Boing Boing featured a recent call for assistance from the current administration of Geekcorps. Evidently a couple of volunteers for posts in Ghana were forced to pull out and the current team is anxious to fill these positions. (As I’ve mentioned before, I no longer am connected to Geekcorps or IESC in any way. I heard about the volunteer shortage when I started receiving comments and questions about the Boing Boing post…)

One aspect of Wayan Vota’s quote in the Boing Boing post caught my eye: “We provide international airfare, expatriate housing, and a nice per diem, with the beauty of Accra, Ghana as an added bonus.”

The “nice per diem” was one of the issues that finally caused me to leave Geekcorps and its parent company, the International Executive Service Corps, a little over a year ago. When we founded Geekcorps in late 1999, part of the thinking behind the organization was that we wanted to create an experience more like being a Peace Corps volunteer and less like a consultant. We knew we couldn’t pay actual Peace Corps wages to people living in Accra, but we tried to keep costs down, both for budgetary and conceptual reasons.

During the seven programs in Ghana Geekcorps ran while I was involved with the organization, we provided volunteer lodging in the same building that housed our offices – we paid $1800 a month for a walled compound that included six bedrooms, living space and three offices. Each volunteer received approximately $550 a month, $50 of which was earmarked to pay a housekeeper/cook who lived on the property. In other words, volunteers got about $100 a week, a lot of money in Ghanaian terms, but not enough to save, turn a profit or pay expenses at home. (This presented a real obstacle for some potential volunteers. It’s hard to spend three months working for $100 a week if you’ve still got car or mortgage payments at home…)

After Geekcorps merged with IESC in 2001, we received a great deal of pressure to pay our volunteers more – specifically, to pay USAID per diem. Set by the State Department, “per diem” is what all government employees receive when travelling, domestically or abroad, for each day on the road. It includes one fee for lodging and another for “meals and incidental expenses” – there’s invariably a five star hotel in any town the US government sends people that will provide a room at the “USAID rate” – i.e., one dollar under the lodging per diem.

The current per diem for Accra is $102 for lodging – which will get you a room at the Labadi Beach or La Palm hotel at a USAID rate – and $54 for meals and incidental expenses. That sum, which adds up to $378 a week, is a lot of money in Africa. It might be what a short-term business traveller spends, but it’s a lot more than a “volunteer” needs to live in Accra. The added money in the pocket makes it easier for a volunteer to to hang out at more expensive, expat-oriented establishments… and spend less time hanging out with Ghanaian co-workers, at neighborhood joints, etc.

So why was our parent company upset that we wanted to save some money? To understand, you need to understand the odd way USAID compensates its contractors. Every organization that does a meaningful amount of business with USAID has a NICRA – a negotiated indirect cost recovery agreement. This basically means that the organization has negotiated an overhead rate on the work they do for the USG. Whatever “direct costs” an organization experiences – plane tickets for volunteers, housing costs, field staff – are billed to USAID, along with an added percentage of those costs, which compensate the organization for administration, marketing and other “indirect” expenses. In other words, if we paid $2000 for a plane ticket to Ghana, we were allowed to bill the US government for the plane ticket and an additional $600 for our “overhead” in purchasing that ticket.

(IESC’s overhead rate was greater than 30% when I left the organization – it may well be lower now, as the rate is periodically renegotiated. Said negotiation usually involves telling USAID how much money you spent directly and indirectly in the previous year and calculating the percentage. If your NICRA rate increases, it may make it harder for you to win US government contracts, but you’ll still get paid for the work you’ve done. It’s very hard to lose money on a US government contract… which is why so many US goverment contractors move to doing business solely with the government.)

Why did my boss want us to pay volunteers more? Because the organization got paid more for spending more. And because paying Geekcorps volunteers less than other IESC volunteers raised questions: Were Geekcorps volunteers less valuable than other IESC volunteers? Or were they underpaid? Or were IESC volunteers overpaid? Better to be consistent and pay the Geekcorps volunteers at maximum per diem, even if field staff thought this was counter to the cultural goals of the program.

I’m still pissed off by this, a year after leaving the organization. As a taxpayer, I’m annoyed that US government contractors are incented to waste my money. As a supporter of international development, I’m angry that the modest amounts of money the US earmarks for international development get carved up by organizations skilled at playing the USAID game before reaching people in the field. But mostly I’m sad that the organization and model I helped build – which hoped to do international development a little bit differently – is now doing international development the same way all other USAID contractors are.

Does this mean you shouldn’t consider a Geekcorps assignment if you’re an experienced database programmer free from June through September? Not at all. But it might mean that you should think of it less as a volunteering tour and more as an overseas consulting gig. Geekcorps no longer maintains Geekhalla – our group house in Accra – and volunteers don’t appear to be recruited in “classes”, who travelled and trained together, as we did in Geekcorps’ early days. Worse? Not neccesarily, but definitely different.

Chris Lydon is back on the air after a multiple-year hiatus of taking his show to the web. He’s recording the second pilot of his new radio show, Open Source, today, to be distributed by PRI.

I’m on hold right now, listening to him interview Rebecca MacKinnon, Hossein Derakhshan and a grab-bag of bloggers from around the world. I’ll try to come up with two or three coherent sound-bytes later in the hour, talking about recent research on media attention in the blogosphere… all of which is complicated a bit by my jetlag. (Yep, even after almost a decade of this lifestyle, I still find coming back from Japan screws up my sleep cycle.)

Now Ndesanjo Macha is on the line – cool! He makes the excellent point that his blog doesn’t need to reach Tanzanian farmers – he just needs to reach journalists and radio DJs in Tanzania to get his ideas and messages out. I’m interested to see who else Chris and Mary found from the Global Voices crew. And I’m thrilled to hear voices like Hoder’s and Ndesanjo’s on the air…

Update – the audio of our hourlong conversation is available here, in mp3.

I was thrilled to meet Kathy Gill at the WWW conference in Chiba. She gave a useful and interesting talk about how newspapers have and haven’t adopted RSS. She observes, helpfully, that the papers who haven’t adopted RSS have make their decisions on editorial grounds, not on technical ones, as other papers within the same ownership structure have enabled RSS. I’m very anxious to try to correlate my LpkC work to her lists of what papers do and don’t enable RSS.

Kathy did a nice job of covering my keynote address, as well as posting audio of everyone’s talks on her podcast. Thanks, Kathy!

I’ve been reading the feed for the del.icio.us “ghana” tag for the past few months – it’s a great way to keep up with Ghana throughout the blogosphere. There’s been an interesting surge of tagged articles on the theme of Ghana as a success story.

Of course, everyone takes a swipe, characterizing “success story” with the condemnatory clause “by African standards”. As a New York Times editorial puts it, “Ghana is a good kid in a really bad neighborhood… Ghana does not have insurgents running around its hinterlands dressed in wedding gowns and wigs (like Liberia and Sierra Leone) or 8-year-old rebel soldiers toting machine guns (Liberia, Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast).” In other words, it’s a success in comparison – but we’re comparing Ghana to nations that are basket cases.

This is the theme of a slightly more positive editorial in the Times (reblogged by the brilliant Howard French) a few weeks later, by Helene Cooper, a Liberian visiting Accra. Explaining why Ghana brings out the Liberian nationalist in her, she explains, “Even as I’m joining my Liberian expat friends in making fun of Ghanaians, I know exactly why we’re doing this. We are jealous. We’ll never say it out loud, but Ghana is what we Liberians aspire to.” In very basic terms, she talks about things Accra has that Monrovia doesn’t – electricity, running water, garbage collection… and a functional government that’s actually making some progress in fighting corruption.

The most positive of the articles that’s turned up in “delicious:ghana” lately is a piece in the Hong Kong Weekend Standard, which celebrates Databank, an exemplary Ghanaian financial services company, in the beginning of an article by Carol Pineau, calling attention to success stories – financial and otherwise – across the continent.

One of the consequences of Ghana’s success – comparative or otherwise – is that it’s become a frequent destination for refugees. For years, Ghana has hosted refugees from wars in West Africa – it’s hardly a surprise that refugees from Togo have been travelling across the border into Ghana. But it is astounding that refugees have travelled from Darfur – 3,000km, across five borders – to settle in Ghana. Ghana’s response – food, shelter, medical assistance and plans to set up a refugee camp.

If you want to judge the character of a person, judge him by how he treats people in need. It’s probably worth judging the character of a nation in a similar way. And again, Ghana’s a success story here. By anyone’s standards.

Belle Tseng from NEC has a terrific visual metaphor for a way to think about blog clustering. She shows us a mountain range, then cuts it off just below the peak with a level plane. The mountain peaks now look disconnected. If you move that plane lower, it’s clear that they’re all part of the same mountain.

This is the same strategy that her group is using for “Tomographic Clustering” of blog posts. Put the rank of a blog (through something like PageRank) on the y-axis of a graph. Draw connections between the different blogs showing which link to one another. Set the threshold fairly high and you don’t have much connection amongst the A-list. Let the threshold drop a bit lower – considering lower ranked blogs – and the blogs look much more interconnected. In other words, the “peaks” are authorities and the “valleys” are connectors. Very interesting, though hard to explain without visuals, so check out her paper.

Natalie Glance, one of the conference organizers, has a great paper on the US political blogosphere. She and a collaborator found a set of liberal and conservative blogs – self-identified – and did a close study of their linking behavior, looking to see a) whether the communities linked to each other and b) whether they linked internally, ala an “echo chamber”.

The results seem to indicate that blogs are part of some sort of “cyberbalkanization”. 91% of links to blogs linked to blogs of a similar persuasion. Conservative blogs were more likely to link to other conservative blogs than liberals to liberals – 82% of conservative blogs are linked to at least once in the set, while only 67% of liberal blogs are. Despite this disparity, both classes of blogs have roughly similar average numbers of outgoing links.

Using technorati, blogpulse and other ranking engines, Natalie and her collaborator found the conservative and liberal “a-lists”. They harvested posts for the top 20 in each list – 12,470 liberal posts, 10,414 conservative posts. Extracting all the links, excluding self-links, they found 1,511 left-left citations, 2,110 right-right, 347 right-left and slightly fewer left-right. While there were fewer conservative posts, there were more right-right links, implying that conservative bloggers link to each other significantly more than liberal bloggers, at least amongst the A-list.

Natalie then used a set of linguistic analysis tools – link and phrase correlations. There were no significant differences between the two communities – in other words, there wasn’t evidence that either the left or right blogospheres were more self-similar as regarding using the same phraseology or linking to the same sites.

Half of the posts in this set of A-list posts cite mainstream media sources. Across these sources, some are evenly cited from the left and the right – the New York Times, the Washington Post. The right showed a strong preference for Fox News, the National Review, the NY Post and the Washington Times; the left preferred the LA Times, Salon and the Boston Globe.

While that’s pretty predictable, the results regarding the mentions of specific political names are a little surprising. The left mentions Donald Rumsfeld and Zell Miller; the right mentions Dan Rather, Michael Moore, and Terry McAuliffe. In other words, there’s some evidence that people would rather tear down than build up…

Evidently, lefties find The Onion funnier than the right – 50 links from the left, 14 from the right. And there’s a set of comics – Day by Day, Cox and Forkum – that (as a card-carrying liberal) I’ve simply never encountered.

Very psyched to read the whole paper sometime when jetlag hasn’t left me half dead.

I’m blogging from the WWW conference in Chiba, where I’ve just given my talk, opening the day-long workshop on weblog ecosystems. (There’s a podcast of my talk online, thanks to Kathy Gill, who’s broadcasting the conference.) Kazunari Ishida from Tokyo University of Agriculture gave an interesting talk about “latent weblog communities”. He’s trying to detect communities of people who are talking about similar topics by looking for connected sets of links (connected bipartate graphs). He’s got an algorithm – Weak Pair – which does a bunch of matrix multiplication (which is well over my head) to try to find connected clusters of blog posts. The hope is to be able to introduce these groups and help them self organize into a catalog that would be a search engine alternative.

I’m interested in his term “whimsical links” – by which he means, links where a blogger is “off-topic”. I suspect it’s a mistake to conclude that every blog is on a single topic, but his results suggest that he’s able to find some small clusters where bloggers are on the same topic. He’s also had some success in finding multiple blogs from the same author, because they tend to all interconnect.

Shinsuke Nakajima from NAIST introduces three ways to think about key bloggers: topic-finders, agitators and summarizers. He talks most about the second two types and methods for detecting them. Summarizers, unsurprisingly, link to lots of people. Agitators can be found by looking for a drastic change in entries posted within a thread, or a drastic change in topic. Nakajima is interested in identifying influential bloggers so they could be used to complement mainstream websites or television. (He seems to believe that this would reduce bias in news. I’m skeptical) – he’s developed automated technique for identifying summarizers and agitators.

Something that caught my eye in Nakajima’s talk – his team is tracking 500k blogs, with 10m entries… but this set includes only 1 million links, which seems really small to me. Natalie Glance from Blogpulse confirms that this isn’t small at all, but typical in English blogs as well as Japanese language ones.

Ko Fujimora echoes this point in his talk about the new EigenRumor algorithm. His team is also tracking 10m entries from 305k sites, and discovers that only 16.5% blogs have one or more links. (In other words, there are a lot of journals out there…) Only 1.25% of blog posts link to other blogs and only 9.28% of blogs had links from one other blog… which might present a challenge for his ranking metric, EigenRumor. Unlike other ranking systems, EigenRumor ranks three scores: hub (the ability of a blogger to evaluate blogposts), authority (the ability of a blogger to create useful blogposts) and reputation (the ability of a blogger to provide posts in conformity with a community direction.)

The math is way, way beyond me, but folks here seemed to feel like EigenRumor could perform better than algorithms like PageRank in very small content sets, like linked communities of blogs.

More in a few moments, but I’m now trying to take notes on the next talk…

Friends at Intelliseek wondered whether I’d get any different results on my LpkC metric if I performed the search using their Blogpulse tool. The results I got were sufficiently different to be intriguing, but not so different that I’m questioning the validity of the metric.

The top ten of US and UK newspapers ranked by the Blogpulse LpkC is as follows:

x The Scotsman – 154.39
Christian Science Monitor – 147.28
x The Guardian – 122.38
New York Times – 96.46
The Washington Post – 94.87
The Washington Times – 91.31
San Francisco Chronicle – 66.58
x The Independent – 46.04
Boston Globe – 42.22
The Seattle Times/Post-Intelligencer – 32.51
(x – UK newspaper)

Those are precisely the same ten papers that rank highest in the Technorati study, though the ranking is somewhat different. The Scotsman, Edinburgh’s paper, leaps from 6th to 1st between the Technorati and Blogpulse studies. The Washington Times moves up from 9th to 6th, and the Boston Globe slides from 7th to 9th. Otherwise, the ordering of papers is unchanged.

Blogpulse clearly turned up more results than Technorati, and not just on Scottish newspapers. The mean increased from 4.45 to 11.87, the median from 1.41 to 6.36. (As I mentioned in an earlier post, I was having difficulties getting results for all papers with Technorati. I suspect once I figure out how to compensate for that problem, Technorati will turn up more results.)

The Wall Street Journal fares significantly worse in Blogpulse numbers than on Technorati – using the opinionjournal.com, the Journal ranks 69th, with an LpkC of 7.49, slightly above the median.

I’m looking forward to meeting Matt Hurst and Natalie Glance of Intelliseek at the Chiba conference in a couple of days. I’ll try to figure out if they’re secretly Scottish and skewing the statistics to benefit Edinburg’s papers…

I’ll post the results shortly. The hotel I’m in is blocking all secure ports, and I’m only set up to access my servers via SSL. (Grr.)

I was talking with a friend on the phone the other day, and he described some of my work as being about “very simple statistics”. I briefly took offense – while I’m not a trained social scientist, I sometimes use reasonably sophisticated statistical methods, and I try hard to make sure my work is statistically accurate and rigorous.

And then I realized that the few times my research has captured people’s interest – as with the recent interest in LpkC – it’s been because I’ve thrown out a very simple statistical observation, rather than a complex multivariable model. LpkC makes sense to people because they can do the math in their heads – GAP has largely failed to capture people’s imagination, I suspect, because it requires people to understand logarithmic regression. Perhaps my profound ignorance of advanced statistics is a feature, not a bug.

I’m getting ready for a speech in Chiba, Japan next week, at a workshop preceding the 14th International WWW Conference – I get to lead off a day-long workshop on “the Weblogging Ecosystem”. (If any of my readers are in Tokyo or Chiba, please email me at ethanzATgmailDOTcom – I’ll be in town from the 8th – 11th.) Looking at some of the paper topics submitted, I’m realizing that the gathering is going to be pretty long on sophisticated mathematical analysis. And so I’m redoubling my efforts to frame simple statistics on the topics I’m interested in: how old and new media pay attention to international news.

AlertNet (a humanitarian news service sponsored by the Reuters Foundation) and Factiva released a study in March that showed media attention to the December 26th tsunami “crowding out” other major humanitarian emergencies. They surveyed a set of relief professionals and asked them to name their top underreported humanitarian emergencies, then searched 200 english-language newspapers for stories about these crises and about the tsunami for six weeks after December 26th. While they found roughly 35,000 tsunami stories, they found 34,000 stories on the other ten crises, combined… over the past previous year.

While the study was attention-grabbing, it’s hardly a surprise for anyone who read Galtung and Ruge’s seminal 1965 paper, “The Structure of Foreign News”. The tsunami story featured many of the news factors Galtung and Ruge identified that make a story likely to gain significant attention: brief time duration, unexpectedness, an affect on wealthy people as well as poor people. Many of the stories Alertnet is studying are long stories – there’s no sudden development in the story of AIDS in Africa that makes for “news”, just an ongoing, predictable un-newsworthy crisis that affects poor people.

The question I’ve been trying to answer with my research these past two years – are the problems of media attention identified by Galtung and Ruge forty years ago getting any better now that bloggers are part of the media picture? I, and other cyberoptimists, like to believe that the ability of anyone to participate in the making of the news will help news “get better”.

But if “get better” means “pay more attention to stories the mainstream media ignores”, there’s not much evidence that this is happening. I repeated the AlertNet study using information from Blogpulse, checking to see how the eleven stories in question were covered by bloggers. (It’s impossible for me to accurately repeat the study without knowing the exact keywords the AlertNet study used – I haven’t been able to find a published paper listing those keywords, and AlertNet hasn’t yet been able to point me in the right direction. So I’m guessing. But I’ll fully disclose the bias of those guesses.)

Searching Blogpulse for mentions of tsunami from March 1, 2004 through February 28, 2005, I find 191,707 appearances. A quick examination of results suggests that at least one in ten is not about the December 26th tsunami. So I’ve ended up using a more restrictive boolean search – “tsunami AND (relief OR india OR indian OR “boxing day” OR 26 OR Indonesia OR “Sri Lanka” OR Thailand OR Aceh OR bangladesh OR disaster OR assistance”) – which yields 96,962 results.

Using searches designed to be generous (“uganda OR LRA or Lord’s Resistance Army” to match stories about the conflict in Northern Uganda, realizing that this is going to match stories about Uganda/Kenya soccer matches), I’ve checked the ten undercovered stories identified by AlertNet and found, collectively, 75,261 blog references over the past year… or 78% as many as the narrow search for tsunami references. In other words, even after I’ve stacked the deck to make bloggers look good, bloggers paid less attention to these undercovered stories – in comparison to attention paid to the tsunami – than mainstream media outlets did. Using the simpler search for tsunami as the denominator, and blogs wrote 39% as many stories about these ten undercovered stories than about the tsunami.

One possible explanation for these results that bloggers covered the tsunami with an intensity that dwarfed the mainstream media, and that blogger coverage of the 10 “ignored” stories looks paltry only in comparison to their massive coverage of the tsunami. And there’s some evidence for this argument.

How much did mainstream media report on the tsunami in relation to other major stories from March 2004 – February 2005? One way to measure this is to take an arbitrary, popular search term – “Iraq”, in this case – and see how other search terms compare to that base term. For the New York Times in the period we’re considering, “Iran” gets 20.53% as many search hits as “Iraq” (1160/5649). The same pair of terms on Blogpulse turns up a 20.19% comparison (66314/328470), a remarkably similar distribution. A few other terms have similar ratios – “frist” (as in “Senator Bill”) has a 3.8% “iraq ratio” on the NYT, and a 5% ratio on Blogpulse. Kerry (as in “Senator John”) gets 102.2% on NYT and 78.1% on Blogpulse.

But the ratios aren’t always that close, even on apparently similar stories. Afghanistan gets a 32.9% “iraq ratio” on the NYTimes, while registering a 15.1% on Blogpulse. Israel shows a similar disparity, with 38.7% on the Times and 25.1% on Blogpulse. (Just to be very clear – there’s no reason to assume that bloggers and the New York Times pay the same amount of attention to Iraq. Lacking a good way to compare the two, I’m grabbing an arbitrary reference point and doing comparisons to that arbitrary point. If bloggers and the Times cover Iraq to radically different degrees, it likely makes the comparisons I’m making here meaningless…)

And here’s where it gets weird. A search for “tsunami” on the New York Times in the yearlong interval we’re considering gets 503 matches, or 8.9% as many matches as searches for “Iraq”. The same search on Blogpulse yields 191,707 matches, or 58.3% as many mentions as “Iraq”. Even using the “adjusted” (narrower, boolean) search for “tsunami” on Blogpulse, we get 96,962 results, or 29.5% as many matches as searches for “Iraq”. If we use Iraq as our baseline, bloggers talked about the tsunami a great deal more than the New York Times did.

Alas, bloggers interest in other humanitarian stories doesn’t appear to follow the same pattern. While the Times covered Darfur heavily – 5% of the coverage that mentions Iraq – bloggers covered it with 2.1% as many mentions as Iraq. While Uganda has similar ratios in the two sets (1.8% of Iraq in the Times, 1.2% in Blogpulse), Haiti’s ratios are quite far apart – 6.6% in the Times versus 1.8% in Blogpulse.

Bloggers, as a whole, undifferentiated group (Blogpulse currently tracks 10.5 million blogs, most of which are personal journals, rather than citizens’ journalism) seem to pay less attention to the developing world than mainstream media sources. The map below is a graphic illustration of this:

This map compares media attention on Blogpulse and Google News over the past 14 days. Countries colored in red were represented more strongly in Blogpulse than in Google News – in other words, stories on Portugal represented a larger percentage of all stories on Blogpulse than they did on Google News. For the most part, bloggers paid more attention to Canada, Mongolia, Egypt, Turkey, Jordan, Iceland and a few southeast Asian nations (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia) than the news sources tracked by Google News did. (Mali, unfortunately, isn’t getting lots of blog traffic. Instead, lots of bloggers mistype the word “mail”. The same thing tends to happen with “Togo”.) Google News is paying more attention to most of Africa, Central Asia, Eastern Europe, Indonesia and some of Central America.

Given bloggers’ tendency to report on developing nations less than mainstream news sources, and the NY Times/Blogpulse comparisons using Iraq as a baseline, I’m tempted to conclude that bloggers reported on the AlertNet 10 under-reported stories no more frequently than mainstream papers. But it looks like bloggers seized the tsunami issue with passion, mentioning the tsunami, tsunami relief concerts and aid efforts to a greater degree than mainstream news sources.

This is heartening news for those of us who see blogs as a way to “hack” the media. As blogs become increasingly important to media professionals, breaking new stories and reinforcing others, blogs are serving as a feedback mechanism, letting professional media sources know what stories audiences are interested in and willing to hear more about. For groups that want to increase attention to “forgotten stories”, it may make sense to try to get bloggers to write and talk about these issues in the hopes of conveying reader interest to mainstream, professional news sources.

Why did the tsunami capture blogger attention to such a great degree? That’s a whole other blog post, and I need to pack for my trip to Japan. But I suspect that the number of personal narratives – by people affected by the disaster, people writing personal rememberances of friends lost, and people writing about their experiences doing relief work – resonated with bloggers to a degree that “straight news” stories rarely do. This explanation is an extension of the explanation I’ve been offering for the popularity of the Christian Science Monitor with bloggers – bloggers are story-tellers and like news that tells stories.

As always, this is research in progress and I’m not sure my conclusions are the right ones. Please feel free to set me straight, or join me in the process of figuring these results out.

The Global Voices weblog is rapidly becoming a great starting point for news from around the international blogosphere. Much of the credit goes to my colleage Rebecca MacKinnon, who has been banging out excellent world blog roundups each weekday. But we’re also getting terrific input from regional blog roundups, notably Ory Okolloh’s Kenya blog roundup, and Mack Zulkifli’s Southeast Asia blog roundup.

In the next couple of weeks, we’ll be running more in-depth profiles of bloggers, as we try to rally the Global Voices team to feature the blogs nominated for awards in the Reporters Sans Frontieres Freedom of Expression blog contest. Please take a moment to vote in the RSF contest, and make sure you keep your eyes on http://www.globalvoicesonline.org">Global Voices as it continues to get bigger and better.

About two weeks back, I wrote about a story that Bob Tedeschi wrote for the New York Times that I felt badly mischaracterized the actions of the principals of Eziba, a web-based importer of art objects. Dick Sabot, one of the founders of the company – and a close friend of mine – shared the letter he wrote to the New York Times in reaction to Tedeschi’s piece. The Times didn’t choose to print it, so I’m reposting it below, both to create a permanent record of the letter on the web and to share Dick’s response with the folks who’ve expressed interest in this story.

Letters to the Editor
The New York Times
April 18, 2005

Re: “Questioning Eziba’s Decisions”
By Bob Tedeschi
Published April 18, 2005

To the Editor:

Contrary to the recent article by Bob Tedeschi, Eziba did not declare bankruptcy. Three large American firms forced Eziba into bankruptcy despite being informed that this would create serious problems for low-income overseas artisan creditors because the process takes as long as 18-24 months for the creditors to be paid. Had Eziba been left in the Assignment for the Benefit of Creditors, where it was placed by the Eziba Board, it is likely that the artisans would have been paid by now.

Eziba had only one secured creditor, a socially responsible bank. The board was advised that the bank could seize Eziba’s assets if we did not pay it. The assets could not then have been sold to Overstock, the proceeds of which sale ($500,000) are now going to the creditors. Had we paid other creditors first, those payments would have been clearly preferential and the court, we were told, would ask for those payments to be returned.

Where a socially responsible company like Eziba is different from other companies in financial trouble is that members of the team stay the course even after a bankruptcy filing. It is a tragedy that Eziba came so close but did not succeed. Overseas artisans that got caught in the process are being paid in full. Payments from former staff, investors and other friends of Eziba to those artisans have begun. We welcome Overstock’s commitment to join us in doing the right thing.

Richard H. Sabot
Co-Founder and Chairman of the Board of Eziba

One of the great pleasures of travel, for me, is photography. My father is an avid photographer, and my memories of travelling around the US, as a kid, is of my father falling behind the rest of the family as he looked for another angle on that barn, tree or wildflower.

Now I’m the guy who holds up the group. As a result, I try to allow for time to wander a city by myself on every trip I take, so that I don’t annoy colleagues by spending an hour wandering down alleys in Ulaanbaatar, looking for great graffiti.

Thanks to someone I met in the #joiito conversation on IRC (I regret that I’ve forgotten who it was), I’ve learned about the plug-in for iPhoto that enables mass uploads on Flickr. It’s by no means perfect, but it’s enabled me to upload about a thousand of the photos I’ve taken in the past year – there are now sixteen albums posted on my site, and I hope to get a few more up this evening.

I’m also running photos from the flickr account on this site, both in a sidebar on the right side of the page and in the header. The photo headers are inspired, in part, by Dave Winer’s headers on Scripting News (Happy birthday, Dave.) I’m planning on rotating them every couple of months – if you click on them, they lead to a page about the photo I’ve taken…

But the clouds have cleared here in Western Mass., and I’m off to look for collapsing barns, my favorite photographic subject. (Dad’s favorite subject seems to be well-maintained barns. I wonder what this says about father-son relationships?)