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Myanmar: Updates From 26 September

Preetam Rai · 18:36, September 26th, 2007 · East Asia

lingua → bn · pt · fr · ar · mg · es · zht · zhs

YouTube user dennisbier09 has posted two video clips and writes

This 2 part video shows both Monks and ordinary civilians protesting the military government in Myanmar (Burma). The footage was taken on a rainy Monday afternoon in the former capital of Yangon (Rangoon) on September 24, 2007.

Awzar Thi has collected pictures on the protests uploaded by Myanmar bloggers at Saffron Revolution.

Thailand based Bangkok Dazed is thinking about his friends in Myanmar

I received a couple of e-mails this afternoon from friends in Yangon. One describes the current situation as “Very, very tense. Our school is getting closed down starting tomorrow. Don't know what's going to happen next.” Another local said that “Here they started fighting in downtown today. It seems bad. I will write later. I don't know how long we will have internet … maybe they will cut soon.” I’ve been surfing online constantly the past few days, trying to get updates on the ongoing situation. Supposedly a curfew is now in effect for Yangon and Mandalay.

Meanwhile, Malaysian politician Lim Ki Siang is urging Malaysia and the regional grouping ASEAN to do more to avoid a bloodbath in Myanmar.

Malaysia and ASEAN must come into the very forefront in regional and international efforts to support a peaceful resolution of the monk-led mass protest marches in Rangoon and Mandalay especially as ASEAN had given the Myanmar military junta a new legitimacy and fresh lease of life by admitting Myanmar into ASEAN ten years ago.

In an earlier post, the politician cautions China and India, the neighbors and supporters of Myamar's ruling junta

China - and in particular the Beijing Olympic Games 2008 – and India will not be able to escape adverse international repercussions of a bloodbath in Myanmar as they will be blamed for giving support to the Myanmar military junta and turning a blind eye to the bloody crackdown in the country.

Myanmar blogger Yangon Thu shares her thoughts on the happenings in Myanmar. The blogger urges readers to sign a petition requesting

China to influence Burma Junta's actions against the peaceful protesters and also to stop intervening with the UN's work for the people of Burma.

Indian blogger at The Acron feels that China, India and Thailand are not in a position to influence the ruling regime in Myanmar.

External actors—excluding China—have no real levers. And as Chandra asked, how seriously can we expect China to ask the junta to introduce democracy. So Chinese advice will only be limited to telling the junta not to exacerbate the situation by spilling blood. That’s similar to the reaction of ASEAN’s secretary-general. Thailand, which might once have taken a bold position on democracy, is currently under military rule. So you won’t hear much from the Thais either.India’s UPA government—in crisis-mode and with talk of elections next year—is likely to adopt a similar approach. No, the Indian navy won’t be conducting exercises off Myanmar’s shores. The same goes for the US Pacific Fleet.

Bangok Dazed ridicules the approach taken by the United States. American president George Bush announced more sanctions against Myanmar.

More sanctions? What is that going to accomplish at this point? But that’s typical of Bush-style diplomacy: call the country evil, impose sanctions on it, and don’t attempt to actually sit down and talk with anyone.

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Thought Leader: An Editorial Blog

Ndesanjo Macha · 15:28 · Sub-Saharan Africa

lingua → es

The South Africa's Mail & Guardian online has been experimenting with new media through their 3-step blogging strategy. The first part of the strategy was the launching of the South African aggregator, Amatomu. The second was a blogging platform, Amagama. An editorial blog, Thought Leader, is the culmination of this 3-step strategy.

Vincent Maher, the Mail & Guardian digital strategist, explains their 3-step blogging strategy:

Thought Leader is the 3rd part of our 3-step blogging strategy. The first was was to aggregate and measure the local blogosphere, which we did via Amatomu. The second was to provide a hosting platform for blogs, which we did via Amagama. The final step, and the most challenging, was to create a hybrid between a group blog and a more traditional opinion and editorial site that we could really throw our reputation behind as a quality news source.
A few people have asked me if there is any method to the madness as we rolled out the previous two products but, as you can see, 1+1+1 > 3 in this case and the 3 sites form a comprehensive approach that not many other SA media have adopted.
Each blog is edited by our editorial team and so are the comments and the intention is for it to become the source for quality blogging in the spheres of politics, economics, society, religion and technology - this will no doubt also spur some robust debate ahead of the elections.
Another thing you may notice is that it features a lot of local blogging talent mixed in with the Mail & Guardian journalists and experts. There can be no doubt that blogging in South Africa has caused an explosion of writing and from this has emerged some real talent [along with some real untalent] and we wanted to help these newcomers get some public exposure and be part of the great debate.

Mathew Buckland, the General Manager, Mail & Guardian Online, announced the launching of the platform calling it an “editorial blog”:

We’ve launched what I call an “editorial blog” platform, called Thought Leader — the third part of our blog strategy, after the amas — amatomu.com and amagama.com.
A key aspect that we were insistent on was that this was an “editorial blog” product. We needed the content to pass through an editor… old-fashioned traditional media style. So all blog content goes through our online editor Riaan Wolmarans. Unlike our other blog products, we needed this because Thought Leader appears strongly under the Mail & Guardian brand, therefore the company is liable, responsible and directly associated with the content. We had the debate internally for months while conceptualising Thought Leader, deciding that all content, whether in a newspaper, a website or blog needs to go through a gate-keeping process if under our brand.

Chilibean described Thought Leader as a “mashup of traditional media and new media“:

Mail & Guardian's Thought Leader blog is quite an interesting mashup of traditional media and new media. The site is basically a really big group blog with about 40 contributors so far. The blog is monitored by Mail & Guardian's online editor, Riaan Wolmarans who pretty much seems to have his hands full making sure the contributions submitted to the blog are safe for publication. The reason for this editorial control makes a lot of sense.
I like the Thought Leader blog and the way it has been put together. If Vincent and Matt add those extra feeds the service will be even more useful. For now, it is early days but I think this one is going to be a goodie going forward. In the meantime, I am going to add one more feed to my list …

Nicharalambous was excited about the new initiative:

am a big fan of the work that M&G have been doing, that’s no secret but I really like this initiative and have been waiting to blog about it for a while. The concept is a simple and effective one.

Ray Hartley, the editor for The Times of South Africa, congratulated Mail & Guardian:

KUDOS to the M&G for launching their Thought Leader blogging platform. Very nice, easy design and a good selection of bloggers ranging from the M&G’s own Matt Buckland and Vincent Maher to the somewhat self-consciously contrarian Ivo Vegter (Mbeki was right to fire Nozizwe).

Bridget McNulty felt honoured when she was invited to be part of Thought Leader:

So I’m really honoured (and a little overwhelmed) to have been invited to be part of Thought Leader - the Mail and Guardian Online’s exclusive new blogging platform (la di da! I hear you say).
Most of the people are blogging on politics and news and sport and the like. I’m blogging on The Novel Life: whimsical observations on the everyday. It’ll be a little like this, only more focused, and only on a Monday and Friday. One for the week, one for the weekend. And it’ll mainly be about novel stuff, and also about observations on everyday life.
Different to this, but also in my voice (obviously).
Come visit me!

Well-known bloggers in the African blogosphere such as White African, Mike Stopforth, and Vinny Lingham are also part of Thought Leader.

The launching of Thought Leader brought back a common debate in the South African blogosphere about “cloning.” Webaddict asked, “Is Thought Leader M&G’s Wibble.co.za clone?”:

Came accross wibble.co.za 41 days ago, submitted it to muti
Wibble is a multi-user, multi-industry blog. If you are a thought leader in your industry open an account NOW
Over at Mail & Gaurdian Vincent Maher & Matthew Buckland have just launched thought leader…
The default plugin that comes or used to come with a Worpdress installation is called Hello Dolly. Dolly, also the name of the first sheep cloned many years ago.
Is it just me or is there something strange happening here?

Stii asked, “So what's the big deal?“:

So, was Wibble the first ever group blog? Did Vince and Matthew clone Wibble? Really, who cares! Did Muti rip off Digg or Reddit? Did Amatomu and Afrigator clone Technorati? Surely that NOT relevant AT ALL as what is important at the end of the day is which service is liked and used more and by whom. THAT is what is relevant IMHO. Not who cloned who and how and why. Wibble does not allow me to comment without having to register. M&G’s Thought Leader does! Guess where I will spend my spare minutes…

Cloning web services is an integral part of the internet’s evolution. If you have a problem with it, you should maybe stop and think for a minute… If you are the creator of the cloned product, then boy! you better watch out… There is a lot of pretty talented people out there and you better stay on top of your game, else you’ll be (God forbid) knocked out by a clone!

While Thought Leader continues to invite more bloggers and draw media attention, Vincent Maher announces: Thought Leader go print:

Usually the way things work in a newspaper is that copy gets written for the print publication and then gets re-purposed for the web. If the publication has a good convergence and integration strategy in place then the final output medium is unspecified at first, but there are not many publications in the world that have this working properly. In parallel, copy gets written for the web product, sometimes in the form of blogs, that seldom finds its way into the print edition. The Times have done this particularly well with their “blogumists”.
This week marks the first week in M&G history where a substantial amount of the Op-Ed section [close to a thousand words in two separate sections] has been dedicated to content that was written specifically for the online product by our readers. Our UGE (User-Generated Editorial) strategy is now in full swing with this, the final link in the chain.
Personally I have longed, for a long time, for the day when online media gets the same level of respect as the printed word. If we online people are honest with ourselves, we have to admit that there is still more authority attached to the printed word, regardless of whether there is a rational basis for it or not. To see Thought Leader go to print, and in such an important section, feels like a seminal moment.

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Culture and Art with an Iranian Accent

Hamid Tehrani · 14:51 · Middle East & North Africa

lingua → ar · zht · zhs

Sepideh Saremi is editor of Pars Arts, a collaborative citizen media project covering culture and art related topics in Iran. She talks with us about the project, its goals and its challenges.

Q: Please tell us about yourself and the Pars Arts project

Pars Arts is a collaborative blog by, for, and about young Iranians everywhere. The goal of the site is to provide smart, relevant, and frequently updated content to the young Iranian diaspora. I'm the founding editor and an Iranian-American writer/editor/blogger who grew up in Los Angeles. I started Pars Arts in late 2006 because I was interested in learning and writing about Iranian things online, and I wanted to do it with a community of people interested in doing the same.

Q: Pars Arts is a collective project where several people including some bloggers contribute. Do you consider it a citizen media project?

I don't personally think of it that way but at the same time, I don't think that's necessarily an inaccurate description. In the broadest sense of the term, Pars Arts could be considered a citizen media project because none of its writers are making any money from it now and I don't think any of us has extensive, traditional, professional journalism experience. That said, all of our contributors thus far live in North America, where none experience any outside censorship and the media are not state-controlled. Also, Pars Arts' focus is art and culture, and not political advocacy or activism, which is usually what “citizen media” connotes to me.

Q: What is the added value of Pars Arts as a site?

We try to make sure each post has a take-away: something new for readers to watch, listen to, read, think about. Hopefully this keeps the pontificating to a minimum and makes the posts useful. We're not at the point where our coverage is as comprehensive as I'd like it to be yet. We need more writers to get there.

Q: Do you have any plan to develop the project? Where do you get funding?

Ideally at some point we can either generate some ad revenue or partner with like-minded sites and non-profits in order to get some of our future plans off the ground. But the priorities now are getting more writers, continuing to create good content, increasing our readership, and then expanding to other plans as we meet those goals. Our biggest obstacle is getting the word out. We have a small Facebook group, but we have put the bulk of our time into site content and need to do more in the area of outreach.

Pars Arts is financially independent, so we are not funded by any government, political party, think tank, or religious organization. I paid for the hosting and our Wordpress template was very graciously designed for free by the site's technology director and contributing writer Javod Khalaj (javod.com).

Q: Why is your site in English and not Persian?

Our primary audience is the young Iranian diaspora, and there's a pretty broad spectrum of Persian language proficiency within that audience, whereas English is pretty universal. My own Persian reading is slow and my writing is dreadful, so it would take me forever to write a post in Persian, and then it would likely still have lots of spelling mistakes. While I work on my “dicteh,” I still want to learn and write about Iranians, so I do it in English. Some of our contributors could probably write in Persian just fine, but it started in English and I'm not comfortable editing Persian yet. And it'd be nice for everyone if non-Iranians learned a little more about Iranian culture, too.

Q: You say you focus on cultural and art issues that other news sites ignore. What do they ignore and why? What is really missing in top Persian sites or Iranian sites in English?

I don't think other sites necessarily ignore art and cultural issues. However, there's a lot of non-political stuff happening that gets marginal attention. For instance, a few weeks ago we had a post about the Iran Cheetah Project , and one of my favorite posts is about online Iranian food shopping.

Of the non-political content that does exist in English, well, one of the reasons I called the site “Pars Arts” was a very nerdy play on the word “parse” - for all the sifting I was doing to get to well-written content. Frequently there's not sufficient copyediting on some sites, and it's hard to take get through an article when it's replete with typos and poor grammar.

That said, I do think Pars Arts has a long way to go, a lot of work to do, and ultimately needs more good writers to be great. I want to see more English-language content with high editorial standards, and I really hope that Pars Arts can provide it.

Q: How do you evaluate the Iranian blogosphere of recent two years? Are you blogging? How do you see the female presence on the Iranian web?

Because I read mostly English-language blogs, I don't have sufficient background to answer the first question. Regarding the second question, I've had various personal blogs in the past and now have a website that mostly has samples of my writing and will have a small blog component as well. This likely won't be a very personal blog. As far as female presence on the Iranian web goes, I think it's pretty great but I'd love to read more blogs by Iranian women in English, and more that are about topics other than politics.

Q: Any ideas to share with us?

Yes! As far as I've observed, there's not a lot of coordinated work among Iranian publishers/journalists outside Iran, and I wish we had a tighter professional network. I wish there was a greater spirit of mentoring and collaboration. We can produce better work if we're working together, after all, or at least learn from each other. I suppose a wish is not an idea, but that's all I've got for now. If anyone wants to work on making it happen, I'm so there.

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Arabeyes: Ramadan Scenes

Amira Al Hussaini · 03:05 · Middle East & North Africa

With the month of Ramadan halfway through, bloggers in the Middle East are still tapping away at their keyboards, reflecting on different aspects of the Islamic month of fasting. This week we make stops in Yemen, Palestine, Kuwait and Israel to see what bloggers have to say.

Yemen: Month of Eating

From Yemen, Thamood (Ar) wonders if Ramadan has become the month of eating and urges people to eat less during Iftar, which is the meal they break their day's fast with.

الزحمة التي تملئ الشوارع قبل موعد الفطور تجعلني استغرب…”متى اصبح رمضان شهرا للاكل” وبالعامية “بالذمة كم كيلو بتاكل!!” ومع ذلك ترى الناس يأتون كل يوم إلى بيوتهم محملين بالاكياس المليئة بكل ما لذ وطاب وكأنهم “محرومون” من الاكل لسنين والامر الامحزن انه توجد مخلفات كثيرة سترمى لكن بعضهم يشبع عينه قبل بطنه والعافية من الله..
اشتري ماتريد لكن الاسراف شيء مقرف خصوصا وانك ترى المساكين يملؤون الشوارع ومع ذلك يصر بعضهم على المبالغة في وجبة الفطور إلى حد الاستعباط…لكن اتعرفون ماهو “العبط الاكثر” ان تتعشى بعد الفطور بساعة!!
ما اسرع الوقت رمضان اتى وسينتهي قريبا اسأل الله ان يعتق رقابنا ورقابكم من النار وخلوكم خفيفن في الفطور.
**شكر خاص اوجهه للذين يدعمون العزابية (امثالي حاليا) بالدعوات خخخخخخ كثروا منها

“The congestion which fills the street before breaking the fast makes me wonder: since when has Ramadan become the month of eating? You see people going to their homes everyday carrying bags of food as if they have been denied food for years. What is also sad is that a lot of food will be thrown out in the garbage. It seems that some of them like to fill their eyes before their stomaches even though health is in God's hands. Buy whatever you want but living in excess is disgusting, especially when you see a lot of poor people on the streets. Despite this, you see some overdoing the Iftar (breaking the fast) to the degree of stupidity..but do you know what is more stupid..to have dinner an hour after Iftar!! Time goes by really fast and Ramadan has come and will soon go. I ask Allah to keep me and you away from hell and please take it easy with the Iftar meals. ** A special thank you goes to people who support bachelors like me and please keep the Iftar invitations coming..” he writes.

Palestine: Time for the Family

In Palestine, Assad Ramallah has taken the opportunity to help his father run his store. He also gives us a sneak preview to the life of Palestinians under siege.

“Ramadan month continues, I have more time to spend helping my family, and spending time with them.
I guess its good for me, but also for them.
Most mornings I'm helping my father in our store. He surely needs my help. His health is not as good as it was before.
I think that this is a result of the past two years…my father nearly closed his shop because of the hard days- People could not afford buying things at the store because many people in ramallah are not working or didn't get any salaries , so they have no money, and when people have no money they cannot spend it…
My father decided to continue working, and keep the store alive. It made me happy, because I know how much he likes his store, sometimes I feel that the store is all his life. And that's the reason why I'm helping him.
I'm glad that I'm free at the mornings to help him, and I'm sure he will be able to continue working at the store in the future.
These days, I have much free time, because studies have not begun yet, but I know that soon I will be busy with university again,” he explains.

Kuwait: Where Did I Park My Car?

In Kuwait, Toomz talks about how she's been avoiding people on chat programs on the internet for six months .. but how Ramadan has made her forgetful.

“For about six months now I've been avoiding chat clients. I stopped logging into my MSN account and rarely use GTalk. They are such time wasters and despite the fact that I'm an awesome multi-tasker I don't have the patience to sit at a computer anymore. I'd rather be out and about.
I've also avoided interacting too much on Facebook in the past few months, but now I've got a renewed interest in it. I think I did one of the stupidest things ever and removed everyone off my Limited Profile list. I blame it on Ramadan.
Ramadan makes me stupid. And forgetful. And stupid. Every day after work I wander around the parking lot searching for my car. I've lost my car every single day of Ramadan. I always remember what floor I parked on but which section? Forget about it!” she writes.

Israel: Cannon Blasts to Break Fasts

Israeli Izzy Bee also shares with us a tradition seen in most Arab countries in this post, where she writes about the cannon firings which signal the time to break the fast (sunset).

“In the old city of Jerusalem there are a tangle of historic tales, waiting to be respun. My droll buddy James Hider, intrigued by the blast that marks the evening meal during the holy month of Ramadan, sought out the Sandouka family that has summoned fasters to dinner for the past century or so with a cannonball. His report appeared in the London Times, and it makes an intriguing read. Uri Lupolianski, the orthodox Mayor of Jerusalem, has no problem with the Arab family that shoots shells at sundown outside the venerable gates. The mayor sided with the traditionalists and derided new rules that would force Sandouka, who has been shooting the signal blast for two decades, to pass a $2000 certification course before handling explosives,” she explains.

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