When I was in Cairo in early December, I asked almost everyone I met with what they knew about blogs. A human rights activist I was meeting with suggested I get in touch with Amina Khairy, a reporter for Al-Hayat’s Cairo bureau, who had recently written a story about Egyptian blogs.

Amina was good enough to meet me for breakfast at my hotel, and we had an excellent, wide-ranging conversation about weblogs, technology, US-Arab relations and freedom of the press. I blogged about our conversation on WorldChanging, and made a mental note to give her a call again the next time I was in Cairo. And then I forgot about our conversation.

Until two days ago, when ego-surfing Technorati, I discovered that a Saudi blogger had linked to me, mentioning that an interview with me had just been published in Al-Hayat. I can’t read Arabic, but the few English phrases in the piece connected to topics I’m deeply interested in. So hey, perhaps it was an interview with me.

I posted to Saudi Jeans’ comments section and asked if he wouldn’t mind giving me a quick summary of what the article said. Ahmed, a pharmacy student in Riyadh, who blogs as “Saudi Jeans”, did one better and translated the entire article, which follows below. I’m deeply grateful to Ahmed for his excellent translation, and for linking to the article in the first place. I’m now reading his blog regularly and am grateful that he’s chosen to blog in English to help people in the west get a better understanding of life in Saudi Arabia.

And thanks, also, to Amina for a great conversation - glad it was a useful talk for you as well, and thanks for your kind and generous article.

from Al-Hayat, by Amina Khairy

An American Promotes Arabic Blogs as Alternative to the Lost Democracy

The meeting seemed very electronic, probably to go with the nature of

the subject we discuss. The beginning of the subject was with an

article in al-Hayat (18/10/2004) about bloggers in Egypt. A blogger

read it, and linked to it from his blog, in English. A seminal blogger

in the States picked up the message and asked a friend who knows

Arabic to translate the article.

After several emails, he could contact the newspaper. He was willing

to travel to the Middle East on his way to the heart of Africa, where

his heart is according to his words. I made several contacts to set a

meeting and drink a cup of coffee in the garden of the Marriott hotel

in Cairo.

The Blog is the Solution

Basically, I don’t know him. The American Ethan Zuckerman has come

from the other side of the world to search a phenomenon he knows it

exists in the Arab World, but he does not know any details about it.

He advised me to read his blog. I checked his website. In the top

there was a photo of Zuckerman he put it to give his site a human

touch. A photo of a huge man standing on the right side and a bull in

the center. The caption reads “I’m the one on the right.”

The interview with Zuckerman started on time. An American, tall with

huge body. His hair reaches his shoulders. He looks like one of the

hippies of the sixties. I found out his one of them, actually. In the

seventies and the early eighties he joined a group of peace and

anti-nuclear weapons activists. Most of them were highly educated.

They toured the cities and villages of America, in addition to other

countries. They carried what they believe in and did not care how they

look.

I was amazed by how his look and his ideas were identical. I always

thought such people do no longer exist in a world of monopolies. Time

has changed some things about him. The most important thing is the

cause he is defending. Now, he says “the solution is the blog.” He is

a fellow at the Berkman Center. He teaches Electronic Democracy, and

how blogs can be used to change writing for media, and for media

coverage of the developing countries, and to bring awareness to their

problems.

Zuckerman is and editor of BlogAfrica, which is considered as the best

source to get information on young Africans and their problems.

Moreover, he is one of the most important sources for what is

happening in Africa because he is independent and well-informed.

The Iranian Blogging Experience

Zuckerman talks about blogging with a big passion, like he is talking

about the achievements of one of his kids at school. During his last

journey to Jordan and Egypt, he worked very hard to meet everyone

related with the world of blogs. The general answer he got was: “We’ve

heard about it, but there aren’t a lot of people doing it here.”

In the other hand, those few people looked like Zuckerman’s treasure.

He wrote on his blog: “I retract some of my earlier complaint that

it’s hard for an American to get a sense for the conversations taking

place in the Arab world. Turns out I just wasn’t listening in the

right places.”

However, blogs still exclusive for a certain type of people in the

Arab World. I told him about my experience with the bloggers of Egypt.

“Usually, bloggers are educated and computer literate people who speak

English. And the people who read blogs are not different from the

bloggers themselves, which means only a certain type of people are

communicating with each other. So, what’s the point?”

Zuckerman agrees, but he has his reservations. For example, bloggers

of America and Europe are white men who work in high positions. So,

the content of their blogs is concentrated on the American and

European politics. It’s like they are living in their “bloggie world.”

Zuckerman is optimistic, as usual. “There must be a start point. The

Internet itself when it had begun was only used by a certain type of

people, but it has spread later.”

He talks with much interest about Iran, where he thinks blogging is

very successful. During a conference called “Voice, Bits and Bites,”

the famous Iranian blogger Hoder talked about the Iranian experience.

He said the population of Iran is about 70m, with 70% under

30-year-old. The Iranian internet users are about 5-7m, and there are

70,000-75,000 Persian blogs.

The weird thing about Iran is that the spread of internet was started

by the spread of blogs. Blogs are divided into three things: windows,

bridges and cafs. As windows, blogs make it possible for Iranians to

look outside, and for non-Iranian to look inside. They are also

bridges that connect the people from different ages and types. They

are an important tool to communicate with people who don’t have other

choices. Moreover, they could bridges connect people with politicians.

For example, Mohammed Ali Abtahi, former vice president, is one of

most well-known bloggers in Persian, Arabic and English.

The Iranian blogs can also be cafs. It turns to be social forums with

endless discussions and debates.

Democracy in the Third World

These discussions and debates are Zuckerman’s goal. He considers them

as major parts of democracy. He points to what he calls “The Second

Great Power,” which his colleague Jim Moore wrote about. The idea of

“The Second Great Power” is about a group of people who try to use

democracy by a model composed of three parts: collecting information,

commenting on it and discuss it, and take action. The good thing about

this model is the new technologies such as the internet, can present

it. Zuckerman points that in the same time the regular/classic media

provide us with information, we can also get information from

alternative sources on the internet with minimum cost.

He keeps on praising “alternative media” by saying the people

connected to internet now can discuss in very new ways, and blogs make

them more powerful and effective, and newsgroups and IM, all that make

the practice much easier. Here, he uses another theory by another

colleague of his called “Accidental/Contingent Democracy,” which

indicates that making decisions can be derived from the world of

blogs. Ideas can be driven by limited networks of people to social

networks, then to political networks assisted by positive reactions.

Then making of decision will be moved from the individual to the

masses. However, Zuckerman realizes that these effective tools are in

the hands of few certain people, “and there is nothing wrong with

that,” he says.

But he says this group of people should realize that they don’t

represent the whole world. They should work hard to attract and

encourage people to use this kind of information technology to make

the blogs even better.

I said that everything he said means only one thing. Bloggers are a

group of optimists convinced they should share their ideas,

information and opinions with others, because this is the way to

change.

After eating his vegetable omelet, he said “but there is a big problem

in this way in the Arab World which is the language. Even if blogs

became popular in the Arab World in a way that makes them alternative

to media, communicating with the West will remain hard because of the

translation problem. However, I know there are many attempts to get

over it especially that other languages already did.”

Better Bad News, “a video blog using voice, character and audio visual support to extend and recontextualize the conversation,” challenges my credibility due to a statement I made in my blog, regarding a comment made by a dinner companion, that compared David Weinberger to the late, great Lenny Bruce.

To clarify some confusion regarding BBN’s assertions:

- I was not compensated by Dr. David Weinberger or by the late Lenny Bruce or his estate for comments on my blog.

- While I have linked to BBN’s accusations, this does not imply that I believe that Dr. Weinberger is a “schmuck” or that he is planning to develop a “$600 a day smack habit”. A link is not an endorsement.

- While it would have been a wise marketing move to compensate BBN for marketing my “personal brand” by featuring me as a central motif in a piece of performance art, I am neither that smart nor that wealthy.

- I am unwilling to source the comment made, off the record, by my dinner companion without said individual’s permission. In the interests of transparency, I am attempting to obtain permission from the individual in question so I can property address BBN’s assertions.

- While I work closely with both Dr. Weinberger and Rebecca MacKinnon, and while it is possible that I have, in the past, been a kitten-eating cyborg, I am working - with the help of my family and my church - to mend my ways.

- The internet is a strange, strange place.

(In the event that this doesn’t make sense to some of my readers, especially those looking for African commentary, don’t worry too much. It’s all related to the “Weblogs, Journalism and Credibility” conference that took place at Harvard last week and generated all sorts of interesting reactions around the blogosphere.”

When I was in Cairo in early December, I asked almost everyone I met with what they knew about blogs. A human rights activist I was meeting with suggested I get in touch with Amina Khairy, a reporter for Al-Hayat’s Cairo bureau, who had recently written a story about Egyptian blogs.

Amina was good enough to meet me for breakfast at my hotel, and we had an excellent, wide-ranging conversation about weblogs, technology, US-Arab relations and freedom of the press. I blogged about our conversation on WorldChanging, and made a mental note to give her a call again the next time I was in Cairo. And then I forgot about our conversation.

Until two days ago, when ego-surfing Technorati, I discovered that a Saudi blogger had linked to me, mentioning that an interview with me had just been published in Al-Hayat. I can’t read Arabic, but the few English phrases in the piece connected to topics I’m deeply interested in. So hey, perhaps it was an interview with me.

I posted to Saudi Jeans’ comments section and asked if he wouldn’t mind giving me a quick summary of what the article said. Ahmed, a pharmacy student in Riyadh, who blogs as “Saudi Jeans”, did one better and translated the entire article, which follows below. I’m deeply grateful to Ahmed for his excellent translation, and for linking to the article in the first place. I’m now reading his blog regularly and am grateful that he’s chosen to blog in English to help people in the west get a better understanding of life in Saudi Arabia.

And thanks, also, to Amina for a great conversation - glad it was a useful talk for you as well, and thanks for your kind and generous article.

from Al-Hayat, by Amina Khairy

An American Promotes Arabic Blogs as Alternative to the Lost Democracy

The meeting seemed very electronic, probably to go with the nature of
the subject we discuss. The beginning of the subject was with an
article in al-Hayat (18/10/2004) about bloggers in Egypt. A blogger
read it, and linked to it from his blog, in English. A seminal blogger
in the States picked up the message and asked a friend who knows
Arabic to translate the article.

After several emails, he could contact the newspaper. He was willing
to travel to the Middle East on his way to the heart of Africa, where
his heart is according to his words. I made several contacts to set a
meeting and drink a cup of coffee in the garden of the Marriott hotel
in Cairo.

The Blog is the Solution

Basically, I don’t know him. The American Ethan Zuckerman has come
from the other side of the world to search a phenomenon he knows it
exists in the Arab World, but he does not know any details about it.
He advised me to read his blog. I checked his website. In the top
there was a photo of Zuckerman he put it to give his site a human
touch. A photo of a huge man standing on the right side and a bull in
the center. The caption reads “I’m the one on the right.”

The interview with Zuckerman started on time. An American, tall with
huge body. His hair reaches his shoulders. He looks like one of the
hippies of the sixties. I found out his one of them, actually. In the
seventies and the early eighties he joined a group of peace and
anti-nuclear weapons activists. Most of them were highly educated.
They toured the cities and villages of America, in addition to other
countries. They carried what they believe in and did not care how they
look.

I was amazed by how his look and his ideas were identical. I always
thought such people do no longer exist in a world of monopolies. Time
has changed some things about him. The most important thing is the
cause he is defending. Now, he says “the solution is the blog.” He is
a fellow at the Berkman Center. He teaches Electronic Democracy, and
how blogs can be used to change writing for media, and for media
coverage of the developing countries, and to bring awareness to their
problems.

Zuckerman is and editor of BlogAfrica, which is considered as the best
source to get information on young Africans and their problems.
Moreover, he is one of the most important sources for what is
happening in Africa because he is independent and well-informed.

The Iranian Blogging Experience

Zuckerman talks about blogging with a big passion, like he is talking
about the achievements of one of his kids at school. During his last
journey to Jordan and Egypt, he worked very hard to meet everyone
related with the world of blogs. The general answer he got was: “We’ve
heard about it, but there aren’t a lot of people doing it here.”

In the other hand, those few people looked like Zuckerman’s treasure.
He wrote on his blog: “I retract some of my earlier complaint that
it’s hard for an American to get a sense for the conversations taking
place in the Arab world. Turns out I just wasn’t listening in the
right places.”

However, blogs still exclusive for a certain type of people in the
Arab World. I told him about my experience with the bloggers of Egypt.
“Usually, bloggers are educated and computer literate people who speak
English. And the people who read blogs are not different from the
bloggers themselves, which means only a certain type of people are
communicating with each other. So, what’s the point?”

Zuckerman agrees, but he has his reservations. For example, bloggers
of America and Europe are white men who work in high positions. So,
the content of their blogs is concentrated on the American and
European politics. It’s like they are living in their “bloggie world.”

Zuckerman is optimistic, as usual. “There must be a start point. The
Internet itself when it had begun was only used by a certain type of
people, but it has spread later.”

He talks with much interest about Iran, where he thinks blogging is
very successful. During a conference called “Voice, Bits and Bites,”
the famous Iranian blogger Hoder talked about the Iranian experience.
He said the population of Iran is about 70m, with 70% under
30-year-old. The Iranian internet users are about 5-7m, and there are
70,000-75,000 Persian blogs.

The weird thing about Iran is that the spread of internet was started
by the spread of blogs. Blogs are divided into three things: windows,
bridges and cafés. As windows, blogs make it possible for Iranians to
look outside, and for non-Iranian to look inside. They are also
bridges that connect the people from different ages and types. They
are an important tool to communicate with people who don’t have other
choices. Moreover, they could bridges connect people with politicians.
For example, Mohammed Ali Abtahi, former vice president, is one of
most well-known bloggers in Persian, Arabic and English.

The Iranian blogs can also be cafés. It turns to be social forums with
endless discussions and debates.

Democracy in the Third World

These discussions and debates are Zuckerman’s goal. He considers them
as major parts of democracy. He points to what he calls “The Second
Great Power,” which his colleague Jim Moore wrote about. The idea of
“The Second Great Power” is about a group of people who try to use
democracy by a model composed of three parts: collecting information,
commenting on it and discuss it, and take action. The good thing about
this model is the new technologies such as the internet, can present
it. Zuckerman points that in the same time the regular/classic media
provide us with information, we can also get information from
alternative sources on the internet with minimum cost.

He keeps on praising “alternative media” by saying the people
connected to internet now can discuss in very new ways, and blogs make
them more powerful and effective, and newsgroups and IM, all that make
the practice much easier. Here, he uses another theory by another
colleague of his called “Accidental/Contingent Democracy,” which
indicates that making decisions can be derived from the world of
blogs. Ideas can be driven by limited networks of people to social
networks, then to political networks assisted by positive reactions.
Then making of decision will be moved from the individual to the
masses. However, Zuckerman realizes that these effective tools are in
the hands of few certain people, “and there is nothing wrong with
that,” he says.

But he says this group of people should realize that they don’t
represent the whole world. They should work hard to attract and
encourage people to use this kind of information technology to make
the blogs even better.

I said that everything he said means only one thing. Bloggers are a
group of optimists convinced they should share their ideas,
information and opinions with others, because this is the way to
change.

After eating his vegetable omelet, he said “but there is a big problem
in this way in the Arab World which is the language. Even if blogs
became popular in the Arab World in a way that makes them alternative
to media, communicating with the West will remain hard because of the
translation problem. However, I know there are many attempts to get
over it especially that other languages already did.”

I’ve blogged before about the idea that weblogs are a selective amplifier. For the most part, bloggers aren’t doing original reporting - they’re reading websites and RSS feeds and commenting on - or sometimes merely reposting - stories that they find most interesting. As a result, the blogosphere’s coverage of global events is twice distorted - once, by what mainstream media chooses to cover, and again by what bloggers choose to amplify.

Roughly four months ago, I started tracking New York Times headlines, looking for which were - and which weren’t - picked up by the blogosphere, according to Technorati. While there’s a tough methodology problem to solve with the data (more on that further down in this post), I’ve got a couple of months of it to play with - you can see today’s results here and get earlier data by changing the date in the URL…

Earlier this month, I wrote a set of scripts that pull data from the RSS feeds of popular news websites (CNN, BBC, the Guardian) and check them for the next five days for their presence in Technorati. The BBC scripts are sufficiently debugged that I’m putting them on Harvard’s server, and I’ll post a link to them here, and on my research page on Monday, just before I leave for India, so you can keep track of what bloggers are amplifying from the BBC and the New York Times.

With believable data, I decided to spend a bit of time today doing analysis. (Feel free to play along - the data I’m referring to is here - it’s sorted by most popular stories, so you can see what stories from the BBC are currently getting the most blogjuice.)

Of the 504 stories posted to BBC RSS feeds in the past five days, the average story was posted 2.5 times to weblogs. (That’s a bit deceptive - 2.5 is the mean. Both the median and mode are zero, which is to say that less than half of those BBC stories were blogged at all.)

While bloggers are fast, it takes us a while to adopt a story. Stories posted the same day I ran the script had 0.89 posts per story. Stories a day old had 2.28. There was little change for two day old stories - 2.38. Three and four day old stories had 3.28 and 4.09 posts per story, respectively. My guess - it takes 1-2 days for stories to make it off the feeds into the blogs of people who follow those feeds closely. Then there’s an amplification effect where people read about the stories on popular blogs and reblog on their blogs. (Obviously, that’s a huge generalization from a small data set - once I’ve got a bit more data, I’ll try to address this issue in a more convincing fashion.)

Want to get a story into the blogosphere? While the front page of the BBC is a great way to get noticed - 75% of stories that run there get blogged at least once, averaging 5.57 posts per story - it’s got nothing on the technology section, where 90% of stories get blogged, averaging 10.3 posts per story. Rounding out the top five most popular sections are health, sci/tech and the Middle East. (Again, disclaimer about a small data set applies. And again, I’ll try this over a month’s worth of data sometime soon.)

One of the reasons I wanted to try this analysis on the BBC is that their Africa coverage is so consistently good. In some of my previous work, I’ve made the argument that mainstream media (MSM) tends to focus on wealthy nations at the expense of poor ones - BBC is the one MSM I’ve found that doesn’t exhibit this bias.

That said, bloggers do appear to exhibit a bias against African news, which ranks second or third from last in percentage of stories blogged and number of blogposts per story. (19.35% of stories blogged, 0.8 posts per story, less than a third of the average blogpost per story count.) But African stories aren’t the least popular - UK News stories are (17.54% of stories blogged, 0.63 posts per story.) Some possible explanations for this - the BBC runs a lot of UK news - 114 stories in the period watched, versus roughly 32 for each other region. And many bloggers reading BBC may be turning to it as an “alternative voice” for international stories, rather than for domestic coverage.

More weirdness - BBC’s entertainment and business sections are far less popular than I would have thought. Again, I wonder if this is a result of lefty bloggers coming to the BBC for world news at the expense of other sections. Would love folks thoughts on why this behavior might be exhibited - I’ll work to see whether I see the same results in other data sets.

Here are the results I came up with earlier today - apologies for formatting, but the Harvard blog software doesn’t always like tables:

analysis of bbc RSS/Technorati data from 1/27/2005

(extremely preliminary results)

sorted by % of stories picked up by bloggers

section % blogged posts per story

technology 90% 10.3

front page 75% 5.57

health 69.23% 4

science/nature 63.63% 3.73

middle east 45.83% 2.76

asia-pacific 43.58% 1.15

business 42.86% 0.93

americas 41.95% 1.68

entertainment 35.29% 0.59

south asia 32.25% 1.32

europe 29.41% 1.61

africa 19.35% 0.8

uk news 17.54% 0.63

sorted by blog posts per story

section % blogged posts per story

technology 90% 10.3

front page 75% 5.57

health 69.23% 4

science/nature 63.63% 3.73

middle east 45.83% 2.76

americas 41.95% 1.68

europe 29.41% 1.61

south asia 32.25% 1.32

asia-pacific 43.58% 1.15

business 42.86% 0.93

africa 19.35% 0.8

uk news 17.54% 0.63

entertainment 35.29% 0.59

Some quick methodology thoughts, for you methodology geeks out there:

Establishing canonical URLs is a real problem. BBC stories tend to have two URLs per story - the URL is of the form: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/4194669.stm. That “2″, right after the co.uk/ sometimes also appears as a “1″. I’m guessing this serves as an edition number. Some stories appear only as 1’s, others only as 2’s, some as both. To get comprehensive counts on Technorati, I’m searching for both 1’s and 2’s and summing the results.

If only it were always that simple. The New York Times uses a content management system that coats URLs in cruft and batter-fries them. Some bloggers remove the cruft before blogging, others don’t. And there’s a special feed that many bloggers use that allows linking to stories in a way that they won’t get hidden behind the for-pay firewall. This makes tracking how a story appears in the blogosphere very, very difficult.

What would help a great deal is if a search for a partial URL within the Technorati API matched all subsidiary URLs. For instance, if I could search for “http://news.bbc.co.uk” and get the thousands of links that begin with that string, doing the sorting on my own to identify which story is which (seizing on the seven integer + .stm string, for instance). The API doesn’t seem to work that way - do that search and you get about 100 BBC matches, instead of the 800+ you’d get by searching URL by URL.

I sat down with Dave Sifry last weekend and he seemed to think the behavior I’m seeing is a bug - he expects an abbreviated URL search to return all the subsidiary pages. I chatted briefly with Kevin Marks over IRC today, and he thinks the behavior is due to the API polling a smaller, faster DB for searches for “popular” URLs, rather than polling the more comprehensive DB. (Makes a lot of sense - we did that both at Tripod and at Lycos to improve catalog speed.) Technorati’s been hugely helpful with this research and I’m sure we’ll find a solution at some point soon.

A couple of blog readers have asked me about the gear I’m using to do my podcasts. Happy to share, in the hopes that it might be helpful to anyone else thinking about trying the experiment.

I use a Powerbook G4 as my main computer, and generally try to use open source software whenever it’s reasonable to do so, so my choices reflect those biases.

I’m bringing audio into my Mac using a microphone pre-amp box made by M-Audio, called the MobilePre USB. It accepts inputs from two XLR mics, or one mic and one 1/4″ source, or from a stereo (mini) mic jack, and gives level control for those two sources. It connects to the Mac via the USB port, and draws its power from the USB port as well. The price was right (about $150 USD from an online retailer), and setup was extremely easy. My only gripe - it doesn’t provide very much amplification - I’m running it turned up pretty high to get a good signal. This may well be the tradeoff for the fact that I don’t have to carry a separate power supply for it. The box appears to be pretty sturdy, and is about the size of a paperback novel - it fits nicely into my briefcase.

At home, I’m using a pair of AKG C1000S microphones, low-end studio microphones from my days as a musician. They’re cheap by audiophile standards (about $200 USD each) and pretty versatile. But they’ve got a record of being a little fragile, so when I’m recording remotely, I’m using a Shure SM57, a cheap ($80 USD) microphone known for its indestructability.

I’m recording into Audacity, an open source sound editing program that’s capable of outputting to mp3. Idiot that I am, I’ve been recording at a very high sampling rate - I’m going to try doing my next recording at 11Khz, which should give me decent sound quality and much smaller files to work with.

In other words, if you’ve got a Mac and want to get started doing this, you should be able to spend less than $250 USD and get gear that allows you to do this in a way that sounds significantly better than plugging a mic into your mic jack. Not that there’s anything wrong with that approach either…

In thinking about how to build an index of bridgeblogs (weblogs intended for a global, as well as local audience) from around the world, I’ve been subscribing to a couple of new feeds: all photos on Flickr tagged “ghana”, every page tagged “ghana” on del.icio.us, any page on Technorati that mentions “ghana” and any page with an explicit “ghana” tag on Technorati.

An early observation - hand-tagging kicks the keyword searching’s butt when it comes to identifying relevant results. For the last week, every flickr and del.icio.us post tagged as “ghana” has been about Ghana, in one fashion or another; that’s true for about 20% of the keyword matches on Technorati. Lots of Technorati keyword matches pull up Ghana as one of a hundred nations listed on a post or a story (pull-down menus to select country of origin are particularly problematic) - others have a passing reference to Ghana, usually in the context of 419 scams, or as a placeholder to mean “godforsaken poor nation I’ve never been to and know nothing about”.

I’m also discovering a lovely form of blog spamming. Say you want to “own” the keyword “banking” in engines like Google. One popular strategy seems to be to take a number of legitimate articles about banking, written in the trade press, and post them in their entirity to your blog. Link your blog in multiple places to the page you’re trying to promote. I have no idea if it works to improve your Google juice, but it’s sure frustrating to me - I see you linking to an article about Ghanaian banking and assume you’re maintaining an interesting blog on international financial systems, while you’re mostly trying to promote your mortgage refinancing business.

None of this is Technorati’s fault - these problems are true for any keyword-based search engine. And manual tagging systems benefit from the fact that they’re usually too young to have anyone spamming them. But this whole experience is making me very hopeful that David Weinberger is right, and that user-created “folksonomies” are going to revolutionize how we use the net.

That said, it’s hard to beat keyword-surfing for pure serendipitious fun. I just found a post about Ghanaian barber shop signs on Ghost of a Flea, cribbed in turn from robot action boy. It leads to a gallery exhibition of Ghanaian barber shop signs, as well as barber and hair-braiding signs throughout the region.

(Some cultural context: in a number of West African cities, some barbers ply their trade by walking around a neighborhood, carrying a sign and a box filled with combs and scissors. They bang a pair of scissors against the wooden sign to attract attention. When they find a customer, the box becomes a stool to sit on, and the customer can point to a model hairstyle on the sign. It’s an instant barber shop - just add customers.)

The gallery exhibition, in turn, sent me downstairs with my camera to document one of my prized posessions, a barber shop bought by my roommates Stephanie and Raoul in Accra in 1993. They’d concluded (very wisely) that Ghanaian barber signs were going to be one of the next big art trends and started walking around Accra, offering barbers $10-20 for their signs, which was usually a subtantial profit over what they’d paid for them. They filled a crate with signs, sent them home to Chicago, and may well have sold several of them to the gallery mentioned above. My sign was too big to fit in the crate, so it lived in my Accra living room until mid-1994, when I brought it home in my suitcase, and it now graces my Lanesboro living room.

On my last few trips to Ghana, I’ve seen very few of these barber shop signs. I get the sense that there are fewer barbers who walk around with clippers, a bench and a sign, and more fixed-location barber shops these days. I wonder to what extent that trend is due to American and European art collectors? Or maybe Accra’s barbers have simply given up hope that I will ever cut off my (rapidly thinning) long hair…?

Technorati tags ghana, folksonomy.

My friend Daoud Kuttab spoke at Berkman yesterday. Daoud’s an amazingly innovative journalist, blogger and media entrepreneur - I’ve written about him previously here and Xeni from Boing Boing has a piece here. His talk covered the history of Ammannet and its relationship to other journalism projects in the region, and he had a good deal of practical advice for Berkman as we start looking into doing more radio production.

I recorded his talk and the Q&A session that followed after. It’s available as a massive single MP3 (48MB) or as two (lower-quality) pieces, the talk and the following Q&A (15MB and 18MB respectively).

A warning - the talk was recorded in a relatively noisy room with people asking questions into a single mic - I’ve done my best to make it listenable, but it’s far from broadcast quality. Apologies in advance.

Okay, so this is my first official podcast. And, since it addresses the issue of whether or not podcasts are a good idea since so many people can’t access them, I’m including a text post that covers some of the same ground.

Taran Rampersand, fellow Worldchanging contributor, takes me to task for jumping on the podcasting bandwagon. (I’m already feeling the karmic implications of my bandwagon jumping - as I sat down to record my first official podcast, my iPod died an ugly death. Coincidence? You be the judge.)

Taran points out - correctly - that podcasting is currently unaccessible for most people in the developing world:

For one, you may have to dial a long distance number. That sucks. The other part is really the audience. In a world where the lowest common denominator is a 56k dial up modem (and even lower in some places), sound bytes suck because of the sheer size.

How many people do you know well enough to wait around waiting for 10-15 minutes or longer to hear speak for 3 minutes? Plainly this is an issue. So while the blogosphere goes googoo over mobcasting and podcasting, it’s really not helping with the digital divide. It’s increasing it. We have a bunch of well off people in the developed world able to communicate with each other better. Wow.

I’m sympathetic to Taran’s first objection - it’s totally unreasonable to expect people in developing nations to call into the US to record podcasts. I’m slightly less sympathetic to his second objection - when I pull down my email from cybercafes around the developing world, people at the terminals next to me are pulling down music and video. Yes, it’s slow, and yes, it’s expensive, but it is, in many cases, the content that compells people to get online.

And I’m with Taran, more or less, that the introduction of new technologies more often increases, rather than decreases, the digital divide. It was one thing to tackle the question, fifteen years ago, of how to get email access to everyone on the planet. Now that the bar is set at streaming video, it’s a much more difficult challenge to put everyone on a level playing field.

That said, I think audio blogging could have a substantial, positive impact for the developing world, if we figure out the way to solve a few technical challenges. One challenge that needs addressing - putting servers either in developing nations, where they are local calls, or putting them on the end of VOIP links (which generates a set of legal issues.) Obviously, we’ve also got to get smart about cacheing and compression as well, to alleviate bandwidth concerns.

But the upsides could be substantial. Many more people in the developing world have cellphones than have regular access to the Internet. Many more are used to expressing their opinions by calling in to talk radio shows than by writing blog posts. And many people with smart things to say have low or no literacy - being able to blog by phone goes a long way towards giving people who can’t write well a public voice.

So I’m cautiously optimistic. Sort of the way I feel about this first podcast - I’m sure you’ll let me know whether or not it worked.

Abraham McLaughlin, the Christian Science Monitor’s Africa correspondent, is in southern Sudan, reporting on the future of the region in the light of the peace agreement between the Sudanese government and the SPLA. He’s been maintaining a blog while on assignment, sometimes covering small details that don’t make it into his stories, sometimes offering personal thoughts on what’s happening that aren’t appropriate in a journalistic context.

Today’s post is fantastic, and tells about a bicycle ride he took around the village of Rumbek, the defacto capital of Southern Sudan. It includes short videos of dancers preparing for a celebration to welcome former rebel leader John Garang back to town, and two videos of women cooking. Probably twenty seconds of video combined, they provide information on southern Sudan that’s almost impossible to get from a conventional newspaper article.

At the Weblogs, Journalism and Credibility conference this past weekend, I found myself sympathetic to two (possibly contradictory) points of view. One, articulated by Jim Wales and Sam “SJ” Klein (both avid wikipedians), as well as Dave Winer, was the idea that passionate citizens might be able to do a good part of the hard work that newspapers do. The other, articulated by Jill Abramson of the New York Times and Rick Kaplan of MSNBC, is that certain types of journalism, especially international news, will always require expensive, overseas newsrooms and large budgets.

It’s my fondest hope that citizens around the world will start taking responsibility for reporting news. Not only will more news - and different news - get covered, but citizen journalists will become skilled media critics and intelligent media consumers. That said, it’s going to be a long time before there are a lot of bloggers in southern Sudan. And, in the meantime, I’m deeply grateful that CSM pays for McLaughlin to be in Rumbek, and doubly grateful that he’s willing to act like a blogger, sharing his travel photos, as well acting as a journalist.

What could be better than Abraham McLaughlin blogging from Rumbek? McLaughlin and CSM helping introduce blogging to Rumbek, possibly by sharing equipment or teaching classes (something I’ve been trying to do in my Africa travel.) News will happen somewhere on the African continent, and McLaughlin will find himself in Senegal or Sao Tome. There will be lots of interesting stories in southern Sudan, but we probably won’t hear about them, because there’s no one there to report.

In my ideal future, this never happens - everyone’s part of the conversation, and we hear about what’s going on in southern Sudan because there are people in southern Sudan. (We hear about it only if we’re listening - it’s still possible, and likely, that someone will speak and we won’t listen. Or we’ll try to listen and be held back by barriers of language or culture.) It’s a distant future, but it’s one worth working towards. And, in the meantime, it’s worth expressing a little gratitude towards the Christian Science Monitor and everyone else who help us keep in touch with the far corners of the world.

I think David Weinberger may be pioneering a new path for unemployed philosophers (something I’ve been many times in my career): standup philosophy. David was the speaker at last night’s dinner for Weblogs, Journalism and Credibility, and he rocked. One of the people sitting with me had seen Lenny Bruce at his prime and favorably compared David to the late comedian…

Ben Walker recorded the talk and has it posted on his site. It’s rowdy, fun, a little scattered… and very, very smart.

Hey, Dr. Weinberger! Do the one where you prove black is white! I love that bit…

Update: Ben writes to tell me that David’s talk is so popular that it’s been killing his server. So now Berkman is hosting it. You can download it here or stream it here (in RealAudio).