Dear Prime Minister Zenawi –

I realise this letter is arriving at a particularly busy time for your administration. Simply keeping track of the more than 100 opposition politicians and activists (including a 15 year old boy) you’ve detained on charges of “treason” and “genocide” would keep most leaders busy. While overseeing violent crackdowns on dissent in rural areas of your nation, you’ve managed to make time to illegally occupy territory granted to Eritrea by the UN’s mediation committee, to intimidate or imprison the independent press, and even to sue Ethiopian dissidents in a US court. You’re a busy man.

It’s easy to understand, with such a busy schedule, that you might not be able to keep up with recent developments in non-lethal crowd control technologies. While not an expert on this topic, I was able to perform some Google searches and locate some pages that might be of interest to you. To my great surprise, it seems that most experts don’t advocate firing live ammunition in crowded city streets to disperse opposition protesters. According to Globalsecurity.org, a number of other options exist, including “malodorants and irritants“, designed to make members of crowds uncomfortable and disperse, or non-lethal munitions, which include sponge or rubber bullets, as well as alternative projectiles like beanbags, which are designed to be less likely to cause serious injury than conventional shells. (Of course, allowing non-violent dissenters to protest, unmolested, is always an option as well.)

You’ll be pleased to hear that many of these technologies can be purchased online and are surprisingly affordable – Security Safety and Supply of Brunswick, Maine offers several different options of nonlethal shotgun shells for $4.95 apiece. (They also offer free shipping for orders over $100!) While that’s significantly more expensive than arming your security forces solely with conventional weapons, it’s worth noting that violent suppression of dissent has caused donors to withhold over $375 million in support to your government – that’s almost 20% of the aid your nation receives per year, or slightly over 4% of Ethiopia’s gross domestic product. A modest supply of 7 million non-lethal shells – one for roughly every ten of your fellow citizens – would cost only $35 million and might encourage former donors to unfreeze their aid to your government.

(Or you could simply wait for other national leaders to follow Hillary Benn’s lead and move their financial support from the “unrestricted” column of your budget to the health and water columns – perhaps you can now move some funds from those columns into the “rubber bullets” column.)

I appreciate your time and your consideration of my modest proposal.

Best regards,

Ethan Zuckerman

Two must-read posts:

Sokari Ekine offers a roundup of posts around the African blogosphere reflecting on the persistence of racism and the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. She’s especially concerned that nations that have made some racial progress – Brazil, France, the US – now seem to believe they’re color-blind and immune to racial prejudice. Very much worth a read, and some serious time thinking about a response. An excerpt:

I have been in the US for the past 3 weeks, in South Florida. When I arrived I started counting the number of vehicles with Confederate Flag bumper stickers – I have now given up as there are so many. As one African American said to me – if you fly the confederate flag you are telling me you are a racist. White Americans have created a myth and bought the line that this is a “colour blind” society but I don’t buy that and I do not believe the vast majority of African Americans buy it either. I have lived in the US (Georgia) for 5 years and visited a number of times and I am yet to meet an African American who has not experienced racism or who believes s/he is “judged, not by the colour of our skin, but by the content of our character” (MLK) Racism has been called the “fault line” of America which could explode at any time. The aftermath of the Katrina hurricane was both a warning and a reminder of this possibility.

Mental Acrobatics was inspired by a post by Keguro on domestic violence to write a post called “Disgrace”, where he talks about the responsibility all men have for violence against women:

As a man I feel disgrace that on what is essentially my watch, i.e. in my years of manhood, it has become more dangerous for women to be women in our cities, in our towns, in our villages, in our homes. Rape, beatings, domestic violence on the increase.

As a man I feel disgrace that on my watch, in my years on manhood, a woman can be stripped naked in our capital city simply because some other men do not like what she is wearing…

It is a failure of our manhood that this can and is happening in our society. Heck it is a failure of my manhood. It is a simple as that. I do not care if society globally is getting more violent, that is not an excuse. If more men are beating women in our society then that is a failure of manhood in our society…

Again, it’s very much worth your time to read the post. He’s got me thinking about questions about what I’m responsible for, whether the issue is racism, violence against women, or any other injustice. Thanks for the posts, friends.

Cote d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast) was West Africa’s economic success story in the early 1990s. When I lived in Ghana in 1993-4, Ivory Coast was where people in the region looked for economic opportunity… and where Europeans in the region went for $10 hamburgers and ice skating at West Africa’s sole rink. (Agnesa Paris has a lovely memory of those happier times.) But it’s been a very different story since 1999.

When Felix Houphouet-Boigny, who ruled Cote d’Ivoire from independence in 1960 to his death, passed away in 1993, Henri Konan Bedie became president. He won a pair of disputed elections, in part by splitting the country along geographic and ethnic lines to prevent his challenger, Alassane Ouattara, a Muslim from the north of the country, from running against him by declaring him a citizen of Burkina Faso. In 1999, Bedie was overthrown in a military coup, setting up six years of tension and violence pitting Ouattara and the (predominantly Muslim) north against Laurent Gbagbo and the (predominantly Christian) south.

French and UN troops have been keeping the peace in Cote d’Ivoire since 2004. But their presence is resented by President Laurent Gbagbo (elected in 2000), who blames many of the country’s ills on French colonialism and the close relationship France maintained with her former colony after independence. In November 2004, anti-French riots chased many European expatriates out of the country. Now similar violence is targetting the UN presence in Cote d’Ivoire. (The BBC’s timeline of events in Cote d’Ivoire provides lots more detail than I can provide here.)

The proximate cause of the violence was a report by international mediators recommending dissolution of the Iviorian parliament, which is closely allied with Gbagbo. In October 2005, Gbagbo was to stand for re-election – because violence made it impossible to hold elections, the UN put forth a plan that allowed Gbagbo to retain the presidency, but attempted to balance his influence by appointing Charles Banny, allied with the northern opposition, as Prime Minister. Gbagbo has proved resistant to ceding any power to Banny, and on Tuesday, his party announced that they were pulling out of the peace process, leading to speculation that Cote d’Ivoire is lurching back towards civil war.

One of the keys to Gbagbo’s staying power is a youth “movement” called the “Jeunes Patriotes” (Young Patriots). They’re a fiercely nationalistic group of students, soldiers and unemployed youth, led by the charismatic 33 year old Charles Ble Goude, who seems equally comfortable with hip-hop style as he is with anti-colonialist rhetoric. In late 2004, Ble Goude led mobs that attacked French troops and citizens in Abidjan and throughout the south of the country; now the target is the UN. On Wednesday, 2,000 of Ble Goude’s followers tried to storm the UN headquarters in Abidjan; Bangladeshi UN troops were forced to evacuate two bases in the west of the country. BBC’s correspondent reported yesterday that the Jeunes Patriotes controlled most major streets in Abidjan. Reuters is reporting today that Ble Goude has called off his supporters, declaring victory and asking them to disperse.

France would like the UN to increase the size of its peacekeeping contingent, increasing its effectiveness in preventing civil war from erupting again. US ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, appears to oppose the move, stating, “When a UN peacekeeping force becomes part of the problem, we have to ask ourselves whether the UN is contributing to the solution or not.” One wonders what Mr. Bolton would propose as an alternative. More French troops, who appeared to increase tensions in late 2004? AU troops, perhaps pulling the few peacekeepers they’ve been able to deploy to Darfur? Or perhaps the US is ready for a rare African intervention?

Brian of Black Star Journal refers to the Jeunes Patriotes as “terrorist mafiosi” and warns that Cote d’Ivoire may be heading towards the sustained strife and violence that neighboring Liberia suffered for years. Milton Madison, who lived in Cote d’Ivoire a few years back is equally unsympathetic to the Jeunes Patriotes: “In essence, they claim that they want their country back, but what they really want is to restart the civil war and that will end up in the deaths of countless people.”

Would love to hear about more people blogging this situation – I’d be particularly interested to know about pro-Gbagbo blogs, either in English or French. If you know of anything I should be reading, please let me know in the comments.

My friend Bruno Giussani has just made me feel better that I didn’t receive an invitation to the World Economic Forum in Davos this year. (Of course, remembering that the last time I went to Davos, I paid $250 a night to stay in a room in a hospital 3km from the center of town because all the rooms in town were booked also makes me feel better about missing this meeting.)

The WEF has been trumpeting their group blog, Forumblog, which advertises, “Every participant of the Annual Meeting – ranging from business leaders to political leaders, heads of NGOs, religious leaders, academics and journalists – will be asked to join the Forum blog.” While this is true, Bruno points out that they won’t be able to post to the blog without their contribution being manually added to the blog by one of the blog’s four editors. The editors explain that, “Opinions will not be censored, however posts that do not abide by these guidelines will not be published, particularly those that do not conform to the on/off the record policy.”

The on/off the record policy is particularly interesting. Of the dozens of venues for meetings at Davos, only three are “on the record” spaces. (It would be fairly absurd to declare these spaces off the record, as what happens in these rooms is broadcast on hotel rooms across town, offering the intriguing possibility of blogging Davos from your room. If you’re lucky enough to get a room.) In the other rooms, “You can report on the tenor of the debate, but you must not quote participants directly. If, however, you receive their subsequent permission you may quote them.”

These rules aren’t new. And they make some sense – the idea behind Davos is that it gives public figures a chance to think through complex issues without being quite as careful in their wording as they would be if all statements were on the record. But they make it difficult to blog from Davos. Two years ago, I did my best to blog following these rules… and generally discovered that I was being far, far more careful than I normally was. (As a result, I was even more boring than I usually am.) I can only imagine how careful I’d be if my posts needed to be cleared by a WEF editor before going live.

Certainly some good blogging will take place at WEF, probably on blogs other than the official WEF blog. But I share Bruno’s question – how exactly is this project a blog? Because it’s based on Moveable Type? I find it hard to believe that anything written for submission to WEF editors by a public figure isn’t going to be as carefully vetted as a press release. And reading a collection of press releases from Davos attendees doesn’t strike me as a real good time.

Elijah Zarwan, an American human rights activist who lives in Cairo, has been following the protest by Sudanese refugees against discrimination and mistreatment in Egpyt, including a number of key posts about the violent dispersal of the refugees on December 30th. His most recent post includes translations of some Arabic-language blog posts about the refugees and the violence they’ve faced. Elijah leads off with a translation of a long post by Alaa, an amazing young man who’s a leading light in both the arab Open Source movement and the Kefayah movement:

The scandal is that people have started to believe what the newspapers say

In the two demonstrations that we staged to protest against the massacre, we had lots of debates with people in the street. They repeated exactly what the media say, so much so that at first I thought they were all informers.

“Do you believe what TV and newspapers say when they talk to you about government promises and tell you how you’re doing as Egyptians?” I asked them.

“No, of course not,” they all said.

So for fuck’s sake, why do you believe them when they talk about refugees?

…

Elijah translates comments and responses to Alaa’s post, as well as other posts in the Egyptian blogosphere on the issue. It’s required reading if you’re concerned about the situation in Cairo, or in larger issues of human rights in Egypt, racial tension between Arab and Black Muslims or issues concerning refugees from Darfur.

Elijah points out yet another aspect of the refugee situation that causes me concern: Sudanese authorities visited the detainees in a Cairo prison. While that’s certainly not unusual – if I were detained in a Cairo prison, I’d very much like US authorities to visit me. But the detainees were, for the most part, people who’d fled Sudan to escape persecution – there’s a very real possibility that Sudanese authorities identified detainees who were political activists and asked that they be returned to Sudan so they could face questioning or detention in Khartoum.

While we’re on the subject of Sudan… African Update has a good post on the outrageous possibility that Sudan will soon be running the African Union. Greg Houle writes, “Imagine Sudan’s president Omar al-Bashir mediating talks (as head of the AU) between the Sudanese government (himself) and the rebel leaders in Darfur! Clearly this is outrageous even by the standards of typical African politics.”

Let’s just hope this particular situation is too outrageous to come true.

And this is why comments rock.

I wrote the other day about a translation of the 23rd Psalm into Nigerian pidgin.

Robbie Honerkamp, a US-based unix geek who’s spent years living and working in Nigeria, posted a comment to let me know about the Nigerian pidgin translation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. At first glance, I assumed this was a joke – I’d never thought of the United Nations being described as “naim be say all di kontris wey de for di world come unite to be one”.

But it’s one of the 332 translations available of the document, a list that includes several languages I’d never heard of, like Tzotzil, Yi and Bugisnese. Poking through the list, we rapidly get pretty obscure with languages like Even, a language of Yakutia and the Kamchatka Peninsula of Russia, spoken by 7,170 individuals in 1979 (and probably fewer now.) But Even’s got nothing on Pipil, spoken by approximately 20 people in El Salvador and Honduras in 1987…

It’s fun to speculate on how the 332 languages represented here were chosen from the 6,000+ living languages spoken worldwide. Ghanaian languages are well represented, with translations into Akuapem Twi, Asante, Dagaare, Dagbani, Ewe, Fanti, Ga, all evidently written by the UN’s Department of Public Information. (If anyone knowledgeable about languages in their nation wants to take a look at the list of languages and let me know whether their local language sphere is as well represented, I’d be very interested in having more data points…) Some languages are not widely spoken, but politicially important, like Inuktitut, widely spoken in Canada’s newest territory, Nunavut. Others are unfamiliar to me, but widely spoken, like Siswati, spoken by 1.7 million people in Swaziland.

Why Nigerian pidgin? The accompanying text to the translation tells us that pidgins and creoles are used for interethnic contact, where people from different language groups come together and communicate in a third language where they both have some competence. If the resulting linguistic mashup gains new speakers, it’s a creole, like Haitian Creole. If not, it’s a pidgin. In this case, “Nigerian Pidgin English, which, though not being considered a Creole, also has native speakers, is a mixed language drawing from English and different African languages. There is no unified standard or orthography. It is used in novels, plays, radio, poetry and becoming more and more important as a language.”

Staring at this collection of translations, it’s tempting to imagine a future where this set of web pages serves as a Rosetta stone for languages that have disappeared. Will we conclude that Garifuná speakers were a stiff, bureacratic people, lacking any sense of poetry because our main record of their language is a passage group-written by hundreds of UN diplomats? Or will it help us decipher documents yet undiscovered? Or serve as a reminder of how strange and diverse the planet was in the late 1900s, before we all became fluent in Mandarin/Hindi/English creole?

Thanks for killing my morning, Robbie. And thanks to anyone who ever comments on this blog…

“If you would not be forgotten
As soon as you are dead and rotten
either write things worth reading
or do things worth the writing.”
- Ben Franklin

It’s Ben Franklin’s 300th birthday, and I can’t think of a better way to spend the big day than hanging out at the Berkman Center. I don’t think John Palfrey had planned the day as a celebration of the polymathic founding father, but the inventiveness my colleages and the extended Berkman community display on any given Tuesday is an appropriate tribute to Franklin’s genius.

If Franklin were famous only for the things he invented, that would be enough to guarantee him a place in history books. Bifocals, the lighting rod, the odometer, a massively improved wood stove would have been the centerpieces of a patent portfolio to make most inventors jealous. But Ben’s genius extended to inventing institutions: the lending library, the fire department, the political cartoon, the US postal service, daylight savings time. More than one of the Berkman fellows crowd wanted to give Ben credit as the first blogger – that one’s certainly arguable, but he probably does get credit for that most American of literary genres, the self-help book.

(Pekka Himanen pins the blame on ol’ Ben for the American culture of self-improvement and perpetual guilt. I think it’s a bum rap. Read his autobiography and it’s pretty clear that he was aware of the irony that he, a highly flawed individual, was dispensing advice. He was certainly aware of the potential for self-deception – in the fourth chapter of his autobiography, recounting how he talked himself out of vegetarianism, he notes, “So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.” It’s hard to take anything literally from a man who’s written that statement…)

It would be hard to be as widely creative as Franklin in this day and age, especially in a nation with centuries of history. (Perhaps, in newly founded nations like East Timor or Somaliland, there are Franklinesque figures responsible for the first iterations of diverse institutions.) In an age where subject expertise is highly valued, and curiosity about various subjects is dismissed as dilletantism, it’s hard to imagine a public figure with such wide-ranging interests and pursuits. Specifically, it’s rare to find people who are inventors both of social institutions and of techological things.

And this is where I find my time in Cambridge endlessly fascinating. I was thinking about Ben as I watched Steve Garfield interview Dan Bricklin. Bricklin was the co-inventor of Visicalc, the first spreadsheet application, a piece of software which brought about business computing as we know it. His newest invention is wikiCalc, a wiki spreadsheet. Documents created with wikiCalc look like formatted spreadsheets, but are editable like wiki pages.

(Geek stuff – the software’s currently alpha, written in Perl – Dan’s designed it to run in modPerl, but it runs reasonably well in interpreted Perl. It uses tons of AJAX for the editing functions and saves the edited cells to a remote server, or a server running on the client machine. It currently keeps history files of the full sheet, but future plans include cell-by-cell histories. It currently knows how to sum cells, and doesn’t have a lot of other Excel-type functions, but hey, it’s released under GPL in Perl, so write your own functions if you’d like. Download info for wikiCalc 0.2 here…)

Armed with a video camera and a mic emblasoned with the logo of video blog Rocketboom, Steve Garfield followed Bricklin through a demo, contextualizing the significance of a wiki spreadsheet for his video podcast audience. I realized that I was watching Garfield help invent citizen video journalism while Bricklin invents wiki spreadsheets. Following on the heels of a Dan Gillmor talk about the future of citizen journalism, a meeting with World Bank executives about low-cost computers for the developing world and a chance encounter with one of the figures behind world music advocates Calabash Music, and it’s easy to believe that Ben’s inventiveness is alive and well, though perhaps a bit more diffuse than in ages past.

As you may have guessed, I have a special fondness for Franklin. One of my favorite childhood books was “Ben and Me”, a wonderful book by Ben Lawson, written from the perspective of the extraordinarily intelligent mouse which lived in Franklin’s fur cap and gave Franklin most of his key insights. A few years ago, friends pointed out a certain visual similarity between me and the great man – I took this as code for “you’re getting increasingly fat and bald, Zuckerman.” Complaining to a few friends about this unfortunate resemblance, they pointed out that, of all the Founding Fathers, Franklin had more joie de vivre than the rest combined.

Armed with that insight and my inherent Franklinophilia, I’ve decided to embrace any visual resemblance that might accidently occur, going as far as dressing in my best Franklin gear for a photo session with friend Daniel Beck. Ah, if only it were this easy to imitate the great man’s genius.

Happy 300th, Ben. And thanks, Berkman, for reminding me that there’s still ever so much to invent.

Steve Garfield’s always got his video camera on and offers footage of me explaining this post to my Berkman colleagues…

It’s Dan Gillmor’s first day as a Berkman Fellow, and many members of the extended Berkman family have come out to welcome him to the Center. We’ve got a packed house here to listen to Dan articulate his vision for a Center for Citizen’s Media, which he’s launching as a joint fellow here and at UC Berkeley’s Journalism school. Dan is the perfect person to launch this project – a universally respected journalist, most recently as a technology reporter and columnist for the San Jose Mercury-News. His recent book “We the Media” has helped frame the concept of “citizen’s media”, an idea near and dear to my heart. And he’s one of the most thoughtful people I’ve ever encountered on issues of the responsibilities and roles of journalists and bloggers. It would be hard for me to be more excited about a new Berkman fellow.

Dan leads off by explaining his key epiphany regarding citizen’s media: working as a technology reporter in Silicon Valley – “the belly of the technological beast” – you quickly discover that your readers know more than you do. They know when you’re wrong, and since they’ve all got email, they’ll be quick to “fill you in… to put it nicely.” At first, this is an intimidating situation for a reporter. But quickly you learn that this is a key part of how media works today.

The realization that the audience is part of the media equation is contemporary with the emergence of the read-write web, which Dan identifies with the rise of blogging in 1999. (For obvious reasons, I’d link it to homepage authoring in 1995, but hey, we’re allowed to disagree.) A talk Dan gave at ETech in 2002 – “Journalism 3.0″ – led to “We the Media”, to his decision to leave the Merc and to a series of experiments with citizen’s media, including Bayosphere, which ultimately has led to the center he’s now starting. The center’s vision is to change media from lecture to conversation… and Dan believes the first rule of conversation is “you need to listen”.

The new center has three areas of focus:

- Research and advocacy. What’s happening in citizen’s media – and specifically, the overlap between journalism and citizen’s media? What threats exist that would hurt the emergence of the movement and how would one combat them?

- Best practices. Dan wants to help identify the good stuff within citizen’s media, collect it and amplify it.

-Education and training. The center wants to help people improve media literacy and learn how not to believe everything they read. One of his targets for education is mass-media organizations, who are moving into the citizen’s media space, but often making “panicked moves, not thoughtful ones.”

A set of questions from the assembled crowd gets Dan to make a set of predictions about the future of mainstream and citizen’s media. What follows are not literal quotes, but as close as I could get, limited by my listening and typing speed – errors are mine, not Dan’s:

- On editors: Editors are going to be really important in the future. We may use a combination of human and machine intelligence to complement the people we call “editors” today. But the essential goal of journalism – an informed citizenry – requires some sort of mechanism that can sort through the flood of information in a meaningful way.

- On ensuring that bloggers get taken seriously when they’re acting in the sphere of journalism: It’s more important that bloggers are credible, first and foremost, to their readers and their community. (I asked Dan how bloggers writing about Uganda’s elections could become more credible to international journalists…) Beyond that, Dan feels like bloggers working in the journalistic sphere could benefit from adopting some of the best practices of journalism: thoroughness, accuracy, fairness and transparency (which Dan acknowledges journalists could embrace a whole lot more.)

- On citizen’s media and social change: As people become more engaged with current events, they increasingly become activists. Readers start by assembling their own view of the media from different newsfeeds, then engaging with professional journalists through comments and online interactions, then become bloggers, authors and people who run community media sites. As we move through the process, the group of people involved shrinks, but their engagement grows. Quoting Wes Nisker, “If you don’t like the news, go out and make your own.”

- On citizen’s video: While there are interesting experiments going on with broadcast of citizen videos, it’s much harder to create a compelling podcast than a compelling blogpost, and probably an order of magnitude more difficult to create a compelling video blog post than a compelling podcast… or at least, it’s more difficult for people who aren’t digital natives.

- On the future of news: The folks who are figuring out the news of tomorrow are eight years old and living in Helsinki and Seoul – highly wired locales that help create digital natives. The US may lag behind in shaping the future of news because our screwed up legal/technical infrastructure prevent us from creating as many digital natives.

- On anonymity: Anonymity is very hard to stamp out, technically, and we want to preserve it for situations where there is serious risk involved to an author. But journalism is better when people stand behind their words. Conversations are better when people are not entirely anonymous – persistent psuedonyms are significantly better than complete anonymity for this purpose.

Dan says he has a mental “trust-o-meter”, calibrated from -10 to 10. A totally anonymous blogpost starts at -10 and rises if the poster establishes a believable identity over time. Someone signing their words starts at a +10 and drops over time if they prove themselves unreliable.

- On the accumulation of data: At some point, we’re going to have a President who blogged as a teenager. And there are going to be things on that blog – accessible on Google until the end of time – that would disqualify any politician from being elected today. In the meantime, we’re heading towards a world where everything’s on the record, and that’s a bad thing. We’ll need to establish zones of privacy where things aren’t perpetually on the record. In the meantime, once everyone has said something unbelievably stupid on the record, we’re going to need to cut each other a lot of slack. But there will be a messy interim before this happens, while “gotcha” still works.

- On getting paid: David Weinberger asks the question, “You say that editors will be around for a long time – who’s going to pay them?” Dan doesn’t have a comprehensive answer, but some ideas. Journalists respond well to comeptition – competition will probably give us better journalism. The threat to journalism is not from the bloggers, but is a business-side threat. Now that classified ads have moved to the web, and readers have gotten used to tivo’ing through ads, it’s a real problem to figure out who’ll pay for investigative journalism. Foundations will help pay for some reporting – see the Center for Public Integrity as an example of this model at work.

- On coverage of the world: I asked whether Dan was worried that a media strongly influenced by bloggers and citizen journalists would overfocus on topics currently popular in the blogosphere – technology and US politics. Dan’s less worried about these coverage issues than he is about the echo chamber issue – people seeing only the points of view they’re interested in seeing. He cites a study that suggested that people who got a great deal of their news online about the 2004 US elections were highly partisan, but also quite knowledgeable about their opponent’s arguments, suggesting that the echo chamber is not perfectly insulated.

To address some of the problems I’m concerned about, Dan has a wonderful idea: “Reinstitutionalize Serendipity”. By this, Dan’s referring to the story in the lower right hand side of the page – the story about something you’ve never heard of but end up reading because some editor thought you should know about it. “I had no idea I cared about most of the things I read on BoingBoing – and I don’t care about many of the things I read…” but the fact that you discover issued you’d never expected to explore shows serendipity at work.

I’m sufficiently fond of the zen koan: “Institutionalize Serendipity” that I’ve threatened to start a CafePress store selling coffee mugs emblazoned with the phrase. Fortunately Dan is a big believer in Creative Commons and I can sell his “intellectual property” with little fear of being sued…

I’m spending Monday catching up on all the work I’d intended to do over the weekend before I got distracted by a series of surprisingly close football games. (American football, that is. The African match I was interested in this weekend wasn’t close. Ghana has evidently decided to celebrate their World Cup qualification by calling in sick for the African Cup of Nations. That, or they’re pursuing a brilliant strategy of throwing their friendlies before the main matches and sitting some of their best players, in the hopes of luring the competition into complacency…)

(While we’re on football, there’s a good editorial in the East African Standard about the high cost of broadcasting the matches in Africa… which means that Kenyans, at least, won’t be watching most of the games. The Times of London is running a five-part series on the African nations that qualified for the World Cup. Given the tone of the first piece – where the correspondent visits the “the footballing minnows of Africa” – I’m pretty sure Owen Slot hasn’t read Binyavanga Wainaina’s “How to Write About Africa”…)

See how distracting football can be? I brought it up to apologize for this quick, multi-subject roundup post, rather than a proper, thoughtful one. (You know, the kind that Martin Luther King Day deserves…)

- Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf’s inauguration is a cause for celebration. A few weeks ago, it looked like George Weah might try to prevent the Iron Grandmother from taking power – a mediated sit-down seems to have smoothed things over. ($5 says Weah is named Minister of Youth and Sport. Any takers?) Imnakoya’s got pictures of the US delegation – Condi Rice and Laura Bush – as well as links to other posts on the topic. David Ajao has a great post celebrating women in politics, connecting Johnson-Sirleaf to Chile’s new president, Michelle Bachelet, and other female leaders. Mental Acrobatics is on the case, pointing out that Tanzania’s new president, Jakaya Kikwete, has appointed women to two key ministerial posts. And, as she so often does, Sokari’s got the big picture over at “Black Looks”, talking about the enormity of the challenge Johnson-Sirleaf faces.

- Jen Brea over at AfricaBeat has an amazingly comprehensive roundup of articles on blogs and in the mainstream media about China’s role in Africa. It includes several that I’ve linked to (and one that I’ve written) as well as some great pieces I hadn’t found. It’s an excellent starting point for someone trying to understand this issue.

- Uganda Conflict Action Network points to an article in the Kampala Daily Monitor about the accreditation of foreign journalists. Journalists from the Economist and the BBC are having a hard time getting accredited, prompting speculation that Museveni’s government isn’t pleased with articles they’ve been reporting and may be retaliating by cracking down on the freedom of the press. Particularly disturbing is a new regulation that forces journalists to get permission before travelling more than 100km out of Kampala. It’s going to be very interesting to see what happens if journalists report critically about the upcoming Presidential elections…

- The UN has put a plan on the table to take over peacekeeping duties in Darfur from the African Union, which has had a difficult time protecting refugee camps due to a shortage of personnel and funds. Predictably, Khartoum has dismissed this plan, asserting that the AU force has been doing fine, and that an African force should solve African problems. All of which sounds well and good, until you realize that Sudan is in line for the chairmanship of the African Union and may well assume it after a vote on Monday. African NGOs are lining up to oppose Sudan’s election, while some North African countries and Zimbabwe have lined up to endorse it. The wild card may well Thabo Mbeki, who has a great deal of sway over other Southern African nations and may be supporting Sudan’s bid.

If you believe an AU led by Sudan would adequately protect the safety of refugees in Darfur, I have a pirated cargo ship full of rice off the coast of Somalia to sell you. This is yet another time where it would be great if the UN were allowed to do what it does best – protect and peacekeep.

The Berkman Center has gotten a lot of love from the mainstream media this weekend. My Global Voices co-founder, Rebecca MacKinnon, has spent the past few weeks making noise about MSN’s censorship of Chinese dissident Zhao Jing, aka Michael An Ti. Between America’s Sinophobic mood, the web’s distaste for Microsoft, and the importance of the issue, Rebecca’s post on An Ti on January 3rd has gotten an enormous amount of attention from the blogosphere.

Now major newspapers are waking up. Editorials in the Boston Globe and the International Herald Tribune this weekend address issues of US corporate participation in online censorship, referencing recent recomnmendations from our friends at Reporters without Borders on Internet freedom of expression. The Globe editorial, which quotes Rebecca, isn’t bad, but reinforces the highly debatable notion that the Internet will threaten repressive governments – I find Rebecca’s argument that the Chinese government is succeeding in turning the Internet into a medium for entertainment by encouraging de-politicized blogging pretty compelling.

Jonathan Mirsky’s editorial in the IHT, which quotes Rebecca and our colleague John Palfrey, is a bit breathless, opening with a fairly major exaggeration: “Chinese searching the Internet for key, or ‘black’ words are likely to be arrested, tried and imprisoned for up to 10 years on charges of subversion, revealing state secrets or spreading propaganda injurious to the state.” While there are (many) cases of Chinese cyber-dissidents and independent reporters finding themselves in jail for publishing stories or posts about subjects the authorities found too controversial to print, it’s not clear to me that people are being arrested for searching for information. Indeed, if it were “likely” that searching for information on Falun Gong would land you in prison, Chinese search engines wouldn’t need to filter their results, as Chinese internet users would be smart enough not to search for these terms. The fact that search engines and blogging platforms block searches and posts containing certain words reveals that very few Internet users find themselves in prison for searching the web.

Exaggeration and errors aside, it’s clear that newspapers are increasingly fascinated about the ways the Internet can be used for political purposes in an international sphere. The cover of the New York Times today features a story on the emergence of the Internet in Bahrain as a space for political debate. (While it features BahrainOnline.org, it doesn’t mention Global Voices regional editor Haitham Sabbah or Bahraini superblogger Mahmood Al-Youssif… which is too bad, as their English-language blogs would be a great resource for Times readers.) And Emily Wax, writing in the Washington Post, quotes yours truly in her article “African Rebels Take Their Battles Online”, which looks at ways dissent and rebellion is finding itself online in Sudan, DRC and Ethiopia.

I suspect some of my Berkman colleagues are periodically bemused with the fact that Berkman’s increasingly identified with inquiry and activism around blogging – there’s terrific scholarship taking place at Berkman around internet filtering, copyright and intellectual property reform and other key topics. But hey, blogging is one of the most visible manifestations of the most important trend in the Internet – the ability of individuals to create their own content, called “generativity”, by our colleage Jonathan Zittrain.

I’m happy that we’re getting recognition for the work we’re doing at Berkman from mainstream papers. I’m even happier that we’re finally beyond the question of whether the Internet and blogging are important and deep into the debates about how we protect the Internet’s most powerful feature – the ability to give anyone online a voice.