 stories, and more than 20,000 of those have been vetted and used as part of CNN coverage. Pieces like this video of nighttime protests from Tehran rooftops and this aerial photo of a lone house left standing after a hurricane in coastal Texas started on iReport and made their way to CNN.

What's cool is that iReport gets a home in the new CNN.com. What used to be a completely separate web site at iReport.com is now a section of CNN.com, just like Politics or World news. Except this section includes a dedicated community of citizen reporters, a healthy archive of first-person news reporting, and a set of tools for posting and sharing news close to you.

We call it CNN iReport.

A few things you should know on your first visit:

I couldn’t be happier that we're moving the two sites together - connecting iReport to CNN.com opens the door for new kinds of collaboration and storytelling that I’m itching to try out, and surely all kinds of cool things we haven’t thought of yet. But first things first: we’ve got some settling in to do. The iReport Team and I are hosting a conversation about the new look and features over on the iReport blog. Sure hope you’ll swing by and say hello.

(Special thanks to iReporter and cartoonist extraordinaire Brixton Doyle, who penned the monstrously awesome cartoon at the top of this post.)

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.

Inmates such as Chris are considered lucky to have a family member standing by their side. That’s why when the Innocence Project in New York told me about Jewel Mitchell, I was stunned. Sure, a mother might wait for her son, but what about a girlfriend?

I wondered how many women would agree to wait 40 years for their fiancés to be freed. Jewel was indeed a rarity; out of the 244 cases overturned by the Innocence Project, attorneys could only locate a handful of women who stood by the accused. I immediately wanted to learn about Jewel and Dean Cage’s remarkable story and share it with others. I hope it can offer optimism for those separated from their loved ones by prison bars.

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.

I asked Jens and Lars to shoot a video of the day they released Wave to 100,000 test subjects in the public. They graciously agreed, and the video they sent back increased my understanding of their personalities and work environment. Before calling up Jens and Lars for lengthy interviews, I watched some of their presentations and product demos online to get a sense of their public personas. These videos - which wouldn’t have been available before the YouTube age - led me to questions I wouldn’t have known to ask otherwise.  Another video of Jens and Lars’ joint presentation at the Google I/O conference this year served as the narrative backbone for my profile.

It was my best chance to see the brothers in action - at a pivotal and stressful moment in their deployment of their ambitious Web application.