As regular readers of my blog know, I’m interested in trying to paint a statistical picture of media coverage of the developing world. Last year, I found some pretty good evidence that the majority of media sources I was examining were far more likely to report on stories in wealthy nations than in poor ones. As I started talking with friends who worked in mainstream media, I got a fairly consistent explanation: “We report on what our audience wants. And, generally speaking, our audience doesn’t care about the developing world.”

This is the kind of explanation that begs for empirical testing. (Well, it does if you’re me.) Do newspapers and TV stations actually know that their readers aren’t interested in these stories? Or are they guessing?

So I’ve been looking for good proxies that I can use to measure audience interest in the developing world. One I’m interested in is book purchasing – I’ve been looking at Amazon sales rank statistics to make educated guesses at the number and value of books Amazon users purchase on various topics. And I’ve been looking closely at what countries people mention in their blogs, using data from Blogpulse and Daypop to map what parts of the world people are speaking about.

I decided to try a slightly different tactic earlier this week, and banged out a little code that scrapes headlines from the New York Times’s website, and checks to see which articles are subsequently mentioned in the blogosphere. My guess was that the stories bloggers would “amplify” would predominantly be ones regarding US electoral politics and technology, especially consumer and Internet technology.

What follows below are the first results – of the 718 headlines that ran on the New York Times website my scrapers found in the last three days (these include stories published much earlier, but still appearing on the site), only 58 had found their way into Blogpulse’s database. (I’m working on a Technorati version at the moment so we can compare and check Blogpulse’s comprehensiveness.) My script looks for the URL, rather than the headline, so the observation: “The Times ran a story today on Chechnya” won’t be counted unless it links to a specific headline’s URL. (I’d love thoughts from folks on whether, by searching for URLs like “http://www.nytimes.com/date/section/article.html”, I’m missing a group of otherwise-blogged URLs…)

(Update – thanks to Kerim Friedman for pointing out that many people link to http://nytimes.blogspace.com/genlink, instead of the NY Times site – I’ll modify scripts later today to look at this…)

Of the twenty stories blogged more than once, only two were substantially about events outside the US. One involved US/Israeli espionage, the other, terror in Chechnya. US electoral politics dominated, with 11 stories directly related to the US presidential race. Tech had a weaker showing than expected, with three stories; surprisingly popular were stories that touched on education in the US, with four stories, including the most blogged story, on charter schools.

A listing of the 58 stories blogged at least once follows below. I’ll be running this experiment for the next month or so, and hope to expand it to follow other media sources as well – if I get the bugs worked out, I’ll start publishing regular results on my research page. Any and all insights you might have are welcome…

• Nation’s Charter Schools Lagging Behind, U.S. Test Scores Reveal: 9
• Internet Gives Teenage Bullies Weapons to Wound From Afar: 6
• Subpoena Seeks Records About Delegate Lists on Web: 4
• Frank Rich: How Kerry Became a Girlie-Man: 4
• Confrontations: Protesters’ Encounters With Delegates on the Town Turn Ugly: 4
• Vast Anti-Bush Rally Greets Republicans in New York: 3
• Spy Case Renews Debate Over Pro-Israel Lobby’s Ties to Pentagon: 3
• The Democratic Nominee: Kerry Enlisting Clinton Aides in Effort to Refocus Campaign: 3
• School Siege: Russian Rebels Had Precise Plan: 3
• The Platform: Social Conservatives Wield Influence on Platform: 3
• Letting Gamers Play God, and Now Themselves: 3
• The Vice President’s Daughter: Cheney Daughter’s Political Role Disappoints Some Gay Activists: 2
• Bush Backs Ending Admission Preferences for Children of Alumni: 2
• Upbeat Republicans Revive Bush Theme of Compassion: 2
• In Retreat, Bush Says U.S. Will Win War on Terrorism: 2
• Effort by Bush on Education Faces Obstacles in the StatesNews Analysis: Bush Offers Bold Strokes, but Few Details in Speech: 2
• News Analysis: First Night, Single Theme for Double Term: Sept. 11: 2
• School Achievement Reports Often Exclude the Disabled: 2
• The Religion Issue: A Call to ‘Win This Culture War’: 2
• A Commercial Software Service Aims to Outfox Caller ID: 1
• It All Started With a Good Cup of Coffee: 1
• Cheney and G.O.P. Mount Vigorous Assault on Kerry: 1
• The California Governor: Arnold Schwarzenegger Takes to Limelight Again: 1
• Building a Better Soundtrap: 1
• In the Classroom, Web Logs Are the New Bulletin Boards: 1
• Bush Is ‘Unfit’ to Lead U.S., Kerry Charges: 1
• Demonstrations: At Least 900 Arrested in City as Protesters Clash With Police: 1
• Europe Opens Another Microsoft Inquiry: 1
• Bush Outlines Plan for a 2nd Term and Attacks Kerry’s Record: 1
• The Former Mayor: Mr. Popular by All Counts, Is He Republican Enough?: 1
• Clinton Surgery Puts Attention on Death Rate: 1
• Sunny San Diego Finds Itself Being Viewed as a Kind of Enron-by-the-Sea: 1
• 9/11 Proposals Lead the Agenda Facing Congress: 1
• Craig’s To-Do List: Leave Millions on the Table: 1
• The Running Mates: Cheney’s Praise of Bush Takes a Dig at Clinton (and Reagan): 1
• Under Attack, Director Says Hollinger’s Black Misled Him: 1
• Jobless Figures on Friday Could Emphasize Bush’s Big Weakness: 1
• Game Theory: The Eerie Allure of Ghosts and the Electoral College: 1
• Democratic Strategies: Democrats Urge Kerry to Turn Up Intensity of Campaign: 1
• Products Slide Into More TV Shows, With Help From New Middlemen: 1
• Techno Files: In Internet Calling, Skype Is Living Up to the Hype: 1
• For Low-Income High Schoolers, a Harvard Education: 1
• Essay: In a Wife’s Request at Her Husband’s Deathbed, Ethics Are an Issue: 1
• Arrests: Facing Fine, City Frees Hundreds of Detainees: 1
• State of the Art: From Microsoft, a First Take: 1
• Back-to-School Issue: When Gadgets Get in the Way: 1
• The Context: On Labor Day, Nominees Have Work to Do: 1
• Officials Unraveling Woes of Texas Schools: 1
• The Candidates: Bush and Kerry Clash Over Iraq and a Timetable:
• The Party Hosts: Money and Power Cross Paths, and a Good Time Is Had by All: 1
• E-Commerce Report: EBay Lends Hand to Dropoff Stores: 1
• Road Trip: Yes, New York Messed With Texans: 1
• Fox Outdraws Big 3 Networks: 1
• News Analysis: In Trying Time, Scaling Down Expectations of Job Growth: 1
• Putting Nature on the Pill: 1
• Intelligence: General Says Less Coercion of Captives Yields Better Data: 1
• Florida Court Rules Against Religious School Vouchers: 1

Colin Powell: “We concluded that genocide has been committed in Darfur and that the government of Sudan and the Janjaweed bear responsibility and genocide may still be occurring.”

Update: Jim Moore has more info and a long excerpt from Powell’s statement on his blog.

One of the great benefits of being a fellow at the Berkman Center is the chance to participate in our Tuesday lunches. Fun folks from the worlds of law, development or the Internet are waylaid while passing through the greater Boston area, dragged to our secret lair in darkest Cambridge, and compelled to give presentations while our gang of inquisitors pose thorny questions. Oh, and box lunches are served.

It’s very nice, really, and open to the general public. If you’re in Cambridge and interested in these issues, or even just in free lunch (because there is such a thing as a free lunch), check out the Berkman luncheon page and let Wendy know you’re coming.

Our lastest victim was my friend Jim Fruchterman, social entrepreneur, big geek and generally brilliant software for social change dude. Jim is the founder of Benetech, a remarkably cool technology company focused on building products that bigger tech companies won’t build (for market reasons) but which have huge social impact. Rather than give the full intro to his work, I’ll offer my notes of his talk:

Jim got his start working on computer vision in a lab at Stanford. His lab was working for the Deparment of Defense on automatic feature recognition and smart bombs – Jim found himself wondering if this technology could be used to help the blind read rather than to kill lots of people. His advisors were less interested in this idea, and he found himself helping run a company that cleaned up in the character recognition space, pioneering tools that did omnifont character recognition (i.e., that were able to recognize text irrespective of whatever font the document used.) While Jim continues to work on the financial side of that business, he mostly runs Benetech.

Benetech comes out of a recognition that most big companies can’t address small markets. Machines that read for the blind might be a $1-5 million dollar market per year. That’s a size not especially interesting to most tech companies, which are looking for markets that are $50m a year or more. But when you’ve got a company that attempts to be profitable, but owned by a not-for-profit foundation, you can choose to take on projects that are marginally profitable and have huge social impact. Hence, reading machines for the blind.

Benetech uses a character recognition card (developed by the other company he works with, I think…), a flatbed scanner, and some text to speech libraries from IBM and offers a reading machine at a price point closing in on $1000, much cheaper than competitive machines designed by Ray Kurzweil. The business broke even in year one and is now so profitable, Jim was able to sell it to a for-profit company for $5 million.

That $5 million has financed the next generation of Benetech projects. One of them is bookshare.org. Jim describes it as “Amazon plus Napster plus talking books, but legal.” Basically, Bookshare takes advantage of the fact that there are hundreds of reading machines located around the world, where blind people can scan a book and turn it into a digital file, which can be turned into speech. But that process is time-consuming (about three hours a book) and it seems logical that a book scanned for one reader should be usable by another blind reader.

So Bookshare allows blind readers to download all they can read for $50 a year. They can upload books that they’ve scanned and share them with other readers, ala Napster. The $50 a year fee doesn’t yet cover the costs of the operation, but does cover about 25%, reducing the project’s dependence on charitable support.

Remarkably, this is completely in line with US copyright laws. There’s a provision, known as the Chafee Amendment, which allows redistribution of copyrighted works for people with certain verifiable disabilities. (No, being too cheap to buy music from the local record store does not qualify as a verifiable disability, you crafty Napster users.) Jim approached major publishers before starting to redistribute their works and, once they understood what the project intended to do, they were generally supportive.

The project uses the weakest possible digital rights management technology, because Jim recognizes that users need to convert the content into various forms: large-type print, braille, MP3, and so on. So the content is unlocked and marked with a warning which reads, Jim says, “If you post this book on the Internet, you screw the blind community. Don’t do it”. Benetech has developed credibility with the publishing community by removing cracked e-books from the site and generally ensuring publishers that they’re not trying to put them out of business, but trying to help the blind.

Another successful Benetech project is Martus, a package of “basic IT tools for human rights groups”. Jim asserts that most testimonies taken by human rights groups get lost: files are destroyed when people get arrested, computers get seized, paper files get eaten by termites. (Really.) As Patrick Ball, the leading stats guy in the human rights field – and now a Benetech staffer says, “Human rights is an information processing industry where no one is developing tools.”

Benetech tries to make storing files easy and safe for human rights organizations. Jim contends that 99% of the groups that organizations like Privaterra train on PGP don’t end up using it (I doubt the figure is that high, but I accept the general point – PGP’s hard to use, and it doesn’t help anyone to know PGP and not use it.) So Martus is the combination of a client, which looks a lot like an email client, which allows users to publish documents locally or to a webserver. Documents are encrypted when saved and copies are uploaded to a server run by a trusted party: Open Society Institute for some groups, the Catholic Church for others.

New Benetech projects include a low-cost landmine detector, and a series of cellphone-based applications for the blind. Jim shares my conviction that PCs are the wrong platform to deliver IT services to the poor – he sees cellphones, which have already become indispensible to blind people, working as reading machines and navigation engines for blind people at low costs.

The common theme to Jim’s work is an attempt to respond to market failures in bringing intellectual property to the market. He’s interested in figuring out how to “gently coerce” IP-holders to part with their rights for limited, specialized markets. For instance, he convinced Intel to donate $250k of mismarked, unsaleable chips to build reading machines – eventually, they decided just to donate $1m of properly marked chips. IBM has donated ViaVoice software, HP donates scanners to keep them from the low end of the market. Are there ways to convince contentholders to give their content under similar terms with similar PR benefits?

Jim sees great opportunities for business students, mid-career professional trying to put their skills to work in the social sector. As he points out, a $1m a year business would be a total failure in the high-tech sector; “It’s a barnburner in the social sector”.

Benetech isn’t the only group pursuing this model. David Green’s Aurolab, based in India, makes programmable hearing aids and sells them at $5 – 100, rather than the $2000 these devices sell for in the US. How? They invested $2m in designing a $5 chip that’s the heart of the device, which now is able to be manufactured for $45 a unit. The hearing aid is sold at higher prices to those who can afford it and subsidizes the cost of hearing aids for those who can’t. He’s evidently planning on expanding into the US, selling the devices at $200-400, cross-subsidizing the cost for users in India.

The Aurolab example raises two important points. One is the importance of being able to do basic R&D in social technology. It’s easy for funders to get excited about a project once you’re selling $45 hearing aids to poor people; it’s far harder to get a funder to put up huge sums to fund the research that makes the device possible.

Second, it forces us to wrestle with the idea of differential pricing. Jim points out that social activists folks tend to talk out of both sides of their mouth on this issue. We pressure big pharma to offer low cost drugs to people in developing nations – to address issues like AIDS, we’re going to need differential pricing. On the other hand, differential pricing tends to be politically unpopular. It offends a basic sense of fairness that an item costs one price for one person and another for a poorer person. It also opens up the very real problem of reimportation – goods sold at one price in a poor nation can be reimported and sold at a higher price in the US or Europe.

Jim generated the most controversy when he talked about comparative approaches to getting intellectual property into the service of the social sector. He offered two options: ask the licenseholder to do the right thing and allow use to take place, or change regulations to allow expections for the disabled. I suggested a third: compulsory licensing.

Jim admits that the solutions he’s currently using are imperfect. The Chafee exception doesn’t apply outside the US, so Bookshare is currently a US-only institution. While other countries like Canada have similar exemptions, there’s no mechanism to allow for exchange, permitting a work created for the blind in Canada to be used in the US.

Of great interest to me, Jim is talking about “public interest exceptions” which might permit people in very poor nations access to certain content without explicitly seeking permission. This is similar to an idea being talked about in Creative Commons circles – a license that would allow rights to be reserved in most nations, but permit widespread use and derivative products in certain poor nations. The holy grail is a library of content that people in poor countries could print on demand for $1 a copy, a project that Internet Bookmobile is already working on, though with texts that are already out of copyright.

(Jim points out that Creative Commons could also use some small license changes to make content more accessible to the blind and disabled. CC folks have generally been open to the idea that content should be available to the disabled without undue restrictions, but changes in the license code might make the process easier.)

Urs Gasser, a fellow Fellow and one of the sharpest legal minds I’ve ever encountered, had a pointed question for Jim regarding creating multiple exemptions to copyright law – isn’t this just patching a broken system? Aren’t there other rights – like fair use – that DRMs prevent people from accessing? If we carve out special exceptions for the blind, are we giving up on the bigger fight of challenging all restrictive DRM regimes? (No, we didn’t come up with a good answer, either.)

A dense, fascinating, important talk. Thanks for joining us, Jim.

I’m sorry I missed this story when it first came out, and grateful that someone on Metafilter blogged it: David Wallechinsky, a contributing editor for Parade Magazine, produces an annual list of the world’s worst dictators, in consultation with Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Freedom House and other smart do-gooder organizations.

The 2004 list includes a number of up-and-comers, notably Swaziland’s King Mswati III, who is the youngest dictator on the list at age 35, as well as Africa’s only remaining constitutional monarch. Several familiar names are off the list – Qadaffi has been demoted from the top ten list, Hussein has been toppled and Charles Taylor is now in exile.

Fellow afrophiles will be pleased to note that our favorite continent hosts only four of the top ten: Mswati, Sudan’s genocidal Omar Al-Bashir, Zimbabwe’s Mugabe and (personal fave), Equatorial Guinea’s Teodoro Obiang Nguema, who somehow manages to redistribute the nation’s oil wealth so that 60% of the people in his country live on $1 a day, despite the fact that average per capita income is $4500.

Asia claims the top three spots on the list with leading dictators in North Korea, Burma and China; the always-colorful Saparmurat “Turkmenbashi” Niyazov brings the continent’s count to four; Cuba’s Castro and Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Abdullah flesh out the list.

To get a sense for the staying power of the world’s dictators, compare the current Parade list with a 1996 Reporters without Borders Top 25 Enemies of Press Freedom list.

I’ve blogged recently about projects like TalkToUS that try to bring voices from around the world into the conversation around the upcoming US elections. Betavote takes a much blunter approach to the issue – they let anyone on the Internet cast a vote in the US presidential elections. Obviously, the vote’s hardly a fair reflection of actual global opinion – there’s only limited attempts to prevent people from voting dozens of times, no way to tell whether people are actually from the countries they claim to represent, and no guarantee that the people who find the site don’t have one overwhelming political bias or another.

So while the results aren’t statistically “clean”, they are interesting. Kerry currently leads Bush 84% to 15%. What’s interesting to me are the countries where Bush is tied with or leading Kerry (where there are more than a vote or two cast.) The two most noticeable are Iraq and Afghanistan, where the candidates run neck and neck with hundreds of votes cast – I’m tempted to conclude that these are the result of interested US Republicans intervening to argue the point that these nations are better off due to Bush’s actions. (It seems unlikely that more people have voted from Afghanistan, with its poor connectivity, than from Japan.) But I’m interested to see Bush with a strong showing in Jamaica, Azerbaijan and Viet Nam – any thoughts on reasons for these countries bucking the global trend?

While on the subject of sites that encourage global participation and comparison, let me share my favorite procrastination site of the week: the Geography Olympics. It’s pretty simple – you choose the country you represent, and then you have 200 seconds to find ten randomly selected countries on a world map. Given how much of my work involves coloring in world maps, I’d expect to be pretty good at this… but I’m not good enough to get perfect scores on this test, which includes all UN-recognized nations, tripping me up as I try to remember which of those small islands in the South Pacific is Samoa and which is Tonga. Still, my personal average is higher than the Irish, who current share the lead with the Taiwanese, the Lithanians and the Nicaraguans. The US is over 20% behind the leaders, despite my efforts to help, and seems to fall behind every time I check the leaderboard. C’mon, folks, a little more geographic knowledge and we can beat the Canucks and leap into 56th place!