- Hi Sylwia, tell us a bit about you and your life, please.

I was born in Poland and at the age of 18 moved to Hungary to study, and later to work in Budapest. I studied Hungarian, German and American linguistics. During studies and first years of employment at Nokia and TCS Hungary I supported a Montessori high school helping talented youth from local Romani minorities to reach higher education - basically teaching English during evening class. I worked with local Polish scouting group and stayed involved in organising subcultural cultural events. I also started my adventure with photography then.
In 2006, when my son was born, I relocated to the UK and joined a word of mouth agency, 1000heads, where I am until now using my personal passion for blogging in daily work.

- How did u get involved with GV?

I read about GV Summit 2008 in Budapest on a brilliant Polish blog written in Hungary and really regretted that I missed it (I already lived in the UK at the time). I noticed that GV Lingua had no Polish translation so I suggested helping out. I also posted few articles about Poland, but my main focus so far was ensuring the Polish Lingua goes live and grows gradually. Once this is accomplished I hope to spend more time on articles about Poland. I also want to get involved in Global Voices Advocacy one day fairly soon.

- What are the challenges you have faced at GV in Polish?

The first challenge was to create a dedicated team and I think that after few months we are there now. I think it's an on-going process though - the more content we have, the more exposure we get and thus more volunteers. There are eight girls working on GV Polska now - we all support each other not only in translating GV content but also outside of this voluntary work. It takes a certain amount of content for audience to understand what GV Polska is about, so I am glad we are working on this now. GV Polska went live recently and we have started working on other supporting mechanisms (mapping out the countries we post about on a Google map, so we do not focus on few regions too much, but try to show events in all parts of the world; engaging in conversations outside of Twitter and gradually establishing more personal relationships with Polish bloggers and social media fans). I think in another six months, we will see the results of our current work outside of the main platform.

- How do you insert GV Polska on the local blogosphere, have you had problems with it?

I think establishing an on-line presence is a lengthy process, and we are beginning to gain readership on the site, but also discussion in other platforms - Twitter, Facebook, Blip (Polish Twitter) and Flaker (also a Polish site). Our presence on Twitter has given us an amazing push in terms of readership, but also interactiveness - we talk about our articles there. Now we need to bring those discussions on to the Lingua blog :) Flaker is a good site for incorporating GV Polska's presence in Polish social media, so we work on that too. I also think it's a very complex process and consists of different elements (I would love to see what other Lingua teams think!). I think one, probably the most important factor is the demand for information. I think we need to target the right people and gradually we are doing so. Our challenge at the moment though is the fact that we only have one of our team members is based in Poland, so it's difficult to spread the word about the site in local communities if our private networks are based elsewhere. You also need to remember that we are reporting on discussions, we do not generate them, which restricts us in taking active part in discussions in local blogosphere. I think we need to gradually build up our content and think outside the box on how we can establish on-going strong relationships with Polish bloggers. What proves effective at the moment are the Twitter and Flaker engagements and our personal relationships with local bloggers. I think it's a good starting point.

- Sylwia, as a lingua editor what do you perceive will be our challenge in the near future?

With GV Polska, we will now gradually work on other tools around the main blog to reach out to different audiences and to relate our articles to different topics in Poland. Now that we have reached our first 100 posts, we have something to show and we can develop a stronger presence in Polish social media. Our next challenge will be to encourage our readers not only to read, but also to comment on our posts and with this to have a large community of GV Polska readers who spread the word about GV's message, although with current trends of moving away from commenting on blogs to discussing blog content in other places online, we might instead invest our time there. I really hope that we will be able to do something offline for our Polish readers soon, to bring our message closer to every day reality of Polish citizens - simply to show them who we are, why we do it all for free and what is the aim. Quite frankly, I want to use my other projects, like Bar Mleczny and Barcamp Transparency (next year planned for Poland too) to help to spread the word about GV Polska. I also think that posting in English about Poland will help promoting work of GV Polska better, so that will be my next, personal task.

Now, in general terms, I am not sure if it's a challenge or just something to think about, and it depends on resources too, so might not be a short term plan but I think there is one bit of communication missing from the current model, which is addressing local issues and conversations in local languages. Somehow I feel it's a missing bit in closing the entire circle of information sharing. I also think it would help Lingua sites in addressing the local audience and promote Global Voices‘ message locally - I mean if I talk about discussions related to other countries in Polish to Polish audience it's great, but I think it would be also very exciting to be able to address Polish issues there. Now, I am not sure how the model would work - that would be another project, ‘Lingua Local' if you like. We could have a separate team in place to post updates on local conversations, or engage translators (who are also authors in many cases) in this additional activity. I am confident that if the rest of the community is up for it, one day we will be able to consider this option too.

- As a translator, how has GV improved your skills?

First of all I do not work in translation at the moment so it's great to keep doing it for GV Lingua. My jobs were always related to translation but not specifically based on it, so it's good I can keep this learned skill active and practice it in my free time. It's one of those things that is worth keeping alive, and while you are doing it you develop constantly.
As a team we always discuss any problems in translations and support each other, which I find really helpful because there is sometimes need for second opinion. We use our Google group to post questions and quite recently we started weekly meet-ups on IRC to discuss GV related issues and gossip a bit;)
I also think I translate faster now, because I want to do the posts and all the other activities related to it - tweet it, map it, etc. The great thing about Global Voices content is that it is very rich in different topics and cultures - so we not only learn while working, but become exposed to various types of information which we might not always read about elsewhere.

- This is going to get a long answer I think. Sylwia, what other internet activities do you have?

Well, I have few on-going presences and more current projects. My first blog, written in Polish is very personal. My English blog is related to my work and interests (social media, ethics, activism, photography). My Hungarian blog is written for friends, but not too often. My son's blog is updated for his UK based family, but also for my friends outside the UK. I am considering bringing them all to one, self-hosted platform now.
I use Twitter (@presleysylwia) and FriendFeed for business networking and communicating with the local community, learning and sharing insights. Flickr is my photo sharing place where I meet interesting artists. Qik and YouTube are places where I share video updates - rather diary of what I do. I use Facebook, Nasza-Klara (Polish social network) and LinkedIn for networking - depending on whom I want to reach. And no, I do not spend all day on all those sites:) I use them each in its own rhythm, whenever required ;)

As for projects there is Bar Mleczny - blog aiming to bring UK-based Polish bloggers together and cross the bridge between British and Polish cultures. It's still a small, one-year-old baby, but with dreams to grow big and one day open an actual dairy bar in Oxford combined with arts, music and support for the local Polish community.
I have co-organised Barcamp Transparency this summer, where we talked about transparency issues in open government, social media and cyber-activism. We want to take this barcamp to Italy, Poland and Spain next year, as well as repeat the one in Oxford. I think barcamp is the best format for creative meeting of people from different business areas on a specific topic. It's free, flexible, but also very specific and practical.

I also got involved in Oxford Twestival in February and have repeated it now, in September. This event brings together all the important aspects of my life really (maybe apart from motherhood;)) - charity work, art and social media in real life. Sometimes people think or actually practice on-line presence completely separating it from every day life, but for me all the online places I am in simply document and enhance my reality. Thus, I am happy I can do a party for similarly minded people who all come over to a pub in Oxford to listen to good music and poetry and all this to raise money to support Oxfam's work in Mali. I am also happy that Oxford can be a part of this global initiative. We have managed to raise £1,570, which is a great sum for such a small community (60 attendees!). And we had fun! I am sure there will be another Twestival in Oxford in spring and I hope I can get involved in it too.
I have also helped out in social media strategy on few other voluntary projects, like World University Project for instance, and I hope to do so in the bear future.

I am very passionate about social media and the positive effect it can have in supporting work of individuals, as well as organisations. I am trying to feed as much information as possible to the GV community, but I also do not want to be monotonous:) so I am trying to feed the information which can be crucial for us. I am a strong supporter of Twitter in our work too, and I think it's great we are gradually moving to other types of social media and reaching out to different audiences. Global Voices as a site and as a community has a great potential and I am very happy I can be a part of it!

- Not all of us manage to succeed at promoting our sites on Facebook and Twitter. What suggestions can you give us?

I think one point is not to push it if you do not feel you enjoy doing it. So the first step is to check your options - mainly the local community of Twitter, Facebook or other online places. If you think you have good audience there and you can bring value to their community (you have people on Twitter who talk about citizen journalism, current events, social media, etc) it's worth trying to build a GV Lingua profile there. You do not have to update it on a daily basis - everyone has their own rhythm, but it's worth doing it in a genuine, natural, personal way. With the site content, which is strongly related to online communities we all bring value. And I am sure once you start talking to others and networking you will see that the presence is not only fun but also works in both directions - you will get fed with interesting facts, local social media events, projects. Just do it;)

- You mentioned photography as a personal interest, what is your approach to it?

Photography and poetry (recently also video) are my passions. I believe in harmony in life, and without art my life would be unbalanced - photography is a way of showing the world how I see it, how I feel about things, what stage of my life I am in. It is my private mirror, but also my statement, if that makes sense. I like experimenting with different ways of communication - it might be the linguist blood in me (my mother is a linguist;)), but generally the photos I take reflect the way I see the world: in details, working out the general trends form little bits and pieces - a mosaic of a kind. I take photos when I feel like, but I do have a target of one exhibition per year to ensure I do not neglect this bit of my life. So far I managed to over deliver on that front, so I can relax and invest more time in social media projects.

- What about other interests? Let's say books, movies, the usual thing?

I like fusion jazz and anything related or created in post-modern style, maybe this is why I like the interactiveness of the web so much. And I have my ‘the best'-lists:) Books: Umberto Eco ‘Name of the Rose' (1), Anne Rice ‘Interview with the Vampire' (2), basically everything from Erich Fromm and Jean Baudrillard (3). Films: ‘Total Eclipse' (1), ‘Before the Rain' (2), ‘28 Days After' (3). Painters: Van Gogh (1) William Wharton (2), Georgia O'Keffee (3). I better stop now, it starts to look like a Facebook meme:D.

Thanks Sylwia.

As she explains in the above video, Marietta joined Global Voices after coming to the 2008 Global Voices Summit in Budapest to cover the event as a journalist for a local newspaper. A self-described technophile, Marietta likes how Global Voices uses technology to encourage dialog between distinct communities that often don't interact. Her latest posts about the Hungarian blogosphere look at recent protests against the Hungarian Guard, Budapest's gay pride parade, a law banning nightlife after 10 p.m. in Budapest's District VI, and a showdown between cyclists and drivers during a Critical Mass event.

Fate, and hard work, brought him from rural Mali to Bamako, where he discovered and fell in love with the World Wide Web.

Joining the translators team at Global Voices in French has steered him onto a new path. He is now involved in multiple projects to promote his native language, Bambara, on the Web, and to bring more Internet access to rural Mali.

If you are on the iPhone and ‘information overload' side of the digital divide, you will appreciate that Boukary has a sobering, inspiring, and even magical story to tell in this interview.

Q: How did you discover Global Voices in French and decide to join as a translator?

It happened in December ‘08.

One day, around 8 PM, I was sitting alone in my room in Bamako when I was seized by the wish to learn more. The following words formed in my mind: “I want.” These are powerful words for me.

I got up, went to the cyber café, booked a computer and typed, “I want” in the Google search bar. I browsed the results and found Global Voices en français.

The next day, I enrolled as a volunteer translator.

Q: Your native village, Sanogola-Bamoussobougou, has no electricity, much less an Internet connection. Please tell us a bit about your life.

I am the son of Négué, a farmer, and Djènèba Kané, a housewife. I grew up on a farm, helping my parents. One evening, I was shepherding cows with other kids when we met a man on the road, a sergeant. His Suzuki motorcycle was broken. His name was Lassinè Traoré.

While we helped him, he asked if I went to school. I said “No”. He went to see my father and advised him to send me to school. For weeks, he came back, until my father gave his consent. Sergeant Traoré told me, “There I leave you. You now have the duty to do well at school to honor me, and later to take care of yourself and your parents.”

I walked six kilometers to the nearest school for years until I moved to Bamako to attend high school. I did bricklayer work and odd jobs on week-ends to make ends meet with my state grant. My mother wanted me to succeed in school, she did everything in her power.

I went on to teachers’ school. I would have liked to go to university, but I don't have the means for that. So I trained myself to use a computer and surf from cyber cafés in Bamako. The Web soothed my thirst for knowledge.

Boukary (left) and his father with a picture of him in hunting gear. Photo: Toujours Pas Sages, on Flickr

Q: How well is Mali connected to the internet nowadays?

Mali has done a lot to promote new technologies in government administration, but there’s a lot left to do to connect people, especially in rural areas.

The interest in new technologies is huge, but people cannot access them. The cost of personal computers, training and Internet connections are too high. A new laptop costs that equivalent of six months of a teacher's wages.

In Bamako, an hour in a cyber café costs around 500 CFA francs (USD $1) or even 1000 CFA francs in smaller towns. Compare this to the price of a 50kg bag of rice, which is 17.500 CFA francs (around US $38) it's well beyond the means of most people.

Q: You've not only started blogging since you joined Global Voices, but you blog in Bambara!

It so happened that Maneno.org, a blogging platform for Africa co-founded by Global Voices' author and translator Elia Varela Serra needed African translators. I speak and write in Bambara, a major language in Mali.

Bambara has special type fonts [see this post] and no keyboard. We overcame this problem with a virtual keyboard. I localized the platform in Bambara and opened my blog, Fasokan. I blog in Bambara and French about Mali, the problems of farmers, and my thoughts.

It is now my great wish to promote African languages on the Web, so that African people can relate and share across the continent. In rural Mali, many people speak and learn to write only Bambara in elementary school. I want them to be able to access the web  in Bambara too.

Boukary trains villagers in Mali to use the Internet. Photo: Toujours Pas Sages on Flickr

Q: That dream came true this summer?

My dream was to bring the Internet to my village, to introduce my family and the farmers to the Web. Through Global Voices in French, I met Albertine Meunier, who conducts internet workshops with senior citizens in France. We launched the Toujours Pas Sages (Still not wise) project on Maneno, in French and Bambara. Thanks to Fondation Orange Mali, we got a mobile Internet connection for remote places.

With donated laptops and camera phones, Albertine, her friend Caroline and I trained children and grown-ups for two weeks in Ségou and my village to use Google to find information, and use the Web to upload digital photos and videos. The villagers were so surprised that they could read and write in Bambara on the Web! It was a great success.

My father is a hunter and was very curious about hunters in America and how they hunt. On Google, he finally discovered what they looked like. And we also learned that it is possible to charge a mobile phone with a dynamo hooked to a bicycle.

Now, we are going to try and train my pupils in Bamako.

Haute Haiku

In many Sub-Saharan African countries, homosexuality is illegal and punishable by sentences ranging from payment of fines to several years or life in prison. According to the International Gay & Human Rights Council more than two thirds of African countries have laws criminalizing consensual same-sex acts, and across the continent people are subject to both physical attacks and discrimination.

Though life in Kenya is reportedly becoming easier for gay people, there is still legislation in place that says homosexual men (not women) can be sent to prison for up to 14 years. In countries like Kenya, Uganda or Tanzania, laws like these have been in place since colonial times, while in Burundi a ban on homosexuality was only just introduced in April of this year.

Consequently, many gays and lesbians throughout Africa live in fear of having their sexual orientation discovered. A small number make use of blogs to help spread knowledge and understanding of what it means to be gay.

How did you start writing for Global Voices?

I got an email from Ndesanjo Macha our Sub-Saharan Africa editor asking if I could cover LGBT issues, and I thought why not? I was skeptical at first, just wondering how many good writers turned him down before he got to me.

How did you get interested in writing about LGBT issues?

I used to read other people's blogs in a jam when going to school. I thought: I could do this. Mostly I wanted to meet people I could identify with, and when I started, I made a vow not to write concerning hate, phobia, or gay rights. Just gay life in general; why we are single, dating etc. Some homophobic remarks from a senior person in government triggered this. I decided no more homo-ignorance.

If you had to, how would you characterize the African LGBT blogosphere?

Progressive. Every day, all sorts of people come out: young, old, confused. There are over 20 queer blogs in Kenya, and most are active. Everyone has got their own beliefs. Some believe in the gay gene, or think they run the gamut of the gay rights movement… And there are those who believe they do not have to be effeminate to be gay. It is all about celebrating diversity.

What are the African LGBT issues you are most interested in communicating to the rest of the world?

Gay marriages aside, I'd say safe sex and control. Since people of different sexual orientations exist, and African leaders have refused to acknowledge this, there should be a campaign for MSM (men who have sex with men). It is a sad fact, to them, but if they ignore this, it is going to blow right up in their faces. They shut down such clinics, and even the ones that are still open are not visited by gay people. The staff would like to help, but politicians say there is no place for gay men in Africa.

How many languages do you speak? How did you decide to blog in English?

Two: English, Swahili, and maybe three, if we are counting my mother tongue. I guess a lot of people blog in English in East Africa, and have gotten quite a lot of readers as a result.

What do you do when you're not blogging? What are some of your other interests or hobbies?

I am still in school, studying business management. My interests are practicing my slam poetry, which is spoken word poetry.

You can read all the posts written by Haute on Global Voices here.

"Who turned off the light?" said the Ferret

“I hate cats,” tweeted @gvferret on Friday, still hurting from his injuries, and wondering when he would be fit to travel and read his favorite website once more.

Bloggers were on the scene at the time of the incident and were able to catch this shot of the feline attack. Rumor has it the cat belongs to Jillian C. York, a prolific blogger on Global Voices.

"I thought you were my friend," cried the Ferret.

From Miami to the World

GV Ferret first started following in the footsteps of Global Voices in Miami earlier this year. A delegation of bloggers attended a conference called WeMedia in February, and in their spare time they taught the furry creature how to blog, take digital photos, and tweet.

He learned fast.

Soon he was visiting bloggers in Guatemala, Japan, Egypt, Thailand, the Netherlands, and New York. He even signed up with Dopplr so his friends around the world could follow him.

Tokyo: Eddie, Yazan, Hanako, Chris, Jannie, GV Ferret, Rafik

New York: Juhie, Solana, Jillian, Anas, Lova

Cairo: Ndesanjo

Amsterdam: Jeremy, GV Ferret, Percy

Still going strong

“I had a small accident. I'm okay, but like @ethanz I'll be wearing an eyepatch for awhile,” tweeted GV Ferret on Friday referring to the interesting coincidence that Global Voices co-founder Ethan Zuckerman is currently recovering from eye surgery as well.

GV Ferret appears not to have updated his Dopplr account recently, which means there is no telling where he will show up next.

Representin'

This past week I was able to catch up with Global Voices author Sara Moreira at the International School for Digital Transformation in Porto, Portugal. Sara arrived to the program after spending several weeks in Dili, East Timor, the country whose blogosphere she dutifully covers on Global Voices.

Sara teaching young women computer engineering at East Timor National University.

She has worked as a professor at East Timor National University and was awarded computer equipment from Hewlett Packard to help introduce more Timorese women to the fields of computer engineering and web design.

Make sure not to miss Sara's three-part series commemorating the 9th anniversary of internet access in East Timor.

Gabriela

Gabriela García Calderón may be the star translator of Global Voices in spanish. She translates on a daily basis for our publications, and as if that weren't enough, she still has time for writing in her personal blog, Seis de enero (January 6th). On a Lima morning, we met to have a drink and chat about various subjects. Here are the results.

Hello Gabriela, let‘s start with one curiosity of mine. As a professional lawyer, what gave you the idea of embracing other hobbies, such as translating?
Little more that a year and a half ago, after almost 14 years of practicing Law as a self-employed lawyer, I felt I had to try some additional activities in my spare time. Among the professional options I had in mind when I graduated from high school were Diplomacy and Translation. I finally chose Law, because since I was 8 my dream was to be a Diplomat, which in the end didn't happen. But languages always attracted me, and those urges of translating texts from one language to another in order to make them understandable to other people were never really gone.

I have never thought about it before, but I can see that both Translation and Diplomacy are professions that bridge people; both have to do with combining characteristics from different cultures, nations and lifestyles. That idea of [studying] Diplomacy came from a Polish friend I met when I was 8 - she was the daughter of a official from the Polish Embassy in Peru and we became best friends. Her dad's mission ended on the early 80's, and I lost track of her. Years later, her dad came back as Ambassador. I don't know how I had the nerve to call him and ask for his daughter, I mean, this is an Ambassador we are talking about! But he remembered me perfectly. He gave me my friend's address in perfectly spoken Spanish, and that's how I found her after all those years.

And how did this urge lead you to Global Voices?
At first, what I was interested in was translating more than anything else, as a collateral and different activity to what I have been doing in the previous years, without leaving Law aside. Gradually, I started realizing that it was a way of getting in touch with life elsewhere, with daily life in other contexts where people consider things we don't even think about around us. For instance, holidays in Muslim countries. It was important for me to realize that some dates that are so important for others while here we barely know about them. Those testimonies are much more valuable when they come from ordinary people who might go through lots of experiences in their hometowns that are similar to the complaints we have in Lima on the spreading of road works, for example, all the way to things like direct testimonies about the bombings in Gaza.

My link with Global Voices (GV) started by chance: on a Saturday in November 2007, I was reading the newspaper and I see this piece saying “if you want to join this translation project, just send en e-mail to Juan Arellano.” That very day, I got an account on GV and I started learning how to edit texts. From then, I just carried on.

What were your previous experiences translating? Was it very different from what you had done before?
In the last few years, I had done some occasional translations, always with family friends because I am not a professional translator. That's why it had to be done for people who knew me and who would trust in the ability of someone who isn't a professional translator. I have even completed that translation of a book about Pope John Paul II, from Italian to Spanish. The author, a Polish journalist, former Polish correspondent in the Vatican (currently back in Warsaw), authorized me to translate it. That was shortly after John Paul II passed away.

This is very different, because GV texts come from ordinary people, the so-called men in the street, the voices of those who don't have a voice, people next door that tell us how their lives are affected sometimes by everyday issues and by not-that-everyday issues too on a Web site with global reach. I sometimes read notes on the newspapers, about events I have translated, about subjects that make front pages in the countries where they have happened. Second, because I find it fascinating to be able to read the opinion of a Trinidadian girl that tells us about something as simple as significant as the love she has for her grandmother, or the Chinese citizen and his impressions about the 20 anniversary of Tiananmen events.

And the best part is that I've been able to establish virtual friendship with people I've met thanks to these translations. One of them is Coffeewallah, from Trinidad and Tobago, precisely the one who told us about the love for her grandma. She even dedicated a post to me. That was so exciting for me, for I didn't expect it and I was speechless as I was reading her text. Another one is Mariyah, who blogs from Syria, and whose blog I got to know via a translation of a post for GVO.

Before getting involved with GV, is it true that you were not aware of things such as Web 2.0 or the blogosphere?
That's correct, I'd heard very little about Web 2.0. To be honest, even now I really don't understand very well what it is all about. Regarding the blogosphere, I read and commented in some blogs on a regular basis, but that was pretty much it. In fact, I think I didn't even know the term blogosphere. At first, it seemed to me an exclusive closed club, and we as readers had some access and that was it, like voices without votes. After a while, I realized that the blogosphere needs the blogger-reader feedback and reader-blogger feedback as well, and many times it needs the feedback between readers that start dialogues through their comments. That's why I don't understand what's the point of blogs that don't admit comments, bloggers that don't reply comments and those who censor comments they don't like. As is usual, we can find a little bit of everything.

Shortly after joining GV in Spanish, you were “encouraged” to have your own blog. How do you feel about it now?
I was encouraged [to have a blog] because what we translate here are blogs. At first, I went through some kind of stage fright: I had the blog already open but with no posts. I felt no one, or very few people, would be interested in a very simple anecdote as the guy selling churros at a corner in Lima, or memories I keep of endlessly beloved ones that are not around anymore, or those simple simple stories I talk about sometimes. Juan Arellano, our editor, told us not to write about complicated subjects - not at first at least…that it would be better to start with the subject we knew best, that is, ourselves. And little by little we'd get used to writing. In my case it worked like that, even though I've made the decision not to speak of politics at all, that's what experts are for.

Now that I mention the guy selling churros, here is what happened to me as a result of that post. I posted it on March 2008, and in June 2008 I received a comment from a Peruvian girl living in Argentina, telling me she came by chance to my blog. She was looking for the blog of a friend of hers, an Argentinan girl from Córdoba, that had posted about the same guy who sells churros in Miraflores. No one can tell me that the blogosphere is not a handkerchief: it turns out that the father of this Peruvian living in Argentina, with a very good blog about cooks, was from Nauta. My mom is from Yurimaguas, and knew an aunt of this Peruvian girl, who had lived for a while in Yurimaguas. It was surprising to find out that the cousins of this Peruvian blogger had played pranks while growing up with an aunt of mine in Yurimaguas.

As one can see, my blog, Seis de enero, has also allowed me to make new friends I would not have dreamed of before. If the person who encouraged me to start a blog would have told me so, I wouldn't believed it. When e-mails took the place of actual mail, I thought that the emotion that comes with receiving news from the other side of the world was forever gone. It's not quite the same, but the emotion is still there.

Would you recommend starting a blog to others?
Sure I would. In fact, I'd say not to doubt it for a second. It is an unpredictable way of expressing ideas, of being related with other people's opinions and experiencies. It may sometimes be useful to find out facts about ourselves that wouldn't be apparent otherwise. Whether it's a blog in which simple and everyday incidents are told, as mine is, or a recipes blog - which I may say are truly successful - or a blog about politics and current affairs…It doesn't matter the subject, it doesn't matter whether you talk about this or that, as long as it is a subject in which we have solid knowledge, and remember never to be disrespectful to anyone. There may be some people who won't agree with you, but that's only a part of the plurarity we can find in the blogosphere.

What's the reason for the name Seis de enero (Janury 6th)?
It's simple: it's my birthday. It was the first thing I came up with when I decided that my posts would be about my own experiences. When I was making the register of the name I thought maybe it was already registered. Fortunately, that wasn't the case.

And your experience in GV, do you think it is useful in other aspects?
It is indeed. As a matter of fact, though, what I learned in one of them was applied on the other one. I remember when I first started with GV, I used to run away from posts that included videos, simply because I wasn't able to insert them, until I had the idea to do so using HTML code, which is what I use when the post I pick up contains too many images, it is easier to do it that way. I think that is my major achievement, and I guess I wouldn't have figured it out had I not had the blog. Besides, I think that making translations from English to Spanish constantly has helped me learn much more. It's not just about the academic language learned from grammar, with its rules and exceptions, but richer speaking forms, more colloquial ones from each place around the world, especially the ones where English is the most spoken language.

Why do you think a man in the street should read GV in Spanish?
Because of the news from around the world,  everyone may realize that everywhere there are people with the same problems. Or with completely different ones from ours, but that are so present in their lives just as it had been, in a time that I really hope never comes back, blackouts and bomb blasts. To realize that we are not on our own, that unrest can be found everywhere and yet people move on, that dialogue is the most important thing, that we must communicate in order to understand each other, that we may disagree, but that is not a reason to consider other people as unworthy because they think differently.

Returning to the first question, what is your specialty as a lawyer?
For about the last five years I am fully dedicated to Arbitration, a way to solve conflicts between parties using an alternative to the Judiciary. At the time of carrying out a contract, the parties agree to resort to an arbitration in order to solve their disagreement. They settle the terms for carrying out the arbitration, and the arbitrator can be a sole arbitrator or be part of a court. I've worked both as a sole arbitrator and as member of a court. It is always a very enriching experience, you get to learn from the other members of the court, from the parties, from the legal secretaries who help you all along the process.

And what do you think is the situation of Peruvian bloggers facing our legislation? For example, would it be easy for a blogger to be involved in legal problems for posting against the government?
I really hope not. I've read and translated a lot about bloggers in other countries being held in prison and mistreated for posting what they think about this or that matter. Just for expressing ideas or thoughts! I guess the problem may exist when, misusing anonymity, a blogger dedicates time and energy to discredit other people without evidence. That's a powerful tool that can be misused in the wrong hands. Of course there is always the possibility of a rectification, but many times the damage is done and hardly repaired.

You said that your family has ancestors from our Amazonian region. What do you think about the recent events unfolding there?
My mom and all my family from my mom's side is from that part of Peru. My mom was born in Yurimaguas, precisely. From a long time ago I have had the feeling that that whole region only exists when there is an invasion from Ecuador. Just to speak about a concrete point, the highway Tarapoto-Yurimaguas, now that it appears every headline. It is about 130 kilometers long. Just a few years ago, it was just a road, a simple way. It wasn't conceivable, but it took 6 hours to travel across that distance. I am aware that there is a highway now (after having heard my whole life that it was the next work to be done) and now it takes two hours to travel that distance.

I don't think it is possible that in that huge territorial area, so enormously rich in so many resources, there are almost no airports, the roads are not properly conserved, the villages are almost completely isolated and the utilities are so precarious. Back to Yurimaguas, there used to be an airport, but now it is hardly used because the runway is too small for big airplanes. And it just stayed like that, nobody cares and nobody does anything to link the population with the rest of the country. In the '70s, when I first went to Yurimaguas, there was electricity only some hours per day. I've always known that during the golden years of the caucho exploitation, the wealthy families sent their children to study in Europe. I assume one of the reasons may have been that coming to Lima was too complicated. While across the Amazon river, getting out to the Atlantic Ocean may have been see as more feasible. Anyway, I want to express clearly that I don't justify any kind of violence whatsoever, no matter where it comes from. As Gandhi used to say: an eye for an eye and we'll all be blind. But I've just said before, political subjects are meant for the experts.

Is there anything else you'd like to add?
Yes - that I feel very comfortable with being part of this wonderful community, that has made me meet a handful of wonderful, dedicated and interesting people. Lingua, GV and all the other projects give voices to those who normally don't have a channel to express and share feelings, ideas, opinions, thoughts, nuisances, injustices, joys and pains.

Thank you, GV.

Thank you Gabriela.

N.B. - for those of you that may want to listen to our voices, I include a short podcast with greetings from Gabriela to the readers of Global Voices Online.

The picture in this post is by Isabel Guerra and has been used with permisssion.

Carolina Chandra Rumuat

Carolina, the West is practically clueless about your native language. What should we know ?

There are 700 or so languages in Indonesia, almost all of them living, spoken languages. In 1928, Indonesia declared Bahasa Indonesia the national language, the language of unity for everyone in this archipelagic country. Indonesian - or Bahasa Indonesia - is the fourth most spoken language in the world

How do you fit in this vast, very diverse, young country ?

In Indonesia, I'm considered three parts minority — well, at least, I was during President Suharto's New Order era: I'm a Christian Protestant, not a Muslim, I am half Chinese, and I'm a woman. I was very close to my Chinese maternal grandparents who practically raised me. Thanks to them, I learned the importance of knowledge, and that some virtues simply stand the test of time. Like, that you should be there for those in need, and be responsive to those under oppression. My grandparents are very Chinese, but luckily their life virtues didn't come solely from the Little Red Book. Sure, hard work is something they stressed, but so was the virtue of a quiet mind (a.k.a patience) I'm a nerdy type and I don't let my passions turn lukewarm. I found writing addictive. It's not just an outlet, it brings me joy. After college, I worked as a news writer in Jakarta, then as assistant journalist in a foreign news agency in Bali.

From Bali to Casablanca, Morocco…What happened ?

In Bali, I met and fell in love with my soulmate. After a while, we had to come to terms with the fact that his business needs him to be in Morocco. Since neither of us wanted to part, I simplified the decision-making process and came with him to Morocco.

Besides this, I also learned that the media is changing quickly. Online media is no longer an alternative: it is the future. I have mixed feelings about this, but one of the good points is that at least we can spare the forests. I'm an impulsive blogger, at Between Birth and Burial, and I have huge interest in new media.

How and when did you get acquainted with Global Voices ?

My fiancé first showed me Global Voices sometime last year. I read the website and without even reading the manifesto, I knew that Global Voices embodies one of those “changes” of dynamism in online journalism. Without a second thought, I bombarded Leonard and Portnoy, heads of the Lingua project, with email pleas. I wanted to be involved because I know that Indonesians' interest in reading is low. I think that, perhaps, if news is published in their native language, their interest in international issues will grow.

President Suharto's era caused people to curb their curiosity, and now is a good time to fix that — Indonesia is one of the world's youngest democracies. That's why I sincerely feel that people should be better informed about their rights, including freedom of speech. My first translation appeared in December 2008, a few days after I officially joined. Lingua is a good platform because it encourages people not to keep their troubles to themselves, it helps them realize that in some ways our lives are amalgamated with the rest of the world, even though we speak different languages.

How did Carolina from Indonesia adapt to Morocco?

Culture shock made me slow in socializing. I landed a job about 2 months ago in an Internet start up. It allows me to learn new things about myself and how to manage people despite our cultural differences. The bright side of my job is that it allows me to meet new people and see how they see live.

Casablanca reminds me a lot of Jakarta. Big and still growing, with a cosmopolitan charm that lures people from smaller cities to try their luck here. It also has a lot of contradictions. We can see women in burqas waiting at a bus stop next to a girl wearing a miniskirt and fishnet stockings. The biggest mosque in Maghreb is only a stone's throw away from the nightlife district, which I find interesting. I haven't had much chance to travel around the country yet. The Moroccans I know say that Casablanca is not Morocco. But so far, I think Morocco is a charming country. It's not the easiest country to live in for most Asians (including myself), but all experiences are valuable. It gives me lots of material for my blog.

Please introduce us to your first volunteer translators!

Global Voices in Bahasa Indonesia currently has 4 active translators including myself. Galuh Tahtya is one of my college buddies. After moving to Casablanca, we started to swap news, and one day I told her about the Lingua project. She decided to join.

Then came Ivan Lanin, the director of Wikimedia Indonesia, who also showed interest in volunteering. We found Oktavia Sidharta through Portnoy of Global Voices in Chinese, while our latest addition, Juliana Harsianti, is also an acquaintance of mine back in Jakarta. She is currently studying in Oslo, Norway with a scholarship laureate in online media.

Global Voices in Indonesian is still a baby but we hope that it will grow as big as Global Voices in French or in Spanish. I have some plans I wish to implement soon. I want to introduce Global Voices' mission to Indonesian young minds, especially those living on the island of Bali. I also wants to get in touch with my school and bring the Lingua project to their attention. I wish to share the beauty of volunteering with youth and the Indonesian public in general. Global Voices in Indonesian is taking it one step at a time, and it's truly a labor of love.

Global Voices in Bahasa Indonesia has a Facebook page!

Photo from www.arkibongbayan.org

This fact makes Raymond “Mong” Palatino the first blogging politician in the Philippines and one of Global Voices’ first contributors to be elected to public office.

Although only 29 years old, Raymond “Mong” Palatino’s CV already runs pages long. He writes a column for an international press syndicate; he’s served as president of the National Union of Students of the Philippines; he’s been a major player in groups like Filipino Youth for Peace, the Estrada Resign Youth Movement and Kabataan Kontra-Kartel, known as Youth Against the Oil Cartel.

Mong began with Global Voices halfway through 2006, covering his home country. By that time he had already been blogging at Mongster’s Nest for more than a year. He moved up to Regional Editor at Global Voices in April 2008.

An office of the UN has compared him to Edgar Jopson, the most famous student leader in Filipino history. He helped usher in TXTPower, a national consumer rights advocacy group. He has long been at the forefront of marrying new technologies to help foster political change.

In a profile in the Washington Post on the use of social media in Filipino politics, Mong admitted that during his work mobilizing students in opposition to President Joseph Estrada in 2001 taught him the importance of tools like texting. But one could argue it’s the plight of the Filipino youth who fuel the many aspects of his work. In 2005, Mong wrote these words:

“The debilitating effects of the labor and education policies of the government account for the cynicism and hopelessness which many young Filipinos feel today. They leave the country in droves because they sense no bright future for them in the Philippines. Those who remain are resigned to the destituteness of the country. “

Two years later, he ran his second national election campaign. His Kabataan Party garnered 225,000 votes on a platform of youth empowerment and the fight against corruption, inequality and promoting social justice. This showing pushed Kabataan past the threshold of two percent of total national votes, making it eligible to sit in the House of Representatives under Philippine’s sectoral allocation law, which provides seats to parties representing minority voices. A recent Supreme Court ruling increased the number of these “sectoral” seats in the House of Representatives from 22 to 55, paving the way for the Kabataan Party to join the House of Representatives.

As Partylist leader, Raymond was sworn in and immediately began work. (A recent tweet has him testing the wi-fi at the House of Representatives. He reported it “seems ok.”)

And a blog post from those first hours in office portrays him tackling the nuts-and-bolts of Filipino politics.

I attended a higher education committee hearing in the afternoon. The committee tackled HB 2380 - Protecting the rights of students requiring professional licensing examinations to enroll in review centers of their choice and providing penalties thereof - which is principally authored by Rep. Teddy Casiño of Bayan Muna. I’m supporting this measure. Most likely this bill will be passed by the committee. During the hearing, Rep. Teves of Negros revealed that there is a school in his province requiring students to live in the school dormitory for two months in order to attend review classes.

Schools should not require students to attend review classes. Enrolling in review schools should not be made as a graduation requirement. Review classes are acceptable if they are part of the curriculum. But the popular practice today involves schools which force students to join expensive review classes.

I had a conversation with Mong regarding the power of the youth and social media in the Philippines.

With all you have happening in your life, why work for Global Voices?

I was invited by Preetam Rai (former Global Voices Southeast Asia editor) to join GV in 2006. I immediately agreed to write for GV. During that time, I was already a fan of GV. I was impressed with its mission to highlight the views of bloggers in different parts of the world. By joining GV, I could more effectively articulate the issues espoused by Filipino bloggers. My initial articles were about reproductive health, nurse migration, election reform and illegal deployment of Filipinos in Iraq. For two years, I contributed 2-3 GV articles per month.

I attended the GV summit in New Delhi in 2006. The summit was influential in broadening my appreciation for the potential of blogging to raise political awareness and improve human interactions in the world. Before the GV summit, my knowledge about the persuasive power of online media was very limited.

It was April 2008 when Preetam asked me to replace him as GV editor in the region. I thoroughly enjoyed my new task for GV. It gave me the opportunity to interact with various bloggers in the region. It allowed me to remain regularly informed about the political developments in East Asia and the rest of the world. I realized too the importance of broadening my perspectives on social and political matters. I noticed that I was satisfied being a Filipino blogger; while I am almost ignorant on what is happening in our neighboring countries. My GV work improved my outlook and my reading habits. Through GV, I learned to appreciate better the need to look for alternative voices which are not usually reported by mainstream media. These blogs, these voices exist. They are out there, waiting to be quoted.

You’ve blogged eloquently about your parents and siblings moving away when you were just an adolescent to live and work abroad. How has this distance from your family shaped your life?

I’ve learned to become more independent. At the same time, it influenced me (during my university days) to ask questions about the social order. For example: Why is labor export a permanent economic policy of the government? Why is migration deemed by many Filipinos as the ultimate solution to poverty? In retrospect I became an activist by starting to ask about the Filipino diaspora.

Social media has been used heavily in Filipino politics. How have these media organized different segments of the youth in the country? (For his answer, Mong sent me to his website, where I found this)

Texting is already the standard mode of communication among Filipinos. It is widely used even in the remote countryside to connect and reconnect with family and friends. Overseas Filipino workers, now numbering more than 8 million, use texting to maintain close relationships with their loved ones back home…

Political forces seek to mobilize millions of subscribers through virtual campaigns which could range from the sending of text messages, downloading of political ringtones, and forwarding of subversive text quotes. It may be impossible to gather more than 50 million cell phone users in the streets but it is easy to persuade ordinary citizens to send political text messages to their friends.

The great number of anonymous prepaid cell phone users is emboldening citizens to express their true political sentiments. A majority of cell phone owners in the country are availing themselves of the prepaid service since this is cheaper. This also allows political groups and disgruntled citizens, fearful of government reprisals, to send daring political messages through texting, without the risk of revealing their identities.

Another important factor which contributes to the popularity of texting is the relative absence of censorship governing Internet usage and mobile communications in the Philippines. The cheap mobile technology and the freedom enjoyed by Filipino cell phone users enhance the opportunities to use the phones for political activities.

Taking a look at the words (quoted above) you wrote of the cynicism and hopelessness of the youth in 2005, What is the difference between the economic situation back then and today?

I see no difference in the situation in 2005 and today. In fact I believe the situation has gone worse. The Philippines is suffering from the global economic crisis because it is too much dependent on remittances sent by overseas workers who are being laid-off in developed countries. Our youth continue to dream of leaving the country to fulfill their simple dream of acquiring a decent job that will uplift the conditions of their families. I have little respect for a government which treats its citizens as commodities to be exported.

Your party, Kabataan, has had more than its share of run ins with authorities. Its members have been threatened by elected officials and even hit by a mayor; a coordinator was arrested and beaten by armed police; during the 2007 elections, two poll watchers were abducted and killed. And yet you continue…

You are correct: our members were harassed; a few were killed in the last elections

The least we can do to honor their bravery and sacrifice is to continue with our advocacy. Our platform for a progressive form of politics is resisted by supporters of the status quo. We will persevere….

You’ve been profiled inside and outside the Philippines as an astute organizer using different forms of social media. Now that you are an elected official, how will you continue?

I will consistently blog my activities in the Parliament. I will use different social media applications like Twitter, Plurk (plurk is more popular among Filipino bloggers) and Facebook to report about my activities. Among our initial activities is to teach some of my colleagues in the Parliament about the potential of using social media in improving transparency and governance in the country.

You spoke these words after learning of the Supreme Court decision to grant your party a seat in the House of Representatives.

“… The Filipino youth have always played a pivotal role in ushering in significant changes in history. We have always been at the forefront of uprisings and revolutions every time the social, political and economic conditions in society became too intolerable for Filipinos to endure.”

Where do you see Filipino youth in the next five years?

I believe the Filipino youth will fulfill an active role in the 2010 presidential elections. They will demand democratic reforms in governance, they will push for a genuine social reform agenda, they will effectively influence the results of the elections.

However, the youth may become more cynical if administration politicians succeed in their plan to postpone the holding of the elections. The challenge is to prevent the spread of cynicism among the youth and transform the mood of hopelessness into a constructive force for change.

Where do you see Raymond “Mong” Palatino in five years?

In five years I still see myself as an activist (this time in the labor sector and human rights advocacy), a public servant, and a blogger; still a member of the GV community and helping with the web translation project involving the several major languages in the Philippines.

You Tube video of a Kabataan Party ad

What is Boiro Camp?

Camp Boiro is the former barracks of the Republican guards in Donka, a suburb of Conakry, Guinea, it became a political prison and torture block from 1958 to 1984. All people accused by the revolutionary regime of Ahmed Sekou Touré, rightly or wrongly, of misdeeds, counter-revolutionary activities, middle-class attitude etc, were locked up and more often than not, executed, after all kinds of humiliation and tortures [Fr] including fatal privation of food and water (a torture called “diète noire” black fast),electroshocks, sexual violences, etc. According to international human rights organizations, including Amnesty International, over 50.000 [Fr] lost their lives in Camp Boiro and similar places in Guinea. Mass graves are still being found all around Guinea.

Could you please state in which context this took place?
In 1958, the former colonial power, France, held a referendum offering African people a choice between staying within the frame of a French-African Community, or opting for independence. Guinea alone decided for independence at that time, which it got. France retaliated by severing all ties and investments, destroying buildings, and isolating Guinea. The leader of the Guinean splinter group of Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (“African Democratic Rally”), Ahmed Sékou Touré, a former trade unionist, embodied the African intellectuals and youth's ideals. A national union government was set up. Left wing intellectuals, Guineans from abroad, flocked home, wishing to help the young nation. But very soon the dream became a nightmare.

Sekou Touré set up a pyramidal political system, with a party cell in every village, city area, military barracks, school. Everywhere Guineans were to be found, they had to create one, even abroad. Each and every Guinean citizen was a «party member from birth to death». The whole country turned into a giant prison, called by some media a “Tropical goulag” [Fr]. To get out of Guinea, you needed an exit visa signed by the dictator himself, individually. A militia was created [Fr] and denouncement took hold, even within families.

On which grounds were people arrested and jailed in Camp Boiro ?

Any pretext was good enough to arrest and torture : an identity check while exiting a movie theatre, student protests, having a wife or a villa that appealed to a lord of the regime, etc. Most of the time, you were arrested without reason. In her memoir, «Grain de Sable” , Ms Nadine Barry recalls how she tried with her husband (who died in jail) to hide a bottle-opener whose handle sported an effigy of General de Gaulle, by burying it in their garden. Unfortunately, the heavy rains of Conakry unearthed it.

Has what went on in Camp Boiro been documented?

Global view of Camp Boiro - the arrow points to the location of the political prison block. Photo campboiro.org

A few books describe the conditions of detention in the camp [Fr]. The new prisoners were « conditionned », left for a few days without food and drink, then tried by the investigation committee. Without knowing for what the committee reproached them, they were asked to give away their accomplices, beaten, tortured with mechanical devices, forced to keep painful positions, cigarette butts were extinguished on their body, etc, until fainting or death. For days, they were asked to confess imaginary crimes : spying for the CIA or the French, receiving bribes, being a “fifth column agent”. As long as the victim did not confess, tortures did not stop. The confessions were then read by the victim on the radio, and were used to give a semblance of rationality for other arrests.

In 1976, Sekou Touré declared war on the Peul ethnic group [Fr], 40% of the nation's population. A brutal repression brought into prisons and graves thousands of innocent people, including the archbishop of Conakry, Mgr Raymond-Marie Tchidimbo [Fr].
An estimated third of the population had left the country when Sékou Touré died in 1984.

You are yourself Peul. How was your family affected by the repression?

One morning, in April 1971, in Rome, I told my wife that I had dreamt of my father being arrested. I didn't attach any importance to this. He never went to school and did not nurture any political ambition. But I had not been living in Guinea under the revolution for ten years. I believed more than ever in our revolution. It was simply unconceivable for me to think that it could arrest and jail any innocent person. I woke up one day, at the Guinean embassy in Rome, when the ambassador harassed me, calling me “a son of fifth column”.

Only later did I learn that my father had been arrested the very night of my dream, during the compulsory weekly party meeting - if a citizen didn't attend, he was not entitled his food ration.
My father was killed at Camp Boiro, but we do not exactly know when. Most probably during the night of October 17, 1971. He may have been tortured until his spine got broken, and “sacrificed” the same day. Sekou Touré's sorcerer is rumored to have advised the dictator to sacrifice a number of people with light complexion that day. Unfortunately, in Guinea, we Peul people are considered light-skinned.

What became of you and your family ?

My family was ordered to abandon our properties, and left only with what they were wearing. My mama, wanting to take her prayer-mat, was violently hurled in the staircase. Before independence, my father was a wealthy businessman. He had sent his father on a pilgrimage to Mecca and bought his first car (a Citroën sedan) in 1949. He started off by selling salt, which he carried on foot from the coast in the beginning, and traded it for kinkeliba, a local tea much liked in Guinea. His money and possessions were “nationalized”, by the same people who murdered him. After my father disappeared in Camp Boiro, friends kept clear from our family, for fear of being arrested as accomplices. Only one of my uncle gave the family shelter in his home.

The militia arrested my mama too, charging her with knowing my brother's whereabouts. She was released and she crossed the border with Sierra Leone on foot, risking her life, to be with him. From there, they had to flee again, to Ivory Coast, as the Sierra Leone regime supported Sekou Touré. We elder children fled the country. That is why today, my sisters and brothers are Canadian, French, American, Austrian, Italian and Senegalese citizens.

Are Guineans aware today of what was going on in Camp Boiro?

Unfortunately, in Guinea, the rightful « duty of memory » is hampered by an information gap. The country lacks education, training facilities. Cyber activism is also very limited, due to poor Internet connexion, electric power shortages, low incomes. Guinean history was falsified by the torturers and nostalgics of the so-called revolution. They praise the dictator's memory, Sekou Touré, who died in 1984 (in Cleveland, USA). His successor, military Chief of staff Lansana Conté, followed his tracks. Up to the death of Lansana Comté, last Christmas Eve, Sekou Touré's memory was celebrated every year by the government senior officials. The country’s presidential palace is named after him. Sékoutoureya means Sékou Touré's house.

This why the Association des victimes, set up by survivors and children of the victims, works at locating mass graves, returning the remains to their families, rehabilitating the victims, claiming possessions seized by the State. Our aim is to turn the Camp Boiro into a Memorial (for some photos of the camp, taken in 1999, see here) dedicated to the memory of the victims, especially the cabine technique “technical booth” where inmates were tortured, and the “Death's head”, where they were executed.

Since President Comté died, another coup has taken place in Guinea.

A bloodless military coup, this time, which brought to the presidency Captain Moussa Dadis Camara. He is educated, he was trained in a democratic country, and he is young enough not to be involved with former regimes. Our hopes for justice got a strong boost on March 24th, when the new President officially received members of our association in Conakry. The meeting was broadcast on national TV. During this meeting, President Dadis Camara asked forgiveness from the members of our Association and revealed that his own father was among the victims. While an encouraging development, however, this is only a first step in a longer process to reach national reconciliation.

Interview carried out on March 27.

His personal blog, The Third World View portrays Bangladeshis and Bangladesh in English to a global audience.

Eager to help create more content in Bangla on the web, Rezwan initiated the Lingua website Global Voices in Bangla with fellow translators.

He is also Features Editor on Rising Voices, a Global Voices project that gives micro-grant funding to new blogging projects in some of the most marginalized communities of the world. Here, Rezwan writes about the internet connectivity problems facing REPACTED bloggers in Kenya, the explosive energy of young bloggers in La Loma, Colombia, and shares the beautiful photos taken by Bangladeshi women-bloggers of Nari Jibon.

A scenic sunset at Bangladesh's Cox’s Bazar sea beach by Nari Jibon blogger Nilufa Anne.

Why did you start your personal blog in 2003 and what was the reason you chose to write in English?

I was in Dhaka then, and I read a story in a local newspaper about the famous Iraqi blogger Salam Pax, who was writing an online diary about the Iraq war and the effect it was having on his everyday life. I started reading his blog and also came across some other interesting blogs.

This inspired me to start my own blog sometime in April 2003. At first I could not figure what to write. But I soon found out from the other blogs that there are huge misconceptions about Bangladesh, mainly due to the absence of Bangladeshi voices on the Internet. And I found my focus: topics on Bangladesh and following the Bangladeshi blogosphere.

In those days Bangla Unicode was only in the development stage so I could not blog in Bangla (as the reader had to have the same Bangla software/fonts I used). My focus was to communicate with the world, so English was the ready choice.

How did you first hear about Global Voices?

I probably first came across the site because my blog was being linked by Global Voices. I was already doing small roundups in my blog and guest-blogging in a couple of regional ones.

Then in July 2005 I received a mail from Global Voices co-founder Rebecca MacKinnon : “We find that we've been linking to you quite frequently over at Global Voices and would love to know a little more about you…” She requested me to post on Global Voices.

I was thrilled to write for Global Voices, and the rest is history.

What is your most memorable blogging experience?

I've have a lot of interesting experiences. I remember in April 2004 I traveled to Sri Lanka and blogged about it. I remember how desperate I was to find an Internet-connected PC to upload my pictures and post my daily report. This urge makes one a passionate blogger.

I also get my share of amusements from the comments in my blog posts. I wrote about the national ID card implementation process in Bangladesh, and sometimes I still receive comments from people who have specific queries like “My ID is lost. Please tell me how can I get a new one.”

What persuaded you to start Global Voices in Bangla?

Bangla-blogging is relatively a new phenomenon. It really took off in December 2005 when a Bangla blogging platform was launched, breaking all technical barriers (it's now the largest). Bangla is spoken by 230 million people in the world, but because of absence of a unified Bangla computing platform (unicode) hundreds of Bangla online sites/publications in Bangladesh and India are not searchable and there is really a shortage of quality, Bangla content on the web.

That is why I was interested in translating Global Voices content in my mother tongue. I knew that soon, more and more people would have access to the Internet, and I wanted them to be introduced to blogs around the world in their own language. We have 15 translators on board but only 4-5 are regulars. I hope we we will be able to find additional enthusiastic volunteers to join the team.

The only thing you need to do now to read Bangla fonts is set your browser's character encoding to Unicode (utf8). Earlier you needed to download at least one unicode Bangla font, but now most recent operating systems come with everything pre-installed. Check here if you face problems either typing or reading Bangla fonts (http://bn.globalvoicesonline.org/bangla-settings/).

What have you learned about citizen media through your writing about the Rising Voices projects?

I enjoy following the developments of the various Rising Voices grantees. I come from a developing country myself and can relate to many of the challenges they face, like getting connected to the Internet, or just to be able to sit in front of a computer. I still hear from bloggers back home that sometimes they open a web page, and it takes so much time to load, they can grab a cup of tea and finish it while they wait. But these people are still passionate to blog, and this is true for participants in every Rising Voices project, whether in Madagascar, Kenya or Dhaka. Highlighting their efforts makes me realize more and more, that what we are doing is right.

What do you feel are some of the most important developments in Bangla citizen media in the past year?

The first one was the Bangla blogging platform I discussed above. Now we have 4-5 platforms with thousands of users and many, many readers, and they have a growing competition between them. The blogs on other multilingual platforms like Blogger, Wordpress etc. are also coming up.

Soon a popular Bangla news daily from Bangladesh will be introducing blogging services and others will follow suit. The Bangladeshi government has declared that it will install computers and Internet connections in almost 10,000 schools across the country. I think we will soon see an explosion of blogging in Bangla.

In South Asia as a whole, do you think citizen media has had any impact on people's attitudes or understanding of cultural and political differences?

Yes of course. We had different developments in the blogospheres in those countries but more or less the people have come to know about the power of blogging.

The Pakistani blogosphere has shown their diversity and openness breaking through the stereotypes portrayed in the media. The Indian blogosphere is so huge and its regional language blogosphere are growing to emphasize the country's multicultural, multi ethnic heritage. In Bangladesh, where the traditional media ignore blogs and are more prone to self-censorship to protect themselves, the bloggers have broken all barriers to voice their opinion fearlessly and some journalists now prefer blogs to publish their investigative reporting.

It also is fascinating to get perspectives from the bloggers about the Sri Lanka's ethnic disputes, Nepal's journey towards democracy, Bhutanese culture, and Maldivians opposition to their long serving President.

The traditional media of these countries often follow the politics of acrimony which sometime augment nationalism and hatred between these countries. You just need to look at a common incident (e.g. the border dispute in India and Pakistan) and follow the newspaper coverage of both the countries, and you see how skewed the reports are. The bloggers are bridging the gap by adding a human touch to the issues, and are in fact creating more friends than enemies between those countries.

Photo of Rezwan above, was taken by Jen Brea and is shared under a Creative Commons license.

JY: Tell us about yourself.

SBG: I started blogging in French, then, after few years, I decided to blog in Arabic and cover interesting stories that deal with digital activism and the use of new information technologies for social and political change. I speak 4.5 languages. The half is what remained from the Farsi that I've learned during the one and a half year that I've spent in Iran.

I studied law at the University of Tunis but I didn't complete my studies. I always hated Law and preferred to study Sociology. But in Tunisia, at that time, it does not matter what you choose to study, the government educational body is there to choose it for you!

I work as a part-time Advocacy director for Global Voices and I'm also trying, together with my colleagues from nawaat.org, to evolve some of the Tunisian citizen media projects and digital activism initiatives to something more professional and sustainable.

JY: You published the first Tunisian e-book (in French) about your exile from Tunisia - can you share a bit of that story with us?

SBG: Well, when I arrived to The Netherlands after one year of travel following my flee from Tunisia, the first thing I did was write down the story of that trip, which was a very rich and intense experience.

“Journey in a Hostile World” is the subtitle of the e-book. And I think that it gives an idea about how it is to travel the world with an Arab or African passport in a region where all kind of frontiers and mountains of obstacles are built to prevent a wide portion of this specific group from traveling and exercising their freedom of movement in a so called “global village”. In this travel, I realized how difficult, and even impossible, it is to travel from one North African or Arab country to another and how often you can get arrested and investigated only because you are a young Arab and thus have the “bad” passport. I was arrested twice, once in Libya where I spent five days in the security offices because my attempts to travel through the Sahara desert in the direction of Niger was deemed suspicious. The second time was in Damascus (Syria) where, after two days of investigation, I was asked to leave the country. The book tries to also analyze the political situation in the countries that I've visited (Tunisia, Libya, Niger, Chad, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran and the Netherlands) and follows the personages of the story through the use of fiction, theological analysis, political debate, prose and poetry. All the stories are linked by the wire of the journey that leads the personages through countries, cities, events and memories, that trace their relationship with the end of a century (XX) and the beginning of another (XXI).

JY: How did you get involved with GVA? What inspired you to work on the project?

SBG: After the article by Sameer Padania, GV former Video Hub editor, about the Tunisian Prison Map mashup, Haitham Sabbah, former GV Middle East Editor asked me to cover Tunisia for GV, which I did for a few months, before starting GV Advocacy.

I personally was impressed by the role of GV after the support that our citizen online demonstration, Yezzi Fock Ben Ali, has gained, thanks to the coverage that has been given to it on GV. It was interesting to see that the Anglophone blogsphere was much more supportive toward our action than the francophone one, which we excepted to be much closer to us than the Anglophone one. The same trend has been observed after my Tunisian Prison Map. Those two cases were my very first impression of GV and they have demonstrated to me the place and the very particular identity that this amazing website is shaping within the media sphere.

JY: Do you feel you're achieving more for freedom of expression living outside of Tunisia than inside?

Since I only started advocating when I lived in the Netherlands and not in Tunisia, I didn't experience the problems I could have had in a similar situation in Tunisia.

I must say that I didn't really experience freedom of expression inside Tunisia and I think that after the short political openness during the eighties, Tunisians have lost a huge part of their freedom of expression and free access to information. Living and blogging from outside Tunisia has certainly helped me express myself freely, but the fact that my personal blog is blocked, as are all the other collective blogs that I'm co-running, always remind me of the harsh situation in which freedom of expression has declined year-by-year in my country.

JY: You recently reported on the status of freedom of expression in Tunisia. What is your take on the matter?

SBG: The Tunisian government has realized that censorship is not working the way it wanted it to. The flow of dissident information into Tunisia is a fact and censorship is simply not succeeding in stopping it. It's true that only a small percentage of Tunisian Netizens have the technical skill and the will to figure out workarounds for the censorship, however, the rest of Tunisian Netizens still can access the same information on Facebook or via their RSS subscriptions and mailing-lists. The government is aware of this breach and it seems that it is updating its policy from a simple blocking of dissents websites and blogs to a much aggressive one that include hacking and deleting of websites and filtering of emails.

By getting rid of outspoken websites and blogs (those who, thanks to the service of RSS, social networking websites and newsletters, are providing their readership in Tunisia with independent information) and by filtering emails (it seems that the Tunisian Internet police has recently implemented what seems to be a Deep Packet Inspection (DPI to filter targeted email addresses and content) the regime hopes to destabilize the two hubs that are providing Tunisia with political information and that the censorship couldn't stop.

The other new development is the response of the Tunisian Netizens in general, including bloggers and digital activists, to censorship. The recent ban on Facebook in Tunisia that lasted for two weeks has generated a very strong mobilization to protest the ban of Facebook itself, on the blogs and websites and as a result, access was restored after two weeks by a “personal intervention” from President Ben Ali, who ordered the lifting of the ban.

Now, and for the first time in Tunisia, a Tunisian journalist and blogger, Zied El Heni, who is also a member of the executive board of the National Union of Tunisian Journalists, has taken legal action against the Tunisian Internet Agency (ATI) over the ban on Facebook and the first hearing has been scheduled for November 4th.

JY: We know you love technology - what new developments are you really passionate about?

SBG: I'm very impressed by the new North African blogs aggregator, Berberus.com. It's one of the most efficient tools that helps you follow, explore, and understand the North-African blogospheres and have a sense of the kind of conversations that are taking place in that region of the world. With graphs, tags, hot topics and a very advanced search into the content and comments of the Maghrebian (North African) blogspheres, Berberus.com offers a range of new functionalities that make the navigation of the aggregated blogs and authors a very interesting experience.

JY: You recently attended your second Global Voices Summit. What did you learn from this year's gathering? What new developments do you hope to see for GVO and GVA?

SBG: During the Budapest Citizen Media Summit we have dedicated one day to debate the online free speech topic, from a variety of perspectives (technical, legal, social, political, etc.) by bringing together on-the-ground activists and bloggers, NGOs representatives, tools developers, free speech advocates and researchers. What I personally took from that meeting is that the battle against online censorship/filtering and the defense of free access to the tools that are giving the platforms for people to express themselves (like blogging services, photo and video-sharing websites, and social networking websites) is a global battle that needs to be fought globally by joining efforts of all actors in the online free speech movement. The building of a coordinated global anti-censorship network is one of the ideas that has strongly emerged from the Budapest debate.

* Photo Credit: Georgia Popplewell

Photo courtesy of LuisCarlos Díaz

You have been writing in your blog “Back from the World” since July. Why did you start writing, and why did you decide to write in English?

I start this blog after coming back from GV Summit in Budapest. I used to blog only in Chinese. After the summit, I feel strongly motivated to stay connected with all the people I know during the Summit. In this case, blogging in English seems to be necessary. GV people “know” each other more or less via internet, but meeting in person is a totally different story. With that experience in Budapest, I am more attached to Global Voices and this group of people. We often say “keep in touch” when we leave, and having an English blog, to me, is really the way to keep in touch with them.

How and when did you get connected with GVO?

I started to translate English posts into Chinese as a practice and put them online since 2004. On November 15, 2006, I got an email from PipperL, another Lingua Chinese translator, inviting me to translate for GVO. I clicked the link, read it, and I am hooked. GVO combines two things I like the most: translation and international issues. That's how the story begins. I keep that particular email he sent to me until now, because in retrospect, it is truly a watershed moment in my life.

Explain the work that you do for GV Lingua.

I translate GVO posts from English to Chinese. Also, Portnoy and I are managers for the whole GV Lingua projects. All we do is try to make the whole Lingua experience as enjoyable as possible.

How does what you do for GV Lingua fit into the world of citizen media?

Traditional media, in every part of the world, only focuses on a few big powers and nearby countries, which leave most of the world in the dark. The beauty of citizen media, in my opinion, is to reveal news and perspectives that may be neglected or overlooked by traditional media. To many of my friends who only speak Chinese, GV Lingua has become the major source of African and Latin American news, for instance. We shine lights to places they won't be able to see in the past. Of course it is due to precious efforts from our authors around the world.

As a translator, how do you decide what to translate?

I translate what I am interested. Some people emphasize we should translate what interests readers, but to me, they are “unimaginable mass”. I never know what readers really prefer, so I follow my heart. Time is sometimes a constraint. If I have other translation or interpretation works to do, I tend to do shorter posts. Earning a living is still crucial to a freelancer like me. I don't and can't oppose long, long articles. GV authors have every right to write posts as long as they want or need. Lingua translators will try their best.

What is your most memorable blogging or translating experience?

The other day, one classmate asked me about the presidential election in Paraguay. I was surprised and wanted to know how she knew about it. It turned out that she read my Chinese translation of Eduardo Avila's post. That's when I know my translation has an influence to others for sure.

How would you characterize the Taiwanese blogosphere?

The blogosphere in Taiwan has a wide variety of interests, such as travel, cuisine, and celebrity. Unfortunately, I am occupied by GV and other things that interest me more, so I don't pay much attention to it.

Give me an example of your average day.

It would be quite boring to most people. I wake up normally at 8, do translation (GV included) before and after lunch, take a walk before sunset (to bookstores sometimes), read after dinner, and watch TV or movies for pleasure. Before bedtime, I write blogs or do more translation (GV included). The more paid works I have to do, the more eager I want to translate GV posts. Weird, huh?

How do you see GV Lingua progressing over the next few years?

GV Lingua is booming in numbers for the past one and a half years. The trend will probably stay for a while. Then we should focus on ensuring every Lingua team is sustainable, as volunteers come and go. As Lingua manager, I feel obligated to help volunteers be connected to the whole GV community. I am still thinking of ways everyday.

Do you have any hobbies?

I love reading, be it magazines, books, newspapers, websites, or others. I read four or five books at a time. After one or two chapters, I put down one book and read another, no matter how attractive the plot is. It may not sound good to others, but it's the way I am.

What is your worst habit?

I love to collect advertising postcards, which my mom always complains because it occupies a sizable part of my place. Everyone should only take one postcard each, but I often end up bringing back two or three of the same kind, as I think I should have backup if I lose one of them. I even waste weekend afternoons walking around Taipei and looking for new ones. It's silly. I don't buy postcards for myself when I am abroad. I look for free ones.

Photo courtesy of Joi Ito

How did you view the people of GV before you met then in Budapest, and afterwards?

I always think of GV as a group of people devoting their time and efforts towards their different goals. It's great that people with different interests can all benefit from GV experience, be it bloggers, translators, activists, etc. After meeting GV people in person, I can really feel this huge energy among us. Outsiders may think GV people are idealistic, opinionated or aggressive. These impressions may or may not be right, but the most important thing is, just as our Outreach Director David Sasaki says, “we are having a good time in GV.” I had a wonderful time in Budapest.

Finally, describe yourself and how you see the world.

I am always optimistic, believing the world will be better in some ways tomorrow. I am always curious, wondering what surprises may come next. I am always talkative, trying to fill up all blanks in conversations. The world, online or offline, is a playground to me. We can always have fun.

To those of us who were at the Global Voices Online Citizen Media Summit or who have had a look at the photographs posted online from the gathering, you may have seen a guy in a hat seeming to be unnoticed. Well, that was Daniel Duende Carvalho, our Lingua Portuguese Editor, and he did not go unnoticed - no matter how hard he tried. Indeed he was a very talkative participant. But I'd like, before start an interview with him, bring to the readers what Jose Murilo has to say about him:

The amazing thing about Daniel and I is that we keep reconnecting everywhere. Ever since I can remember of my history, we were always getting together around games, gadgets, books, friends, jobs (not girls, thank God), and parents. No surprise at all in the fact that we are together again in Global Voices — connecting and creating in  an ever-expanding network that now has many voices and relatives — just like a really big family.

Well, said that let's see what Daniel has to tell us.

How and when did you learn about blogs and start blogging?

Well. To be honest, it was in the (Brazilian) spring of 2002. I was bored one night in my somewhat far off home and then began reading some of my friends blogs. It sounded like something interesting to do, and then I created the Alriada Express [Pt] (whose archives date to that day in April ‘02). My blogging was mostly about nonsense and personal remarks at first. That kind of blogging was very common among my group of friends at the time. Some days later, I showed my blog to some people that are great bloggers today, but that had no blogs at the time, and heard things like “this is a complete waste of time”. I “wasted my time” for years, and then I think I began to get the sense of it. I don't consider myself a great blogger today — in fact it comes as as surprise to me to be featured in this respectable series of interviews! — but I think I know a thing or two, and sometimes know how to spread it through my good ol' Alriada Express. In the beginning of 2007 I created O Caderno do Cluracão (The Cluricaun's Notebook, in Portuguese), my blog about literature, photography, my outlook on arts and culture and, above all, my writings. In the last few (or not so few) months it's been hard to find the time to blog, but if you ask me, my newer blog is about writing I miss the most. Currently almost all my “blogging time” is dedicated to Global Voices, and I believe this is fair. It's better to provide workforce to a wonderful project like Global Voices Online (and Global Voices Lingua) than to flaunt my ego ranting almost alone in my almost abandoned blogs.

How did you get involved with GV?

In the (again, Brazilian) winter of 2007 I've heard about the Global Voices Lingua project, and the possibility to create a Portuguese site translating the great content published at Global Voices Online. I already knew Global Voices Online for about one year then, and visited it at least once or twice a month to check the news, spending one hour or two reading about what's being said around the world. I was living in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, then, and I was working with the Brazilian cultural site Overmundo [Pt]. But I was craving to come back to my hometown, Brasilia, Brazil's capital, and in the end that's what I did. When I came home to Brasilia, I was looking for a job but otherwise had plenty of free time. That's when I began translating for the newborn Global Voices em Português site, with a (not so) little help from a friend. In the beginning of July I've heard that the choice for the site coordinator was being made, and some days later was officially informed that I was chosen for the task. In the last one year and one month I've been translating, coordinating GV Lingua Português and, when possible, writing roundups and articles for Global Voices Online.

Let's talk a bit about Lingua

Lingua is a great project, that gives back all the content compiled to Global Voices Online (in English) to the linguistic groups from where all those wonderful, shocking and important words came from. It's more than fair exchange. It's the answer for a great demand for high quality citizen journalism content in languages other than English. More than that, Lingua is a very important experiment on volunteer translating and localization. Each day we are learning how to deal with extensive, very lively, volunteer communities and how to manage to translate not just the words, but the meanings, of what those global voices are saying. It's very exciting, and in my humble opinion something that is very demanded by the contemporary internet citizens: the group experiences geared to making things work and producing content.

However, Lingua sites are not visited as they should. How can we improve this?

Lingua sites visitor numbers are growing steadily, if not fast. I believe it's a matter of time before the global linguistic blogospheres discover them. The Lingua teams around the globe are doing a great job 24 hours a day, and such great work usually gets recognized in time. But of course there are things that can be done to improve that. Most of them are already being tried and done by some or all the teams. I believe the most important of them is to create an horizontal and collaboration-oriented relationship with the blogospheres that speak their languages. Once the bloggers discover that Global Voices not only quotes them and provides them with things to be quoted, but it's like a bigger brother that can help advance important issues and conversations, they become more than happy to help in any way they can. Bridge blogging, the work done wonderfully by Global Voices, is part of the worldwide conversation system that is the reason all of us write in our blogs: to be read, listened, and make part of the global conversation concerning issues local and global alike. Lingua is finding its place, and it's being found day after day by bloggers all around.

When was it that your interest in translation started?

That's a great question. Since I learned how to speak more than one language, and I was thought how to speak and write in Portuguese and English almost at the same early age, I was fascinated with the differences and similarities between the meanings and concepts in the diverse languages. When I was still very young I loved to translate song lyrics and English prose fragments to my friends. Years later, I came in contact with many collaborative translation projects on the web. The most important of them were Wikipedia. I collaborated with Wikipedia for almost a year, and learned a lot from that time. When the Lingua project appeared in my life, it was like remembering the past Wikipedian days with a plus: a better integrated and more dynamic work, with a great team. And a great team makes all the difference when you're trying to translate and make sense of things you don't always grasp completely — a situation every translator knows very well.

Why did you stop collaborating with Wikipedia?

Well. I was very disappointed with the way many moderators acted in the Portuguese and English (language) Wikipedia. I gave my time, many hours of it each week, to write and care for more than 20 articles. But they had a hard time speaking nicely, and even a harder time discussing matters in a reasonable way. And they ended up “losing” me, for I wouldn't lose my time collaborating in a project where moderators make me feel like they're doing a favor to me to let me collaborate. Wikipedia is a wonderful project, and I always link to it when some clarification is needed in specific subjects, but I'm sad to point that behind those wonderful pages we have a lot of people being frustrated in their efforts to collaborate everyday by moderators that are, to say the least, very poorly chosen and trained. Wikipedia definitely lacks something that overflows at Global Voices Online and other projects around the world: respect for people, kindness and humaneness.

Speaking of peopple, what about the Portuguese lingua team?

There are no words to thank and recognize all the WONDERFUL work that's being realized everyday by the Lingua Teams. Portuguese Lingua Team, the one I know best and interact with everyday, is always surprising and making me very proud to wear the badge of “coordinator”. But I'll tell you a secret: most of the time they're so brilliant, that they need very little coordination at all. Some days the team works so well that I feel like I'm just one more translator among them, and they're usually great translators, and that makes me even feel belittled in my less-than-brilliant translating skills. Ok, I used a lot of words just to say LINGUA TEAMS ARE AMAZING! :D The same goes to the huge team behind these wonderful global voices we translate everyday. They're just as amazing, and it's an honor to have the chance to bring their words to the Portuguese language.

You mentioned that in your blog, you write about cultural themes, and that you even worked on a site devoted to such issues. Can you merge that hobby with your Global Voices labour?

I like to post roundups on the Brazilian literary blogosphere whenever I can, but that's not as often as I would like to. The Brazilian Portuguese speaking literary blogosphere — with blogs on literature and blogs where original short stories and poetry are posted — is huge, and a lot of great artists are using their blogs mainly (or solely) to publish their literary works right now. Surprisingly, few citizen journalism bloggers seem to care about literary blogs, or even take them as a serious artistic expression in the country. On the last Campus Party held in São Paulo, Brazil, there wasn't even a mention of literary bloggers on the event schedule, and few if any of these bloggers were around to be seen or to speak for their class. In fact, they don't see themselves as a “class”. Rather, most of them seem to think themselves as regular writers and critics that use the internet as their media of choice. Some internet stars in Brazil seem to shun such nonchalance. But I digress… I believe the short answer for your question is: trying to give voice to this part of the blogosphere that doesn't care about YouTube, Citizen Journalism or Twitter, but that definitely has something to say, and does so beautifully in prose and verse. The question is: will anyone care for them?

Tell us something about the place you live Is it like all of us - non Brasilians - think life in Brazil is like? I mean lots of sun, samba and parties?

Life in Brazil can be like that to some people, mostly in Rio de Janeiro, Salvador or other seaside cities. But that's hardly the reality for the vast majority of people in Brazil - rich or poor. In fact, Brazil is so big that we can hardly say we have something like a “Brazilian lifestyle.” In my case, I live very far from the sea, in the capital city of Brasília, DF. I'm not very fond of sun, mostly because of my general geek upbringing (lots of books, being born in front of a computer, etc…), and although I deeply respect our samba and sertanejo (traditional country music) traditions, that's hardly what I've been listening in the last 30 years. To put it short, life in Brasília usually is mostly work and booze. We don't have much else to do here than that, we don't party a lot nor have a true cultural life. And the new law that threatens with prison anyone who is caught driving after drinking even a single sip of beer is driving us even more to the work side. :) But I must make it clear that Brasilia is one of the most unusual places in Brazil. In most other cities we have a lot of parties for all tastes, and wonderful cultural life. But don't just assume that all Brazilians like sun, samba and parties. There's a lot of us that prefer moonlighting, rock music and internet cafes, although it sounds as definitely not very “Brazilian” to the outside observers.

So, if a lot of Brazilians are so driven to computers and the Internet, what do you believe is the place of blogs and blogging in the Brazilian life?

This is not an easy question. First of all, even with our rising internet access standards in the last five or six years, mostly due to improvements in Brazilian economy and e-inclusion and outreach projects being held in the country (the best ones are from the Government), we still have a huge part of the population that don't even know what a computer (or even daily meals) really are — what to say about internet? Even among our digitally connected population, most people hardly steer very far from Orkut (Google's social network is an amazing hit here since 2004!) or the big content sites, like Terra Magazine or UOL. If they ever read blogs, these are the ones sponsored or linked by these sites, or some few other blogs that managed to fall into the popular taste. Most of these blogs don't talk about much else than visual jokes and charges, celebrity gossip and such things. The very rare other blogs that get a lot of traffic tend to repeat the mainstream media in almost every aspect. But the real small part of the Brazilian netizens that blog and read a lot of blogs is still significant, when you think about the huge scale everything takes when we're speaking about Brazil. So, we can say blogs and blogging have a great importance to this “small group of hundreds of thousands”, and that's the lot where our great bloggers come from. And they're actively blogging about many things, they're fighting against absurd laws like Eduardo Azeredo's Cyber crime Bill, and they're actively discussing our country and our world. The problem is that it's hard for them to really aggregate, or have a true voice, in a place where everything is so huge and full of noise like the Brazilian internet. It's hard to talk and be heard in the middle of our big-media sponsored internet samba. But if you're really paying attention, there's a lot of interesting things going on in our blogosphere and even inside Orkut's huge communities base (basically owned by the Portuguese speaking Brazilian users). Browsing Jose Murilo's or Paula Goes articles can give you a taste of our really active bloggers. They're many, but still far from being representative of the Brazilian online lifestyle, if we can ever say we have one.

And what do these “few hundreds of thousands” blog about?

Ouch! That's an even harder question, my friend. It's like asking what are the Peruvian bloggers, or the Mozambican bloggers, or the Swedish, or the Iranian bloggers blogging about. Lots of things, although some subjects become real hot sometimes and lots of them blog about it for some days. But still, these words would apply to any of the above mentioned blogospheres. I can't say (i.e. I don't know, hehehe) if we have any special particularities about the subject choice or conversation dynamics in our blogosphere, other than the ones that might come from the particularities of its size — at the same time so relatively small and absolutely large. We're starting to have more and more bloggers that come from more economically and socially challenged backgrounds now, and we used to have mostly white-upper-middle-class bloggers before, and that's a change for sure. Some subjects that didn't really matter in the past to most of our old-school-monetization-oriented-white-southern bloggers are now being more and more discussed by these new people on the blog-block, and that's a wonderful note. But it's still early to ascertain exactly what does it mean. To end my obvious answer, here come's my favourite obvious remark: “Brazilian internet is always changing, but we still don't know what will happen”. Sorry for the obvious answer, anyway. I believe the best answer that we can give is being given everyday by Paula Goes and José Murilo in their articles. Stay tuned to them, for I suspect they are some of the best to speak about Brazilian blogosphere.

Photo by Luis Carlos.

Among the topics he has blogged about in the past year are, atrocities of war in his region, the arrest of Radovan Karadžić, human rights, Serbian politics, and Kosovo's independence claims.

Siniša lives with his family in a town called Novi Sad, which is well-known for the EXIT music festival. He is a graduate of Serbian language and literature at Belgrade University. He does not have a personal blog, but is planning to create one in the future. More urgent are his plans to help start a new Lingua website, Global Voices in Serbian.

In his spare time, Siniša likes reading books and sometimes writes short stories. Before he became blind, he liked to play tennis. These days he is a fan of Serbian tennis players Novak Djoković, Janko Tipsarević, Ana Ivanović and Jelena Janković, and also likes Roger Federer and Maria Sharapova.

Serbian Authors Ljubiša Bojić and Siniša Boljanović at the Global Voices Summit in Budapest 2008, Photo by Elia Varela Serra

When did you first learn about Global Voices?

One day in May 2007, while I was surfing the internet, I accidentally found an interview with Global Voices co-founder Rebecca MacKinnon in a Serbian online media magazine called Link. Until then, I'd never heard anything about Global Voices. Starting with the first of Rebecca's sentences, it was already clear to me that Global Voices is a really serious, modern and interesting project. While I was reading the interview I remembered an old Latin proverb:Vox populi vox Dei (‘the voice of the people, is the voice of God’). I think if there are more voices, there will be much more truth around the world. At that moment, in my eyes Global Voices looked as an modern version of this saying. Of course, I immediately visited the website.

What is your most memorable blogging experience?

Every time I remember how I published my first post for Global Voices I am numb with fear again. Just a few days after reading Rebecca's interview I wanted to write a post for the site. Back then I didn’t know english almost at all. Back then I didn’t know how to use WordPress at all. I didn't know almost anything what was necessary to start blogging for Global Voices. At the same time I was enthusiastic and I had a strong desire to publish my first post. I was translating it the whole day using a Serbian-English dictionary. Ljubiša Bojić, Global Voices’ other contributor from Serbia, and Veronica Khokhlova, the Central and Eastern Europe editor, unselfishly assisted me, and thanks to them I succeeded in finishing my foolish adventure. I’ll remember that as long as I live.

Can you describe the software you use to read and write on the computer without seeing?

Blind and low-vision persons use screen reading software to read digital text. These softwares are logically based on use of keyboard shortcuts, instead of a mouse. I use Jaws. It's one of the best screen readers. There are numerous applications that are supported in JAWS, including word processors, encyclopedias, financial and spreadsheet packages, email and messaging applications, and more.

For example, in Internet Explorer, for navigation over the page I use arrows on the keyboard or TAB or PageUp/PageDown buttons. Jaws can read everything in a textual form on the page. If I want to enter a web address to visit a website, I type “ALT+D” to make the address bar available for editing. Jaws says: “Address - Edit”.

When I hear that, I can fill out the address bar.

Apart from Jaws' keyboard shortcuts there are also Windows keyboard shortcuts. They are not exclusively intended for blind and low vision computer users. You can see these options in the menus of almost all applications and use them instead of the mouse.

How do you write the posts for Global Voices?

I have no problems doing that, because the WordPress platform is accessible for screen reader users.

Vera, Siniša, Ethan, Ljubiša at the Global Voices Summit in Budapest 2008. Photo by Ljubiša Bojić.

What are the Serbian issues you are most interested in communicating to the rest of the world about?

I think there are a lot of interesting things Serbia can communicate to the rest of the world. Unfortunately, we are in the shadow of political issues. I am sure we will communicate with the European Union more and more in the next months, in order for Serbia to become a member as soon as possible. Slobodan Milošević's regime isolated Serbia for more than a decade, but Serbia is a very nice and attractive country from many aspects. We can communicate with people around the world about tourism, economy, industry, sport, art and other issues too.

Do you think we can look forward to a Serbian language Global Voices website?

I am thrilled to announce that a Serbian-language Global Voices website will start very soon. My friend Dijana Djuričković, who will be one of translators, is currently preparing the site, and I hope the first post will be translated and published in the Serbian language at the beginning of September.

How do you think Global Voices could be better?

As time goes by Global Voices is getting better and better. There are a few new interesting initiatives such increasing the availability of audio versions of posts. They would make Global Voices better and more approachable by different kinds of readers.

I think there are more populations who can get their place on the Global Voices in the future. For example, I am very interested in how young people live around the world. I remember when I was 13-15, I wanted to know how persons of the same age from other countries live, what their problems are, what they think about etc.

I would love if we could provide something like a “Junior Global Voices” website, where young people could read posts created by other young people. For now, everyone of us could find several boys and girls from different countries and encourage them to be bloggers. I think the Global Voices could be better in this way.

Do you think your daughter Maša will grow up to be a blogger?

I think she will be. She is a very clever and curious little girl. She is almost 4 and I am going to enroll her in an English school. She likes the computer and she already knows how to type on the keyboard. Maybe these are initial steps to becoming a blogger one day.