Considering the multilingual nature of the region, Maneno was built to allow for multiple language versions of articles to “sit atop one another for immediate access.” The interface of the platform is also translated into different languages to remove linguistic barriers. At the moment, Maneno is readable in English, Spanish, French, Swahili and Portuguese. Maneno developers are also planning on enabling African bloggers to use mobile phones to blog.

Maneno is a non-profit registered in the United States. Its Directors, three of whom are regular Global Voices contributors are Rebecca Wanjiku, a journalist and blogger from Kenya, Elia Varela Serra, journalist and photographer with a background in humanitarian development, Saul Wainwright, a South African finance manager, researcher and strategist and Miquel Hudin Balsa, a web developer.

Translation of the site is open to people in the community:

Maneno relies on people in the community helping us to translate the site. We encourage anyone out there with knowledge of a Sub-Saharan language to contact us to offer their linguistic help. Please don't be discouraged if your langauge isn't widely spoken; we'd still love to have it as an option!
To create a translation is quite simple. Once we hear from you, we'll send you a basic text file. You substitute in the words for your language and send it back. If desired, we will happily thank you on this page and in our blog for your work.

White Africa tested the site and found it a lot faster than most blogging platforms. Do we need another blogging platform?, he asks:

When I first heard about Maneno, the first question that came to my mind was… “what about WordPress.com and Blogger.com?” Don’t those serve the same purpose? Realizing that my knowledge in this might be lacking, I contacted Miquel to answer a few answers. Here is his response:
“We travel quite a bit and I found that anything hosted in the US gets slower and slower the further you get from the US, so I worked to create a CMS/blog platform that was very stripped down, yet fully functional. Don’t get me wrong, Wordpress is a beautiful, fantastic system that I admire and also use, but when you’re on a satellite connection in Bukavu or very slow DSL in Sarajevo, it’s mighty slow to use, which is the same problem with GMail and other web based applications that were developed in North America and Europe. So, I realized that what I was doing for our personal blogs would translate very well in to a system that would meet a great many of the needs for a new blogging system for Sub-Saharan Africa.”
That makes sense. Any hosted web platform based in the US and Europe is going to have lag issues Africa. Every byte counts, so a system that has been custom built to work in this scenario can be useful.
Final thoughts
The site absolutely flies. It’s a lot faster than most other blogging platforms. I’m interested in hearing from others around the African continent on how fast the site loads for them.
Besides the standard text and images, Maneno allows you to add up to 10Mb audio files as a post. This is a great idea, and shows just how much they’re thinking about things differently, as many normal users of blogging platforms can’t figure out how to host podcasts or audio files to get them out in the public.

Aid Worker Daily considers Maneno a lightweight blogging platform for “folks heading to the field,” and wonders if its code or template will be released to the public as open source:

A few days ago I posted on Loband and how it’s the perfect tool for browsing the web in low bandwidth environments. Miquel dropped by to read the post but also to let us know about Maneno which is a lightweight blogging platform that he and his team have created. His comment sparked a discussion with Alan Jackson over at Aptivate, the creators of Loband, and while most of the back and forth is fairly technical Alan took the time to lay out some observations he has made of the Maneno platform. It looks like a great product and it seems like a perfect tool for that mass of aid workers that start blogs primarily to keep their friends back home updated and to let their families know that they are still alive. It has very low bandwidth demands and offers a clean and simple interface. Please check it out and let us know what you think but first head over and check out the rest of the comments. Here’s a taste:
Miguel it’s great to hear about your lightweight blogging system. We’ve been thinking there was a need for something like that for a while. Are you going to release the code / templates open source? You might be interested in our web design guidelines where we go through various techniques for optimising the size of web pages. We came up with a target page size of 25KB using estimates of the bandwidth you get on the desktop in African universities.
The 50KB typical page size of Maneno is fantastic, especially when you consider the average web page size is now over 300KB (which would have a 2 minute download time on a 20Kb/s connection). If you’re interested in shaving off even more, you might want to have a look at converting RGB images to images with indexed palettes or reducing the number of indexed colours down to something like 32.

What is the point of a new site or platform when other good ones are available?, asks Mike Blyth:

There are several advantages:
• The site is designed from scratch with the goal of making pages load fast over the slow connections that most of us have in Africa. There really is a noticeable difference.
• The site is easy to use. (Actually, I'm not sure it's any easier than Blogspot, but the authors are working to keep it simple.)
• Maneno is multilingual. Other sites do allow you to type your blog entries in your own language, but Maneno has the added feature of an easy interface that lets any member translate any blog post into another language, sort of a communal approach to making the entries themselves available in other languages. Of course, it's the African languages that are the focus.
• Maneno recognizes that many users in Africa do not have access a computer, so the site is exploring ways to allow people to access it through mobile phones and other relevant technology. (Blogspot also allows posting by mobile phone & email … will Maneno be better in some way? Probably it at least will be slimmer.)
• Maneno is focused on Africa. Unlike Blogspot, which is a place for any and every type of blog, Maneno is more topical, describing itself as striving “to provide a communication and development platform for Sub-Saharan Africa.”

TinderBlog hopes Maneno becomes the future of Content Management Systems:

So imagine my joy when I came across Maneno last week. A CMS blogging platform designed specifically with low bandwidth in mind and provided from servers in Africa, cutting down on slow internal connections. As the blurb says “Maneno strives to provide a communication and development platform for Sub-Saharan Africa.”
Good looking and providing all the functionality you need in a decent website, the online feedback I’ve seen so far has been universally positive, particularly around download times, which can massively increase the expense of browsing the net in the very places where this service needs to be as cheap as possible. That is really important. In the words of blogger White African “The site absolutely flies.”

Although Maneno is still in a beta version it works like a dream and looks very impressive. It seems just the ticket if you are setting up a new site with little knowledge of design and want to ensure potential readers in Africa actually get the opportunity to read what you have to say.

Cross-posted at Rising Voices.

Via Juliana Rincon we learn about a special bicycle in operation in Caquetá, Colombia:

“It seats two and carries with it a complete radio broadcasting system, able to send out Wi-max signals and be heard not only through the Andaquí Community Radio, but live through Internet as well“.

Radiocicleta [ES] is a community communication project which is breaking down the walls between the studio and the town itself:

“It is sustainable, it is cheap to maintain, it is environmentally sound, it is human instead of fuel powered, it allows for innovation and investigation, it can reach many different places and can be brought inside homes and it brings people together, working as members of a team,” Juliana says.

Affordable internet kiosk with mobile internet

Bangladesh has a population of more than 140 million. Its tele-density was very low only a decade ago because of the inadequate land phone infrastructure (it did not have penetration in rural areas). But thanks to the growth of the mobile phone companies now the number of mobile phone users has risen to 32 millions in a few years and the coverage is across the country even in the remotest of places. The growth rate of the cell phone industry is close to 25% which is remarkable.

In a country where the internet users are less than 1% (only a million) these mobile networks have brought an excellent opportunity for the nation to be connected to the internet which would not be possible with the current network of traditional landphones or expensive dsl cable connections. Some of the operators even support EDGE technology which offers data transfer speeds of up to 128 kb/s.

Using this mobile internet facility people in rural Bangladesh are building telecenters or internet cafés for use of mass people. From this website we learn that the technology required for such internet kiosks is very simple:

“There's only one PC, which functions as a server: each of the other workstations is powered by a small device, not much bigger than a cigarette packet. For another, there's no wired connection between the server and the outside world. The clue to how it's done is provided by a Motorola clamshell mobile phone connected by a USB cable to the server. The Centre is getting its Internet connection via an Edge-enabled mobile phone!”

Using Ndiyo-type thin-client networking in combination with Open Source software dramatically reduces the Total Cost of Ownership of Internet cafes, networked classrooms and small office systems. In the process, it makes it possible for entrepreneurs like Abu Sufian, the proprietor of the Fultola CIC, to make investments which earn revenues for them by providing services to local people and organizations.”

I believe these successes of innovative technologies based on internet can be replicated in all developing countries in the world.

In addition to being able to search all of Global Voices or all of Google, now you can also search “the Global Voices Web.” Right now, that includes about 4,800 blogs that our Regional Editors follow each day, and from which they select their “Daily Links”. In other words, when you use this search function, you are searching all the blogs that we regularly link to or which our editors have found worth following.

GV doesn't cover North America and Western Europe because we believe the views of people from those parts of the world get disproportionately more attention on the world wide web and in the global media than people from all other regions. GV is meant to be a small effort towards counter-balancing that imbalance. Thus the search includes few blogs from N.America or W.Europe except for blogs by members of various diasporas currently living in the West. The point is to have a search that covers the same footprint of citizen media that GV covers.

This new “Global Voices Web” search was constructed by Ethan and Boris using Google's Co-op search, with a bit of help from some people at Google who responded to their requests for changes. When Ethan and Boris started putting it together, Ethan blogged about the lack of results on some terms in a post titled “What Google Coop Search Doesn't Do Well.” The folks at Google eventually read his post and fixed the problem. Google engineer Vrishali Wagle wrote about the fix on the Google Custom Search blog and says he encourages people to give more feedback. Ethan is now much happier.

Note that our search is still very very “beta.” Because it was constructed by importing the feeds from editors' aggregators, we had to weed out a bunch of non-blog and off-topic feeds (news sites, U.S. tech blogs, and things like that). If you try it out please let us know if there are any non-blog or off-topic sites we've failed to weed out or if there appear to be glaring omissions. We're sure it is far from perfect at this stage which is why we need as many people as possible to test it out and let us know what's wrong.

As Ethan explains in his blog post about this new search function: “a future version will include all the sites we link to on GV, which should expand the collection quite a bit. And an even further off version will integrate with the giant aggregator we’ll be offering on the site next year, which will let you look at new posts from all the countries we cover, as well as offering suggestions for feeds we should be watching - the blogs covered by that aggregator will be the same blogs tracked by the search engine.”

Please help us make it better. We are already discovering things we want to improve and would like to know your requests and concerns.

To understand Cambodian cooking, we have to look back to explore the historical events that took place there and the cultures that influenced the building of today's gastronomical bounty.

In the 6th century, Cambodia was a kingdom with an Indian-inspired culture, situated on the delta and along the middle reaches of the Mekong river. Until 1432, Cambodia progressively expanded its borders, taking in present-day Myanmar (formerly Burma) and Vietnam, but in the 18th century the Vietnamese began to colonize the delta and this territory became a battleground between Vietnam and the former Siam. (TWWG)

Now, take a look at this peculiar Corn on the Cob with Grey Onion Sauce. Would you like to try that or not?

#2:  From Thailand & Myanmar (Burma), Real Thai

Talking about the culinary tendencies of the neighboring countries, how about learning a bit about cooking and eating in Burma and Thailand? You are going to love it, first visit here: More Myanmar.

Thai Day: Eating with the neighbors, Explore the largely unknown landscape of Burmese cuisine.

Thai Day: Chili Me Softly, Discovering the delights of Thai cuisine need not be a spicy, complicated experience.

#3: From India, Rani and Raja

Bananas over corn, or going bananas for corn? Anyways, you decide:

I was surprised to find corn used so widely in India. Barbequed corn on the cob sold on the street is a great way to warm up on a cold winter night. One of our favorite corn dishes we sampled was makki roti, a flatbread made with corn flour. Rotis are usually served with vegetable curries or meats. Makki roti is so good it is a great snack all by itself. In Ajmer we were served makki roti dipped in ghee!…

This will help you satiate your hunger for authentic Indian food: Street Food shots in Mumbai

#4: From Trinidad, Can Cook, Must Cook

You know what? How about a rabbit dinner this week? Get some Caribbean inspiration to prepare this delicacy by reading Cute, Furry and Really Tasty!

And what did I think? I absolutely loved it. The rabbit was flavourful and very tender. I was expecting it to taste quite ‘gamey' but it wasn't.
Rabbit is quite versatile, and can work in different styles of cooking quite easily. Unfortunately, rabbit isn't a meat that's commonly used in Caribbean cooking, but I think it would be great in a Trini style stew with dumplings or curried with vegetables and rice.
The next time I buy one, I'll certainly be cooking it in true Caribbean style.

#5: From Singapore & Italy, Kuidaore

This is the perfect shopping and culinary vacation guide for Rome. Can't wait to follow her recommendations one by one! :)

When in Rome…11 great things to do!:

That Bacchic excess is Roman in origin comes as no surprise. For there's something about this intoxicating city that makes you want to live life larger than usual. Eat too well, drink too much, shop more than is considered prudent - all this, and more, is par for the course. For latter day sybarites with a serious addiction to luxury, there's no place like Rome.

…The list below includes highlights of my brief stay but is hardly comprehensive. It is in fact downright esoteric. Rome wasn't built in a day. Even a list of 1001 things to do would barely begin to scratch the surface, much less a random list of 11 having no theme in particular other than all subscribing to a set of personal preferences. Quite aside from leaving out the sights to see, I've also virtually weeded out all of the clotheshorse-centric details (this ostensibly being a food blog and all; although if you're into "pre-loved", vintage or re-worked vintage, Via del Governo Vecchio near Piazza Navona and Via del Boschetto in Monti district are heavenly). Also, while we inevitably didn't manage to eat at every single restaurant on our hit list, of the ones we did dine at, I've omitted mention of the meals that didn't live up to the hype or were anything short of spectacular.

#6: From Korea, Umami

Seoul: Foreign Influences?

Korea, being neighbored by two strong and forceful countries like Japan and China, is determinedly proud of its own identity and culture. What the Koreans have also done well is to assimilate the ways of its neighbours and made it their own.

This observation was exemplified by the popular snack and lunch dish of kimbap. Kimbap is rice rolled with pickles, vegetables and a protein treat like tuna or omelet and wrapped round with seaweed. Looks like maki sushi, tasted a little like sushi found in any conveyor joints around the world, but try calling it sushi or maki, and our Korean colleagues would object and insist that it is their invention.

Continue reading…

#7: From Argentina, SaltShaker

Thinking about writing an Ode to Radicchio, but your poetry talents are nearly non-existent and limited to reasonably good attempts at haiku. Why don't you cook then a Radicchio Confit?  It is a mouth watering recipe that will make you forget about the nonsense radicchio-poem attempt! An excerpt from the original post follows. For the complete version visit the Argentinean Radicchio Paradise!

After six hours in a slow oven the whole thing had come together beautifully. The radicchio itself has darkened without browning, and it’s taken on a certain transluscent quality from the oil it has absorbed. It’s not quite the same as meat, where the idea in slow, low heat cooking, is to dissolve the collagen that makes meat chewy, resulting in “spoon tender” meat, but it’s akin - the texture changes to one that is clearly solid, but no longer crunchy - it avoids the wilting that occurs over direct heat, and the wedges stay nicely intact. The garlic, too, has softened and poached through, and makes a nice accompaniment served along with the radicchio. I let the radicchio stay in its oil until cool, then put it in the refrigerator overnight. Obivously this is a long process, but could be speeded up to a single day - brine overnight, poach during the work day, and let steep in the oil until later in the evening when you make dinner - I doubt the flavors would be all that different.

#8: From  France, Sweden, the US,  Kalyn's Kitchen-Weekend  Herb Blogging:

How is your aromatic cooking herb's intake this week doing? No more excuses! Take a look at these fragrantly revealing exponents of Kalyn's signature weekly event:

Okra, by Flavors (Arizona, US)

Parsley, by Garlic Breath (France)

Chervil soup with crayfish tails, by Kuchenlatein (Germany)

#9: From Estonia & Scotland, Nami-Nami

Cooking Estonian: Barley Mousse:

Need an unusual dessert for a weekday night? Have no money and need something cheap to satisfy your hungry sweet tooth? This dessert should do the trick then. All you need is some barley flour and sugar in your cupboard, fresh milk in your fridge and some of that redcurrant juice you made from last summer's berries in your chiller cabinet. Failing that, a shop-bought cranberry juice will do.

#10: From Peru, Peru Food

I know you have been thinking about visiting Peru.  That being said, how about exploring the delicious food you could enjoy there: Mega Post on Restaurants in Peru!

See you next weekend!

I was thinking about that one day and realized that most people don't know how to tag their blog in order for it to be indexed by the top blog search engine: Technorati. Technorati is a valuable tool that can greatly increase your readership, and if you register and create a profile it will help you build your personal “brand” on the web.

Tag your blog if you want more readers
Technorati reports that there are 75,000 new blogs being created every day, what are you doing to make yours stand out? What are you doing to make it visible?

One of the easiest tools is to begin tagging your posts with the code necessary for Technorati to index it in the 27.7 million blogs that they track. All tagging is, is a way to help people find your article in the myriad of others. If you write a blog post highlighting African technology bloggers, you might tag it “Africa”, “African”, “blog”, “technology”, “tech”, etc… It's very simple and it makes sense to do over time.

It can sound daunting at first, because now you're dealing with that scary thing called “code.” But it's really very easy. Take the below template, which I've tagged for “africa”, and replace the word “africa” with the tag of your choice:

<!– technorati tags begin –><p style=”font-size:10px;text-align:right;”>technorati tags: <a href=”http://technorati.com/tag/africa” rel=”tag”>africa</a></p><!– technorati tags end –>

That's how easy it is. Rinse and repeat with different tags. If you have 4 tags, it might look like this:

<!– technorati tags begin –><p style=”font-size:10px;text-align:right;”>technorati tags: <a href=”http://technorati.com/tag/africa” rel=”tag”>africa</a>, <a href=”http://technorati.com/tag/technology” rel=”tag”>technology</a>, <a href=”http://technorati.com/tag/african” rel=”tag”>african</a>, <a href=”http://technorati.com/tag/blog” rel=”tag”>blog</a></p><!– technorati tags end –>


For those who are interested in knowing how I put code onto a blog as an example, you can do that easily using Tamba2's tool.

NOTE: WordPress user's categories are automatically indexed as the tag, but sometimes you still want to use this code to add other tags than are in the categories.

technorati tags: technology, technorati, tagging, how to

Eight-minute video documentary of the prototype of Nicholas Negroponte's $100 laptop, which premiered yesterday at the WSIS summit in Tunis. Andy Carvin talks with the chief technology officer of the initiative and gets a first-hand look at this highly anticipated device.

WordPress is usually referred to as a blogging tool, and a large number of bloggers from all around the world already use it, including some pioneer Arab bloggers such as Serdal and Subzero Blue. I totally realize that this tool is powerful enough to manage the content of any website of any kind. Global Voices Online is a good example for that. However, I did not think that any Arab website would take this step. I'm glad that the people at Doroob have made that choice, and I think this can give a push to the blogging movement in the Arab World.

Blogging can be a huge success in the Arab World, but we still don't have the required tools. I think a large number of the thousands of members of Arab internet forums would welcome a tool that makes it easy for them to publish their opinions in the form of a personal website (blog), with complete freedom, without the supervision of moderators, and to get rid of the problems they usually face with using forums as a publishing platform.

However, it is too bad that none of the Arab tech companies seems to be ready or even willing, to make this tool. I think we can use a model similar to the one used at Blogsome. We need someone to translate WordPress completely to Arabic (Dashboard, forms, templates, etc.), and then offer to host blogs for free, and maybe coupled with some text ads.

I don't know if this can be profitable, but even if it is not, someone has to do it, sooner or later. I think it is better for users if someone from the Arab World makes it, instead of some international giant that might dominate the whole market. It's been almost a year since we have heard the rumors about Google updating Blogger to fully support languages written from right to left (Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, etc.), but Google did not provide any further information on this since then. Another approach for Arab companies to take is to try to start a partnership with Google to provide an Arabic version of Blogger, the same way it is now in Brazil.

Probably there are more business models, and more opportunities, to spread blogs in the Arab Word, but that is all I could come up with now. I think blogging can lead to a true publishing revolution in the Arab World, where the freedom of expression is a serious matter to everyone. I think the spread of Persian blogs is a good example for what we can achieve.

Unfortunately, when the dot com bubble burst in the West, it affected Arab tech companies that could have been the starting point for Arabic blogging. The likes of Arabia.com, PlanetArabia, and Sakhr, could have done that job. However, both Arabia.com and PlanetArabia now rest in peace, while Sakhr has lost its appeal. Arabia.com, founded in 1995 as the first Arab dot com company, received about US$25m of venture capital in 2000 from the likes of Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal, Intel, Compaq, and HSPC. Today, it no longer exists.

Does any of the current Arab tech companies, or any of the Arab investors, has the courage to take the last step that will open the door to the Arab blogging revolution? I hope so

Click here to listen (MP3).

Thanks to Erica George for pointing us to this Livejournal Community devoted to information sharing in the aftermath of today's bomb blasts in London.

DoWire.org has put together a “London Responds” wiki.

Metroblogging London has been going all day, as have thousands of other blogs, chatrooms, flickr pages, moblog sites, etc. Boingboing has an excellent set of links.

The best way to find blog posts and photos as they hit the internet is through technorati and flickr tags.

You can now subscribe to RSS feeds of the following Technorati tags:
London
bombs
July 7
7 July
terrorism
London bomb
London blast
London explosion

On Flickr, see the bomb blast pool and the London explosions pool.

Also the following tags:
London
bomb
blast

On buzznet:
http://www.buzznet.com/buzzwords/london/

Please let us know of any other good sites and tagging systems that are aggregating London blast related blogging.

All major media are putting together tremendous staff resources to aggregate and collect eyewitness stories and images from todays bomb blasts in London. The BBC in particular is doing an excellent job, showing how professionals and citizens can work together to cover a story. The Wall Street Journal has a useful page here where new links will be updated. Wikinews is also aggregating a lot of stories - both from professional and citizen sources.

There's now a search box on the top left of each page of the site. When you enter terms into the search box, you'll get posts and pages on the Global Voices site that cointain that term. Because these posts appear in the right side of the screen, where our posts normally appear, you may think you're not getting results. You are. Really. We promise. If everything works, the term you were searching for will be highlighted in those pages as well.

(The early feedback we've gotten suggests that the search system we've implemented is a little confusing. If too many people find the new search confusing, we'll replace it with a search that uses Google's site search tools.)

You can now subscribe to Global Voices and receive all our posts via email. We hope this will be helpful for people who want to keep up-to-date with Global Voices but don't use an RSS aggregator. Head to our email sign up page, enter your email address and we'll send you a confirmation email. Click on the link in the email we send you, and you'll be added to the mailing list. To unsubscribe, just visit the subscribe page, enter your email address and select the “unsubscribe” button.

Finally, we've added a form where you can let us know about breaking stories you think we should include in the daily blog roundup and blogs you'd like to see added to the Bridge Blog Index. Of course, you're still welcome to send us email with suggestions, or add blogs directly to the Bridge Blog Index.

We'll keep tweaking and tuning the site so that it works as smoothly as possible. If you've got any suggestions for features we should try to add, let us know, preferably in the comments on this post.

If somebody would like to translate these instructions into Chinese, please feel free to do so, post the translation on your blog or website, and please give us the link in the “comments” section of this post. Alternatively, if you don't have a blog or website, you can post the whole translation directly into the “comments” section.

UPDATE: The Working Man blog in Taiwan now has a translation.

ALSO NOTE: Doubleaf says he has tried using MSN China Spaces and the sensitive words are no longer blocked. Are other people out there having the same experience?

FURTHER UPDATE (9:15PM June 16th) - I just tried setting up a Chinese Spaces blog myself using the Chinese characters for “democracy” “human rights” and “freedom,” and got an error message telling me I could not use forbidden words.

Also, if you're in China and try this, if you have problems, questions, or if it doesn't work, please also let us know in the “comments” section.

——————————————————————–

How to put banned Chinese words in the title of a blog on MSN Spaces China

WARNING! Even though you can use these instructions to insert banned words into the title of your Chinese blog, Internet access in China is still monitored and controlled by the government. If you use these instructions to post banned material, you should not publish your blog from an Internet terminal where your actions could be traced back to you personally, and you should not publish anything on your blog that could be used to identify you. You should also use a HotMail.com address that doesn't identify you by your real name (create a new HotMail.com account if necessary).

To use these instructions, you will need to create a new MSN Spaces account. Unfortunately these instructions cannot be used to remove the filter settings from an existing blog. If you have already created an MSN Spaces account using your MSN.com or HotMail.com address, you will also need to create a new MSN.com or HotMail.com address, since each existing MSN.com or HotMail.com address can only be associated with one MSN Spaces account.

To create blog where you can post banned Chinese words in the title:

IF YOU SPEAK ENGLISH:

• If you speak English, go to http://spaces.msn.com/?mkt=en-us
  Use the English interface to create a new MSN Spaces blog.
• Then once the blog has been created, go to the URL http://spaces.msn.com/?mkt=zh-cn to switch the interface back to Chinese. You can now publish your blog in Chinese and use banned Chinese words in the title. As long as your blog is *created* using the English interface, the word filter will not be applied.

IF YOU DO NOT SPEAK ENGLISH:

• You must have a HotMail account. Create a new HotMail account if you don't already have one, then go to www.HotMail.com and sign in to your HotMail account. Make sure you are signed in before proceeding.
• Go to this URL: http://spaces.msn.com/?mkt=en-us
  The interface will display in English.
• Click the “Sign Up” button in the middle of the page. [Note: if this document is translated into Chinese, the words “Sign Up” should remain untranslated, since this is how the user will see the button.]
• On the page where you enter settings for your new blog:
  In the field marked “1.”, enter a title. You can enter banned words in the title here, or you can change the title later.
  In the field marked “2.”, enter the URL you want.
  Leave “3.” the way it is.
  In section “4.”, check the checkbox (which indicates that you accept the MSN
  Terms of Service).
  In the bottom row, click the button on the left labeled “Create your space” [note, if this document is translated into Chinese, do not translate the words “Create your space”] to create your MSN Spaces account.
• The next page that comes up will say (in English) that your MSN Spaces account has been created. In the bottom row, click the button on the right labeled “Go to Your Space” [note, if this document is translated into Chinese, do not translate the words “Go to Your Space”] to proceed to the page to edit your MSN Spaces account.
• Once you are viewing the page to edit your MSN Spaces account settings (in English), add the characters “&mkt=zh-cn” to the end of the URL in the browser.

This will switch the interface back to Chinese. However, since you *created* the blog using the English interface, the Chinese word filter will still not be applied to the title of your blog.

• You can now edit the title of your blog to enter banned Chinese words.
  (However, you still will not be able to enter English words like “ass” that are banned from the English interface.)

(If you're going to participate in editing this document, two requests: One, create an account on our wiki, so we can keep track of your contributions. Two, keep in mind the audience for this document - we're hoping to write a document that's fun, readable, technically correct, translatable, and aimed at activists in developing nations. We're not trying to write a document aimed at cypherpunks.)

Thanks for your help!

So here's the plan: If you are posting something on your blog about Chinese-Japanese tensions, Sino-Japanese history debates, and related issues (or if you're uploading related photos to the web), please give it the following tag in del.icio.us, Flickr, Furl, and/or Technorati: cn_jp_dialog

(Further instruction: to add the technorati tag to your blog post, please add the following HTML to any post you want included: <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/cn_jp_dialog" rel=”tag”>cn_jp_dialog</a> )

If you tag your material under one or all of those systems, it will appear on this page: http://www.technorati.com/tag/cn_jp_dialog

Chinese bloggers have been pioneering the use of tagging as a way to talk about issues - especially politically sensitive ones. After the SMTH bulletin board at Tsinghua university was shut down, Chinese bloggers used the SMTH tag to share information and views about what happened.

See more from Kevin Wen and Andrea Leung on how tagging can be used to build information communities and create dialogue.

For more on tagging generally, see David Weinberger's posts here and here.