[huridocs-tech] Global voices: blogging the world

This article by Becky Hogge was originally published on openDemocracy.net
under a Creative Commons Licence. If you enjoyed this article, visit
openDemocracy.net for more. source:
http://www.opendemocracy.net/media/global_voices_3117.jsp

*Global voices: blogging the world 
*13 - 12 - 2005 
*The pioneering Global Voices initiative hosted bloggers from Algeria
to Zambia at a conference in London. An impressed Becky Hogge
reflects on the challenges it may soon face. 

*Christmas came early for Joshua Schachter this year. On Friday 9 December
his web-based social bookmarking tool, del.icio.us {http://del.icio.us/ },
which lets users share their favourite links with each other using a
tag-based system, “joined the Yahoo! family” for an undisclosed sum
{http://blog.del.icio.us/blog/2005/12/yahoo.html}.

The deal closes a good year for the internet. In March, Yahoo! purchased
Flickr {http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/03/21/yahoo_buys_flickr/ }, a
photo-sharing website also based on tags; in September, eBay bought Skype
{http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/09/12/ebay_bids_skype/ }, the internet
telephony company. With web giants Google and Amazon also continuing to
pour money into research and development, it’s clear that the second
dotcom boom is upon us.

There have been ripples in the corporate world on the east side of the
pond too. Wanadoo, Europe’s most successful internet service provider, is
preparing to align its brand with its sister mobile telephone company
Orange in 2006. British Telecom, mindful of the disruption on the horizon
represented by internet telephony, has been busily developing its media
and tech development arms, hiring whole office-fulls of ex-television
executives and hackers at one time. British television company ITV has
bought Friends Reunited
{http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/-/1/hi/business/4502550.stm } (no, I don’t
know why, either) and the British Broadcasting Corporation continues to
prepare for the eventual demise of television with its interactive media
player, the IMP {http://www.bbc.co.uk/imp/ }.

*The listening art

*With all this cash slushing about it seems only fitting that the Global
Voices conference on 10 December 2005
{http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/globalvoices/global-voices-2005-london-summit/
} should have been held in London’s Canary Wharf. A swooping gesture
towards corporate aspiration, the twenty-year-old business district
contains the UK’s tallest building, 1 Canada Square, whose straight tower
and glass pyramid roof has more than a whiff of the Franco about it.
Walking through it (or indeed, taking the DLR monorail) is like being
transported into a world where global free-market capitalism got to paint
on a blank canvas.

The Global Voices project, started a year ago on modest seed capital by
Ethan Zuckerman and Rebecca MacKinnon of Harvard’s Berkman Center for
Internet and Society {http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/home/ }, couldn’t be
more of a contrast. In late 2004, MacKinnon and Zuckerman realised that
although American weblogs were talking to one another and gaining lots of
exposure in the mainstream press, blogs from the rest of the world needed
a bigger audience. Their central mission, beyond supporting the right of
people to speak and speak freely, became promoting the importance of
/listening/.

The result is a website {http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/globalvoices/ }
which aggregates posts from weblogs around the world. The homepage of the
Global Voices site is dominated by a cloud of tags
{http://www.tagcloud.com/ } listing countries from Afghanistan to
Zimbabwe. Clicking on each one brings you the news from the blogosphere,
with options to visit other blog summaries in the region. The site,
originally maintained by Zuckerman and MacKinnon, now has a team of six
regional editors. It is supplemented by a wiki running through the centre
of the page, where readers can suggest other regional blogs worth
monitoring.

The project has grown at an enormous pace. The site received a total of
800 visits in its first four weeks. Now 300,000 individual people check
the site each month. On an average day, Global Voices gets 12,000 readers,
many from the mainstream press, which uses the stories as its own personal
and international news desk.

The modest origins and bottom-up character of the project make it
revealing that the London conference is being hosted in the vast white
marble Reuters building on the edge of Canada Square. Many of the bloggers
have been flown from their respective parts of the world at Reuters’
expense, thanks to a new partnership between the grassroots blogging tool
and the world’s most recognisable newswire. The result is vibrancy
tempered by doubt: as bloggers from Kuala Lumpur, Tel Aviv, Amman, Beijing
and Kingston sit down to coffee and cakes together, a series of questions
pops up – now we’ve got so big, will we screw it up? Do we need to start
behaving like journalists? Where do we go next?

On hand to help are professional journalists, not only from Reuters, but
also from the BBC, as well as “citizen media” expert Dan Gillmor
{http://wethemedia.oreilly.com/ }. Ethan and Rebecca act as conference
Oprahs {http://www2.oprah.com/index.jhtml }, weaving their way through the
audience, mic in hand, picking out contributors and reinforcing
contributions with their own thoughts on the way between one speaker and
the next.

The information being generated from the conference is immense. An audio
stream is beamed out to those who could not make the show in person. They
in turn populate an Internet Relay Chat ( IRC
{http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/globalvoices/2005/09/27/tuesday-live-chat-handbook-for-bloggers-cyber-dissidents/
}) channel, monitored by one of the conference attendees, who gives a
periodic summary of the remote debate taking place. The meeting is both
transcribed and compressed, live on screen, into a set of notes. Meanwhile
bloggers weave through the audience taking snapshots, which are
immediately uploaded onto a Flickr photo pool to share with the group. On
more than one occasion the wireless network cracks under the strain of all
the information flowing through it.

The format reflects perfectly why Global Voices has been such a success.
These people clearly know how to handle data, and have harnessed the
wealth of information generated by weblogs around the world to great
effect, much like del.icio.us harnessed the wealth of people bookmarking
links on the net, and Flickr captured the trend for sharing photos online.

*The personal and the political

*But opinions (as expressed in blogs) are not links or photos, and one
gets the impression that the friendly, armchair style employed by the
hosts has enabled the project to cope with such diversity for this long.
One session asks how to nurture the blogospheres of countries that have
come late to the web. The answer? Be encouraging; be nice.

What doesn’t get discussed is also revealing. On a weekend when the World
Trade Organisation is preparing to meet in Hong Kong, the United Nations
is hosting a conference on climate change in Montreal, and the “war on
terror” is blowing up in the face of the United States and British
administrations, political issues seem to be off-topic. When Robert
Scobles {http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/ }, the Microsoft blogger, starts
talking, a ripple of what feels like outrage drifts over the audience, but
the discussion is quickly brought on to friendlier terms by a few words
from MacKinnon.

One question from the floor is still resonating in my head: is Global
Voices personal or political? For me, the answer has to be the former.
Weblogs are the ultimate personal communication medium, and the decisions
of what to feature on a digest of personal weblogs made every day by
MacKinnon, Zuckerman and their regional editors are also personal, in the
sense that they are made by a person and not a machine. Diversity and
transparency are the watchwords of all the Global Voices editors – the
more voices they feature, the more likely the site is to offer a full
picture of events and aspirations around the world. But as the project
begins to be taken seriously as a global news source, will this be enough?

There is a cautionary tale for Global Voices in Wikipedia’s recent
travails {http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4502846.stm } (Jimmy
Wales, founder of the online, open-access encyclopaedia, has announced
that contributors are now required to register before they can create
articles, after John Seigenthaler
{http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2005-11-29-wikipedia-edit_x.htm
}, former journalist and founding editorial director of /USA Today/,
accused it of being host to “volunteer vandals with poison-pen
intellects”.) Once your profile as a source of information grows to a
certain level, more than diversity and transparency alone are needed to
secure your reputation. It became clear meeting people around the
conference that the Global Voices community are well aware of the pitfalls
they face. How they chose to steer around them in the coming year will
have something to teach us all.



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