Confused about what’s going on in the northern Kivu region of the Democratic Republic of Congo? Don’t worry, you’re not alone. Many people who follow African issues closely were surprised to see fighting in the eastern DRC become so fierce so quickly. I suspect I’m not the only person tearing myself away from US elections coverage and trying to catch up on an extremely complex situation.

The very basic rundown: DRC has been nominally “at peace” since a ceasefire was signed in 2003 between most of the parties involved with the Second Congo War, often referred to as “Africa’s World War”. It’s a conflict that has cost the lives of over 5 million people, largely due to disease and poverty exacerbated by the fighting, rather than to direct violence. And the conflict has never really ended, despite reasonably successful elections in 2006.

The conflict, in part, is an outgrowth of the Rwandan genocide. When Paul Kagame’s forces chased Hutu militias out of Rwanda in 1994, they fled across the border into eastern DRC. This created one of the world’s most morally complicated humanitarian situations. People who’d fled Rwanda were refugees, and many legitimately feared for their lives, so humanitarian organizations felt compelled to care for them. But it became clear that these camps were housing and feeding militias, who were making raids across the border and continuing to kill Tutsis, which made some humanitarian organizations wonder whether they were helping perpetuate the conflict. (This is why we don’t set up refugee camps in war zones… but it’s very hard to figure out where those zones actually are.)

There are still Hutu militias in eastern DRC. And there’s a Tutsi militia as well, the CNDP, led by Laurent Nkunda. This group is nominally a self-defense miliia to protect Tutsi populations against the Hutu groups… but things are a little complicated in eastern DRC. This part of the country has amazing natural resources - a wealth of minerals as well as valuable timber - and anyone who’s fighting in eastern DRC is probably also attempting to gain a share of some of this wealth. When the Second Congo War ranged, it drew in Rwanda, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Angola and Namibia, all of whom wanted a share of the booty.

So the current conflict is nominally between Nkunda’s forces, the CNDP, who are trying to root out a Hutu group called the FDLR. The FDLR is probably supported by the Congolese government, and so much of the conflict has been between the CNDP and the Congolese army. But the Congolese army is badly trained, miserably supplied and extremely ineffectual, and lots of army members have simply been running away. So the conflict has ended up being between the CNDP, who are marching into cities in eastern DRC and the UN’s forces - MONUC - who are in those cities trying to protect civilians.

This ends up being a deeply odd situation. Since the Congolese army won’t fight, CNDP - which many believe to be backed by Rwanda - is fighting the UN, which consists mostly of Indian soldiers. Oh, and because MONUC hasn’t been very effective at protecting civilians (in part because they’ve got the mandate of keeping a peace that doesn’t exist), they’re getting attacked by the civilians they’re supposed to protect.

Video from the fall of Rumangbo Station, the headquarters for Virunga National Park

If you’re an average Congolese living in north Kivu, the situation is very, very scary. Roughly 250,000 people have fled their homes, and many are seeking safety in the thick jungles of Virunga National Forest. The video above is from the official website of the forest, which does an amazing job of using digital media to share what’s going on in eastern DRC… and to raise money for the work rangers are doing in protecting natural resources in a very unstable war zone. Nkunda’s rebels have now seized the headquarters of the park - the team is now trying to find 50 rangers who’ve fled into the jungle, and are looking for places to make phonecalls and let their families know they’re alive.

Most of the 250,000 people who’ve fled don’t have a resourceful team of bloggers and videographers looking out for them, but it’s worth paying close attentions to the accounts from Virunda, because they give a sense for how desperate and precarious the situation is.

For more on the situation, which is fluid and changing:
The Economist has a pretty good overview, as does the Guardian, focusing primarily on international mediation efforts. Global Voices is covering the situation from the perspective of bloggers, mostly the Virunga crew. Sokari’s got a strong piece about western mineral interests in DRC that’s worth reading.

A few years back, I observed that the Christian Science Monitor, a small paper with a strong focus on international news, published in Boston, was one of the “bloggiest” papers in the world. Despite a small paper circulation - now roughly 52,000 - it’s frequently cited by bloggers, usually pointing to their rich international coverage, delivered via eight overseas bureaus and a large contingent of foreign correspondents.

Due to business pressures and a changing print journalism market, the Monitor is embracing its bloginess and becoming one of the first newspapers to shift away from print. Currently a weekday paper, the Monitor will stop producing print editions in April 2009 and focus resources on their website, as well as a daily email edition. They’ll introduce a new print product, a Sunday magazine, and writers will focus on updating stories a few times a day on the website and producing longer editions for the magazine.

On the one hand, you can read this move as a brave embrace of the future business reality that faces high-quality journalism. Readers are moving away from print and towards the web. While revenue has yet to follow them to the extent that newspapers would like, it’s no longer possible to believe that adding color photos, more local coverage or snappier graphics to a daily paper edition is going to regain lost readers, at least in print editions. It’s a scary move for the Monitor, because everyone agrees that advertisers aren’t paying the premiums online that they’ve paid for print placement, but it seems like the best way maintain the paper’s commitment to investing heavily in international coverage.

However, some of the figures and statements coming from Monitor management in discussing the change are downright stark. The Monitor is a nonprofit venture, and it’s heavily subsidized by the Christian Science church. According to an announcement on the Monitor website announcing these changes, the paper will lose $18.9 million in its final year as a print daily - that’s a loss that the vast majority of newspapers could not survive. The new strategy isn’t designed to make the Monitor profitable, but to reduce the loss to $10.5 million a year. While the Monitor is hoping to convert current subscribers into subscribers to their weekly magazine - with a reduction in subscription costs from $219 to $89 - editor John Yemma doesn’t sound very confident about its value as a moneymaker: “‘We certainly know newsmagazines are cratering,’ Mr. Yemma said. ‘We’re under no illusions about it being a growth vehicle.’”

Anyone who cares about the survival of international news - or perhaps the survival of independent, high-quality journalism in general - will be watching the future of the Monitor closely. But the traffic numbers the website is currently experiencing are dispiriting, not just for the Monitor, but for all internationally-focused news sites. The Monitor’s website sees roughly 1.5 million visitors a month, and those visitors generate $1.3 million in ad revenue. I’m surprised by how small the online readership is. It’s huge in comparison to the print readership, of course, but only about 3-4x of the readership of Global Voices, across our different language editions. Given that reach, I would have expected less online revenue - that’s encouraging, as GV starts looking to increase earned revenue and decrease our reliance on foundation funding. Yemma is quoted in the New York Times as hoping to build online traffic to 20-30 million unique viewers a month over the next five years. That’s a huge growth curve, and perhaps an unrealistic one, but it’s likely what the paper needs to do to cover the subsidy from the Christian Science church.

One of the groups that will be watching the Monitor closely are the folks behind GlobalPost, a new, for-profit project designed to provide rich online coverage of global news through a worldwide team of freelance journalists. With extensive foundation supportWith the backing of investors willing to take a great deal of risk in support of journalistic goals, GlobalPost will provide modest income to a large stable of freelance foreign correspondents, making these stories available online and syndicating them to local and international news outlets. It’s a very good deal for the corresondents - while the money GlobalPost is offering isn’t enough to support most correspondents, it’s a fantastic safety net for someone trying to make a living as a freelancer. It’s much less clear that the model can work for GlobalPost without a large, continued subsidy. Unfortunately, the numbers the Monitor are revealing are a strong signal that there’s not an enormous, pent-up demand for high quality international news in the US right now.

Updated: My friends at GlobalPost point out that they’re structured as a for-profit, not non-profit. While they are backed by some adventurous and risk tolerant investors who may be willing to take on high risk to support their model, they intend to turn a profit with this model in the long run and not to rely on foundation support. My apologies for mischaracterizing.

Of course, circumstances could change. If there were critical international issues affecting people’s lives, I’m sure we’d all pay more attention. You know, a global financial crisis where mortgages in California sink banks in Iceland, cutting police budgets in the UK. Or a worldwide energy shortage coupled with global climate change. Or a complex war, with many international actors and complex religious and cultural dynamics. I’m sure something like that would have readers looking for more international perspectives. I’ll just keep crossing my fingers that some important international news occurs soon.

I wanted to close this post by urging people to subscribe to the Monitor as a show of support, and to do so myself. Unfortunately, the subscription offers on the site still point towards a daily subscription. I haven’t subscribed to the Monitor because I’m so rarely home that daily papers end up becoming expensive kindling. I hope that the Monitor will follow their announcement with an opportunity to subscribe to the new print magazine and that lots of folks who appreciate the high quality of the Monitor’s coverage will sign up for that new product, showing support for the paper’s brave new direction.

The Global Voices project Voices without Votes was just featured in an excellent article in the Washinton Post. Fearless leader of this important effort, Amira Al Hussaini, is prominently featured, and celebrated for her ability to keep together a team of international volunteers, mining the world’s blogospheres for persepctives on the US election. I’ve got high hopes that recognition from the Post will help draw some of the attention this project deserves.

There’s no shortage of citizen media around the world focused on the US election, both blogposts and videos. Personally, I’ve been digging the hit song “Barack Obama” from Ghanaian reggae star Blakk Rasta. If the acoustic reggae beat’s too soft for you, no fear - there’s a “crunk” version as well.

But my favorite is this homemade video, put together by some of the young men at the Orphan Aid school in Accra (and, I’m guessing, some of the folks who work with them). Through (patent-pending, I assume) Ghanaian green screen technology, Senator Obama makes an appearance on the soccer pitch and visits with a few of his many Ghanaian supporters.

I’m out of touch with the Ghanaian music scene, so I hadn’t heard Blakk Rasta. His biography is pretty fascinating - raised in Tamale, the major city in northern Ghana, he’s an observant Muslim as well as a convert to Rastafarianism. He’s got a degree in Land Economy from one of Ghana’s best universities and is evidently about to seek a law degree. Let’s hope that he doesn’t use his newfound legal skills to take on the remixers…

• Japan jobs, Japan singles, learn Japanese, teach English in Japan
  Passionate article by an American sumo commentator and fan about the challenges of anti-Mongolian racism in Japanese sumo
  (tags: japan mongolia sumo race racism commentary blog)

Bill Bishop, in “The Big Sort“, argues that Americans have sorted themselves into separate Americas, where we attend different choices, eat in different restaurants and shop in different stores. It shouldn’t be a surprise that we watch different YouTube videos.

My friend John Kelly and his colleagues with Morningside Analytics have put together a very smart new tool, called Shifting the Debate. Analyzing what YouTube videos bloggers on the left and the right link to, they’ve offered a portrait of video political commentary. They offer a tool - the Video Barometer, which displays which videos are more likely to be linked by bloggers on the left or on the right, how strong the left/right preference is, and how popular these videos are, in terms of incoming links.

Screenshot from Morningside Analytics Video Barometer

Unsurprisingly, there are two large sets of videos linked almost exclusively by folks on the left or on the right. 34 conservatives and no liberals have linked to Glenn Beck’s Obama National Anthem… you’ll be very surprised, I’m sure, to know that it’s sung to the tune of the former Soviet national anthem, and has The Messiah demanding your money and guns. And 38 liberal blogs and only one conservative blog link to a video montage of conservative commentators complaining about McCain’s presidential campaigning. (Just a note for all the smug, self-satisfied liberals out there - a group that often includes me: There are a lot of videos listed here linked only by conservative blogs and not by liberal blogs. I couldn’t find a single video that’s solely linked to by liberal blogs. Who’s running the more insulated echo chamber here?)

My friend Bruno Giussani suggested 18 months ago that this would be the year of user-generated swiftboating, where average citizens lined up to create blogposts, photo montages and videos that critiqued, discredited and smeared political candidates. While there’s been some of that, one of the interesting discoveries that comes from the Morningside set is the importance of video from professional media.

The most-linked video on the liberal side is Wassup 2008 - a parody of Budweiser beer ads that revisits the “Wassup?” guys after eight years of Bush/Cheney - it was produced by 60 frames, a web-based entertainment company. The second most popular is produced by Al Jazeera, and is a painful overview of some of McCain/Palin’s most out of touch, racist and bigoted voters. On the conservative side of the fence, the most popular is a McCain speech at the Al Smith Foundation, filmed by Fox News. The second probably qualifies as citizen media (and perhaps as user-generated swiftboating), a video by Illuminati Film, which appears to be a pair of independent filmmakers. Titled “Obama Citizenship”, it’s a video questioning whether Obama was born in the US, largely featuring a Pennsylvania attorney who runs a website called Obamacrimes.com. All these videos have relatively high production values, suggesting that one of the major obstacles to user-generated swiftboating is the level of technical expertise we appreciate in our media, including in our viral videos.

What’s most hopeful for me in the Morningside data is the discovery that there are some videos linked to by both the left and the right. One popular video is the full footage from the third presidential debate. Another is a video - Five Friends - where the cast of Friends urges Americans to vote. And then, there’s humor - both liberals and conservatives are finding something to like in a video that counts Barack Obama’s references to pie - “Too Much Pie for One Guy“. I think we can all agree that Obama should eat before he speaks in the future.

What’s the most popular video evenly linked by liberals and conservatives? Turns out we can all agree that remaking eighties music videos by narrating what happens in inexplicably trippy videos is an excellent idea. Yes, we all love the literal version of Take On Me. Perhaps there’s hope for political compromise in the United States after all.

Oddly enough, few on the left or the right appear to be linking to the Japanese video Obama is Beautiful World (エニワン・ブラザース・バンド) Can’t imagine why…

A somewhat more informative and serious look at the Morningside project from colleagues at Berkman’s Internet and Democracy project.

• Netting Demystified Derivative Dribble
  The $55 trillion in collateralized debt obligations? Netting helps explain why that $55 trillion figure may not be nearly as scary as it sounds
  (tags: economics finance bonds derivatives crisis mathematics)
• Schools in need employ teachers from overseas - USATODAY.com
  American schools are recruiting teachers from overseas to fill difficult teaching positions, particularly science and math teachers in urban districts. Filipino teachers appear to be especially succesful, both because they've got strong English fluency and because of similarities between educational systems.
  (tags: usolitics education migration economics labor globalization xenophilia)

• "There's an awful tough tightrope for Obama to walk" | Salon News
  Frank, challenging interview with Michael Eric Dyson on the challenges a President Barack Obama has with dealing with racial disparity in the US.
  (tags: uspolitics obama racism)

• Harvard Business Online's Now, New, Next
  Monitor Talent - a group of thinkers, innovators and speakers that I'm proud to be part of, now has a blog, edited by team leader Chris Meyer. Hope to see some of my posts appearing here soon and looking forward to this as a way to keep up with extraordinary folks like Howard Rheingold, Chris Luebkeman, Kevin Kelly and others.
  (tags: blogs ideas)
• Tuvan Throat-Singing Rap by Ondar, with the voice of Richard Feynman - Boing Boing
  Great video of Kongar-Ool Ondar doing "durgen chugaa" - a form of Tuvan throat singing that sounds a lot like rap, though it's basically a way singers test each other with tongue twisters. Long live Tannu Tuva!
  (tags: music video russia tuva throatsinging boingboing)
• Green Guru Gone Wrong: William McDonough - vantagepoint - green architecture | Fast Company
  Harsh and interesting analysis of William McDonough's influence on sustainability through his "cradle to cradle" idea. Reads as a classic tale of a visionary who couldn't bring an idea to scale and let an obsession with intellectual property stop him from leading a movement… or perhaps it's a hatchet job.
  (tags: design green criticism sustainability mcdonough c2c leed environmentalism)
• Blogging plant posts daily news on its mood - Telegraph
  We were shocked when the number of Japanese bloggers surpassed English-language bloggers. Now the explanations - they're teaching houseplants how to blog. A plant in a cafe is blogging using data from sensors in its pot. It's more articulate than many of the folks I read.
  (tags: japan blogging science humor)
• busuu.com | the language learning community
  Fascinating project that's trying to offer language lessons by leveraging web2.0 aspects, letting users correct each other's work and (I think) create teaching materials. Membership-based - you really need to join it to get a sense for what they're doing
  (tags: language translation web2.0 xenophilia participation)
• Innovation in Africa tips Design in Africa
  Tips on innovating in a developing world context from Paul Polak, Amy Smith, Design in Africa… and me. :-)
  (tags: innovation design africa economics development ideas)
• Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: The centripetal web
  Nick Carr offers an interesting theory - that as the web expands, we concentrate attention on a few large sites. Seems to miss the point about the technical difficulties of running popular sites, or the power of network affects in large sites. Still, interesting to think about in relation to echo chambers and the homophily problem
  (tags: blogs media internet wikipedia web2.0 google networks longtail trends)
• BBC NEWS | Africa | News blogger detained in Nigeria
  Jonathan Elendu of Nigerian citizen media site ElenduReports.com has been detained in Abuja by Nigeria's SSS. It's likely that his family visit raised attention of local forces who consider some of his highly critical online content to be seditious. This is bad news for Nigeria's vibrant independent media community.
  (tags: internt censorship africa freedom nigeria freespeech humanrights journalism)

For the past decade or so, there’s been a movement to bring computers, telephones and other “information and communication technology” into developing nations to increase economic development and eliminate poverty. Those of us involved with this movement - colloquially called ICT4D (Information and communication technology for development) - have argued that information imbalances underly major problems in economic development. If farmers don’t know fair prices for their commodities in big cities, they’ll sell for too little money. If students can’t access textbooks or other resources, they’re doomed to a poor education.

There’s a strong critique of ICT4D that argues that the importance of information is overstated and that ICT4D proponents either overvalue information technology because they’re personally attached to the tools, or more sinisterly, because they’re looking to create developing world markets for these tools. Many supporters of ICT4D - myself included - will concede that there are lots of badly thought out and poorly executed projects that do little more than drop expensive technology in areas where it’s a scarce resource and likely to stay a scarce resource for a long time to come.

One bright light for the ICT4D field has been the rise of eGovernment, a movement that tries to get governments to deliver key services to citizens using digital technology. India has been the location for many eGovernment pilot projects, some of which have been very successful in delivering key information services to citizens. In many states, citizens can visit information centers where they can obtain driver’s licenses, business licenses, residency or birth certificates, and other critical documents.

Jennifer Bussell, a political scientist who recently completed a PhD at UC Berkeley, has spent a great deal of time studying these projects and asks a tricky and important question about eGovernment in India - why do some states adopt eGovernance more readily than others? Are there policy environments that we can put in place to make it more likely that eGovernment projects will succeeed and that they’ll affect the lives of citizens positively?

In a talk at the Berkman Center on Tuesday, she offered an interesting opening paradox. The state of Karnataka is comparatively wealthy and extremely engaged with information technology - its capital is Bangalore, the epicenter of India’s technology and outsourcing industries. Chhattisgarh is a new state, carved out of Madhya Pradesh in 2000, and is extremely poor and low-tech. We’d expect eGovernment services to catch on in Karnataka much more quickly than in Chhattisgarh… and we’d be wrong. eGovernment has caught on far more quickly in this young, poor state than in the technology giant, raising questions about what factors actually contribute to the success or failure of eGovernment projects.

To understand what’s going on in these two states - and indeed, across many of India’s states (Bussell developed her theories in seven Indian states and has tested them on nine additional states, analyzing 16 of India’s 28 states) - it’s important to understand corruption, and how eGovernment might affect corruption. Indian citizens pay a lot of money in bribes. It’s estimated that Indians pay $5 billion USD annually to bribe government officials. Sometimes this is wealthy citizens paying money to “jump the queue” and obtain services more quickly that average citizens. But extremely poor citizens pay bribes as well - Bussell references a study that suggests that citizens below the poverty line collectively paid $22 million in bribes to access essential and guaranteed government services.

Taking old, paper-based bureacracies and turning them into “e-government” services appears to squeeze some opportunities for corruption - “rent-seeking”, in the language of political economics - out of the system. It’s not entirely clear why this is - the service centers rolled out in Indian states don’t generally put computers in the hands of citizens and let them access services directly. There’s an opportunity for the operators of these new systems to seek bribes. But the digitalization of India’s massive railway system is a good example of what’s happened in some eGovernment systems. Before digitalization, it was difficult to purchase a ticket without knowing someone to bribe within the system. Now tickets can be purchased online, and transactions within railway stations are simple, efficient and bribe-free (even if you’re a clueless American looking for trains from Rajastan to Delhi, as happened to me not very long ago.)

Bussell argues that e-services tend to systematically reduce corruption, and that they therefore can be threatening to existing political elites. Elites have the power of transferring bureacrats, moving them from a job where it’s easy to seek bribes (the customs service) to one where it’s harder to do so. They exercise this power by demanding kickbacks from bureacrats, which they use as campaign finance. A politician whose political livelihood relies on control of bribes and rent-seeking officials is likely to be threatened by eGovernment efforts and might fight their introduction.

Bussell further theorizes that the removal of bribes could be a threat to political stability within coalition governments. A coalition can be thought of as a group of politicians all seeking a share of the benefits of being in control of a state’s government - part of this control includes control over offices with a high chance for gains through corruption. So she theorizes that we’ll see eGovernment projects succeed in areas where there’s lower corruption, and where there’s a single party in power.

She studies eGovenrment adoption by tracking how many services are available in a given state - some offer just a few, like driver’s licenses, while others offer dozens. Her models try to explain the adoption of eGovernment services in terms of several factors. Some turn out to be largely irrelavent. Technology infrastructure isn’t statistically significant in explaining why some states have aggresively embraced eGovernment. Nor is the time of adoption - states that started eGovernment earlier aren’t neccesarily ahead of the curve. And the level of economic development isn’t statistically significant either.

Corruption, on the other hand, is a strong factor - states with above average corruption (based on surveys by groups like Transparency International) have adopted 10.6 services on average, while those with below-average corruption average out at 20.1 services. Unitary government matters as well - single party governments with below average corruption adopt services more aggresively than coalition governments, even in below-average corruption states.

This is useful information for anyone attempting to build eGovernment systems and roll them out in developing nations, though it doesn’t offer much insight on what to do if you’re in a high-corruption, coalition-governed area. (Duck and cover, perhaps.) And there’s a intriguing larger question - how does the introduction of eGovernment affect corruption in the long term? Do states that adopt eGovernment systems become progressively less corrupt over time? Bussell’s intrigued by these questions and looking for ways to study them going forward, which is good news for anyone who cares about ICT4D and wants to make sure people are doing rigorous, careful evaluation of what works and what fails.

I’ve had an artistic idea I’ve wanted to play with for some months now. It was inspired by a conversation with Dale Joachim, who uses cellphones to study owl populations. By calling forests during the night and broadcasting owl calls, he can listen through GSM-enabled microphones and hear responses.

This idea of listening into spaces has morphed into a much weirder idea, one that I’ll likely never get a chance to do… so I might as well share it with you.

There are lots of spaces around the world that map neatly to one another. A Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in Canton, Ohio and another one in Canton, China, for instance. On the one hand, they’re the same spaces. On another hand, they’re profoundly different. (For one thing, the shop in Ohio probably doesn’t sell preserved egg porridge.)

KFC in Beijing, photographed by isriya.

I want to build windows between these spaces. We’d place videoconferencing systems unobtrusively in walls within these spaces - possibly something no more complicated than a flat-screen monitor and a webcam. They’d connect, at random, to one of these mapped spaces around the world, and for some period of time, you’d have a window from your restaurant in Ohio into China… and then a few minutes later, into Pakistan or Poland. You’d be able to hear the conversation in the other space, but it wouldn’t be any louder than the ambient noise in your location. If you chose to turn to the monitor and engage with someone on the other side, that would be up to you as well… which would be incredibly cool, but confusing, I suspect.

I’d like to build these windows in a variety of mappable spaces. Some would map very cleanly onto one another - one Starbucks to another, for instance. Others would be more conceptual - a public space in a shopping mall mapping to one in an outdoor market, like Makola in Accra, for instance. Or installing a monitor in place of the mirror above a sink in a public restroom, which maps to a monitor above another sink across the world.

Makola Market, Accra. Photo by Caroline Beaumont for Transaid.

I think we’d want to make all the video streams available online as well, both to show the diversity of locations and because it would create a great opportunity to monitor any possible interactions.

What would we do faced with these windows? Would we ignore them, the way we generally ignore other people in public spaces? Nod politely to fellow customers across the world and then turn to our own chicken? Or would we turn to face the monitors and introduce ourselves to the men having coffee in Bahrain, the women selling fish in Accra?

(If I were Cory Doctorow, say, I’d write a short story about the idea rather than wondering how to build it, where a group of kids in Brazil befriend another group in China that they meet randomly over the monitor. The keep returning to the restaurant at pre-agreed times, hoping the random algorithm will connect them to their friends, rather than to a room of bewildered, unsmiling Germans.)

I’ve found myself wondering whether anyone at a global chain restaurant or store would be crazy enough to try the idea. I could imagine doing a very small-scale version at Walmart or Best Buy, converting a single television or computer monitor on display into a window. But the charm of the idea, for me, is a window that might not be noticed as part of a public space where people linger, as in a restaurant. Anyone know a truly crazy VP of marketing who wants to make the case that their company is truly a global brand? Someone convinced that stumbling onto international connection can help sell coffee or chicken to xenophiles?

What got me thinking about the idea today was an email from the folks behind Woices - a new web2.0 service that allows you to tag geographic spaces with a small piece of audio. These tags - called “echoes” - were designed to create a new type of travel guide. With a location-aware phone, you could explore audio tags that people had put on a space you were wandering as a tourist, for instance. The company founders decided to share the idea more widely, and now you can annotate random locations on the planet, for whatever reason you’d like. I spent a while today listening to people read the menu in a Japanese restaurant in Tarragona and talking about pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago in Galicia.

It helps to speak Spanish to get a sense for how the system works at present, but there’s nothing language specific about the technology. And I love the idea that spaces can get overlaid with the voices of local people who love these places and visitors who are trying to understand them. Maybe this is a more practical way to execute my vision and I simply need to start annotating every KFC I eat in, from Canton to Canton.

Update - Tracy points to [murmur], a project similar to Woices that’s began in Toronto in 2003 and has spread to other cities.