Co-produced by Chat the Planet (NY) and Iraqi filmmakers in Baghdad, the movie series Hometown Baghdad shows Iraqis in Baghdad talking to a camera in their homes, schools and places of business. Simple films of everyday life. A scientific sampling? Nah. But in its ordinariness it’s some of what we’re not otherwise seeing.

The first three episodes are here. [Tags: iraq peace ]

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From the header of Blog to America:

Content for Blog to America is completely generated by the readers. Blog to America is a site where individuals from around the world post their opinions on the United States in the form of letters and comments. This can be done by clicking on the “submit a letter” tab and filling out the form or by simply sending us an email. Our site aims to encourage global communication and create an international dialogue between America and the world.

As an American, this is some painful reading so far. The posts range from tough love to just tough. It’ll be especially interesting to see if the comments develop an ethos of dialogue; there’s some hope there so far.

It’s one of those experiments that depends on getting unpredictable small things right. Otherwise, the site might turn into AmericaSucks.com.

(BTW, BlogToAmerica.com claims the copyright for anything posted there. Also btw, the domain AmericaSucks.com is registered to Register.com.) [Tags: america blogs gv global_voices]

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Global Voices has hired Tunisian activist Sami Ben Gharbia to be a hub connecting anti-censorship efforts around the world. Sami’s been living in exile in the Netherlands for the past seven years, where, among many other things, he created the Google Maps mashup that plots secret Tunisian prisons. GV was able to fund the position thanks to Hivos, a Dutch foundation focused on human rights and development. Thanks, Hivos! (Disclosure: I’m proud to be on GV’s advisory board.) [Tags: gv globalVoices berkman hivos same_ben_gharbia]

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Reuters has started a site devoted exclusively to Africa. Each country has its own page. And there at the top left of each page is a feed of the most recent posts from Global Voices. Reuters is a funder of GV, and this is a very cool integration of the mainstream media and our global voices.

It makes me inordinately happy. [Tags: global Voices africa news media msm reuters everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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The Chinese blogger Isaac Mao has a three-part proposal for Google to help it get right in China. In an open letter to Google’s founders he suggests: 1) Google set up a $1B venture fund to invest in leading edge companies in China. 2) “Develop anti-censorship tools and service for global Internet users.” 3) “Increase the incentive to Chinese Google Adsense users.”

When Google first announced that it would agree to censor certain search terms in China, I thought that it was a reasonable choice among only bad alternatives, given other steps Google took, such as hosting the Chinese service out of China so that the Chinese totalitarian government wouldn’t have access to its records. I wasn’t sure then, and I’m not more sure now, that Google made the right choice. Adopting Isaac’s proposals would help explain why Google being in China is overall a good thing. (Thanks to Rebecca MacKinnon for the link.) [Tags: china google search isaac_mao]

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Global Voices begins a post this way:

We didn’t want to have to write this article. As Global Voices‘ Latin America editor/Spanish translator/Digest dude David Sasaki wrote on one of our mailing lists yesterday, “I have low tolerance for the amount of internet bandwidth dedicated to the latest and greatest Apple product. . . .” Searching his Latin America RSS feeds, however, David could find “little else other than excited talk about the Apple iPhone,” and several of our other authors and editors reported on similar oohing and aahing coming from their respective blogospheres.

And why wouldn’t GV want to cover this? Only because there are some other issues that also matter, including “Freedom of the press and Saddam Hussein in the Moroccan blogosphere,” freedom of press under attack in the Philippines, freedom to blog under attack in Iran, the St. Petersburg flood, , the holidays and politics in Bangladesh, how Somalia is roiling Kenya, the life of a ten year old girl in Cambodia who peddles bracelets to tourists …

All that and more in 24 hours on the site. Global Voices continues to astound. [Tags: globalVoices gv iphone morocco philippines russia iran bangladesh somalia kenya cambodia media ]

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That’s the headline of an enthusiastic report by Shivan Vij on the Global Voices confab in Delhi. Worth reading… [Tags: gv global_voices shivan_vij media blogging blogosphere total_world_domination ]

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Quinn Norton has a good overview of Global Voices, including its recent Delhi confab, at Wired.com. [Tags: global_voices ]

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The Global Voices folks are meeting in Delhi, and there’s a whole lot of blogging going on. There’s live blogging at the conference blog. Rebecca’s put a slideshow up at GV. Theres IRFC at irc.freenode.net #globalvoices. There’s a live audio stream. You can search for the tag gvdelhi2006 to find all the other blogs, photos, streams, and biometric monitoring… [Tags: gvdelhi2006 globalVoices berkman]

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Le Web 3, which I thought was an outstanding event and a very good conference—great for networking and community, with excellent speakers trapped in a traditional conference framework—is now enmeshed in a controversy that confounds me.

If two of the three leading presidential candidates came to a US tech conference to talk for twenty minutes each about their Internet policies, it’d be considered a coup. At Le Web, however, some attendees feel cheated and betrayed.

In part, perhaps it’s because Le Web was a genuinely international conference. I happen to enjoy politics, so I was happy to hear from the French politicians (even one who I thought treated us like pommes de terre de couch). Others obviously don’t share my interests, so perhaps it felt to them as if two soccer stars bumped other speakers to promote their books. (But the candidates were talking about Internet policies, so the analogy isn’t exact.)

Some apparently resent the intrusion of the traditional media. They came in with the candidates, elbowed people aside, and left with the candidates. On the other hand, one of the candidates, and Loic, pushed back on them. Le slap across the media’s face.

Then there’s a personal layer. Loic Lemeur (Disclosure: I count Loic as a friend. Plus Le Web paid my plane and hotel expenses) has blogged in favor of one of the candidates. He was quite gracious to the other candidate, but some have accused Loic of inviting the candidates in order to advance his own career, and perhaps to advance his company’s interests. If you see no other value in having the candidates attend, then I suppose personal motivations become the best available explanation. And how could any of us not be tempted by the opportunity to be noticed by possible future presidents? But since the candidates’ appearances at the conference seemed to me so obviously a positive, I don’t need to resort to Loic’s inner motives.

None of this has been helped by the post-event conversation, much of it quite angry, and further fueled by an ill-tempered, late-night response from Loic, for which he quickly apologized. Frankly, the swirling path of anger is too exhausting and unpleasant for me to follow.

Finally, there’s the possiblity that there’s simply a cultural divide here, and I’m just not getting something. Perhaps there’s a subtext or a history. My own understanding—it may well be deficient but for now it’s all I have—leaves me feeling bad that a first-class event is being torn down for what I thought was a net (and Net) positive. [Tags: leweb3 loic_lemeur politics france]

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