Stories about Blogger Profiles from March, 2005
Sokwanele Blog in Zimbabwe
Zimbabwe is preparing for parliamentary elections tomorrow. The outcome is hardly in doubt. Most observers expect Robert Mugabe's ruling Zanu-PF party to win in a landslide, garnering at least 75% of votes. This is not because Zanu-PF is especially popular, but because the election process is believed to be so...
Blogger Profile: “Owukori”, aka Sokari Ekine
It's easy to get the impression, reading most popular weblogs, that all bloggers are white American males obsessed with technology. If that's your impression of the blogosphere, you're reading the wrong blogs. A good place to start your re-education is “Black Looks – Musings and Rants by an African Fem”,...
Bloggers in Malaysia Warn of Earthquake
A violent tremor was felt in parts of Malaysia, and bloggers, experienced in early detection of crisis when blogging about the Asian Tsunami disaster, came out with warnings. Those who I picked up blogging early on this issue are; Andreas from AlwaysWOW Peter Tan from Digital Awakenings FANTASIZED blog headlined...
Hoder drives huge traffic to Iranian presidential candidate's blog
Hossein Derakhshan (Hoder) says “Mostafa Moeen, the reformist candidate for the next president, has written his second post on his blog, which means he is taking it seriously.” Unfortunately when I clicked on the link, there is an error message showing that Moeen’s bandwith has been exceeded. The power of...
The Malaysian Blogosphere: chat with Mack Zulkifli and Jeff Ooi
(photo courtesy Jeff Ooi) Malaysian bloggers Jeff Ooi and Mack Zulkifli have been blogging up a storm lately about attempts by vested political and business interests in Subang Jaya, who want to build a “food court” in the spot where a badly-needed police station was planned. (The neighborhood where the...
Introducing Peter Tan
In the intro to his blog, The Digital Awakening, Peter Tan writes: I am a Roman Catholic Malaysian Chinese, born and bred in Penang, late-thirties, suffered spinal cord injury at eighteen, paralysed from chest down and afflicted with chronic kidney failure. This blog chronicles my life, thoughts and opinions. Chatting...
The China situation: Q&A with Isaac Mao
Chinese blogger Isaac Mao has been watching the latest crackdown on internet bulletin boards and website registration with great concern. I e-mailed him some questions which he was kind enough to answer: Rebecca: Up until now bulletin boards have remained the number-one way that Chinese communicate on the internet. Will...
Video Blog: Baramati Bus Stop
This weekend I completed a short Web documentary on my visit to a mobile computing lab in Baramati, India last week. The video, called Baramati Bus Stop, is about six and a half minutes long. It explores the mobile computing lab, which features two dozen thin-client computers installed on a bus. I also show my visit to a rural primary school classroom, and meeting some of the local village children who aren't enrolled in school -- and thus have no access to the technology. I've made two versions of the video, one without captioning and one with captioning. Both versions of the movie are quite large - more than 45 megs. So you may want to let the video download for a brief time before trying to stream it. Better yet, download the whole thing first so you won't have to worry about it pausing due to bandwidth bottlenecks. The movie is released on a Creative Commons noncommercial/attribution/share-alike license, which means it may be viewed, disseminated and even edited for educational and noncommercial purposes. For those of you who are interested in how I made the video, here are some quick tech specs. I shot the video on a Canon A60 digital camera, capturing about 15 minutes of footage, on location in Baramti, India. I uploaded this footage to my Mac G4 laptop and edited it using Final Cut Pro. Music was licensed from ProductionTrax.com; licenses for four songs cost approximately USD $30. For voiceover (narration) I used Final Cut Pro's voiceover tool, spoken through a LogiTech USB headset mic. Captioning was also done using Final Cut Pro. The total editing process, from uploading footage to exporting the movie as a Quicktime file, took approximately eight hours over the course of several days. Anyway, please check it out when you get a chance and let me know what you think. -andy
Dina Mehta on the Indian blogscene
Dina Mehta, a brilliant Indian anthropologist and blogger, just published an article on the emergence of the Indian blogosphere for online magazine Nirantar. Referencing Malcolm Gladwell's new book, “The Tipping Point”, she points to the emergence of “Connectors, Mavens and Salesmen” as evidence that Indian bloggers are emerging as a...
Plagarism is the sincerest form of flattery – Controversy in the Kenyan blogosphere
Ory Okolloh, the Kenyan Pundit and Global Voices ally, is keeping her eyes on an interesting situation in the Kenyan blogosphere – the plagarism of a prominent Kenyan blogger by a columnist for one of Kenya's most respected newspapers. Here's the original post, a mock-job ad for positions in President...
