I’m blogging from Camden, Maine, at the wonderful Pop!Tech conference. This year’s a special treat. My wife, the lovely Velveteen Rabbi, and I are team-blogging, trading off posts. You can read her posts on her website, or just read all of ours on the Pop!Tech site, where Michelle Riggen-Ransom has been doing brilliant work thus far. There’s lots of bloggers in the crowd and on twitter – follow the #poptech tag for lots of different perspectives.

Steve Barr, the founder of GreenDot schools, has been on the front lines of turning around education in Los Angeles, where they’ve built 17 schools. Barr (after cracking a joke about the TED/Pop!Tech rivalry) tells us that he’s not an educator, but he is a product of the California public school system. He tells us that his class, the class of 1977 of Cupertino High School, represents the last year of the fully funded, truly high quality educational system in the US. Silicon Valley wasn’t about engineers who liked to surf – it was the product of a really good school system. “A couple guys down the street, Steve and Steve, went into a garage and built a pretty cool company.” And as a son of a waitress, Barr received the same education.

“In my lifetime, California schools went from the best in the world to the worst.” We debate about this. The left says “let’s give more money to a failed centralized system built for a manufacturing society.” The right is largely indifferent and blames the teacher’s union.

Barr was transformed from a career in politics by two tragedies – the death of his younger brother and his mother within two years. He started thinking about schools and how they’d changed. When he graduated from high school, he tells us, the schools believed that “20% of you are going to college and will do great, and 20% we can’t do anything for – the rest of you, if you can read and write, are going to do just fine” because there will be good jobs that will let you support a family and buy a house. That’s not how it works now. And “most of the people in this room have fled the system.”

Barr and GreenDot took over Locke High School in Watts. “Tough neighborhood” doesn’t begin to describe the location around this campus. It was founded in 1968 as a “sign of hope” in the wake of the Watts riots. The Blood and the Crips were founded within ten blocks of the school. The school has become a dumping ground for surrounding schools – for problem students and teachers.

Since the school opened, 60,000 people have passed through this badly broken school. Only 8,000 made it to four year universities. Only 2,200 graduated from those schools. How many came back to Watts to become a teacher, start a business, or be politically active? Basically, none. “Can any business overcome the infrastructural damange of that school?” Every city you’re from, he tells us, has a Locke High School. Until we fix this, there’s no widespread American financial recovery.

What would be the fastest way to change education in the US? We could make private schools illegal. (He’s joking. Sort of.) “What would happen if Bill Gates had to send his kids to public school? He’d go to McKinsey and demand that they turn this stuff around!”

Barr visited the big public schools in LA and observed that they looked like prisons. And then he went to the succesful private schools. “You’d never send your kid to a school with over a thousand kids if you were paying 25 grand – they’d fall through the cracks.” You’d have high expectations for every kid, and bring kids up to speed so they could learn together and so every kid would be focused on college prep. You’d call the school if they didn’t assign your kids homework – and they’d answer the phone. And you’d participate in the school’s culture – the bake sales and the teacher conferences.

Critically – and perhaps most politically – “You’d never spend 25 grand if half the money didn’t go to the classroom but to another building where folks walk around in suits.” 60% of the employees in the LA educational system aren’t teachers. Sure, he tells us, we need some principals and some school bus drivers. But the LA system is building the best bureacracy that money can buy.

GreenDot now runs 16 schools in LA, and one in the South Bronx. While they’re enormously succesful, Barr tells us, “I’m tired of charter schools.” He’s tired, because we’ve proved that you can succeed with high expectations for kids. The question is how we might create a movement.

He references Lucy of Lucy’s El Adobe, a Mexican restaurant in LA. She’s a Buddhist, and suggests that there are two things needed to make change: wisdom and method. Barr’s method, in no small part, focuses on finding politicans who are able to challenge their preconceptions about race, politicians “who actually know that black and brown kids can learn”. Politicians who don’t get it tell him that his students learn because they’ve got motivated parents. They do, Barr agrees, but the vast majority of those parents in LA are illegal immigrants. You don’t need rich parents to get a good education – you need committed, engaged parents and politicians who accept responsibility for turning around the American educational system.

I’m blogging from Camden, Maine, at the wonderful Pop!Tech conference. This year’s a special treat. My wife, the lovely Velveteen Rabbi, and I are team-blogging, trading off posts. You can read her posts on her website, or just read all of ours on the Pop!Tech site, where Michelle Riggen-Ransom has been doing brilliant work thus far. There’s lots of bloggers in the crowd and on twitter – follow the #poptech tag for lots of different perspectives.

Luis von Ahn, professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon, believes we can make computers better by harnessing the intelligence of humans. Inventor of the CAPTCHA and the reCAPTCHA, a technology that both helps eliminate spam and digitizes books, Luis was recently recognized with a MacArthur fellowship for his groundbreaking and creative work.

“Have you seen those distored squiggly characters on web forms? Do they annoy you? I invented that.”

Luis explains why we need CAPTCHAs on the internet. They prevent scalpers from buying millions of tickets at once through online systems like Ticketmaster, and they slow down spammers from obtaining a near infinity of email accounts. They don’t always work, he explains – an automated system on Yahoo creates distorted letters from random letters. When the system prompted a user with the word “WAIT”, she waited for twenty minutes before giving up. He’s just grateful it didn’t say “RESTART”.

Luis von Ahn. photo by Kris Krüg

Without CAPTCHAs, bad things can happen. He tells us about a Slashdot poll that asked users to vote on the best CS grad school in US. Students at CMU wrote a program to game the poll. MIT fought back, and within a couple of days, the poll needed to be taken down as both schools had more than six million votes.

Spammers need lots of email accounts, since each account tends to be limited to sending a few hundred emails a day. So spammers write programs to harness lots of accounts. CAPTCHAs slow this down. So spammers are now building CAPTCHA sweatshops, hiring humans to type CAPTCHAs in countries where the minimum wage is very low. Luis observes that, well, at least it’s costing spammers something. And it’s creating jobs in the developing world. Pornographers who want email accounts have found out how to do this for free – they ask people to solve the CAPTCHAs they’re confronted with in exchange for free porn.

CAPTCHAs have now been tried in different ways in different countries. Russian CAPTCHAs frequently ask users to solve complex math problems – Luis is astounded that Russian CAPTCHA authors assume that a random user can calculate a limit in a complex algebraic equation. Indian CAPTCHAs sometimes feature circuit designs and ask a user to calculate resistance. And, of course, in the US, blog captures feature tough problems like “What is 1+1?” He points out that all these CAPTCHAs fail, because they’re all pretty easily solveable by computers.

While he’s proud that 200 million CAPTCHAs are typed online everyday, Von Ahn mourns the waste of human time and energy, up to 500 thousand hours a day. So Luis invented the reCAPTCHA, which is used to help in the scanning of books. Scanning books involves taking photos of book pages then using OCR (optical character recognition) to figure out what the words are. In older texts, OCR is quite inexact – he tells us that for books written before 1900s, OCR misses roughly 30% of the words.

reCAPTCHAs present users with two distorted words. The system knows what one is – if you identify it correctly, it assumes you’re probably answering the second one (the order is randomized) to the best of your ability. When a dozen users identify an unknown word the same way, it’s very likely that the recognition is an accurate one. The system now digitizes 45 million words a day, the equivalent of 4 million books a year.

The two word reCAPTCHAs are as efficient as entering in random strings of 6 to 8 word characters, so von Ahn isn’t making us work harder. The texts are coming from the New York Times archives and from the Google book scanning project. Google likes the technology so much that they just acquired reCAPTCHA.

In the question and answer session, von Ahn explains that he’s hoping to use these methods for language translation and image tagging in the near future.

Andrew closes our first session with the announcement of a new initiative. He explains that Pop!Tech has focused on three areas: innovation, social change and science. The new initiative focuses on helping young, working scientists become visible leaders, learning communication and leadership skills to complement their scientific skills. Starting next year, 15 to 20 scientists will be involved in a year-long training program which will may appearances on the Pop!Tech stage. Andrew acknowledges that, in the academy, there’s something of an anti-popularization bias – the role of Pop!Tech is to ensure that scientists continue doing excellent academic work but are simply more skilled at communicating their exploration, knowledge and discovery. This work is supported in a big way by Microsoft, along with National Georgraphic, and is endorsed by the National Science Foundation.

I’m blogging from Camden, Maine, at the wonderful Pop!Tech conference. This year’s a special treat. My wife, the lovely Velveteen Rabbi, and I are team-blogging, trading off posts. You can read her posts on her website, or just read all of ours on the Pop!Tech site, where Michelle Riggen-Ransom has been doing brilliant work thus far. There’s lots of bloggers in the crowd and on twitter – follow the #poptech tag for lots of different perspectives.

Tony Hey, in charge of external research for Microsoft, is interested in the impact of digital data across all fields – not just science, but the humanities as well. Thousands of years ago, he tells us, people were looking at the stars to understand celestial mechanics – they wrote down and shared their observations. This was the beginning of experimental science. Not until the 1600s did we see the emergence of theoretical structures to predict scientific behavior in the work of Kepler and Newton – they introduced a second paradigm forcus on generalization and theory.

We’re now moving towards a third paradigm: computational science. This is the only ways we can look at problems like climate change and galaxy formation, Hey tells us. And there’s a fourth paradigm – data-intensive science, where we examine massive data sets to make new kinds of discoveries.

Hey believes that scientists need to think about and explain how scientific discovery happens in this new, fourth paradigm. He’s asked scientists to share essays on the topic, and they’ve been published in a creative commons, downloadable book called “The Fourth Paradigm“.

Tony Hey. photo by Kris Krüg

To fully embrace this fourth paradigm of data-intensive science, we need lots of scientists. Hey references his colleague Curtis Wong, who’s pioneered the WorldWide Telescope, a program that turns your computer into a telescope using data collected from the best telescopes around the world. WorldWide Telescope powers Galaxy Zoo, a site that lets “citizen scientists” classify galaxies by their shape. Citizens can do real science – Hey points us to the Hanny van Arkle’s object, the bluest galaxy we’ve ever seen. The galaxy was discovered by a Dutch schoolteacher, and it’s now a target for exploration with the Hubble telescope.

Other citizen science projects include “Fold It“, a computer game about protein folding which actually forward research on genetics, proteins and molecular structure. Another project invites students to run scenarios about global warming on their home and classroom computers based on a wide range of starting parameters – by running these simulations, schoolkids can discover that global warming may evolve very differently based on minor changes in starting parameters.

For these models of citizen science to work, Hey recommends a model: engage the viewer, build mental models, and access reference material to validate. You need to draw viewers in, help them understand what they’re seeing through a scientific model and then confirm those models with data and through authoritative sources.

Trying to open science to a larger audience, Hey tells us about Project Tuva. This is an unpacking of seven physics lectures by Richard Feynmann. Bill Gates was so fascinated by the lectures, he personally negotiated the ability to stream the videos. They’ve been enhanced with hyperlinks to Wikipeda and other supporting media, and full text search that indexes the video.

So what about the humanities? Hey shows us a video of the eHeritage project launched by Microsoft Asia. The goal is “preserving cultural heritage through advanced computing research.” One project reconstructs objects before they went through the weathering process. Another creates rotatable models of jade objects and one animates traditional Chinese paintings.

The example that’s most compelling to the Pop!Tech audience is the remarkable Photosynth. It’s a program that sews together images into moveable three-D models. Using photos posted online of the Camden Opera House, Hey and his team have assembled a beautiful model of the inside of the Pop!Tech venue. It’s a very impressive demonstration of a technology that could be very powerful for visualizing ancient historical and archeological sites.

I’m blogging from Camden, Maine, at the wonderful Pop!Tech conference. This year’s a special treat. My wife, the lovely Velveteen Rabbi, and I are team-blogging, trading off posts. You can read her posts on her website, or just read all of ours on the Pop!Tech site, where Michelle Riggen-Ransom has been doing brilliant work thus far. There’s lots of bloggers in the crowd and on twitter – follow the #poptech tag for lots of different perspectives.

Zoë Keating is a cellist who’s more than a cellist. Formerly of rock cello band Rasputina, she’s now an innovative classical composer and performer. Using her instrument and a small pile of electronics – and heavy doses of creativity – she creates rich, layered textures that some have termed “avant-cello”. She opens the conference alone on stage, adding deep, lovely layers to a piece that resolves itself into “Amazing Grace”. Mac laptop at her side, tapping floor pedals as she goes, she draws themes from the cello, which repeat then recede into a shimmering background. It’s a meditative, slightly solelm and deeply beautiful start to the second day of the conference.

Zoë Keating, photo by Kris Krüg

(Watching the video feed from the lounge, the cameras capture her heavily taped left fingers on the fretboard. For a moment, her hands look like those of a boxer or an offensive lineman, a reminder, with her fraying bow, of the rigors of making music.)

Andrew Zolli, our host, mentions that he had initially invited Zoë to be part of the Pop!Tech audience, but that she’d been so moved by his idea of opening each day with American music that she volunteered to perform.

Pop!Tech social innovation fellow Nigel Waller is CEO of movirtu, a socially-responsible company dedicated to providing “mobile for the next billion”. He promises that on this morning’s session on “mind shifts” that he’s going to change how we think about the mobile phone. He asks us to imagine sharing a mobile phone in a family – a family in Kibera, Nairobi, where a phone is shared by a father (a carpenter), a mother and a daughter (who’s boyfriend the father doesn’t like.)

There’s 3.5 billion people with mobile phones today, and an additional billion sharing phones. The people who don’t own phones spend an astonishing amount of money – 5-30% of their income – on phones. Waller suggests that you can reduce costs to an individual of $6 per person per month with a phone and increase their income by $5. We could get more mobile phones out there if we could reduce handset costs. To a very poor person, a $25 handset is as inaccesable as a $5000 handset would be to us. There’s disincentives for mobile operators to bring these people online as they’re low revenue users.

Waller’s big idea is to put mobile phone functionality into a cloud. Users who share a mobile phone can have independent lines, but access that account from everywhere. This model might actually make significant money for mobile phone operators. Working with NGOs, universities and testing in labs in South Africa, the system is ready to go, and Waller believes that the model could serve a million African customers this year.

One of the first thing Bektour Iskender, co-founder of Kyrgyz blogging community Kloop.kg, said when we met was, “I read your book.” That surprised me, as I haven’t written any books. But then I realized he was talking about a guide I’d written about anonymous blogging. He went on: “I was translating that guide at the same time as David Sasaki’s book on citizen media, so the two of you tend to blur in my head.” As we talked about how Bektour got interested in citizen media, he mentioned a transformative trip he’d taken to Prague to study with Evgeny Morozov at Transitions Online.

As we sat in Porter Exchange in Cambridge yesterday, I realized I was having dinner with the next generation. Friends like Evgeny, David and I have been working since 2004 to ensure that citizen media is a revolution that doesn’t just include North Americans and Western Europeans. Here, slurping noodle soup with me, was a blogger trained by my generation of bloggers, who’d read the guides we’d put out into the world and now busily cultivating another generation of bloggers.

What made it especially cool was discovering just how impressive Kloop’s success has been so far. In a country where internet access is expensive and doesn’t extend far outside the capital, Bishkek, Kloop now hosts more than 1100 blogs on an installation of WordPress MU. Kloop provides these blogs for free, and they’re “freer” than blogs provided by LiveJournal or other international blogging platforms, as Kyrgyz bandwidth is so expensive that cybercafes and ISPs charge more for accessing international sites than local ones. Kloop also maintains a citizen media portal, an edited news site that draws on contributions from Kloop bloggers. That site has become increasingly important in the Kyrgyz media space – Bektour tells me that Kloop reporters wrote many of the most linked stories on a Kazakstan block of Livejournal last year.

Kloop is developing a track record for training young journalists in what Bektour refers to as “the Anglo-American model of journalism”, a style that focuses on facts rather than opinions. (I think this must be the dying Anglo-American model, perhaps killed off by Jan Moir, but Bektour reassures me that there’s a lot to be said for “just the facts, ma’am” in countries where Soviet propoganda shaped many journalists’ conception of themselves.) An early success story is Timur Toktonaliyev, a sixteen year old reporter who’s been credentialled to report on Parliament, and who now is a paid freelancer for an international news agency.

The long-term plan for Kloop is to achieve sustainability by teaching classes in journalism and new media. Bektour outlines a curiculum for me that involves classes that will help NGOs use social media, as well as training bloggers and journalists in media ethics, and offering workshops on basic programming for social media users (customizing stylesheets, installing WordPress, etc.) Tutors for these workshops will likely come from outside Kyrgyzstan initially, but over time, the goal is to train a set of social media experts who can help spread social media through the region. It makes sense for Kyrgystan to act as a hub for social media as the media climate is more free in Kyrgyzstan than in any of the other Central Asian nations.

The idea of Kyrgyz bloggers supporting their bretheren in Uzbekistan isn’t as strange as it might sound. Bektour tells me that much of the success Kloop has had so far has come from the broader community of former Soviet states. Bektour was one of the organizers of a BarCamp in Riga, Latvia last February. Much of the technical support for Kloop comes from people he met at the BarCamp, and Bektour points to collaborations happening between bloggers in Central Asia and the Baltics.

Most of Kloop’s blogs are in Russian, but the Chess photoblog, maintained by a filmmaker, is a nice introduction to those of us who don’t read the language. A 2007 interview with Bektour on Global Voices, conducted by Ben Paarman, gives a sense for how far the project has come in a short time.

An interview with Bektour by Chris Schuepp of Young People’s Media Network.

A couple of years back, Technorati dropped out of my life. It was a sudden break, though I didn’t notice it at first. I blog using the WordPress platform, and WordPress relied on Technorati’s API to track mentions of my blog in other blogs, which I saw daily on my blog’s dashboard. And then WordPress began using Google Blog Search instead. I didn’t notice the difference for a while, and when I did, I didn’t really care. Google Blog Search, at that point, was pretty good, and it met my needs – it gave the the reassurance that people were reading and commenting on my words and that I wasn’t just wasting time talking to the ether.

And then Google Blog Search got less usable – first it got spammy, and then it got sparse. I turned back to Technorati and to Blogpulse and discovered that neither was especially satisfying. Talking with friends who blog, we agreed that it was strange and sad that there was no worthy blog search engine. In a meeting at Berkman yesterday, we were bemoaning the fact that Technorati had disabled their API, wondering whether this was a sign that the company was heading towards extinction.

I realized I hadn’t actually looked at the Technorati site for quite a while. I was surprised to discover that Technorati is back. It’s very different from what it was, and in some ways, much better. And, in one way that’s critical to me, it’s much, much worse. The site’s return raises some fascinating questions about the nature of the blogosphere, its influence and importance.

Self-obsessive that I am (a trait shared by the vast majority of bloggers), I checked Technorati to see how this blog ranked. When I checked Technorati regularly, this blog usually squeaked into the top 5000 blogs tracked by the site – in the past couple of years, I’ve slipped in influence (I’m sure you’ve noticed – thanks for not mentioning it) down to roughly 7,000. But I’ve now vaulted back to prominence with a ranking of #1116. Woo hoo! Except that I’m no longer 7,000 of 133 million – I’m 1,116 of 825,402.

Say what?

Technorati have historically been the cheerleaders of the blogosphere, pointing to an increase from four million blogs in 2004 to 70 million in 2007 and 133 million in 2008. Behind the scenes, people familiar with the challenges of indexing blogs knew that these numbers were suspect, in at least two directions. They were inflated, because the pingservers that aggregators like Technorati used to build their catalogs were riddled with spam. And they were undercounting the blogosphere, because many bloggers around the world – particularly those in China – use blogging platforms that don’t talk to pingservers, rendering those blogs invisible to ping-based catalogs. Dave Sifry would announce that there were 30 million blogs and proud internationalists like me would announce that the number was surely undercounting Chinese blogs, where the China Internet Network Information Center reported 47 million bloggers with 72 million blogs.

So what happened? Well, first, Technorati kicked out the non-English speakers. A quick tour through the top 100 sites indexed by Technorati reveals no non-English blogs. That top 100 list used to be quite diverse. I published a paper in Public Choice using data from Technorati in September 2005 that saw 15 of the top 100 weblog authors writing from outside the US, in Chinese, Italian, Portguese, Japanese and German. Some of those blogs have died, while others continue to be active and influential. Blog de Beppe Grillo is an incredibly important site to Italian political discussion – Alexa ranks it as 5,016 in the world in terms of traffic, 135 in Italy, and Google Ad Planner estimates 840,000 visitors a day, generating 11 million pageviews. That makes sense – Grillo is, in a very inexact analogy, Italy’s blogging Jon Stewart.

Technorati knows about Beppe Grillo. They just don’t think he’s very important. He gets a 1 in influence, the lowest rating on a scale from 1 to 1000. (I get a 611. Take that, you protest-leading, profanity-spewing, politically influential funnyman. That’ll teach you to actually reach an audience of millions!)

Other influential internationalists don’t make the index at all. My friend Harinjaka – one of the leaders of a blogging campaign in Madagascar, sufficiently influential to get invited to the TED conference – doesn’t appear at all. Others appear with a surprisingly low rank. Roland Soong’s indispensible EastSouthWestNorth – the most important blog for English-speakers trying to understand China – ranks 59,101, with an influence of 113. The “influence” score isn’t easy to understand anymore – it used to measure incoming links in the past six month. Now, “Authority is calculated based on a site’s linking behavior, categorization and other associated data over a short, finite period of time. A site’s authority may rapidly rise and fall depending on what the blogosphere is discussing at the moment, and how often a site produces content being referenced by other sites.”

In other words, links and some other stuff. Fair enough. But an algorithm that doesn’t see Beppe Grillo or Roland Soong’s influence has got something badly wrong with it. Or simply refuses to consider pages with substantial non-English content. (Soong’s blog is so important because it translates large volumes of text between English and Chinese, helping each group understand China-focused conversations happening in the other language.)

Technorati may have a very good reason for shrinking their catalog and kicking out the non-English speakers – it lets them build a carefully classified, hand-edited catalog. That blog directory is an extremely helpful resource, both to people who want to explore (English-language) blogs and to internet researchers. On the other hand, it’s hard to believe that the universe features only 88 basketball blogs, given that I can name 10 sumo blogs off the top of my head.

My guess is that Technorati’s good reason has to do with repositioning advertisers’ understanding of what blogs are and aren’t. In the early years of blogging, the goal was to convince tech pundits and financial markets that blogging was a real, important and growing phenomenon, so that investing in a blogging search engine sounded like a good idea. Now the goal is convincing advertisers that bloggers are creating highly-targeted, advertiser friendly content. That would explain why this year’s State of the Blogosphere doesn’t feature statistics about the growing population of bloggers (Now up to 830,000! Down from 133 million!), their geographic distribution (More bloggers in Japan than the US! And we don’t index them!) and focuses instead on a survey of 2,828 bloggers, asking them about their motivations for blogging.

Technorati classifies the new, advertiser-friendly 2009 blogosphere into four camps:
• Hobbyists (72%)
• Part-Timers (15%)
• Corporate (4%)
• Self Employeds (9%)

In other words, the criterion for classification is blogger’s financial motives. Part-timers blog to supplement their income, corporate bloggers sling bits for an employer, while self-employed’s labor in the bit mines on their own. Those of us, like me, who don’t actually make money from our blogs are “hobbyists”. We are evidently on the wane, due to “an increase of work and family commitments”, making those professional bloggers ever more important.

However loathsome you find this categorization, it helps explain where Technorati’s trying to go. Their business isn’t a comprehensive blog directory – it’s the hub of an advertising network that now ranks fifth in the universe of social media, managing ad inventory on 450 web properties. Persuading advertisers that bloggers are “are a highly educated and affluent group,” not to mention mannerly, neat and well scrubbed, recently helped the company raise another $2 million in venture capital funding.

And Technorati’s right – there has been a significant move towards professionalization in the blogosphere. Many of the top sites Technorati is tracking are highly professional, multiple-author ad supported newsrooms. Some of the bloggers who were primarily interested in sharing links or status updates have moved to Twitter or other tools better suited towards brief updates. Blogs have moved into longer-form essays and journalistic stories… though the hobbyists in the crowd, like me, might point out that they’ve also become platforms for academic publication and collaboration, for political organization in the US and elsewhere, for citizen media, whether or not those activities directly yield advertising dollars.

So here’s the new Technorati. It works better than it used to, and there are clean, well-lit pathways to almost a million blogs. What’s wrong with that?

Nothing, so long as people understand that Techorati doesn’t index the blogosphere. It indexes the blogs that it indexes, excluding those that don’t make sense in its new paradigm. And that’s got consequences. You may never have clicked over to Beppe Grillo when he ranked high in the top 100, assuming that since you didn’t read Italian or follow Italian politics, there was nothing for you on his site. In the process, you would have dicovered that virtually every post is translated into English, and that Italian political culture has a playful and performative quality that US politics would really benefit from understanding, if not embracing. At the very least, the presence of non-English blogs in that top 100 were a reminder that the Internet isn’t an English-only space, and that citizen media isn’t just a North American/Western European phenomenon. Technorati used to remind us that the Internet was a crowded, complicated, multiligual, multicultural place – now it tells us that the Internet speaks English and is safe for advertisers.

Perhaps the Technorati we’re seeing today is a preview of a larger transformation. Perhaps we’ll see language and culture-focused Technoratis, indexing Japanese, Chinese, Persian, Portuguese and Malagasy blogs. Maybe days four and five of this year’s state of the blogosphere will remind us of the global import of blogging, not just for advertising electronic gadgets, but for challenging coups and dictators.

And maybe not. We’ve got a little website called Global Voices that tries to make the rest of the blogosphere accessible to English readers… and, in turn, we now make that website accessible in dozens of other languages. We used to rely heavily on sites like Technorati to help us find bloggers in other parts of the world. Now we’ve got hundreds of dedicated new media people from Kyrgyzstan to Kiribati who’ll help you understand what people are talking about in those countries… whether or not Technorati chooses to include them.

Ghanaians have lots to celebrate. The football team defeated Brazil in a dramatic final of the under-20 World Cup, that featured a 0-0 tie through overtime and a 4-3 win on penalties, and fans danced in the streets. (Ghana played a man down through much of the match, and goalkeeper Daniel Aygei was extraordinary.) A new fiber optic cable offers the promise of reduced internet rates and the possibility of more business process outsourcing contracts. And there’s oil off the coast, prompting a bidding war between CNOOC and Exxon.

But it’s big news that former president John Kufuor isn’t celebrating this week. Kufuor was the favorite to receive the third Mo Ibrahim prize for African leadership. It’s a big prize – $5 million over 10 years and $200,000 annually for life thereafter – designed to recognize democratically elected former African leaders who’ve stepped down in the past three years after compiling a record of good government. Kufuor was the prohibitive favorite this year – Thabo Mbeki had been forced to resign from his post, while Olusegun Obasanjo is widely viewed as having rigged an election to appoint his succesor. Kufuor, by contrast, saw his party ousted in an election viewed (rightly or wrongly) as being free, presided over dramatic economic growth and was active in international peacekeeping efforts. Ghanaian media outlets were announcing Kufuor’s victory before it happened... and were stunned when the Ibrahim foundation decided not to award the prize this year.

Reactions to the non-award have been mixed. Kufuor’s party is, predictably, furious. The man himself has been gracious, expressing gratitude at being considered for the award. And Ibrahim has taken pains to point out that the decisions aren’t his personally, but those of an advisory board that he doesn’t even sit on. On the other hand, there are legitimate critiques of Kufuor’s presidency – corruption may have increased during his time in office and the former President’s retirement package was excessive.

Peter Guest, writing in the Guardian, suggests that Kufuor didn’t win the prize because it’s unclear whether his economic policies will help Ghana in the long run – he’s run up a substantial deficit, waiting for oil revenues to come online. Guest thinks this is a reason to celebrate the Ibrahim foundation, because they’re raising the standards for African leadership: “Rather than despairing of the plight of African governance, we should be heartened by the decision not to award Kufuor the prize, not because he was explicitly a failure, but because in thinking he automatically deserves it we have once again fallen victim to low expectations and judged him on an archaic understanding of what constitutes African leadership.”

Fair enough. But it’s worth asking whether the Ibrahim prize was designed to recognize the most exemplary leaders in African history or to honor and recognize leaders who took steps in the right direction. When the prize was introduced, the logic for the large financial reward and ongoing revenue stream was that the prize could serve as an alternative pension for leaders who hadn’t enriched themselves by emptying national coffers or remaining in power indefinitely. In a recent article, Ibrahim emphasized that aspect of the prize: “But what do decent, hard-working African leaders have to look forward to once they retire? This is part of the importance of our prize. It provides African leaders with the option of continuing a life in public service.”

Ibrahim ends his article by explaining, “The foundation wants to help restore proper balance to perceptions of Africa, showing the world that our continent is as much about Mandela as it is Mobutu.” Kufuor isn’t the next Mandela, but he also isn’t Mobutu. And if the purpose of the prize is to keep decent, hard-working leaders focused on public service, I think they may have missed the mark here.

US politicians talk a lot about Main Street. But what does Main Street actually look like in contemporary America? That’s what Harvard PhD students Jesse Shapins and James Burns, and journalist Kara Oehler, along with public radio producer Ann Heppermann, are doing with their “collaborative documentary”, “Mapping Main Street“.

Shapins, Burns and Oehler are speaking at Berkman today explaining the nature of a documentary which is attempting to document what’s happening on the 10,466 streets named “Main” in the US. They’ve accumulated photos and videos of 400 of these streets – a little under than 5% of the whole set. Only 80 of those streets have been mapped by the project’s initiators – the others have been mapped through submissions from the public.

Why create a “new map of the country through stories, data, photos and video recorded on actual main streets”? There’s lots of political and artistic theory inspiring the work, Jesse tells us:

- Bruno LaTour’s idea of the crisis of representation. The images and turns of phrases in today’s networked publics shape political sensibilities, capacities for action, and therefore we need to closely consider those representations and their implications.

- Russian/Soviet avant-garde filmmakers and media critics. Jesse cites “Man With A Movie Camera” by Dziga Vertov, a provocative 1929 film that is a reflection both on modernity and on filmmaking, editing, the audience and the process of media itself as well as “Art as Technique” by Victor Shklovsky. Shklovsky warns us that we take aspects of our lives for granted, leaving them unquestioned. Art’s role is to bring the unconscious, the ignored into consciousness: “to make the stone stony.”

- Robert Frank’s famous 1950s photo series, “The Americans” and earlier series from the 1930s shot by photographers for the Farm Security Administration

- The idea of the “deep map”, put forward at the Stanford Humanities Lab, a map that overlays the historical and contemporary, the artistic and geographic, the multiple layers of geography.

James, trained as an economist, argues that a belief in causal relationships leads to a reductive understanding of data, data as a descriptor of cause. By playing with a data set “that no sane economist would ever be interested in,” James hopes to understand data in a more complex, less reductive fashion.

In practical terms, Kara tells us, this has meant that the researchers piled into a 1996 Subaru and started visiting Main Streets. The first trip took them from Boston to Chicago. Kara notes that street interviews – vox pops – usually yield one response out of three. “But everyone talks to you on Main Street.” From May to August, the team travelled 12,000 miles, stopping at hundreds of Main Streets.

They produced a series for NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday, which began with a focus on Chatanooga, whose Main street features both a small portion revitalized with galleries and restaurants, and a stretch used primarily for prostitution. The story follows a couple, one making a run to buy drugs, the other reflecting on her history turning tricks on the street.

Not all the media is a radio story – they’ve asked four songwriters to offer musical reflections on Main Street. Their site incorporates a set of main street photos contributed by photography students… and anyone can contribute a photo by posting it to Flickr, tagging it with “main street” and the location, and submitting it to the Mapping Main Street group.

If you visit the Mapping Main Street site and search for a city, you’ll see footage if the project has captured any. Otherwise, you’ll see a Google Maps view – the view the producers tell us they’re trying to move away from – and an invitation to submit your own media. The project serves both as a “relational navigator” (driven by similar tags) of this data and as an archive of professional and user-submitted media.

Questions include:

Q: How do you manage user contributions, authentication?
A: We’ve put the responsibility onto the media hosting sites, like Flickr.

Q: Is there demographic data included in your set?
A: Not yet, but we could incorporate it. But we don’t want people to encounter the summary statistics as much as we want them to encounter the impressions.

Q: Are you getting a bias of submission based on what Main Streets are popular and which are abandoned? Can we condition the behavior of content producers?
A: We’re using a simple algorithm for “interestingness” to push people towards unexpected places. If we’re getting a bias in submissions, we could use that to drive people to different locations for producing media.

Q: Is there a political output of the project? A path towards civic engagement?
A: A lot of people felt like Main Street was extremely unrepresentative of their town. (This was acutely felt in Chatanooga.) Others felt like Main Street focused attention on stories that we too often ignore. The project itself is a wedge to provoke debate.

Q: Given that the audio stories synthesize, while the user submissions are pontillistic, what decisions go into making media from Main Street?
A: The decision was not to have rules about what was submitted. Originally, the project suggested ten things to photograph on Main Street, but we ended up removing that suggestion after going out and shooting Main Street ourselves.

Q: Robert Frank’s work was very focused on people. Your project so far seems to be shooting architecture. Is that okay?
A: Actually, there are six hundred photos tagged with people thus far. But there’s an attempt not to look for the classic “small town America” photo.

Q: What do you do when “main street” isn’t your main street?
A: What’s interesting is the places where Main Street takes you to a part of town you normally wouldn’t go to.

Q: What’s the strategy for including the voices of youth in the project?
A: Teachers are already using the project without our intervention. And we’ve been approached by more people than we can actually respond to.

Q: There are at least two levels on which politics play into this: the national symbol of Main Street and small town America – this project may open up that meaning. On the local level, it might close down meaning – Main Street can define a town in unwanted ways. Is the project in opposition to itself?
A: Main Street can force us to look away from the monument, the other part of town, where we might usually look.

Q: How long do you keep going?
A: Perhaps until we get all ten thousand. Visualizing progress is going to be very important – looking forward to the moment where there’s one dot left.

Q: In most places, even if Main Street is now run down, the intention was for the Main Street to be the center. It might be nice to have that history included with the documentation.
A: We’ve had people share some bits of older imagery. You could develop a lot of subprojects within the project.

Q: You say you want to capture Main Streets at a particular place in time, but the project is evolving over time. Have you thought about visualizing the passage of time?
A: We’ve got data on the dates taken, at least on new photos. It’s a cool idea and a good point.

Q: What happens when the photos you have online aren’t representative of Main Street? Or represent one part and not another?
A: We could move towards a panorama or more geographic information. But thus far, we’ve been trying to make it as simple as possible, not taking into account geo-tagged information.

Q: What does it mean to curate the Internet as an archive?
A: We’ve got unbelievable amounts of information online, produced in different media formats. Archives tend to be closed, undemocratic institutions. But the internet is helping the archive transition to the database. This project is database-driven, taking bits and pieces of Vimeo and Flickr and curating them into an archive.

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