Congratulations to you and everyone involved in GV, and thanks for the fascinating analysis.

At i-together, we are passionate about faciliating the emergence of true voices from amongst the loud ones, so it’s heartening to see that GV is becoming a shining example in this regard.

BTW, found your post on Blog Friends. : )

Cheers,

Luke

Why do we have this arbitrary time measure to judge success? We seem to look back on things as failed when all they’ve done is ended. It’s taking what happened, and pulling it out of context. How many Tripod users do you suppose just signed off and left the web? You’ll never know how many websites, blogs, memoirs, tutorials, and on and on wouldn’t exist if their makers hadn’t gotten started on Tripod. The internet left Tripod behind, but that’s what the internet does when it’s going strong.

Geekcorp was wonderful- the idea that you could give geeks a role in humanitarian work that wasn’t giving money or leaving what they loved. No one I know had ever thought of what they did as valuable in that way.

I don’t know that much about Worldchanging, I’m going to have to let that one go.

Global Voices has continually surprised me. I had no idea what it was going to be in the beginning. How it’s developed, what it’s accomplished- that there are stories there that would have faded without it, people that wouldn’t have had a platform to speak. The very idea that it needs western attention feeds into the preconception you’re trying to break. GV is the only thing that keeps me liking blogs.

But GV is a blogging site on the internet. You’re going to outlive it. It’s going to die or become something completely unrecognizable. What GV is right now is a powerful good. As it changes and grows or is (hopefully) superseded by something better it doesn’t become less good right now. It doesn’t stop having done what it’s done.

Hemingway said something I’m butchering to be all happy endings are lies. All sad ones are lies too. Where we end the story is always going to our editorial framing. So… I guess I want you to admit the others were successful, because if I hear you going hard on GV in five or ten years, I’m going to bitch slap you. Um, lovingly. A… bitch slap of friendship. Anyway.

If you want to measure the success of GVO then don’t just look at Technorati rankings and other web metrics, listen to your audience and watch how they use the information resources at GVO and interact with one another. It’s nice to make it into the Technorati Top 100 but it is infinately more important to impact the lives of people around the globe everyday. If there were a way to accurately measure GVO’s impact on people’s lives, you guys would go down in history as one of the Top 10 new media/communication pioneers of the (early) 21st Century.

Time to move on to the next level of this global communication experiment if you ask me. Where we going Ethan, and who is going to take the lead?

PS: I almost spilled coffee in my keyboard at this line “criterion for success in my book …”

I was about to place a special order at my local bookstore! *curses

(And, in fact, in many cases, there’s a point Y where removing the critical individual ends up being beneficial to the organization, but that’s another story altogether.)

For example–there’s no doubt in anyone’s mind that Dean Kagen has done some amazing things for Harvard Law School. However, if the dean should suddenly leave, HLS will soldier on. On the other hand, can you imagine what would have happened to, say, Microsoft if Bill Gates had decided in 1979 that what he really wanted to do was go back to school and become a lawyer, like his father?

Anyway, this is a really long and roundabout way of saying that I’m really impressed by what GV has become, and that I’m proud to have contributed my very tiny little bit of work to the project.

I say that as I ping Technorati with tags on every post, but don’t see so much readership coming back from it. It’s down at #30 of referring sites over the past month, tied with Japanese CNet. Which hints that even though OLPC News focuses on educational technology for the developing world, our readership is very much geeky North Americans.