AKMA documents Pippa‘s latest turning of the world into art. Very cool.

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I’m in the lovely lounge at the Newark Airport, waiting for my 19-hour flight to Singapore. But my client put me into business class which looks pretty spiffy, so I’m not complaining. Besides, I get to go to Singapore.

I got here at 6pm from Boston, and waited until 7:15 for the Singapore Air counter to open. For half an hour, a crew of the young and beautiful (six women, two men … and guess who was in charge! (Hint: He pees standing up)) put out poinsettias, stacked cards, and unrolled carpets, all without ever making eye contact with us. It was like watching a play get set up.

Anyway, unless business class includes magic air-blogging, don’t expect to hear from me on Monday. Have a nice day on the planet while I’m up in the air.

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You may notice some new names in my blogroll to the left and a new gif next to some of them. The gif is supposed to be a backwards B and a forwards B with a bridge beteen them, standing for BridgeBloggers. During the planning of this weekend’s Global Voices track at the Berkman Internet and Democracy conference, that was a working name for bloggers who are using their blogs to build bridges to other cultures and lands. So, I’ve taken it upon myself to stamp some of those names with the ugly gif I designed myself this morning.

Yes, all blogs are bridges in one sense or another, although I like Hoder‘s three metaphors: Windows, bridges and cafes. I’ve put the BB gif next to blogs that are consciously trying to build bridges and who were at yesterday’s event. I’m open to discussion of the criterion. (I also don’t have a good list of attendees yet.)

Meanwhile, a Global Voices blog has started up to discuss spreading blogs to give voice to the least heard parts of the world … and ears so those voices can be heard.

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Joi Ito and Jim Moore are leading a discussion of what could be in a “manifesto for a better global conversation.”

The first comment is that generally we care about our families and towns before we get to worrying about the world.

Alex Steffen from WorldChanging says that our goal should be to expand our notion of family.

Ethan says that we should start from the common ground: All of us are trying to reach out beyond where we are.

The conversation meanders a bit into more abstract topics. (I am guilty of contributing to it.) Ethan slaps it upside the head.

Next comment: Shame moves people to action.

Ethan: We should today form at least an informal group that believes that it’s good for people to have voices, and those voices need to be heard. And we’ve heard today that we need tools.

Alex Steffen: This group believes: 1. in extending free speech, 2. that direct connection of people across boundaries is transformative; 3. that we’re planetary citizens and probably agree in 95% of the issues.

Joi: We should have multiple media forums.

Someone: The group needs a champion.

Joi: In open projects, you always need a champion, and that champion can’t leave until s/he finds the next champion.

HollywoodHill: The tools need to be vastly simplified.

Ethan: We need a name, an identity, a site, a sense of how we can help one another. We have general agreement about what needs to be done, but we’re not ready to write a manifesto. People are saying that what matters are the projects we’re working on and how we can help one another.

Ethan: We can continue this conversation at the GlobalVoices blog.

[The event thus takes a step toward becoming a “postmodern movement,” which I think was Jim Moore’s phrase.]

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At a lunchtime session, we’re trying to come up with a plan for using the Internet to advance a campaign to keep afternoon schools open until 5, with additional tutoring available. It’s a case study and an exercise, but grounded in reality.

It makes clear to me once again the difference between (1) using the Internet to organize a marketing campaign and (2) trying to light a fire on the Net. In this case, the polls show people support the idea, and the group knows who they need to talk with, so they only need to organize, not light a fire. Thus, the discussion turns to marketing and taglines.

Here’s the rub. The two approaches are at odds. If you want to light a fire, say something interesting, but marketing is reassuring and thus tends to be boring.

(BTW interesting != controversial)

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[This entry is in progress. I’ll update it as the day proceeds.]

The part of the conference that most excites me is about to begin. Ethan Zuckerman, Rebecca MacKinnon and the Open Society Institute have created a track that has pulled together bloggers from around the world. The aim is to see what we all can do to help blogging spread, particularly in parts of the world where voices most need to be heard.

Ethan says that we’re here today to talk about blogs as bridges, borrowing Hoder’s metaphor from yesterday (blogs as windows that give you insight into someone’s world, blogs as cafes where people can talk together, and blogs as bridges). There’s something big happening, Ethan says.

We each introduce ourselves, all 60 of us. We are bloggers from Iran, Iraq, India, Kenya, China, Prague, Malaysia…as well as online activists and other bridge builders. This is a wonderfully diverse session.

Ethan: Our aim is to try to figure out how to be Hoder. “Hoder is to some extent responsible for why there are 75,000 Persian bloggers online.”

Omar from Iraq talks about the importance of blogging as a way of routing around propaganda. Then he talks about how the open comments from around the world on his blog helped his nephew “If I visited America a year and a half ago, I would have felt llike a stranger. This time I feel like I’m with friends, and that is the greatest gift I can think of.”

Mohammed from Iraq says that blogging is person-to-person. “Through blogging we can spread love, more than separate by hate.” “The media just want to create hate. But I have a different story.” He says that, for example, the newspapers play up an American soldier punching an Iraqi but don’t say that people go up to American soldiers and shake their hands.

Q: Who can get access to the Net in Iraq?
A: Just about everyone.

Chalu Kim (China): Do you also blog in Persian?
A: No. But we’re going to be talking about a Arabic language blogging tool today.
Rebecca: Big issue. Today we want to talk about how bridgebloggers can help bridge the translation gap.
Jeff Jarvis: It’s important to do both. Writing in your language builds community. Translating gets the story out.

Blackfive says he’s a military blogger. He never thought of himself as an activist, but his blog grew to include raising money for homecoming, wounded soldiers, and advocating for particular bills.

Q: How do we get a sense of what it’s like to be in the military in this conflict?
Blackfive: That’s a main reason people come to the site. Obvoiusly, bloggers can’t give away “operational information.” That’s where the censorship comes in.

Jarvis: What stories do you have of blogs forming bonds?
Blackfive: Email and blogs have brought us closer together. There’s a huge inter-service rivalry. Even within the services. So it’s really important to get beyond that. There’s not a lot of interaction between Iraqi bloggers and the military, but there is between Iraqi and American civilians.

Ethan: We’re seeing a lot of bridging to Americans. Can we open up the conversation to be more international? Jeff, what’s going on in Malaysia?

Jeff Ooi: Malaysia has given itself a mandate to enter the first world. Bloggers ask if their governance model is the right one. There are two blogging spheres in Malaysia, one written in our language and the others written in English. Blogs are aggregated at Petaling Street. “Blogging is not going to work if you have to do it alone. You have to hold the hands of the newcomers.” Broadband penetration is only 1% but we’re trying to do build bridges and renew the country.

Ory: What percent read from within your country?

Omar: Many of the people who read our blog from outside of Iraq are Iraqis.

Jeff: Malay bloggers don’t get much notice because they’re not googleable. [There’s some discussion of why that’s so.]

Q: The assumption with a bridge is that there are two level grounds. But that’s not the same wth the Internet. Even if everyone has access in Iraq, I’m sure that’s stratified by gender and education. in Iran, 3-4M out of 68M have access to the Internet. So, are blogs replicating the stratification?

Ethan: One of the obstacles to blogging in W. Africa is that there’s great conversation on talk radio. But there’s room for blogging as a way of recording stories for history.

Hoder: How about posting pre-revolution diaries so people can understand what had happened in the same places and same cities. [Great idea. I’ve been re-reading 1984 and one of the scariest bits is the way history is forced down the “memory hole.”]

Omar: Both the media and blogs in Iraq are newborn. The Iraq media doesn’t know that there are blogs.

Jeff: I was threatened with jail for something I blogged, and it helped that it was covered for 4 days on the front page of a leading newspaper.

Rebecca: We’ve seen Chinese bloggers blogging in English, and translating the English responses into Chinese, but the Chinese conversation that that engendered didn’t get brought back into English.

Part II: Building a local blogosphere

Hoder:

You can only start a blogosphere in the local language. So, I wrote a simple step-by-step guide in Persian. I even included instructions on how to copy and paste using your mouse. A month later, we had 100 Persian weblogs, the number I thought we’d have in a year. [I’ve turned his narrative into a bulleted list.]

I made templates that were widely used.

At the same time, I was trying to keep my blogroll uptodate because at the beginning there has to be a place where people can find other blogs. Competition developed to see who had the most visitors. And it’s important to support the new bloggers; if you don’t promote them, link to them, introduce them, they’ll die in a few days. Also, people need tech help understanding things like trackbacks and RSS.

Then get some local celebrities to blog. Keep up with technical innovation.

Encourage developers to create local language apps.

Hoder is coming to think that blogs shouldn’t be hosted in local countries if the regimes are repressive.

He says that the social ground must be ready forit to take off; the steps in another country might not work. His hypothesis is that the value change that happened among the young in Iran made it easier. Blogging is hip in Iran. It shows how self-expressive and tolerant the new generation has become. A sense of individuality is very important if blogging is going to take off.

India-Pakistan Blog (Dialog Now): The people who write there, mainly older people, don’t have their own blogs. In some cultures, some people are more comfortable in a shared social space.

Ory says that the blogging community in Kenya is very small. She’s returning in a couple of weeks and isn’t sure she can give a successful “pitch” about why Kenyans should blog. Most are not comfortable with this form of individualistic Web presence. She’s going to encourage more group blogging, like virtual insanity. The media is pretty open in Kenya, so that doesn’t provide a spark for bloggers.

[session still in session…]

Hoder has a page where we signed in.

Some of the blogs represented here (as I’ve rather randomly captured them):

IraqtheModel.blogspot.com


http://www.hoder.com/weblog/www.petalingstreet.orgwww.usj.com.my

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Well, he’s out now, but John Perry Barlow’s account of his arrest for carrying controlled substances in the rights-free zones we call airports is a must-read. Here’s one snippet that happens not to be part of the rollicking and terrifying narrative:

In general, the TSA and the Department of Homeland Security have been extremely unresponsive and have instructed Covenant Security to stonewall us as well. We have asked them whether they knew who I was when they searched my bag and whether my identity had any bearing on the exquisite granularity of their search methods. They’ve refused to answer on grounds of national security. We have asked them for the training manuals and search guidelines under which Covenant Security was operating. No dice. We asked whether their x-ray machines were tuned to identify drugs as well as explosives, a technical capacity some of these units possess. Sorry. That would be SSI (or Sensitive Security Information.) We have inquired whether Covenant Security had any incentive program which rewarded its employees for discovering evidence of illegal activity. Again, preserving the safety of all Americans prohibits a response. At one point, they were even insisting that it would be threat to national security if the Covenant Security employee who allegedly discovered the purported contraband were called upon to testify, thereby abrogating my constitutional right to confront my accuser, but they seem to have relented on this point.

JP is fighting this one. Here, in a roundabout way, is why I think it important that he win.

Last night, I wasd talking with a friend I love who said that he had been talking with Michael Turk, head of the Bush e-campaign. (Here and here on Turk.) My friend said that Turk said that the Bush blog had no commenting because they were afraid people would say things that would alienate Bush’s fundamentalist supporters. My friend said, “I was impressed. I’d thought that they’d shut off comments because they were into command and control. But they had good, political reasons for doing so.”

Of course they did. That’s how command and control structures get put in place. Generally, someone doesn’t say, “I favor control, so no comments!” Instead, there’s a direct reason that can be debated by reasonable people, but behind it is the impulse to control, and ahead of it is a system that’s locked down as tight as the bolts that stick your car seat to the frame.

In the same way, totalitarianism generally doesn’t happen because people say, “Gosh, isn’t totalitarianism great?” It happens through a series of steps that can be debated on their own grounds. The routine violation of privacy to prevent terrorism is one of those steps. Behind it is the idea that the dangers of the age justify the abrogation of each and every right of citizens. Ahead of it is a nation that values fear over freedom.

Fear the small steps.

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JZ is giving a talk in his masterful way. I can’t convey the humor and the graphics, but the basics of the idea are (sort of):

With a platform, you can’t predict what people will do with it. that’s what we got when PC’s met the network. That enables tremendous freedom for people to innovate. He calls it “the generative Internet.”

But innovation disrupts. Entrepreneurs who succeed at the platform (e.g., Microsoft) then want to close it off.

Now general purpose PC is giving way to devices that do something addictively well but not open to third party apps — Tivo, Blackberries, XBox.

The insecurity of the Internet will not stand. That’s why we’re seeing gated communities within the network. And the warning from XP that says that an app isn’t certified will expand so that your computer (especially if it’s your business’ or the library’s) simply won’t run “insecure” apps. And won’t we require licensing of sw developers so they can’t produce apps that destroy entire industries?

The Net’s getting closed, JZ says. We’ll see a comeback of the “appliance” model: closed tech. The young nerd’s need to tinker with stuff is under siege.

In the hopeful future, there’s a unified Internet and the freedom to tinker. It’s not just neutral in the middle but the endpoints are free also. (He points out how much damage you could do if you hacked the Microsoft auto-update server.)

It’s about the experts vs. the amateurs, Jonathan concludes.

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Zack Exley, Kerry e-Campaign

The Left criticizes the Kerry campaign for being too top-down. But we strove to go after results that would actually move the vote or get more volunteers on the ground in an organized program that would persuade voters and get our Kerry voters. And we also strove to get more money so we could run ads. We raised $122M online. The vast majority didn’t come from discussion groups. We sent out emails, giving people reasons to give, or reasons to go volunteer. [Yeah, but IMO they should have let more air into the campaign. E.g., MeetUps are a great way to bring new voters into the campaign. This is an argument I have had with Zack more than once, and have lost every time.]

Dan Gillmor, newly self-unemployed

I’m horrified at how bad the media coverage of the campaign was.

We have used the Internet in campaigning, but we need to think about how we should use it for governance.

Interesting things are going on stemming from the notion that journalism is becoming a conversation. In the future, I hope we see much more of people throughout campaign coverage. I want to see prominent wikis in campaigns that cover every issue so we can get a deeper understanding of what candidates believe.

Sunshine Hillygus, Harvard

I’m going to play the role of curmudgeon and point to unintended consequences.

First, the Net has removed some hurdles to participation, but only for those who are politically motivated and interested. [Really? Scott Heiferman said that said 50% of meetup attendees were new to politics.] Also, the Net increases class bias in the electorate because you have to have a computer and interest.

Second, it increases polarization. People reinforce what they believe. And the anonymity lets you profess more extreme views.

Third, the Net has contributed the pressure on the mainstream media to produce faster, more scandalous, lower cost news. They are pressured to report on things that have not been verified.

Chuck DeFeo, e-campaign manager for Bush-Cheney

Our campaign was 1:1 marketing, viral marketing. [The electorate isn’t a market!] We were most interested in building community in geographic space. E.g., “Parties for the President,” modeled a lot off of what MeetUp did. These were like MeetUps in your home. And our “Walk the Vote” and “Neighbor to Neighbor” programs. When you signed up, we pinpointed undecided voters near you. In a typical campaign, you’re bused to a part of town where you don’t know anyone. Instead, you could do it on your own time, talking to your neighbors. That’s a much more powerful statement. This helps to build networks of people for future elections, including local ones.

Q: Why did the Bush campaign turn off international access to their web site?

Chuck: In the final weeks, it was more important to get our message out to the electorate.

[A ruckus occurs because Chuck won’t say why allowing international access would prevent American access. Zack says, “He doesn’t want to say it, but they were hacked.” Chuck denies it, but won’t answer why they shut off access. Dan asks if they were afraid of a denial of service attack. Chuck repeats the same canned phrase. It was bullshit.]

Chuck: We had three missions: Raise money, get out Bush’s message, and empower our constituency.

[Zack lightly refers to that last mission as “hippie.”]

Q: Has the Net helped make the mainstream media’s coverage so dreadful?

Dan: The Net worries me because the news cycle is all the time. That puts pressure on the press to report fast but not well. I think the public service side of journalism is beginning to be abandoned. I don’t know how to fix this.

[Overall, what happened here was generally true of the day. This was a panel of fascinating people made less interesting because of the panel format. Too many panels! Not enough hallway time. I think I’m just not cut out for panels. But, tomorrow, it’s all open discussion. Looking forward to it. (Jarvis on the same topic.)]

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Oh Yeon-ho, , of South Korea’s OhMyNews

The Internet started in America for military purposes, but citizen journalism started in Korea.

Ohmynews is the citizen-journal of S. Korea. He talks about how it affected the 2002 election. There are now 35,000 citizen reporters who submit 150-200 posts a day. [No, not each.] They are paid only a little bit — $20 if it’s a big story. Readers can also comment on articles. Versioning of content encourages paid subscriptions.

Why in Korea? Because there’s resentment of the media monopoly, because broadband penetration is high (75%), it’s highly networkedsocially, and the young folks are open minded, liberal and activist. It hasn’t happened in Japan because Korean youths are more activist.

OhMyNews is a child of the marriage of technology and democracy.

Stephen Ward, Oxford Internet Institute

Why aren’t there more S. Koreas?

1. Because politicians are risk averse. And change is happening outside the parties.

2. The culture of politicians — they’re ingrained a f2f culture.

3. There are party rules that make it difficult

Rebecca MacKinnon, Berkman

The biggest influence of the Net will be in emerging democracies such as S. Korea. Philippines, too, where SMS text messaging brought down the president, which it’s unlikely to do in the US.

The Net also gives voice to the powerless in controlled environments. The problem is that you can’t go from voice to action. You can’t use MeetUp because the police will find you.

OhMyNews doesn’t claim to be objective in the way the Times does. OhMyNews is lefty. For example, there was a dispute between Korea and China, and OhMyNews set up a special section titled “Chinese Hegemon.” OhMyNews counterbalances Korea’s traditionally conservative media.

Jeff Ooi, Malaysian blogger

[He talks about the difficulties faced by Malaysian bloggers. I missed it. Sorry!]

Q: Esther Dyson: What does this do to objectivity and our expectations of the media?

Oh: The mainstream media is jealous of what we have done. Citizen reporters are asked to write under their own name, with a social security number and phone number so they can check. Copyeditors do fact-checking. We ask our citizen journalists not to follow wthe style of professional journalists; write in your own style.

Rebecca: Transparency helps with the objectivity issue.

Rebecca: Cellphone may have an impact on politics in repressive countries.

Oh: I went to N. Korea and was able to connect to the Internet by making an international call through China. Maybe someday N. Korean citizens will be able to contribute to OhMyNews.

Jay Rosen: Pretty soon we’ll be able to say to journalist, “Oh, you’re not really bloggers.”

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