December, 2004

Stories from December, 2004

Emergency Action Blog initiative

  28 December 2004

After the tsunami disaster in Southeast Asia, bloggers from India quickly set up The South-East Asia Earthquake and Tsunami blog for news and information about resources, aid, donations and volunteer efforts. This blog's an invaluable coordination effort, and it pointed to the need for a more robust and permanent site...

GV Covenant: Spanish version

  27 December 2004

The Global Voices covenant in Spanish, thanks to Ricardo Bello: Creemos en la libertad de expresión: en proteger el derecho a hablar – y el derecho a escuchar. Creemos en el acceso universal a las herramientas de expresión. Con ese fin, queremos empoderar a todos los que deseen expresarse para...

Making Podcasting Accessible for All

  24 December 2004

Hi everyone... I've just posted my first podcast. The topic of this five-minute audio is the growth of podcasting and the subsequent accessibility challenges faced by the hearing impaired. I'm hoping it's the first in a series of podcasts from me on a variety of issues related to the Internet, the media and the digital divide, among other topics. If you have a good Internet connection you can download the podcast; it's just over five megabytes in size. Otherwise, a transcript of the podcast can be found on my blog. For those of you who want to subscribe to my future podcasts using software like iPodderX, please use my blog's RSS feed.

Global Voices Covenant 0.2

  23 December 2004

SJ has posted a frozen version of the Global Voices Manifesto, renamed the Global Voices Covenant (version 0.2). The current version: We believe in free speech: in protecting the right to speak — and the right to listen. We believe in universal access to the tools of speech. To that...

Whither BloggerCorps?

  21 December 2004

BloggerCorps has had its first success story in Kentucky: Bob Cornett reports that his education-focused grassroots group has found a local blogger to help them build a blogging strategy, thanks to our site. Unfortunately the other two organizations – in England and the Middle East – have not been so...

Conference Raw Audio Posted

  21 December 2004

Below is the raw audio for all Global Voices sessions. Please note that not everybody spoke clearly into the mike, so some people are more audible than others. For the most complete experience you may want to follow along with SJ's transcripts (session 2 onward). Thanks again to Benjamen Walker...

Yet more next steps…

  20 December 2004

Ben Walker and Rebecca Mackinnon have proved that my running around the room with microphones was worthwhile. They've done an amazing job of editing our conversations and debates into a brief audio story for future broadcast or podcast. If you we're able to attend the Global Voices gathering in person,...

Manifesto

  17 December 2004

Thanks to the many who have proposed changes and edits, here is the latest version of our Manifesto. Please suggest any further changes on the Wiki, but we hope that we can finalize it by Monday at the latest. We believe in free speech, both in protecting the right to...

The working draft

  16 December 2004

I've posted a draft of the Global Voices Mission Statement/Manifesto to Hossein's wiki. (We're trying to get a mediawiki up at Berkman so we can stop abusing Hossein's server, but a recent virus outbreak has put Berkman tech folks a bit behind…) Alex and I drafted the statement on Sunday,...

BloggerCon IV

  16 December 2004

I just finished listening to a podcast of the closing session at BloggerCon III, titled The Fat Man Sings. In it, Jay Rosen made an interesting observation: I was at the first BloggerCon and when I came back I thought, “wow, this is really cool, this cult of bloggers.” Then...

WSISblogs.org: An Idea Worth Developing?

  14 December 2004

Last night on a whim, I went online and bought the domain names wsisblogs.org and wsisblogs.com. There's been a dearth of media coverage regarding the upcoming 2005 World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) and its important policy outcomes, including Internet governance, bridging the digital divide and online freedom of expression. So I propose aggregating all the civil society bloggers who will be participating in the process to help make up for the shameful lack of mainstream media coverage.

Manifesto session next steps

  12 December 2004

I just uploaded the log of the IRC session for the Global Voice manifesto session. It definitely needs to be edited. I'll try to do it soon, but if someone else wants to take a shot, be my guest. If you're going to work on it please comment here so...

Virality

  12 December 2004

A lot of the virality stuff I talked about yesterday came from discussions with Jonah Peretti who did ForwardTrack and Reid Hoffman, the former SVP of PayPal, Francesco Cara and Marko Ahtisaari. If anyone is interested in going down this rat hole any further, I will try to put a...

Wiki for participants

  11 December 2004

You can now use Global Voices wiki page to register your name and blog, so we all can keep in touch after the conference.

Academic paper on Persian blogging

  10 December 2004

Alireza Doostdar, an Iranian Harvard gruadute student, has published his interesting paper in American Anthropologist, entitled “ “The Vulgar Spirit of Blogging”: On Language, Culture, and Power in Persian Weblogestan.” It's one of the few academic papers on blogs in Iran.

Andrea: Roundup on blogosphere development in China and Hong Kong

  9 December 2004

Rational blogger Andrea wrapped up recent resonates about China and Hongkong's blogosphere in her T-Salon blog: Xiao Qiang, director of the China Internet Project at UC Berkeley, has put the two year old Chinese blogosphere into perspective in “The ‘blog’ revolution sweeps across China”. “In the current Chinese cyberspace, bloggers...

Ory on Kenyan blogs

  8 December 2004

Ory Okolloh has written a briefing paper on Kenyan blogs as part of the I&S conference materials here (PDF file). She says that blogging has been a life-changing experience for her, and presents the results of interviews with three other Kenyan bloggers. In the concluding section of her paper Ory...

Rashmi Sinha: some thoughts and introduction

  8 December 2004

Among other issues, I am interested in understanding how to support real dialog – not just people talking, but also listening to each other. Current tools support self-expression quite well. They could be better at supporting dialog. What I worry about is that we will have more and more voices...

Echo chamber, sensorium, reflection, and action

  7 December 2004

On Tuesday, December 7, 2004, at 05:17 PM, Joichi Ito wrote: One thing that I've been noodling on is the attention issue. How do we get people to care? It seems to me that video is able to capture attention better than text. Human voices help. Music is good. One...