Earlier today, I posted the first Global Voices podcast, an interview with friend, fellow WorldChanging contributor, and all around terrific person, Dina Mehta. Dina was kind enough to serve as guinea pig as I fiddled with the various technology that make this sort of broadcast possible. I hope it was a useful warmup for her - she’s on Chris Lydon’s inaugural radio show on WGBH Boston this evening…

I’m posting the audio for our interview here (30 minutes, 17MB, mp3) in part because it’s a good piece and I want you to hear it, and in part because I’m still debugging WordPress and RSS enclosures. WordPress is supposed to automatically sense that a post contains a link to an audio file and create an enclosure of that mp3 that can be read by a podcast aggregator like iPodder. The WordPress installation on Global Voices didn’t do that - I’m hoping it will work here.

Two things that are very attractive about podcasts:

Sudan’s state prosecutor, Mohamed Farid, has ordered that Paul Foreman, head of the Dutch branch of Médecins Sans Frontières’s team in Sudan, be arrested in conjunction with a report MSF published on rape as a weapon of war in Sudan. He was released on bail later today, but has been prohibited from leaving the country. If convicted of “publishing a false report”, Foreman could face three years in a Sudanese prison.

The report, titled “The Crushing Burder of Rape: Sexual Violence in Darfur”, was based on 500 cases of rape treated by MSF doctors over a 4 1/2 month period. The report details 300 of these cases, with detailed witness statements for several cases. The number of rapes MSF treated suggests that rape has been widespread as a weapon of war in the Darfur region. More than 80% of the victims interviewed for the report said that they had been raped by soldiers or militamen.

According to Farid, under Sudanese law, Foreman should have consulted with the Humanitarian Aid Commission before publishing this report. (It’s unclear whether any other relief groups working in Sudan have coordinated with the Aid Commission before publishing reports.)

Upset by the contents of the report, the Sudanese government has demanded the medical records of the women treated for rape - MSF has refused, citing medical confidentiality. (Given evidence that the Sudanese government has colluded with Janjiwid forces, it would be utterly absurd for MSF to reveal the identity of these women to the government.) Given MSF’s unwillingness to share these confidential records, the Sudanese government has concluded that MSF’s report was fabricated and has pressed charges against Foreman.

MSF has confirmed the arrest and expressed outrage about the Sudanese government’s intimidation. MSF has worked in Sudan for over twenty years and provides medical care throughout the country, not just in Darfur. Commentators speculate that the Sudanese government knows it can’t afford to throw MSF out of the country, but is lashing out at the program director due to anger over the report.

Joanne Mariner, in an October 2004 article, points out that rape is a war crime, as well as a human rights violation, though governments often try to explain rape as a “private crime”, committed by wayward soldiers. She notes that, as of October 2004, the Sudanese government had acknowledged only two incidents of rape in the Darfur conflict, and dismissed suggestions of widespread sexual violence as “fabrication”.

The image above is from Human Rights Watch’s “Darfur Drawn” series. Drawn by a 13-year old, it depicts the rape of a Darfuri woman by a Sudanese soldier.

As I spend more and more time on the Global Voices project, I’m starting to realize that I’m grossly underqualified to work on this project on one critical axis: language skills. Like many Americans, I speak only one language with any degree of fluency. I can make myself understood in Spanish, and order breakfast in French, but I can’t hold a conversation in either of these languages.

As I realize the wealth of opinion, insight and perspective in Iranian, Polish, Brazilian and Chinese blogs, I find myself praying that someone will - quickly - figure out the technical miracle of machine translation. (I’m not optimistic - I spent far too much of my undergraduate years and early tech career beating my head against artifical intelligence projects to believe that good machine translation is right around the corner.)

So while we recruit bloggers from all corners of the globe to help us navigate unfamiliar languages, I’m finding myself spending more and more time looking at photos from countries where I don’t speak the language. I’m trying to find people doing interesting photoblogs from nations we don’t hear enough about in American/European media, perhaps for a feature on Global Voices.

Jad Madi got in touch with me a few weeks back, when he saw some of my Jordan photos on Flickr and asked to use some of them as part of a project he’s putting together for Jordan Planet, an amazing group blog put together by friend Isam Bayazidi. Jad has an excellent collection of photos of Jordan, titled “My Lovely Country”, which serve as a great visual introduction to this beautiful nation. (My last trip to Jordan had me in the country for less than three days, which is a crime. I’m looking forward to my next trip to the region and hope I have time to meet the whole circle of Jordanian bloggers…)

I just discovered Cronicasmoviles yesterday, when Pablo Altclas posted a comment to Global Voices. Using his mobile phone, Pablo maintains an ongoing visual diary of his native Buenos Aires. His photos are extremely painterly - he manages to turn the disadvantages of his chosen medium into a distinctive style. Taken as a whole, the photos paint a compelling (though dark) portrait of his city.

Robin Elaine Taylor, on the other hand, I’ve been following for a long time. She’s living in Bamako and doing tons of work for Geekcorps Mali. Travelling around the region or just around her neighborhood, she’s got a great eye and a gift for capturing details that help explain the region to neophytes… and make old Africa hands like me heartsick…

My latest passtime is searching Flickr for photos of places I’m fascinated by, but have never been to. My visions of Chisinau, Moldova - shaped by Tony Hawks’s funny, but somewhat unsympathetic “Playing the Moldovans at Tennis” - have been transformed by “kapooosha”’s photos of her family home. (Plus she got to see Revenge of the Sith in Moldova. How cool is that!)

Who should I be following in putting together a photo roundup like GV? (Aside from obvious choices, like Kevin Sites.) Help me out, people…

I love the Macintosh on an abstract, conceptual, idealized basis. The actual, physical Macintosh I encounter in reality often frustrates the heck out of me. This is made more embarrasing by the fact that I’ve developed a reputation around Berkman as a Mac evangelist. (I’ve gained this reputation largely by snickering at Windows users when they wrestle with technical problems I no longer encounter since moving back to the Mac two years ago…)

Wherever I go, I carry a little white plastic widget with me - the adaptor that lets my road-beaten Powerbook talk to a VGA monitor. This lets me attach my Mac to a projector and give a talk. At home, it lets me attach the Mac to the large monitor I bought a few months ago when I discovered my eyesight was getting markedly worse. Needless to say, I’ve been pretty distraught to discover that the adaptor is getting dysfunctional in its old age - unless I twist it in increasingly complicated ways, I get a picture that’s deep blue, or lacks red, or is an odd shade of green.

So I called my Mac retailer of choice and ordered a new widget… and, a few days later, received something that looked exactly right, but didn’t fit into my monitor port. A month of travel intervened, and now, my first “free” day at home in a month, I called to get the right part. “That’s the only one that exists, sir.” After about half an hour, we established that I have an “old” Powerbook - one manufactured in January 2003 - rather than a current Powerbook, and that parts for “old” Powerbooks weren’t available through retailers.

I called the Apple Store and discovered that they, too, don’t sell “old” adaptors. They sent me to the parts department, who denied for half an hour that there was ever an alternative port design for the Powerbook. Finally, he conceded that there was an old Apple cable called an “RGB to VGA” (actually, it’s a form of mini-DV to VGA, but let’s not quibble) and offered to sell me one for the miraculously low figure of $16.80, including shipping. (This is truly miraculous, as the last time I tried to buy something from Apple - an “X” key, to repair damage to my keyboard - they quoted me a $800 service fee. I repaired it myself with funtack.)

So I asked to buy three - one for travel, one for the home monitor, one for backup. Nope. It’s a replacement part, and they’ll only send me one. I’ll need to get Rachel - who’s got the same machine - to order another one, and will keep my eyes open for folks with old-skool 12″ Powerbooks to see if they can order my third.

For anyone coming from a search engine: If you’re trying to find a VGA adaptor for a pre-September 2003 Macintosh PowerBook G4, the part number is 922-4554. The Apple Store will not sell it to you - call the support phone number and ask for the part specifically, by number.

You’d think, by the end of this runaround, I’d be pissed at Apple. And I am. But mostly, I’m thinking about buying a new Mac, when finances permit. Because the truth is, as much as Mac’s hardware, service and IPR policies surrounding iTunes frustrate me, nothing could get me back to the sorts of tech hell I used to inhabit when I was on either Windows or Linux.

I watched Rebecca wrestle with Windows XP the other day (it had spontaneously decided to prohibit her from using any of her web browsers) and realized how much of my life I lost to fixing either my Windows laptop, or the Windows boxen at the Geekcorps’ offices around the world. I never wasted quite as much time with Linux, as I only used it as a development environment, but I remember watching much smarter friends lose days on end getting Linux to see their external wireless card or their internal microphone. (Lots of those friends seem to be carrying Macs these days.)

Someone observed that the real problem with Microsoft is that their operating systems have taught users that it’s normal for software to crash catastrophically. I’d argue that the real problem is that Microsoft’s OS is so unusable that Mac’s mediocre service and quirky hardware look so good in comparison.

Committee to Protect Bloggers is organizing a “Media Fast” today to call attention to Mojtaba Saminejad’s hunger strike. Mojtaba, an Iranian blogger, was arrested in November 2004 for reporting on the arrest of three Iranian bloggers - he’s being held at Tehran’s Gohar Dashat prison, which has a bad reputation for abusing detainees.

CPB is encouraging bloggers to fast in solidarity, or, at least to call attention to Mojtaba’s situation and strike. They’ve got more information on Mojtaba’s arrest and a page about the strike and the Media Fast.

Mongolia’s presidential election is taking place today, and former Prime Minister, Nambariin Enkhbayar, looks slated to win. His party - the Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party - is the former communist party, and his popularity reflects a communist-era nostalgia that’s been a force in Mongolian politics since shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union. On the other hand, the Mongolian president is less powerful than the Prime Minister - Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj - who represents the relatively liberal democrats.

There’s no reason to expect any fireworks around the Mongolian election - as we saw with the Kyrgyz parliamentary elections - as there have been multiple free elections in the country, and power has changed hands, unlike in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, where powerful leaders (had) ruled for long periods of time. And, indeed the election isn’t getting much coverage.

But the last line of the story Reuters ran on the Mongolian election caught my eye. It reads:

“Genghis Khan, born around 1167, unified disparate Mongolian tribes to create a lethal, fighting force that rode roughshod over China and Central Asia and forged a short-lived empire that reached as far west as Poland and Hungary.”

So let me get this straight: a critical piece of context for an article on contemporary Mongolian politics is the nation’s 800 year old military history? It’s like finishing a story about Tony Blair’s recent parliamentary victory with a paragraph about the Norman conquest.

(Okay, to be fair - maybe the Mongolians bring the Khan connection on themselves. When I was last in Ulaanbaatar, I stayed in the Chinggis Khan hotel, drank Chinggis vodka and generally got all the Khan I could handle.)

Let me offer a bit of contemporary Mongolian trivia to balance Reuters’ useful bit of historical trivia: Mongolians have become the dominant force in Japanese sumo wrestling.

When I was in Japan two weeks ago, I was lucky enough to catch the second day of the May sumo tournament (basho). The highlight of the afternoon was watching Yokozuna (top-ranked wrestler) Asashoryu demolish his opponent, grabbing him by the belt and flipping him over his hip a few seconds after the match began. Today, Asashoryu won his fifteenth match of the basho, and now ties an interesting sumo record - he’s won 12 Emperor’s Cups (the prize for winning a basho), tying him with Musashimaru for the most Cups won by a non-Japanese wrestler.

A Mongolian, originally named Dolgorsuren Dagvadorj, Asashoryu is one of the most dominant wrestlers sumo has seen in recent years. And he’s not alone. Early last year, WebJapan reported that 53 of the 693 professional sumo wrestlers in Japan were foreign-born, and 35 of the 53 were from Mongolia. At the most senior Maku-uchi ranks, the Mongolian presence is even more obvious: Russia, Georgia and Bulgaria each have produced a sumo wrestler currently competing at the sport’s top level - by contrast, there are seven Mongolians in the sport’s most challenging division.

The last wave of foreign wrestlers who shook up sumo were Pacific Islanders - mainly Hawaiians - who were notable in part due to their sheer size. Konishiki - now a popular entertainer in Japan - was almost 600 pounds when he fought; Akebono and Musashimaru weren’t much lighter.

The Mongolians look tiny in comparison. Asashoryu isn’t exactly skinny, but at 145kg (319 pounds), he’s a petite guy who wins with skill and technique, not sheer power. Ama, one of my favorite Mongolian wrestlers weighs in at only 115kg (253 pounds)… slightly lighter than I am. They’re tons of fun to watch as they pivot, throw and slap much larger men down to the dirt floor of the dohyo.

Why are the Mongolians so good at this eminently Japanese sport? Well, turns out it’s a Mongolian sport as well. Visit a Mongolian picnic and you’ll see young men grabbing each other in informal wrestling matches, the same way Americans would throw a frisbee around or Indians would set up a wicket and play pickup cricket.

Bayirldax, traditional Mongolian wrestling, has rules very similar to sumo, and is extremely popular, both as part of the annual Naadam festival, and throughout the year. Asashoryu is part of a proud and successful Mongolian wrestling family - his success in Japan is both a source of pride in Mongolia, and seen as a natural outgrowth of his family’s wrestling prowess.

So good luck with the elections, Mongolia, land of Yokozuna Asashoryu.

I’m in Amman, Jordan for the next three days (well, 54 hours remaining…) for a meeting of Open Society’s Information program. One of our guests at the meeting this morning was Isam Bayazidi, an open source hacker, wikipedian and blogger. He’s helped the OSI team get some understanding of the dynamics of weblogging in the Middle East, along with rockstars like Daoud Kuttab of Ammannet and women’s rights activist Ra’ida al-Zu’bi.

I’ve been reading a couple of Jordanian bloggers regularly - Mental Mayhem, Sabbah, Jad Madi - but I wasn’t aware of Jordan Planet, a fantastic aggregator of english-language blogs from Jordan. Not only does it have great content, it’s very technically impressive - Isam tells me he’s using Drupal to aggregate RSS feeds, and a clever Atom to RSS script to feed Blogger blogs to Drupal. Very elegant…

We spent a while talking about why so many Arabic speakers are blogging in English in Jordan, and throughout the region. Many bloggers from the region have a technical background, which requires good English comprehension, so it’s unsurprising that they’re fluent. What did surprise me were the explanations offered by some of our discussants: that some authors chose to write in English because a) many of the subjects they wanted to talk about didn’t have well-defined terms in Arabic and b) that writing in classical Arabic - so that it would be understood by writers throughout the region - rather than colloquial Arabic - which varies from region to region - seemed uncomfortable when discussing personal, opinionated, bloggy matters.

(I get into trouble every time I try to make generaizations about Arabic, a language I don’t speak or read, so apologies if I’m wrong on linguistic details - I’m doing my best to convey other people’s opinions and impressions.)

The upside of the decision of many Arabic speakers to write in English is that it’s easy to get opinions and personal views from a part of the world that Americans think they know a lot about and actually know very little about. Glad that my aggregator grows a little fatter every time I come to this sort of a meeting.

As Rebecca and I work to flesh out the Global Voices catalog, we’re finding different kinds of bridgebloggers in different nations. In countries where there’s a well established blogosphere - like Kenya or Bahrain - we’re finding a wide range of indigenous bloggers, some working in the tech industry, some journalists, some expatriates.

In other countries, where blogging is less widespread, we sometimes discover that there are only one or two bloggers talking about the country. Sometimes that person is an expatriate aid worker, like Yvette Lopez in Somaliland. Other times it’s a non-resident expert, like Nathan Hamm of Registan.net. A Peace Corps volunteer in Uzbekistan until 9/11, Nate speaks Uzbek and Russian and is able to contextualize and translate events in Central Asia for a global audience.

Interested in the recent events in Andijan, the BBC interviewed Nate on his impressions of the current political situation in the Fergana Valley. While the interview hasn’t aired yet, you can hear it on Registan as an mp3.

Nate observes that, while many young Kyrgyz are finding information on the web, few young Uzbeks are using the web. (The heavy censorship of the ‘net by the Karimov government may have something to do with this…) Until more Uzbek bloggers come online, we’ll rely on Registan and Lydon Allin’s Scraps of Moscow to help us understand what’s going on in these part of the world. Thanks, guys…

Rebecca asked me to cover the Global Voices daily blog roundup yesterday. It was a good chance to discover just how powerful the Global Voices aggregator has gotten… and how much work it is to sort a coherent post out of the hundreds of voices we’re trying to pay attention to.

Our tools, at this point, are pretty primitive. We’re soliciting suggestions for new feeds to watch via the Media Wiki-based Bridge Blog Index, and tracking the feeds via Bloglines. (I managed to crash Firefox on my Mac several dozen times before realizing that I simply can’t load all the posts from the 439 feeds we’re currently trying to track - Firefox grabs multiple megs of memory for each Flickr picture involved, then slows to a crawl… So now I view the site country by country, region by region.)

Brief geeky digression. Non-geeks may skip the next two paragraphs, if you wish.

At some point this summer, I’d like to glue together a good, server-based aggregator (so that other folks can see our feeds) with a del.icio.us - like ability to tag and categorize feeds and the wiki-like ability of multiple users to suggest feeds for inclusion in the catalog. I’ve talked briefly with some wikifolks about an API for mediawiki… though increasingly I’m thinking I could get the functionality just from del.icio.us and a server-side aggregator.

I’m likely to try this based around the del.irio.us codebase, trying to get it integrated with an aggregator, either by writing that functionality or duct-taping it to an existing web-based aggregator. I’m looking at rnews and feed on feeds - anyone have experience with either, or suggestions for something else I should be looking at? (I’m more comfortable with Perl/PHP/Python than Java, so Java suggestions aren’t that helpful to me. And yes, I’ve thought about integrating with a client-side aggregator and rejected it for the simple reason that this tool needs to be used simultaneously by people on five different continents.)

In the process of surfing these global feeds, I’m finding that there are few corners of the globe where there isn’t at least one blogger. I’m surprised - and delighted - to find Avaiki blogging from the Cook Islands, a group of 15 islands in the South Pacific which is self-governing “in free association” with New Zealand. (In other words, Cook Islanders handle internal affairs, while New Zealand is responsible for external affairs, in consultation with the Islands goverment.) And Yvette Lopez, living and working in Somaliland, is helping me learn about this country emerging from the chaos of Somalia…

And while we initially had a tough time finding people reporting the events first-hand in Andijan, a number of Peace Corps volunteers are blogging regularly from Uzbekistan, providing key information on the situation. (Dee Warren of Noughsaid has just been ordered to leave her village in the Fergana Valley.) And Lyndon at Scraps of Moscow has been doing an incredible job of translating every single snippet he can find about Andijan in the Russian-language blogosphere.

Following links to the blog is also turning up amazing blogs to watch, like Blog Nnegh, a blog apparently in Tamazeight, a Berber language.

All these blogs make me want to get on a plane and meet more bloggers out there. All of which makes me sad that I’ve had to cancel my trip to South Africa later this month. I’d planned to speak at Commons-Sense, a conference associated with the launch of Creative Commons South Africa, but some personal issues have meant that I need to spend a bit more time at home, and I couldn’t make the travel work out for a shorter trip. I’ll be sorry to miss all the friends who are attending the conference and all the South Africa bloggers I’d hoped to meet, but hope we can do some blogger dinners when I’m in town in September.

Okay, off to Amman now…

I’m reassured that Dina finds India paradoxical as well - I worried that I was the only one. Travelling from Bangalore to Bombay, Rajastan and New Delhi earlier this year, I described India to friends as having the highest standard deviation of anywhere I’d ever been. That is to say, I’ve been to places much poorer than villages I saw in India, but I’ve never seen poverty in such proximity to widespread wealth.

Dina’s recent blogpost provides a great photographic example of this disparity. A cultural anthropologist based in Bombay, Dina often is asked by companies to study how products are used in different Indian environments. Blogging from a recent trip to a village in Utter Pradesh, Dina notes that the village has no electricity, no working phone lines, and six cellphones. She, on the other hand, is able to post her digital photos from her laptop via a CDMA phone:

And here I am sitting in this taxi with a laptop and my Reliance CDMA connection, being able to beam these images to the world in real time through my blog. India is a strange paradox!

(The photo is from Jaisalmer, in western Rajastan, February 10, 2005.)