Global Voices · Citizen media stories from 2008 December 07

7 December 2008

Daily archive · 6 posts

Stories from 7 December 2008

Egypt: Egyptian Dialect Wikipedia

Written by Tarek Amr · Middle East & North Africa

Wikimedia has agreed to create a new section - a Wikipedia in the Egyptian Dialect. This decision was the catalysis for a discussion across the Egyptian blogosphere. Is it a good or a bad move, and is Egyptian and standalone language, or just a dialect of Arabic?

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Egypt: Change the Channel Initiative

Written by Nermeen Edrees · Middle East & North Africa

During the past few months, Egyptians have been haunted with catastrophic headlines and top stories on a daily basis. Amid this grim, Egyptian bloggers decided to revolt against the country's current rueful state and bring out some positive energy to the surface through the “Change the Channel” campaign.

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Video:What image opened your eyes to human rights?

Written by Juliana Rincón Parra · Latin America

The sixtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is on December 10th, and Witness' The Hub team has put together a video that responds to the question: What images have opened your eyes to Human Rights? The video is online right now and with it they are asking all of us to participate by showing and telling the world about the power images have had in making us care about Human Rights.

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China: Official report — political aristocracy has ruled national wealth

Written by Bob Chen · East Asia

National wealth, as an dauntingly open article in public media suggests, has almost been monopolized by the class of political power. What makes the matter worse is that, the privilege has been passed on to the next generation.

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Armenia: CNN Genocide Coverage Controversy

Written by Simon Maghakyan · Middle East & North Africa, Central Asia & Caucasus

Too short for Armenians and too long for the Turkish government, a two-hour CNN documentary by Christiane Amanpour on genocide includes a 45-second mention of the WWI extermination of Ottoman Empire's indigenous Armenian population. Premiered on December 4, 2008, Scream Bloody Murder has made many Armenian bloggers angry.

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Korea: Train Connecting North and South Stopped.

Written by Hyejin Kim · East Asia

The train service that connects North Korea and South Korea was suspended on the 28th of November. [En] When the train that stopped more than 50 years started operating after...

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Updates from 7 December 2008

Bangladesh

Life as a Tai Tai posts some pictures of Eid and Christmas Bazaars in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh.

• Rezwan

Pakistan

Kashkin at Pak Tea House responds to Thomas L Friedman’s article “Calling All Pakistanis” published in the New York Times.

• Rezwan

Brazil

A new bridge over the Paraná River will join Paraguay and Brazil. However, the costs will be financed entirely by Brazil, and Michael Quomo of Zoopolitica [es] believes that it makes his country of Paraguay to be dependent, means “condescension” and “creates informal subordination links.”

• Eduardo Avila

Mexico

How can one stop the robbery of cell phones in Mexico? Diego of Blog Mx [es] thinks that unique registration codes can help identify the phones, but according to laws the information can only be seen with a judicial order.

• Eduardo Avila

Japan

Agile Media Network announces [ja] a bloggers meeting on December 18th starting from 19.30 at the Nomura Research Institute [ja]. The event is free and in Japanese. More info in Japanese here. [ja]

• Chris Salzberg

Japan

In a post entitled, “I realized for the first time yesterday that Hatena is doomed” [昨日初めて「”はてな”はダメだ」と思った], blogger id:grgr56 explains how they tried out the new service “Hatena Bottle” yesterday [ja] and concluded: “Hatena Bottle is a spam trap”: “I noticed [after registering] that mails started coming. […] If you go to the top page of Hatena Bottle [ja], you'll see that nothing is written about what kind of service it is. I guess some people must consider it the fault of the person who registers for the service [that they end up getting spam mails]. Well, that was my mistake. I overestimated Hatena.”

• Chris Salzberg

Armenia

Today marks the 20th anniversary of the 1988 earthquake which devastated parts of northern Armenia including the country's second largest city of Gyumri. Unzipped says that for the estimated 7,000 families which still remain homeless the past two decades have been full of nothing more than empty promises. Meanwhile, Anush Babajanyan's Photoblog puts the figure at nearly half that and posts photographs of life in just one district of Gyumri where 300 families still live in domiks and other deserted buildings.

• Onnik Krikorian

Japan

Takeshi at Saigon kara kita tsuma [サイゴンから来た妻] writes about his Vietnamese wife who took the Japanese Language Proficiency Test [en] [日本語能力試験, nihongo nōryoku shiken] today, as do thousands of other people every year who want to test their Japanese level. Seeing his wife to the test site, Takeshi-san was moved by the number of foreign people — coming from all over the world and speaking every language imaginable — who decide to live in Japan and dedicate themselves to the study of the Japanese language.

• Scilla Alecci