Ethan does a superb job blogging and reflecting on a presentation at PopTech by ten young African innovators the conference — to its great credit — brought to the conference. What a great idea!

Ethan live-blogged the whole conference. Fantastic coverage. And IT Conversations streamed it and will make the sessions available as podcasts. (I skipped the conference this year because I need to work on my book. But from all accounts, it seems to have been as thought-provoking and eclectic as ever.) [Tags: PopTech EthanZuckerman africa]

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Bloggers are on the scene. [Tags: earthquake GlobalVoices]

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Rebecca MacKinnon at Global Voices gets the scoop on Reporters without Borders‘ Handbook For Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents being released today:

The Reporters Without Borders Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents is not for any of those purposes. It is the first truly useful book I’ve seen aimed at the kinds of bloggers featured here at Global Voices every day: People who have views and information that they want to share with the world beyond their own national borders. They are often people whose perspectives are not well represented in their own country’s media, and certainly not well reported by the international media. Sometimes they are political dissidents, but usually not. Mainly, they are just ordinary citizens with a passion to communicate with the world – and no easier way to do so than by writing, podcasting, and posting pictures on their own blogs.

The Handbook for Bloggers is for people who want to be serious participants in the emergent online global conversation: How to set up a quality, credible blog. How to get it noticed. And.. if you’re in a country where there government might not like what you’re saying, how to avoid getting in trouble when you by-pass the information gatekeepers and talk directly to the world.

She then asks a series of trenchant questions… [Tags: GlobalVoices RebeccaMackinnon blogs blogging ReportersWithoutBorders]

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It’s BlogDay, so here are five blogs from around the world that I just came across. I’ve only read them a little so far, but they seem interesting…

Rajeev’s Random Musings — “Rajeev on books, science, India, world…”

China Snippets – Shanghai Views — Here’s the tagcloud: “china chinese coffee english favorite great local money seems shanghai start street yangshuo”

Madame Chiang — “Madame Chiang is presently based in Manila but her heart remains in Hong Kong, she has lived in many dark and interesting corners of the globe. Many things interest her including (but not limited to) World Affairs, Literature, Art, Life’s Idiosyncracies and Travel.”

It’s Peru, Baby — “Although I’ve always been interested in International Affairs, I never expected I’d move to Peru to be with a man who doesn’t speak English. Nor did I anticipate I’d fall in love with a Spanish speaker whilst I was living in Japan.”

Jakartass — ” The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to the site owner reaching his/her bandwidth limit. Please try again later.”

[Tags: blogday GlobalVoices]

The Bobs are back, awarding Best o’ Blog ribbons to blogs in nine languages and thireen categories. Vote here.

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Alex Steffen of WorldChanging posts an interview with Ethan Zuckerman of GlobalVoices and the Berkman Center, who has now become president of the Board of Directors of the non-profit behind Worldchanging. (The interview seems to be a year old. Still hugely relevant, though.)

Here’s Ethan’s basic challenge:

…issues which fall outside of the immediate experience and concern of the people blogging in some ways actually seem to be harder to talk about in the blogosphere than in mainstream media.

and

You’ve actually just identified the essential problem of free market journalism. In free market journalism you’re allowed to print whatever stories your audience wants to read. And because you know your audience is more interested in Michael Jackson than Jesse Jackson, you’re going to run fewer stories on policy and more on the abuse of boys on Neverland Ranch. Unless you get some extremely strong current of countervailing opinion, your coverage tends to fall towards the lowest common denominator. That’s why the international news hole in domestic television coverage has shrunk to almost nothing in recent years. The assumption is that no one’s interested.

That’s why a blogging community that pays attention to the rest of the world is so important. If bloggers talk about what’s happening in Africa, say, that not only means that more people have access to information about what’s going on there, it also means that there’s a countervailing force which shows the editors at the New York Times that people are interested enough in these issues to read about them.

For the “What can I do about it part?,” plus much much more, read the rest of the interview.

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We used to believe that the world was divided into those who believe the truth and those who don’t. Our job was to convert them, kill them, or let them live their lives peacefully unaware they were about to plummet into an eternity of fire for believing the wrong things.

Then we were able to communicate at the speed of light rather than at the speed of wind, so we learned more about other cultures. At least some of us grudgingly concluded that those other people were entitled to their contrary beliefs. The world, we admitted, was unsatisfyingly relativistic and we attempted the impossible task of believing that beliefs for which we were willing to die were no better than their contradictions. Different strokes for different belief systems.

Then the Internet happened and the world fell into conversation. It’s no longer a matter of getting reports back on the strange beliefs of distant lands — “Why, in China crickets are considered to be smart and monkeys to be dumb…Believe it or not!” — but an immediate awareness that we’re all living within a single conversation space. We may not actually be IM’ing Chinese Communists or Jihadists, but we at least know that what’s being said in one corner of the Web is being refracted elsewhere. And we know that we can pick up the Skype phone and actually talk with a Communist. Where there aren’t actual conversations, there is now the constant awareness of the potential for conversation.

There is a big difference between a relativistic world in which contrary beliefs assert themselves and a conversational world in which contrary beliefs talk with one another. In the relativistic world, we resign ourselves to the differences. In the conversational world, the differences talk. Even though neither side is going to “win” — conversation is the eternal fate of humankind — knowledge becomes the negotiation of beliefs in a shared world. What do we need to talk through? What can’t we give up? What do we believe in common that seems so different? What should we just not talk about? These are the questions that now shape knowledge.

Knowledge is not the body of beliefs that needs no further discussion. Knowledge is the neverending conversation. And much of that conversation is precisely about what we can disagree about and still share a world.

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Islamicate runs a msg from a friend traveling through Afghanistan as part of a circus. A snippet:

Along the way, Hamid, Du’ad, Nadir, Asad, Jamil, and Sher Khan have more than a dozen laughing fits. I’d never seen a group of Afghan men laughing playfully until this trip, even though it happens all the time here. They sing to the radio and clap until my ears echo with Indi and Afghan pop music. We stop along the way and squat by a river, eating fresh mangoes and watermelons, then for daily prayers. They tease me like a close friend and we break bread together at every meal, eating naan flat bread for breakfast, then potatoes, rice, oils, and naan for lunch and dinner.

[Technorati tags: afghanistan]

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The idea is that on August 31, everyone who signs up will recommend 5 new blogs, preferably from a different culture or at least a different point of view, or at least using different fonts… [Tag: blogday]

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On August 2, Deborah Elizabeth Finn wrote:

…today I had the notion that a blog is a kind of bully pulpit, and that it would be fun and possibly even edifying for nonprofit bloggers engage in a bully pulpit exchange. In other words, we should get a group of folks who work for or with mission-based organizations, throw their names in a hat, and randomly assign each one to be a guest blogger for a day on somebody else’s nonprofit blog.

If you’d like to participate in the Nonprofit Blog Exchange on a date to be announced, you should send an email to Emily (eweinb04yahoo.com) with the following info:
Name:
Organization:
E-mail address:
Geographic Location:
Name of Blog:
Website Address of Blog:
Description of Blog:
[Tags: DeborahElizabethFinn nonprofits]

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Ethan has compiled some amazing figures documenting GlobalVoices’ growth, as well as some analysis of whose linking. from where. [Tag: GlobalVoices]

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