· October, 2005

Stories about Citizen Media from October, 2005

Effect Measure on Facing the Global Bird Flu Threat

  25 October 2005

Masked Mao With recent reports of avian flu in Western Europe, the disease is clearly no longer East Asia's problem. It's a dilemma for the world. Last week I emailed Revere, the pseudonymous leader of Effect Measure, a public health group blog. Since its inception in late 2004, Effect Measure has been covering the global response to avian flu. My goal was to discuss the pandemic fears and what the world -- and ordinary people -- can do to prepare for it. Revere, an environmental epidemiologist in a senior faculty position at a major research university, has 40 years of experience in medicine and public health. He is also one of the individuals behind the Flu Wiki, an Internet-based experiment in community mobilization and knowledge-pooling to face the feared epidemic. He paints an alarming picture. "If a pandemic is going to happen (and we don't know how to predict if it will or not with certainty), it will happen whatever we do," he writes. "There will be no "outside" for help to come from, so each community needs to prepare to cope on its own." In previous flu pandemics, hundreds of thousands of people went sick or died, leading to massive disruptions as workers failed to show up to work and instead surged into ill-equipped and ill-prepared hospitals ill-prepared. Revere sees two big tasks ahead: managing the consequences of a potential pandemic, and building (or rebuilding) the world's rotting public health infrastructure.

Chile's Presidential Blog Forum

  19 October 2005

此篇文章有繁體中文的翻譯” While all of South America has been experiencing an exponential growth of weblogs, podcasts, and other online methods of civic participation, no country has done more to institutionalize the new tools into its political process than Chile. The ruling class’ embrace of online media as a way to encourage...

South Asian blog roundup

  16 October 2005

Bangladesh: - Rifat of ‘Close your eyes and try to see’ discusses premarital sex in the context of Bangladesh. - Shappir of ‘Bring your own Shisha’ recollects the story of Joseph/Yusuf/Yosef, the prophet of three religions to uphold the virtue of forgiveness. - Razib of ‘Me, myself and Bangladesh’ links...

Flooding Throughout Central America

  9 October 2005

A week's worth of rain caused by hurricane Stan has caused massive flooding in Guatemala and throughout Central America. Death toll estimates are already at a conservative 1,400 in Guatemala alone, higher than that of hurricane Katrina just a few weeks ago. Last wednesday, Oscar of Guate 360 wrote: The...

What's going on in the African blogosphere

  9 October 2005

Some snippets from the African blogosphere. - Gatwiri takes issue with the July/August edition of Foreign Policy magazine which classifies Kenya as a failed state. He points out that, “The source of the research material is also incredulous. They say they used software to analyse data from tens of thousands...

Pakistan: Blog Response

  9 October 2005

The initial news of this massive earth quake that hit the sub-continent took us all by surprise (understandably) but the resulting devastation and 18,000 + fatalities (so far) has shocked us even more. Obviously, many Pakistani bloggers responded to the news of this 7.6 EQ and I can’t list all...

South Asian blog roundup

  8 October 2005

Bangladesh: - Subhan shares some typical & unique Bangladeshi styles from personal observations in a post called “You know you are Bangladeshi when*@#!!” - Arafat of ‘Anthology’ analyses a news about “the first Muslim gay marriage in Pakistan” in the light of a previous discussion on the subject which reveals:...