Global Voices Online

I'm in southern India this week (just outside of Bangalore), at the AsiaSource conference, a gathering of NGO tech professionals from around Asia, who are learning how to convert their organizations to open source platforms. It's been an amazing cross-cultural experience - I've had great conversations about access to the Internet in Burma and software development in Cambodia… as well as a great basketball game, where the US/Polish/Iranian side trounced the Danish/Mongolian/Croatian side…

My contribution to the gathering was a three-hour workshop, yesterday, on blogging. The connectivity here is poor, and it's unclear how many of the people who attended were able to set up blogs. But I'm hopeful that some of the amazing people who attended this conference will start blogging and that I'll be able to follow some of these blogs.

We've been having a lively discussion between some of the Global Voices participants about ways to keep track of bridge blogging efforts around the world. One of the outputs of this conversation has been an experimental index of bridge blogs around the world. Using a combination of technorati and del.icio.us tags, a group of us is trying to identify great bridge bloggers and add them to a wiki-based index.

If you're interested in what's been indexed so far, take a look at the entries for Morocco or Ghana. If you're interested in getting involved with helping us build this index, check out the wiki page on bridgeblogging, as well as the

Posted by Ethan Zuckerman

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Wendy of Babasiga is attending Fijian Conference in Adelaide, Australia and blogs about the experiences there. “The conference discussions and sessions were in various styles – academic, story telling, humorous or serious, and passionate preaching.”

London based Burmese bloggers show concern over the increase in teenage crimes. Steve E. questions “Why is the incidence of knife crime growing up rapidly these days?” and wonders a way to reduce such crimes while CMS witnesses yet another teenage gang fight.

While the football world is enjoying the UEFA European Football Championship, many countries in Africa are restricted to watching 8 tournament games. Jentilisa, blogging from Madagascar, explains that the number of games to be broadcasted was decided by AFNEX (African Network and News Exchange) who bought the rights to the tournament in the region for African national televisions. He argues that Africa is home to many of the elite players who play in major European clubs and soon home of the next FIFA World Cup 2010 in South-Africa and the tournament should not be restricted to rich people who owns satellite dishes. He wishes that Chinese TV CCTV would dispute this monopoly in the future and lower the broadcasting fees for resource limited nations (fr and mg).