April, 2005

Stories from April, 2005

Children's Voices from Darfur

  29 April 2005

In February 2005, Human Rights Watch sent researchers Dr. Annie Sparrow and Olivier Bercault to Chad to talk with refugees who'd fled from the bombings and Janjawid militia attacks in Darfur. A pediatrician, Dr. Sparrow usually gives crayons and paper to children to entertain them while she interviews their parents....

Friday World Blog Roundup

  29 April 2005

Spreading the blog gospel (blogspel?): Hossein Derakhshan (aka Hoder) posts his recent presentation on How Weblogs are affecting Iran. He also outlines his upcoming talk on how to make a blogosphere. Mideast: The Lebanese Blogger Forum points out that Lebanese expatriates outnumber Lebanese in Lebanon, and is supporting a campaign...

Blogging from Togo – Views of the Post-Election Protests

  28 April 2005

The post-election situation in Togo is getting increasingly complicated. Faure Gnassingbé, the son of deceased Togolese leader Gnassingbé Eyadema, has claimed victory with 60% of the votes counted in Sunday's election. But there are widespread accusations of election fraud, and opposition supporters have responded to Gnassingbé's election with violent protests....

Interview with Riverbend about her book

Alternet has an interview with Riverbend, the “Girl Blogger from Iraq.” An excerpt: Lakshmi Chaudhry: Let's start with the obvious: why did you start writing a blog? The first person to encourage me to write a blog was Salam Pax of “Where is Raed?.” After the war he suggested I...

Thursday World Blog Roundup

  28 April 2005

Blog activism: In the wake of recent earthquakes and tsunamis, Brandmalaysia's Mack Zufikli has launched a blog-driven campaign to get the Malaysian government to include the needs of the disabled in their evacuation plans. Mideast: Mahmood at Mahmood's Den is defying the new Bahraini government regulations requiring that all websites...

“Theory of Everything” focuses on Global Voices

  27 April 2005

Ben Walker's “Theory of Everthing” radio show is getting love from all over the blogosphere – Mark Frauenfelder at Boing Boing has favorably compared it to Ira Glass's excellent This American Life, one of the best programs available on American radio. Ben's latest show, available for download as an mp3,...

Wednesday World Blog Roundup

  27 April 2005

Photo of the day. Sabbah reports that Qatar will replace child camel-jockeys with robots. We are hoping to make the world blog roundups a regular (and eventually daily) feature of Global Voices. This is still in the experimental stages. We're playing around with format and approach. It will improve as...

Isaac Mao's take on the China protests

  27 April 2005

Isaac Mao believes theres not more to the anti-Japan protests than just government manipulation: Just in these two days, China gov tighten the control of internet to prevent from any callings on new protest. Yesterday, the spokesman of Minisry of Public Security warned that any online organizing or gossip on...

Introducing bridge blogger Ndesanjo Macha

  20 April 2005

Sometimes the Internet helps you find interesting people halfway across the globe. And sometimes it helps you find out that interesting people from halfway across the globe are living in your neighborhood. I had the second sort of experience Sunday, when I travelled to Brattleboro, Vermont (100km away, but in...

Tagging for Chinese-Japanese dialogue.

  20 April 2005

USE THIS TAG: cn_jp_dialog We've had some Sino-Japanese-U.S. email exchanges going on to discuss the best way to foster a rational discussion on the latest Chinese-Japanese tensions. Eventually a group blog and/or aggregator may be set up but we agreed that probably the best way to start is through a...

How can we promote Chinese-Japanese dialogue online?

  19 April 2005

Joi Ito has a thoughtful post responding to the anti-Japanese demonstrations in China. An excerpt: As a Japanese who has a great deal of sympathy and empathy for China, what I find difficult is trying to understand the various threads and how Japanese people can try to make a difference....

New faces in the bridgeblog index

  15 April 2005

I was recently introduced to the concept of “wiki gardeners”, people who tend wikis, cutting away spam, fixing formatting and grammar, and generally tidying up the place. I just spent a few hours on the BridgeBlog Index, and I'm struck by what a good metaphor gardening is. We “planted” the...

A technical guide to anonymous blogging – a very early draft

  13 April 2005

The Electronic Frontier Foundation posted an excellent guide to safe blogging a few days back. While the guide is quite rich in tips to ensure you don't reveal too much personal information while blogging, it doesn't look very closely at the technical issues associated with keeping a blog private. I...

What's going on in the Kenyan blogosphere.

  13 April 2005

Mental Acrobat on why politics rocks and why Africa needs millions of students of politics. Mama Junkyard is “confuddled” (please give her props for coining this term) about her blog identity versus her real identity. Do those distinct identities even exist, are they two different people, would they like each...

Banned Iranian Reporter Turns to Weblogs

Iranian regime is the best promoter of weblogs. The latest example is Massih (Masoumeh) Alinejad, the parliament correspondent for reformist newspapers who was banned from the parliament building last week because of the troubles she had made for hardliner MPs. It took 80 signs to oust her who had revealed...

Blogging Safely

  9 April 2005

Thanks to Curt Hopkins of the Committee to Protect Bloggers for pointing out that the Electronic Frontier Foundation has released a guide: How to Blog Safely. While many of the suggestions focus on how to avoid getting fired in the American or Western European context, the document also addresses the...

Community Fabric

  7 April 2005

I've just set up a wiki for a new open-source project called Community Fabric with some friends (from the joiito freenode IRC channel). The idea is to allow people to harness existing social net tools to blog, bookmark, collaborate and post photos from within an easy-to-use and integrated community environment.

Isaacmao.com blocked

  7 April 2005

Isaac at the Harvard Global Voices gathering, photo by Jeff Ooi. As some of our readers have pointed out, Isaac Mao's site – isaacmao.com – is being blocked. Isaac gives part of the story on his backup site, helpfully titled “Not isaacmao.com”: The site of isaacmao.com has been blocked due...