Comments on: A day/night doubleheader

By: Bill Allison

Bill Allison — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 23:23:15 +0000

If you’d like to contact the folks who participated in Sunlight’s “Is Congress a Family Business” project, just email me and I’ll pass on your contact info to them.

We have phase two online now: http://www.sunlightfoundation.com/node/1489

…and are hoping to get the original folks plus some new people to take part.

By: mathewingram.com/media » Why we still need editors

mathewingram.com/media » Why we still need editors — Sun, 22 Oct 2006 03:29:17 +0000

[...] Meanwhile, Ethan Zuckerman says that more and more he is looking to hear from bloggers that have some special connection to an event or a place where traditional journalism isn’t reaching: Increasingly, it strikes me that there are three types of netizens I want to hear from: [...]

By: Center for Citizen Media: Blog » Blog Archive » Some Citizen Media Types

Fri, 13 Oct 2006 23:23:04 +0000

[...] Ethan Zuckerman, my Berkman Center colleague, writes: Increasingly, it strikes me that there are three types of netizens I want to hear from: – folks who are in the right (wrong) place at the right (wrong) time: the commuter in the London underground when the bombs go off; Gnarlkitty, as she visits demonstrations surrounding the coup in Thailand. – folks who have an insight or perspective I can’t easily find in mainstream media: TheMalau writing about Congolese politics; Russell Southwood writing about African telecoms; Roland Soong writing about, well, almost anything. – folks who make themselves part of a distributed effort to create new knowledge: the researchers who pick apart records of Congressional pay for the Sunlight Foundation, the bloggers who cover the Kenyan parliament for Mzalendo. [...]

By: …My heart’s in Accra » Transcript of ZCTU video

…My heart’s in Accra » Transcript of ZCTU video — Fri, 13 Oct 2006 01:17:13 +0000

[...] Speaking at Parsons on Tuesday, a student asked me for suggestions on encouraging audio and video blogging from the developing world. I made the argument that media bloggers needed to start finding ways of creating metadata, if not full transcripts, for their content so that it would be indexed by search engines. [...]

By: links for 2006-10-12 at This is really happening.

links for 2006-10-12 at This is really happening. — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 02:24:27 +0000

[...] …My heart’s in Accra » A day/night doubleheader Another great post from Ethan. We should definitely rename Web 2.0 the “chmod 777 Web” (tags: personaldemocracy technology development) [...]

By: Alaa

Alaa — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 23:22:45 +0000

Ethan, sure it would be more interesting but I’ll jsut read the local part, this is of course partly a selfish outlook I’m semi local and can read arabic so it makes sense this will interest me more.

but even abstractly I find the more local “new media” more interesting.

then there are people like baheyya (or Ahdaf Soueif from the literature world), who write for locals using English and the result is to say the least interesting.

I guess part of my problem is the huge mindshare representation gets on the smaller blogospheres, I’d prefer to accidentaly find a bridge than to have one specifically constructed for me, somehow when people are too concerned about representation (meaning representing more than just themselves, becoming spokespeople for their nation/religion/ethnic group/whatever) it doesn’t work out so well.

in terms of globalvoices I don’t enjoy reading global voices on the middle east, it feels wrong no matter how hard the editors try yet I love reading the rest (which probably means I can’t detect the flaws or the flaws are not that big and important anyways).

but yeah it’s not a simple question, I guess I’ll need to see initiatives similar to globalvoices done not to bridge languages and cultures but to bridge the web, imagine a website with roundups, pointers and context in the local language to those who don’t like following blogs or who follow just a few blogs this would be exploring representation without the tiring and confusing east-west north-south dynamics, I’m sure GV can learn alot from such a project (I’m sure it’s been done hundreds of times already too).

interestingly enough I am involved in a project that is supposed to do that but with narrow focus on activism and not general blogging, let’s see where it will take us.

By: Ethan

Ethan — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 22:14:34 +0000

I want both, Alaa – I want the blogosphere to be a great way to reach a local audience as well as to reach an international audience. It does mean that the role of something like GV will need to change, to focus more on translation and such. But I also think that figuring out how people talk to each other across national borders is an interesting question… Would the Jordanian blogosphere be more interesting to you if there were both the internal and the external conversations?

By: Alaa

Alaa — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 19:38:16 +0000

interesting question, to me the age of the internets is the golden age the age of bridge blogs is something we need to get over pretty quickly.

I’m much more interested and much more fascinated by blogospheres like Egypt’s or Iran’s where it is mostly about talking to your local audience (even if it is still smallish and from relatively privileged background), the jordanian blogs bore me to death cause most of them are concerned about collective representation to that vague entity the west.

but at the same time I do appreciate globalvoices. having someone else to do the bridging sounds like a good idea (think of translated literature), not sure how sustainable it will be.

By: lynne

lynne — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 18:02:47 +0000

wish i had been keeping up with your blog recently to know you’d be in nyc. i would have loved to see/hear your talks.

By: Ethan

Ethan — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 16:57:34 +0000

“…have you ever had things go terribly wrong?”

Oh, about every third talk I give, Steve… :-)